The Effect of a Real-World, Long-Term Media Literacy Intervention: A Difference-in-Differences Approach

As the fight against misinformation continues, governments across the world have started to invest in media literacy interventions. It is hoped that such interventions help citizens become better at discerning between untrustworthy and mainstream news headlines, but studies relying on online- and field-experiments provide inconclusive or even worrying results: media literacy interventions targeting misinformation either have no effect, help citizens recognize fake news, but also reduce trust in mainstream news. Leveraging a natural setting in a high school in the Netherlands and using a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach, I show that a long-term literacy course increased students' ability to accurately assess the reliability of mainstream, but not untrustworthy news. Since the prevalence of the latter is much lower than that of the former, I argue this to be a welcome finding. Additionally, I show how real-world, intensive courses allow for unique opportunities to test the effectiveness of existing media literacy programs.