Abstract:

Since the increase in the use of social networks as spaces to produce and consume information, it is essential to study the impact of media education on the development of societies and their innate desire to share information. Currently it is normal to witness how citizens share false or unverified information on social networks, however, the relevant evaluation of information in a critical way would help to make informed decisions about what content we should or should not share. Education is the basic foundation for the construction of any society, especially when the lack of it causes individuals to share information, such as fake news, without prior evaluation. The development of a society depends increasingly on the education of its people, which includes being literate in traditional and digital media. Therefore, this study aims to verify the relationship between the level of digital literacy and the intention to share unverified information. For this, a questionnaire was applied to a sample of 647 people between 18 and 65 years of age from two Ecuadorian cities. A confirmatory factor analysis was then carried out to verify the reliability and validity of the measuring instrument, after that, the proposed hypotheses were tested through a structural analysis using the EQS software. Some of the most important results obtained show that the greater the digital literacy, the less intention to share false or unverified information; it was also proved that the interest in the content of the message has a positive effect on the intention of sharing unverified information, thus, the results of this study help to demonstrate the importance of digital literacy to the population in order to generate the necessary criticality demanded by the new digital society.

Keywords:

Digital literacy, unverified information, media education.