England is launching a curriculum to help school-aged children identify fake news, misinformation and harmful material, with experts suggesting doing the same in Australia would help fight the rising radicalisation of young people online.

Bridget Phillipson, the United Kingdom’s education secretary, said that students across England would learn critical thinking in school to “arm our children against the disinformation, fake news and putrid conspiracy theories awash on social media”.

Dr Jane Hunter, an associate professor of professional learning at the University of Technology Sydney, said that students receive this education in a “widespread and integrated way”.

“With AI and the rest of it, it’s going to become increasingly difficult to know what is fact and what is fiction,” she said.

“The more we do of this and get students actively participating in knowing how can they do a more authoritative search and how they look and recognise fake images is really important.”

She said that although Australian students performed well in creative and critical thinking compared to other OECD nations, there were still gaps.

“I’ve been working recently with one school in Western Sydney where the head teacher, from his summation, thought his students had no capacity to critically think,” Hunter said.

“It is the responsibility of all subject areas to be having these conversations with young people and it can’t just be left to general capabilities in our curriculum or a subject like health and PE, or English.”

The New Daily contacted the Department of Education for comment.

Battling radicalisation

Mike Burgess, the director-general of ASIO, recently warned that extremists were recruiting children as young as 12 online, while arguing it is becoming an issue increasingly difficult to address.

Mike Burgess recently warned that ASIO is seeing an increase in young people becoming radicalised online, while lacking the tools to handle it. Photo: Australian Parliament House

Timothy Graham, an associate professor of digital media at the University of Queensland, said society shouldn’t allow social media platforms to palm off the issue as an individual’s responsibility.

“Time and time again, we see that influencers, celebrities, politicians and even some news media that are responsible for this stuff going viral,” he said.

“We keep seeing that platforms have a massive role to play in inciting violence and I think that the fact ASIO is putting out warnings and raising the terror threat level in response to radicalisation and the new evolution of violence that are done for political reasons is a sign of the times.”

He said social media platforms, particularly X, have monetised extremist content, with the recent riots in the United Kingdom – that triggered Phillipson’s announcement – being an example.

“The modus operandi of these platforms is to go for quantity over quality and they’re less interested in what is being circulated and more interested in if we make tweaks to the algorithms and designs of the platforms, does it get us more clicks?” Graham said.

“X has come under major fire, but as far as getting the balance right, it’s about as far wrong as you can get.”

Getting it right

Both Hunter and Graham pointed to recent riots in the United Kingdom as an example of how radicalisation and disinformation can have real-world consequences.

Dr Dana McKay, associate dean of interaction, technology and information at RMIT University, said that although the UK’s program was aimed at high school students, learning critical thinking and internet literacy should start even earlier.

“There has always been some level of civics education in schools. What that looked like was different depending on where you’re from,” she said.

“Our aim needs to be talking to them about how to be careful and how to protect themselves and how to stay safe and how to reflect and decide what they believe for themselves.”

She said that learning empathy, alongside critical thinking, from a young age is important too.