Developing Media Literacy Skills with Manipulated Media

Developing Media Skills

Today's media culture muddles reality. Rapid advancements in technology allow anyone to create media quickly, and information gatekeepers can no longer filter information to the masses. Today, the world cannot keep up with the vast amounts of media manipulation. Add teenagers and their media consumption habits to the mix, and there's a perfect formula for decreased media literacy.

Researchers from Stanford University raised the media literacy alarm in a study in 2021. In the study, researchers asked over 3,000 diverse high school students to evaluate videos posted on Facebook claiming to demonstrate voter fraud in the 2016 election. Only three students of the three thousand successfully identified the footage as manipulated. In another study, 96% of high school students unsuccessfully uncovered the truth about an anti-climate change website—the website funded by the fossil fuels industry. 

To improve media literacy skills, Fairhaven High School media students explored manipulated media techniques, including deceptive editing, audio editing, graphic creation, conspiracy theories, and tracing the spread of misinformation through social media and the consequence of a misinformed population. 

We asked students: "Could you, a high school student with a basic understanding of editing media, create something that misleads an audience? If so, what can people with advanced knowledge of media creation create to mislead the masses?"

Manipulating Media

In this project, students chose to manipulate three different types of media, and attempt to change the context of the content. Project options include:

• Altering the context of a news story

• Altering the context of a film or film character

• Manipulating a movie trailer that tells a different story.

Project Highlights