Ouagadougou: The British government plans to adapt school curricula to better arm children against misinformation and ‘nauseating conspiracy theories’ circulating online following recent far-right riots, according to an interview published on Sunday.
The authorities are very angry at the role of social networks in the week of racist and Islamophobic violence which followed the knife attack which cost the lives of three little girls in Southport (north-west of England) on July 29.
‘It is more important than ever to give young people the skills to think critically about what they see online,’ Education Minister Bridget Phillipson told the Sunday Telegraph.
‘Our curriculum reform will include the acquisition of critical skills to arm our children against the misinformation, fake news and nauseating conspiracy theories that abound on social media,’ she added.
This objective will be part of a vast review of primary and secondary programs launched by the new Labor government, the conclusions of which are expect
ed next year.
According to the Sunday Telegraph, the government’s idea is not to create specific courses on disinformation but to include this subject in several subjects.
English classes can be devoted to analyzing newspaper articles to disentangle real information from fake news, computer science classes can help identify “fake news” sites or retouched images, while those in Mathematics can emphasize the interpretation of statistics.
The riots erupted amid partly debunked online rumors describing the suspect in the Southport attack as a Muslim asylum seeker. He is in fact a 17-year-old teenager born in Cardiff whose parents, according to media reports, are from Rwanda.
The government has increased warnings to Internet users and digital platforms regarding their legal responsibilities.
The first convictions were handed down on Friday, with prison sentences against authors of online messages encouraging violence.
These affairs were strongly denounced by the boss of X, Elon Musk, who reinstated accounts
banned since he bought the network which was still called X last year.
The billionaire himself has been accused of adding fuel to the fire by spreading anti-immigration articles from conspiratorial circles, including a false article in the Telegraph which claimed that the government wanted to send the thugs to camps in the Falklands, in the South Atlantic.
Source : Burkina Information Agency