ql-align-justify">Examining Social Media Posts for Hidden Messages is one of the examples in Critical Literacies—where students analyze social media posts to identify hidden messages, stereotypes, or even persuasive techniques. Through this practice, the teacher will present several viral posts, memes, or trending contents from platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram. Students will then examine the language, images, and tone used in the said posts. Moreover, students should be guided by the following questions they have to answer:

What message is this post promoting?
Who benefits from this message?
Do you find this content appropriate and reliable?

After answering the following questions, students will now proceed to reflect their own answers based on how social media can influence people’s beliefs and behaviors.

One of the strengths of this approach is that it will develop students’ critical thinking skills. Students learn to question information rather than just accepting it. Just like the previous topic, it will promote media awareness, which is very important since there are so many posts from the internet that are not appropriate, and so hidden messages are inside of the viral photos.

However, this approach may also present some challenges. Some students may find it difficult to recognize hidden messages without strong guidance from the teacher. Discussions about stereotypes or social issues may also become sensitive or controversial.

The problem of disinformation and social media abuse has reduced trust in online platforms. Efforts to combat false and misleading in-formation have been widely studied in many different contexts ranging from detection of false information from content features and the responses to it on social media, to understanding the diffu-sion patterns and accounts involved in its spread. Different from social bots and individual malicious accounts, a growing area of research is the detection of coordinated accounts a growing area of research is the detection of coordinated accounts (coordinated disinformation or influence campaigns), also called “troll farms", orchestrated by group of human and/or bot accounts that are made to work jointly to promote disinformation or other narratives. (Sharma, K., Zhang, Y., Ferrara, E., & Liu, Y., 2021)

Reference:

Sharma, K., Zhang, Y., Ferrara, E., & Liu, Y. (2021). Identifying Coordinated Accounts on Social Media through Hidden Influence and Group Behaviors. Identifying Coordinated Accounts on Social Media through Hidden Influence and Group Behaviours, 1441–1451. https://doi.org/10.1145/3447548.3467391

Critical Literacies Pedagogy in Practice: