Abstract:

Media and digital affairs are part of people's lives, but not all of them develop skills that allow them to manage a critical and reflexive behavior regarding the contents they consume, mainly false ones. Usually, the task of verifying content has been assigned to journalists and the media; however, the enormous amount of content produced by prosumerism forces all users to be alert. In this context, teachers are key actors who can help young audiences to develop competencies to verify information, but to do so they must first be educated.

The results of a qualitative research are presented with a group of primary and secondary school teachers in Ecuador on the development of information verification processes with the use of a fact-checking bot that works through WhatsApp, for this purpose the technique of non-participant observation with audiovisual support was applied.

Among the main results, it is evident that teachers consider the Internet as a means of reference, that they are not in the habit of verifying the information they consume, that most individuals assume that what is published on the Internet has already been verified and that fake news is only present in social networks not associated with the media. Google searches are the only strategy they use to verify when a piece of information generates doubts, but at the same time, few teachers are interested in verifying it. They identify journalism skills as key in media education and the need for them to be taught as part of teachers and students’ training in order to create audiences that are more critical of the content they consume.

It is concluded that media education should be part of the teachers’ training, since they are responsible for promoting media education in the classrooms of the country's schools and high schools, in this context, journalism can be a fundamental ally.

Keywords:

Media literacy, fact-checking, fake news, education, media competence.