Introduction: What Drives the Need for New Skills?

Over the last half century, our world has increasingly become digital. The original ARPANET “network of networks” first created by the U.S. military for linking university scientists’ research now makes up a diverse global internet of websites, connected devices, and social media platforms that is almost endless in its scale. It is also essential to the functioning of not just our economy, but our systems of education, public health, national security, and even our democracy itself.

And yet, that very same space has become a new kind of conflict space. It is not just that the networks can be hacked, but that the people on them can fall prey to false and toxic information. Hate and conspiracy theories have proliferated, spreading on a scale like never before in history. In a world of “alternative facts,” where even the phrase “fake news” has become twisted and weaponized, it is useful to define the very terms of this problem.¹

A simple breakdown is offered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a resource for those who teach journalism:²

• Misinformation: Information that is false but not created with the intention of causing harm.
• Disinformation: Information that is false and deliberately created to harm a person, social group, organization or country.
• Mal-information: Information that is based on reality, but elevated or pushed in order to inflict harm on a person, social group, organization, or country.

Each term is agnostic about the topic of information, the party behind it, or the target of the harm. Yet across each type and on every topic of importance, this “weaponization of social media” has shaped not just what people see and believe online, but also how they act.³ Indeed, the last year saw a surge in foreign and domestic campaigns that sought to spread falsehood, foment distrust, and destabilize the U.S. during an election, while enabling and elevating the forces of extremism and conspiracy theory. What public health professionals call the “infodemic” of false information about COVID-19 has been one of the reasons that the pandemic has been so devastating and long-running.⁴ As the chairs of the bipartisan U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission stated, facing this challenge is now of "truly life or death importance."⁵

It is also arguably key to America’s standing in the world. As U.S. Army strategist Ryan W. Kort writes, how we handle information threats is "just as vital to success as shrewd diplomacy, a favorable correlation of military forces, and economic metrics such as gross domestic product or industrial capacity…If the United States is serious about competition in a global, informationalized arena against other aspiring great powers, a better-informed and engaged populace capable of thinking critically about the veracity of information it encounters daily should strengthen America’s intrinsic informational and economic strengths. A better-educated and informed public is a cognitively armed population, better able to participate in the processes of government, drive civic outcomes, and thwart disinformation while also producing innovative products and solutions."⁶

Yet, the issue is not just the safety and security of our society writ large, but also for the individual. In an increasingly digital world, new skills are needed to thrive as a student, consumer, and citizen. They are key to our health, as people use the internet to search for everything from information on vaccines to mental health support. And they are a critical matter for our education system. Every day, teachers and parents deal with how our youth can safely and effectively navigate and participate in the increasingly online world they depend on for everything from classroom research to extracurricular activities, job-searching, entertainment, and socializing.

As this challenge has become increasingly recognized, a wide range of organizations have begun to wrestle with its ramifications. New business and government initiatives and more than 460 civil society, university, and think tank projects, task forces, and other programs are focused on various facets of this problem of information disorder.⁷

This work has generally broken down along two lines, focused either on software or legal code change. That is, one track of work seeks to resolve the problem through the platform companies that host and run the information networks. These are initiatives that focus on getting companies to alter their policies, with, for example, calls for different approaches to content moderation or the network-shaping algorithms. The other track seeks a resolution through government regulation. Its focus is on measures that range from changing the relatively limited corporate liability for what is on their networks to potentially breaking up the firms themselves.

These proposed fixes via technology and government regulation bring in highly contentious questions of both government and corporate power, as well as foundational debates over freedom of speech. The outcome is a hard truth. The various desired (and often contradictory) changes to company practice or government policy are unlikely to be implemented to the full extent of their advocates’ wishes in the near term. This is a simple fact of the nature of both a free market and a democracy, especially one as deeply divided as ours.

Yet, even if these proposed fixes were somehow achieved, the challenges would remain. Again and again, the groups behind such disinformation campaigns—be they foreign governments, domestic conspiracy theorists, or just “click-bait” marketers—alter their strategies and tactics to work around technical or policy changes.⁸ This combined market and battle space will always feature the interactive back-and-forth of adaptation.⁹

Nor would these changes, which tend to be focused on the most pernicious issues of national security, prove useful to the needs of either today’s young people or future generations at the personal level.

While we obviously must better defend young people against cyber threats, they also simply need to learn to navigate the challenges of using the internet to take care of their health and improve their social and educational lives—not to mention build their own spaces for dialogue and community involvement. Whether students are connecting with friends or researching the pyramids for a school paper, they have to weave through commercial marketing and one-sided histories, and risk even being sent down an algorithmic rabbit hole to extremist content.¹⁰ For many students—particularly those in marginalized groups and those who are subject to hateful speech and threats in their own communities—the stakes are high. The next generation needs to be able to feel safe in online spaces. They also need to use digital tools to learn about the world, inquire about it, and learn about themselves and their communities without being co-opted by hidden forces trying to divide them.¹¹ A report to the Washington State legislature sums it up: “Helping our students navigate the deep waters of technology and become responsible, ethical digital citizens is crucial to their development and to our future.”¹²

This points to the importance of a third approach, in addition to legal or software change. And despite attracting far less attention in political debate, media discussion, and civil society projects and task forces, it is the one that is most recommended by experts.

When the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace gathered 84 proposals from 51 different organizations exploring what needed to be done to counter online forces of toxicity that contaminate and poison truth, one of the most frequently recommended policy actions was to raise the skills of those who consume and share that information.¹³ Unlike the above software or legal code approaches, it focuses not just on the attacker or the location of attack. It seeks to aid the target of the attack. Building up the resilience of the individual, and the society as a whole, enables the attack to be shrugged off.

This is not to say that these other approaches are not needed nor valuable. A repeated finding in these proposals is that there is no silver bullet for the challenges of digital life. What is optimal instead is a sustained effort analogous to the layered social prevention strategies, inoculation measures, and personal approaches to healthy living and hygiene that are used in public health. Here too, efforts at raising digital skills can and should be nested within wider work to improve the policies of both companies and government.

Focusing on aiding the human target of mis and disinformation also has a valuable effect beyond that individual. In strategic terms, the value of such resilience building can be conceptualized as “deterrence by denial.” In this, attackers are dissuaded not out of fear of retaliation, but because the intended attack is less likely to succeed.

Yet, these skills are not just about defense against a foreign government or domestic conspiracy theorist. They are as much about what is needed to operate effectively in an increasingly digital world. Whether it is searching for information on voter registries, concert tickets, or vaccines, the primary issue we face is no longer how to find information (which is all too easy), but understanding the environment from which that information comes.

Yet, despite the essential value of such skills across so many different areas, the U.S. has fallen behind its peers in this aspect of education. For a space that is all about networks, there are a series of connection points missing in our response to it.

First is a disconnection between the research and policy communities. This problem area brings in issues of education, technology, cybersecurity, national security, information warfare, and counter-extremism. Yet, experts and policymakers in these varied fields are often not only not working together, but completely unfamiliar with each other’s work and organizational approaches. Second is a disconnect between those research and policy communities and the practitioners, who are the ones who must implement such policy in school systems, classrooms, and extracurricular programs. Finally, the insights and experiences of these educators and the teaching tools they must use are not gathered for easy and ready use, limiting both the scale and effectiveness of the limited curricula and educational programs now available.

This paper proposes a path forward. The first section will explore the history and definitions of the key concepts behind such skills-building. In the next section we examine the question of whether such programs work and under what conditions. Then we explore the current status and challenges of implementing these programs within the U.S. education system, moving to a section providing examples of some new tools and instructional materials being developed for educators. We then propose how to fill a key missing piece in the implementation and success of these programs in the U.S. and beyond: a resource where educators can easily search for and compare instructional materials and share best practices. We close by offering a series of policy recommendations that can better equip our teachers, our kids, and our nation for an even more digital future.