“The Algorithm Is Raising Our Kids — And It’s Pulling them into Deadly Rabbit Holes” - Teaching Media Literacy with Matthew Johnson

Here’s a run down of what we discussed in today’s episode: Introduction Why Media Literacy Matters Now More Than Ever How Algorithms Shape What We Think Is “True” Our Brains On Misinformation The Influence Economy: When Content Becomes Advertising Teaching Kids to Question Without Fear Why Saying “Just Don’t Believe Everything Online” Doesn’t Work How to Tell the Difference Between Facts and Feelings What Makes Some Narratives “Stick” So Easily Helping Loved Ones Who Are Falling Down the Rabbit Hole Empowerment & Building Critical Thinking Skills References: mediasmarts.ca mediasmarts.ca/resources-for-parents Check in with today’s amazing guest: Matthew Johnson mediasmarts.ca Disclaimer: The content in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is never a substitute for medical advice. If you’re struggling with with your mental or physical health, please work one on one with a health care provider. If you have heard yourself in our discussion today, and are looking for support, contact the free NEDIC helpline at 1-866-NEDIC-20 or go to eatingdisorderhope.com. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •✨ Reach Your Weight & Health Goals — Without Dieting! Pre-order The Hunger Crushing Combo Method, Abbey’s revolutionary additive approach to eating well. Learn how to boost satiety, stabilize blood sugars, reduce disease risk, and improve your relationship with food — all while getting the best nutrient bang for your caloric buck. With 400+ research citations, cheat sheets, evidence-based actionable tips, meal plans, and adaptable recipes, The Hunger Crushing Combo Method is the only nutrition bible you’ll ever need. 👉 Pre-order today! 🛒 Where to Purchase: Amazon Barnes & Noble Amazon Kindle Apple Books Google Play Kobo Apple Books (Audiobook) Audible abbeyskitchen.com/hunger-crushing-combo • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •✉️ Subscribe to My Newsletters: Abbey’s Kitchen Newsletter 📘 Check out my FREE E-Books: Hunger Crushing Combo™ E-Book Protein 101 E-Book 👋 Follow me! Instagram: @abbeyskitchen TikTok: @abbeyskitchen YouTube: @AbbeysKitchen Blog: abbeyskitchen.com Book: The Mindful Glow Cookbook • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 🎧 Don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — and leave us a review! It really helps support the show ❤️ 💬 If you liked this podcast, please like, follow, and leave a review — and let me know who you’d love to hear about next! ⭐ ⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  The young people say they're aware that these images are altered, but they still feel pressure to participate in that culture.

• 0:45Abbey Sharp?

  Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, where I dismantle diet culture rules, call out the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good.

• 0:58Abbey Sharp?

  Today, we are turning our attention to something I have become incredibly passionate about as both a mom and a science communicator online, and that is media literacy. And I'm so honored to be joined by the Director of Education at Media Smarts, which is Canada's leading not-for-profit center for digital and media literacy, Matthew Johnson. Matthew has spent over two decades creating resources for parents, teachers, and youth to help them understand, navigate, and challenge the messages that we see across traditional media and now, social platforms. From online privacy and grooming to stereotypes and body image,

• 1:42Abbey Sharp?

  his work is all about giving people the tools to think critically and engage with media in healthier ways. Today, Matthew and I will be talking about the dangers of comparison culture in an age of AI, the seemingly innocent kid content that can serve as a dangerous pipeline to extremism and misinformation, and some age-appropriate tips and tools to teach media literacy at every stage. Selfishly, I am so excited about this convo. But very quickly, before we hop into it, a quick reminder that if you are new here, I would love if you would hit that subscribe button and leave me a comment because it really, really does help me out. Also, if you haven't heard, my upcoming book,

• 2:27Abbey Sharp?

  The Hunger Crushing Combo Method is now on pre-sale and I would really, really, really appreciate your support on this as pre-sales make a massive difference in the success of a book. And if you order now, you'll get my free Hunger Crushing Combo Holiday ebook. So check out the description on how you can reclaim. All right, folks, let's dive in.

• 2:55Abbey Sharp?

  All right. Hi, Matthew. Thank you so much for joining me today.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  My pleasure.

• 3:00Abbey Sharp?

  I have to tell you, in preparation for this interview, I did a deep dive on your website, Media Smarts. I literally printed out all these resources, little scripts for myself. They are so helpful. I'm definitely going to be linking to that in the show notes. And actually, I have a call with my, my son's school next week to argue for the need to be teaching media literacy to students in school as part of the regular curriculum because I don't, as someone who works in this industry, in this world, I would way rather my kids have solid media literacy skills than like even learn like geography, to be honest. Like, I just think this is so important in, in 2025. And as we move forward, there are just so many

• 3:44Abbey Sharp?

  inherent risks in online spaces and we're really just going to be able to scratch the surface today. But I want to kind of start with a discussion on, on diet culture because that's what we talk a lot about here on the Bite Back Podcast, which diet culture is nothing new. Obviously, it's always been around. But compared to older forms of media like television and magazines, how do you feel social media platforms have intensified pressures for young people, especially as it pertains to the way they look, their appearance?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Well, there are a number of different ways. One of them is that we use the same platforms now to communicate and to consume content, both from celebrities and from our own peers, our friends, our family. And so that makes a real difference, that we are not just looking at airbrushed or photoshopped images of celebrities, which we know do have an impact on body image. But we're seeing our own peers do the same thing. And, you know, there's evidence that actually the people who have the biggest impact on us are people who are kind of in the middle of that range. Because we have a sense that, obviously, celebrities, in most cases, they're celebrities

• 5:00Speaker 01

  in part because they're very attractive. Being attractive is part of their job. So we're kind of conscious that, okay, that's not a realistic way of seeing someone. Right. And similarly with the people close to us, well, we know what they actually look like. We see them in daily life. We can tell when they're using a filter or something like that. But it's the people in between. It's the people who are friends of a friend. There are people who are classmates that maybe we don't see all that often or that we're not that close to. That seems to be what has the biggest impact when we see either carefully curated photos or filtered or otherwise manipulated photos. We don't have those safeguards that tell us that that's not real.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  But there's also a pressure because we're participating as well. We're not just consuming content, we're participating in it. And so there is a pressure to present the same kinds of images ourselves. And that's something that we've seen in qualitative research quite a few times, that young people say they're aware that these images are altered, but they still feel pressure to participate in that culture, in that diet culture, in that culture of presenting a particular look. And that may come from using photo manipulation. It may come from taking 100 photos and picking just the perfect one. And of course, it also comes in the form of trying to actually change the shape of our bodies. Right.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  So that's one aspect. Another aspect, of course, is that these are advertising platforms. They're designed to keep us using them, to keep us engaged, so that we can see more ads. And so first of all, it means that it's a lot easier for advertising to reach us than it used to be. The barrier is much lower. Small companies are much more able to advertise to us than they were. So now a lot of messages, advertising messages that might not have reached us through mass media are able to reach us. But also, all of these platforms

• 7:07Speaker 01

  are surveilling us all the time in order to feed us content that we will engage with, that will keep us on the site. And that can have an effect that is intensifying. So we've heard again and again, and this has been shown both in qualitative research from young people, but it's also been shown quantitatively, that once you start consuming a certain kind of content, consciously or not, the platform will show you more of that. And that's particularly true when it is content that has a strong emotional resonance. So we've seen it with different kinds of misinformation. We've seen it with hate content. We've seen

• 7:49Speaker 01

  it with violent content. And of course, we see it with diet content, with content that makes us feel bad about our bodies. And so we hear again and again from young people that they maybe watch one video about a diet, or even about healthy eating, that the algorithm concludes is part of this cycle. And suddenly, you start constantly seeing diet content, and it becomes progressively more and more extreme. Yeah. And even kids who are recovering from eating disorders, we have said, you know, it becomes so difficult to access recovery content, because to the algorithm, the recovery

• 8:33Speaker 01

  content and the diet content, or even the eating disorder promotion content are all the same in the algorithm's eyes. Yep.

• 8:42Abbey Sharp?

  It's, it is, this is the reason like, you know, why I do what I do. And actually, there was a recent Wall Street Journal investigation where they created kind of fake accounts, dozens, a dozen automated accounts on TikTok. They labeled them as being 13 years old. And instantly, they were inundated by extreme weight loss content, being told to eat less than 300 calories a day, only consume water rather than food, take laxatives. So, you know, you don't over images of, you know, with very ultra-thin women with bones protruding. And, and you're right, it's, it's really terrible, the amount of dangerous information and the lack of regulation. And ultimately, you know, these young people are being inundated by

• 9:27Abbey Sharp?

  these messages, this hyper restrictive content. And it's just getting worse. It's so pervasive, so inescapable for kids. And now we've got the surge of AI-generated images and videos, many of which, you know, present even more unrealistic ideals than, you know, even traditional social media did. Like, we just saw Vogue's latest Cover Girl is not even a real woman. She's this blonde, thin, beautiful figment of someone's imagination. And the lines are being blurred even more in terms of what is reality and what is not. And it's very interesting that you said that, you know, kids may know this, like, they may be able to articulate to you or to other adults, like, I know that this has got a filter on it. I know that this

• 10:08Abbey Sharp?

  is AI, but they still want to emulate it. And so you mentioned just a moment ago about the algorithm, kind of, starting in a potentially, like, innocuous place, whether it's like, you know, healthy eating, maybe that's what you're searching for, and it taking you down the rabbit hole into dangerous places. And I, I talked about this with a sociologist when the television show Adolescents came out. And we were talking about how young boys interacting with this seemingly benign content related to, you know, masculine bodies, like, hey, how do I get fit? How do I get a six-pack? You know, how do I get a date?

• 10:47Abbey Sharp?

  Kind of, very quickly led them into this misogynistic red pill manosphere content. And so, yeah, there's this, there was actually another study, I'm sure you've seen these things, where researchers seed relatively benign, mild content about masculinity. And then within five days, their algorithms escalated them to this kind of extremist misogynistic content, like, fourfold. So I'm curious from your perspective, like for boys and girls, are there any other kind of seemingly innocent genres of content that we see people get into? Or search terms that parents should be aware of that could, or more often escalate into more dangerous territories?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, the way that that algorithmic sorting works and the way that in particular, you know, the far right and some other communities, like anti vaccination communities have been consciously drawing connections on the internet means that there are almost no enthusiasms that can't lead you somewhere bad. I mean, we know, for instance, you know, the modern far right has tremendous links to the, you know, the comic book

• 12:07Speaker 01

  and video game community. That doesn't mean that anyone who's connected to comic books and video games is going to be drawn into the far right. But it means that the far right identify those communities as areas where there are going to be people who are

• 12:25Speaker 01

  susceptible to their messaging.

• 12:27Abbey Sharp?

  Right. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. You know, the ones I see often in my circles are like, what are you in a day? Fitzpuration, clean eating, meal prep with me, get ready with me, outfit inspo's. All these can have ED coded undertones, even motherhood content, which can go kind of teeter into that, like that trad wife, like that whole area, which again, it can be a slippery slope where you get into the anti vac space and you know, the misinformation about foods and food safety and raw milk and all those kinds of things. You mentioned a moment ago that there are things we can do to kind of train, like what can we kids or parents?

• 13:09Abbey Sharp?

  What can we, how can we like preemptively like inoculate against these kind of this algorithmic escalation? Like what, what could that look like?

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Well, when we talk specifically about algorithm. There are a number of different things that we can do. So the first is if it is a platform like Instagram, for instance, where most of the content that we see is people that we follow, then we want to make a practice of regularly curating those feeds. So there's a lot of research that shows that when young people curate their feeds to follow more body neutral content, then that has a really positive impact on self-image and can mitigate a lot of body image concerns. And that can be something that we do, not just with celebrities or influencers.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  It is can be something that we do with people in our own social circles, because curating doesn't necessarily mean unfollowing or blocking. It can mean muting. I think the mute button is probably the most underused tool in social media, because the wonderful thing about muting is that nobody knows that you did it. So it's a great kind of mental health first aid tool, where if someone is just, you know, sharing you sharing content that makes you feel bad about yourself, or honestly, just things you don't want to deal with right now, whether it is, you know, pictures of their perfect vacation or themselves in the swimsuit, and it makes you feel bad about

• 14:44Speaker 01

  yourself, just mute them. You don't have to mute them forever. You can mute them for a little while. But we have to teach kids they have an absolute right, in the same way that they have an absolute right to block anyone who is harassing them, or who is sharing hate content or sexist content or whatever, they have an absolute right to mute anyone. So beyond that, we also have the ability to train those algorithms. So we can limit, in many cases, what information they use to to target us. Many of the social networks do have settings that you turn off the algorithmic recommendation. But in some cases, that is what people want. So we know from the research that's

• 15:28Speaker 01

  been done with young people that they have Kind of a complex relationship with recommendation algorithms.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  They like being served relevant content, but they don't like being served overly relevant content. They don't like the rabbit holes. So in most cases, they don't want to fully turn off algorithmic recommendation. We know, for instance, that in a case like TikTok, it is a big part of the appeal is that it is feeding you things that that you didn't know you wanted. So when it's something like YouTube, we can recommend, you know, search, don't surf. Use YouTube the way you would use Netflix or the way you would use TV or the way you would use a library. Go out and find what you want. Subscribe to channels. Don't just watch in the up next bar. But with YouTube or with something like TikTok,

• 16:20Speaker 01

  that's not necessarily realistic. Similarly with Instagram reels. So what you want to do in those cases is each of those does have a way that you can make the algorithm forget everything it knows about you. So we have a video and a tip sheet called how to train your algorithm. And that's the first thing that you need to do is have it forget what it knows about you. And after that, you can consciously try to train it. And there are different ways of doing that because the different platforms weight things differently. But what is generally consistent is that they put more weight on what we call implicit inputs rather than explicit ones. So an explicit input, for instance, would be

• 17:03Speaker 01

  giving something a thumbs up or a like or a thumbs down. So that's when you're going out and saying, I like this. I don't like this. But they don't actually pay much attention to those. There's some evidence that on TikTok, in fact, those have no effect whatsoever. What they mostly care about, because they're more honest, is implicit inputs. And the biggest one of those is simply how long you watch something. So it really helps to get in the habit of if you see something that you don't want to see. Get rid of it immediately. Stop watching it, swipe it away. But if you do see something that is the kind of thing you want to watch,

• 17:43Speaker 01

  let it play to the end, even if this video itself isn't necessarily what you want to watch. If it's the type of content, so if you're seeing body neutral content, if you're seeing, or just maybe you just don't want to get body related content from your feed at all. But if you're seeing what you want to see, then let it play. And it doesn't take long. When you start from zero, every now and then I do a little experiment and I try to get it to pay just one kind of content, like just cat videos or something like that. And when you start from zero, it never takes longer than about 15 minutes to get it to give you just that. Now, most people don't want just one kind of thing, but it shows how relatively little time it takes

• 18:25Speaker 01

  if you are making a conscious effort to get that algorithm, to get that feed to give you just what you want and to largely stop showing you things you don't want.

• 18:36Abbey Sharp?

  That's really, really helpful.

• 18:52Abbey Sharp?

  And I want to put social media aside just for a minute because I kind of want to go to our younger kiddos and talk about traditional forms of media, movies, shows, because like body image messages start really young. I've got two boys, five and seven. I'm experiencing this firsthand, really. They don't have social media. They don't have phones. But the other week, my eldest son was like flexing his muscles and his abs and saying to me like, I want to get a six pack. And my little one was like, well, I want to get a 10 pack. And my eldest is like, there's no such thing as a 10 pack. He's like, well, how many packs can I get? And I mean, it was the funniest conversation, of course, but I'm also like kind of freaking out inside because like we don't talk about bodies like that in my house ever. I've never said anything about a six pack, eight pack, whatever.

• 19:38Abbey Sharp?

  Turns out this desire for rock hard abs they're getting from watching the K-pop Demon Hunters and they're seeing. Other kids talk about this six pack, this eight pack in relation to just a character, a cartoon character. And so, you know, we, you know, it's very easy when you actually look at children's media to see that the protagonists are always the beautiful, you know, fit, thin, you know, have muscles. Those are the heroes in the story. And, you know, then of course you get the kind of quote, quote, fat, you know, funny sidekicks coming in. And kids learn that really quickly because of media that they want to be the

• 20:19Abbey Sharp?

  hero. And if the hero is always the fit and thin, not fat one, they learn to fear that fatness so, so early. So there's clearly so much work to, we need to be doing. How early can we get media literacy skills started? And what can we do for our younger kiddos?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  We can get media literacy started more or less as soon as kids understand language. And the earliest message, what's really important early on, is getting across two main ideas. And the first is that the media we consume is made by people who made choices. Because we instinctively see media as being like a window. You know, we didn't evolve with media. And so our brains think it is real. And kids as well, naturally, they just assume that it reflects reality. So it helps from really early on to highlight the fact that

• 21:18Speaker 01

  this was made and this was made by people who made choices. So you can talk about the people who made media. You can, early on, you can find, there's some great kids books that help to highlight that idea. So one series that I really love is a series by a Canadian writer and illustrator named Melanie Watt. And the series is called Chester. And each of the books is a conflict between Chester the cat and Melanie Watt, the author. And it's a really great way, early on, of highlighting the idea that this book was made by Someone and because we are seeing the conversation between the character who wants the book to go one way and the writer who wants the book to go another way.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  And the other idea that we want to get across from early on is the idea that most media were created for commercial purposes, that they were created to make money. So when you're in the grocery store, for instance, and your child asks you or points out, you know, there's SpongeBob on a cereal box, you can say, well, that's because they know kids like SpongeBob and that's going to make kids ask for that cereal.

• 22:28Abbey Sharp?

  Parents for it.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  And it's that conversation that really matters. You know, we can't shield our kids from media and nor should we. Media is a huge part of the enjoyment that we get from life. And honestly, even if you shield kids from media in the home, they're going to be exposed to it through peers and through friends, through other relatives. So we want to get in the habit of co-viewing with our kids. And co-viewing doesn't just mean watching with them. It also means being willing to pause and talk about something because just co-viewing without that conversation can actually make media effects worse because when kids see something objectionable, when they see, for instance, a character with a larger body

• 23:10Speaker 01

  being made fun of and you don't say anything, they think that's okay. So you have to be ready either with that pause button or to talk about it after, but you need to be ready to interrupt those messages and highlight if there's a pattern. You know, you can say, boy, this is the third time that we've seen this. And of course, when they're young, you have so much more power to curate their media, whether that is choosing something on Netflix or Disney or something like that, or whether it's, you know, creating playlists on YouTube, you can find content that where characters with larger or frankly, you know, just not small bodies or not muscular bodies where

• 23:54Speaker 01

  they do have those hero roles, it's out there. We just have to go to a little bit of effort to find it and just particularly showing a range. It's exactly the same as how we want to address gender stereotyping. It's not just about finding works where that have, you know,

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Tough as nails, female characters or compassionate male characters. It's about having a range of both. And that's the concern, particularly when it comes, for instance, to female characters or characters with larger bodies. It's not that there's anything wrong with a character being funny. It is that when that's the only time you see characters with larger bodies, when that's, when they're always playing that funny sidekick role, that's the problem. And so it doesn't mean you can't watch, you know, Scooby Doo or something like that. But you also want to make sure that you are watching with your kids content where there is a range of body shapes and a range of roles played by each body shape.

• 24:58Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah, that's so helpful. I mean, I wanted to also kind of then go to our preteens and our teens or early teens because at this point, yeah, TikTok's a thing. Instagram's a thing. They're on it. They're likely more aware of their diet, their body. And absolutely they're more exposed to more explicit kind of dichotomy messaging, gendered messaging. What kind of activities or conversations are helpful at this age, aside from, of course, doing the curation of the feed as best we can? They're going to see it somehow. And then what do we do?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Well, that's obviously an age where we have to be really careful how we talk about bodies and about our own bodies because we know they listen to us very closely. There hasn't been as much research with boys, but certainly there's a lot of research with girls that shows that it is their parents and particularly their, how their mothers talk about their own bodies.

• 25:55Abbey Sharp?

  Yep.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Even more than how they talk about the child's body that influences how they see themselves. So we do have to think about the messages that we're sending and we have to think about the messages that we're sending, of course, through our own media use.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  I think what you really want to do when kids start using social media, you know, it's kind of futile to try to surveil it. You need to talk to them about it. You need to get a sense of of why they're using it, of what they enjoy about it. And in exactly the same way you would with with mass media with me, you know, traditional media, talk to them about the messages that they're seeing. And one thing that's really valuable is helping them understand that everybody feels pressure to look a certain way. Because one of the really interesting things that we find again and again in media

• 26:56Speaker 01

  is that what is really powerful is not the direct effect. It's what we call the two-step flow. And that is, we don't believe that media influences us, but we believe that media influences other people. But because of that, we respond to those social norms that we think media has influenced in other people. So a good example, because it's really powerful in this case, is pornography, where we know most young people are aware that pornography is not real. So just telling them, you know, that's not, that's not how people really have sex.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  It's important messaging. You need, they need to know that, but by itself, in most cases, that's not that powerful because they don't think their peers know that. They think their peers believe that pornography is real, that their peers are not as media literate as they are. Everyone thinks they're more media literate than the people around them. And so they think, oh, well, when I have a sexual partner, they're going to expect me to behave the way people behave in pornography because they think it's real because they're not as media literate as I am. Or they might have had other partners who thought that pornography was real and so they would have behaved in such a way.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  And so we see again and again where young people are saying, this is not, when they see pornography, they're saying, this is not what I want to see. This is not what I want to believe sex is like, but this, I believe that everyone else thinks that. And it's exactly the same thing with how bodies in general are represented. People, again, they're aware that these are curated, they're aware that these are filtered. We still have to tell them these things. We do have to make sure that they know that, but it's not enough. We also need to tell them, everyone is struggling. Everyone is going through this. No one is happy with how they look. No, none of us. I mean, everyone has flaws. Everyone feels pressures.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Everyone feels the need to present a positive image. So we can set a positive image or positive model ourselves through how we share. So if we are sharing honest content, if we are sharing, maybe, you know, maybe don't take 10 photos, just take one and say, that's gonna be good enough. Share the photo where maybe you don't look so great. Share the mundane moments of your lives because it's all tied together. It's not just our bodies, it's our lives as well, where we feel a pressure to make ourselves look ideal. So don't necessarily wait until you have the great news or you have the terrific event or whatever.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Share the lows as well as the highs and share the mundanes as well so that we're not just seeing the highlight reel because that is really what it comes down to. Whether we're looking at bodies or we're looking at lives more generally, the basic issue is that social media is the highlight reel, but we see everything. We see the highlights, we see the bloopers and we see the stuff that winds up on the cutting room floor in our own lives and we're comparing that to the ideals we see in social media.

• 30:22Abbey Sharp?

  I love that idea. I love that. And I also don't want to forget about us adults, because as my whole career indicates, we, like you said, we are struggling to not get swept up into the dangerous algorithms. Like, how can we, as adults, you know, grownups, even if we don't have kids, who are trying to kind of like, like you mentioned, like, post the less flattering shot of yourself. Don't put a filter on. I love that advice. How can we build habits to critically evaluate what we're consuming for ourselves, especially in high-pressure spaces like wellness, fitness, beauty, et cetera?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  So, one of the big changes that we've made in media literacy, or digital media literacy practice over the last few years, has been the idea of information sorting. So, when media literacy as a discipline was first developed in the 1980s, there was a lot of emphasis on what we call "close reading." So, people who were my generation who learned media literacy in schools, because, you know, in Canada, it has been in the curriculum across the country for 25 years now. And it was brought into the curriculum in some provinces in the 1980s. So, those of us who are in older generations who learned media literacy probably learned that kind of "close reading," where we were looking at how things like ads,

• 31:39Speaker 01

  or news, or information sources were constructed. We were looking at framing. We were looking at close details. Now, that stuff is still super important. But it was based on a world where it was expensive and difficult to make media, and particularly to distribute media.

• 31:58Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  What that meant was, there was relatively little media that we had to deal with. And we could count that the people who made it had enough of an investment that they weren't just going to straight-up make things up and lie to us. You kind of had to seek out misinformation in those days. So, you might go, someone might be handing out, you know, flyers about something, or if you went to a health food store, you might find some small print magazine that had some, you know, bad advice and things like that. And of course, you would get, there were all kinds of diet books and things like that that had terrible advice in them. Um, but you could be pretty much count on the fact that if you were buying something, a professional magazine, or if you were watching something on TV,

• 32:41Speaker 01

  you were not going to be getting stuff that was flat out untrue and harmful. Yep. And that's simply no longer true, you know, Correct. Not even with social media, even before social media, with just the web itself, publishing became practically free. And distribution became literally free. And so now we have what we call information sorting, where that kind of close reading is the second step. The first step is what we call companion reading, and that is where we are filtering out information. We're filtering out the stuff that is just not worth our attention. Because if we're doing that close reading on things that are not worth our attention,

• 33:24Speaker 01

  we're wasting our time and it just becomes overwhelming. There's no point in looking at how misinformation is framed, unless you're studying it to learn how to recognize misinformation. But if you're looking at it in terms of information, all of that stuff doesn't matter if it doesn't have that basic level of trust. If you're looking at some AI-generated slopped video, or if you're looking at a fake news site, I mean, there are perfectly believable looking websites and social media accounts that look like news outlets that are just complete nonsense, or sometimes worse. Because sometimes they're, you know, some of them are run by oil companies, or sometimes they're there to, you know,

• 34:07Speaker 01

  push particular political messages or anything like that. So we start with what we call companion reading, and we teach in our Break the Fake program, which is aimed for all audiences, young people and adults. We teach four quick and easy steps to just to find out, first of all, whether something is basically true and whether a source is worth your attention. So the first of those is using fact-checking tools. A lot of people in our generation have probably heard of Snopes. It's the most famous one, but there are dozens of them around the world, in different languages, in different countries, that professionally vary- Verify or debunk content. And we've actually made it easier because we had made a custom search engine that searches about thirty of those all at once, and it doesn't search anything else.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  So if you want to know if just something is true, if you hear a health claim, oh, they've just discovered that this causes that, or this helps with that, is that true? Fact checkers are a great way of very quickly finding out, did this really happen? Is this true?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Secondly, you're seeing something, you want to know where it came from. You want to find the original source because thanks to social media, a lot of times we get things shared by influencers, by peers, by friends, by relatives. We're not going to bother verifying those people because in almost every case, they're not the source of the information. So if some influencer is saying, okay, you're going to eat ten pounds of celery every week. If you eat ten pounds of celery every week, you know, you'll lose ten pounds or whatever. It'll prevent you. You'll cure cancer. Yeah, exactly, precisely. You don't care about that influencer because you want to find out where did that original research come from? That's what matters.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  So find that original source, and we have a lot of different techniques for doing that. And then if it's not a source that you recognize as being reliable or unreliable, verify it. And that's where your two best friends are Google and Wikipedia. Because Wikipedia often will give you an overview of the source, and it'll tell you whether or not it's generally considered to be reliable. Wikipedia is a great source for finding out the general consensus on something. And it's generally pretty accurate in those broad strokes. But if it's not on Wikipedia, the other thing that you can do is you can Google, and then one of the great Google tricks is excluding the original website.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  So if it was published in such and such a journal, you can do a Google search for that journal and use the minus sign and then the web address of the journal's website, or whatever source it is, an institute, or a center, or whatever. And what that will do is it will show you what other people say about them. It will exclude their own website with that minus sign. And so obviously then you need to use a little bit of critical thinking because you want to look at those. I mean, anyone can say, oh, this person is a quack. You want to say, okay, someone says that's a quack. Who is saying it? Is that person someone I want to believe?

• 37:17Speaker 01

  And that sounds complicated, but we're still talking at this point about probably one or two minutes at most to verify. Yep. And our last step is checking other sources. And that means finding sources that you already know are reliable and checking those. So we talk about that a lot in terms of news. We talk, for instance, about how the Google News tab is a much better source than the main All tab, because it's curated to just news sources. They're not all 100% objective necessarily, but they're all news sources that really exist. When it comes to health or science, it's really helpful to build up a little stock, a little toolbox of sources that you know are reliable. And that's something we can do for kids as well.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  We can provide them with sources of reliable information about things like diet, about body image, about health, about mental health, about sexual health, giving them reliable sources to turn to so that they don't have to go looking for information. And so when they do get a new claim, they can check it against one of these is really powerful. And we can even make our own custom search engines. So if you are in the habit of looking up information about a certain topic, you can find five or 10 or however many reliable sources that you want. You can add those to your own custom search engine and then it will search all of those all at once.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  So if you hear a new claim about something, you can search for that claim using your custom search engine. And it will tell you this is what those 20 sources say about that claim, rather than searching the entire web. And so it's those four steps. You don't have to do all of them every time, but generally speaking, a couple of them are going to do the job. Those either give you a Enough information to decide this is basically true or not. Or they give you enough information to tell you, okay, this source is sufficiently worth my attention that I'm going to go to the close reading. So I've determined, let's say it is really, let's say this claim really did come from a paper that's been published

• 39:25Speaker 01

  in a reliable journal. So now I'm going to find news articles about it. Now I'm going to find the journal itself. This is when I do the close reading where I look at, oh, okay. Actually, it turns out, yes, this is a legitimate source and it is a legitimate claim, but so far, actually, they've only found that in mice.

• 39:44Abbey Sharp?

  Right.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  I mean, there was one study recently where it was looking at ultra-processed food. People who were on the non-ultra-processed food diet lost two times as much weight as the people who were eating ultra-processed food.

• 39:57Abbey Sharp?

  Right.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  So, well, that sounds great until you find out that the difference was actually two pounds and four pounds.

• 40:02Abbey Sharp?

  Yes.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  So in that case, the framing by talking about it in relative terms instead of absolute terms made the difference look a lot bigger. So that's an example of the close reading that we do. But we only do that when we've confirmed that this is a source worth our attention. So in this case, you could track that story to a real study. You could track it to a story in the New York Times. You've used those companion reading steps to determine, yes, this is worth my attention. But then the close reading tells you, maybe it's not actually that meaningful.

• 40:40Abbey Sharp?

  That is super helpful. And at the end of the day, you know, those are skills that need to be honed.

• 41:00Abbey Sharp?

  You know, the journalist who is reporting on that rat study. They're not scientists. They're not science communicators and they're seeing something, oh, that could get clicks. That could get people to to listen because it could be a truthful, but also not necessarily statement that is as alarming as they are able to spin it to make it seem. So I'll be leaving some information about that in the show notes as well. But this was so helpful. I got so much out of this. And if people are looking for more resources, where can they look?

• 41:32Speaker 01

  So pretty much everything that we do is available for free on our website, mediasmarts.ca. Everything we do is also available for French in our sister website, Habilo Media Plaisia. So we have, we have many, many videos. We have workshops that people can put on, but also that are available as self-directed tutorial workshops. We have tip sheets and we also have hundreds of classroom lessons and other material for schools because this is something, of course, it's important that kids learn this as early as possible. And we are working to get it integrated across the curriculum, not just in the places where digital media literacy has traditionally been found, like language and health and tech,

• 42:17Speaker 01

  but in math and science and really every part of the curriculum because of course, media is part of every part of our lives.

• 42:28Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah, absolutely. This was so helpful. Thank you so much again.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 42:34Abbey Sharp?

  Okay, I feel like I need one-on-one coaching because this world is constantly evolving and the content our kids have access to is only becoming more dangerous. So as a parent myself, I have been loving the resources on Matthews Companies website, mediasmarts.com. They offer incredible resources for parents and teachers with K to 12 curriculum integration with lesson plans, worksheets, and printable activity sheets for home use. I'm not even exaggerating when I say I have gone through like a whole pack of trees, just like printing. These things offer my kids. They've been honestly so helpful.

• 43:19Abbey Sharp?

  And I wanted to quote straight from one of the articles that I read called Talking to Kids About Media and Body Image that I found particularly useful because Matthew offers some really great conversation starters for our kids that can help them think more critically about both body and gender representation in the media. Let's first talk about our girls whom we know are socialized from a very young age to desire a petite, thin body. Starting, of course, with the type of dolls that they're typically exposed to. Barbie, I'm looking at you. If your daughter is wanting or playing with a Barbie-sized toy, you might ask them, what do you like best about this doll?

• 44:04Abbey Sharp?

  Do the women and girls that you know look like this doll? If not, why wouldn't the people who made this doll want it to look like a real person? Now, if your daughter enjoys watching TV shows or movies that promote certain body types and suggests that it's most important for girls to be popular and attractive, you may ask them if the women that they know in real life look like the main character in the show. What do good characters in the show look like compared to the bad characters? And why do you think that they look different? You might also ask them which characters that they would want to be friends with and why.

• 44:47Abbey Sharp?

  These are all just some ideas to get you started. As for us parents raising boys, as I mentioned in the show, so much of the media kids consume tends to portray male protagonists as being muscular and fit. So for our younger kids, when they show interest in playing with a toy or action figure with an exaggerated, stereotypically masculine body, we can engage them in questions like, is this how you or your friends or the grown-up men that you know look like? Why do you think that the people who make action figures make them look like this? Do you have to have big muscles to be a hero?

• 45:29Abbey Sharp?

  Can you think of people who are heroes who don't necessarily use their muscles to do good things? Spoiler, some of my favorite heroic but not so muscular characters are Mario N. Luigi, Harry Potter, Baymax, Steven Universe, and Luca. If you notice your child watching a television show or movie, or playing or wanting a video game that promotes hyper masculinity through large bodies and tough attitudes, you can also ask, what's the difference between how the good guys and the bad guys are portrayed? Do other boys or men that you know look or act like this? What is the difference between the video game world and the real world?

• 46:14Abbey Sharp?

  Does the game make you solve problems by hurting people? And what might be some other ways of solving problems in the game that don't involve violence? I highly recommend checking out all of the amazing resources on mediasmart.com. It is honestly a treasure trove of information. And on that note, I gotta go co-watch Netflix Kids with my kids. I have a lot of media savvy questions to ask them. But thank you again to Matthew Johnson for helping me bite back against die culture online. Signing off with Science and SaaS, I'm Abbey Sharp. Thanks for listening.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.