June 17, 2022 Release of Teaching Materials for Raising Awareness of Disinformation and Misinformation, titled "How to Deal with the Internet: What You Should Do to Avoid Being Deceived by Dis/Misinformation," etc.

For the purpose of contributing to the comprehensive promotion of initiatives to improve media and information literacy, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) conducted a survey on the current situations and challenges concerning initiatives to improve media and information literacy and developed teaching materials for raising awareness of disinformation and misinformation.
Accordingly, MIC releases a report of the results of the survey and the teaching materials for raising awareness of disinformation and misinformation with the guidelines for teachers.

1. Background and details

With regard to the problems of illegal and harmful information on the Internet, including the problem of circulation of disinformation and misinformation (meaning false information created with the intention of harming others and incorrect information created without such intention) becoming conspicuous, it is not sufficient to take measures only targeting the senders of such information. It is considered also necessary to improve the media and information literacy (MIL) (a combined concept consisting of media literacy and information literacy, which covers various other related types of literacy, such as news literacy and digital literacy) of the users who receive such information.
In order to address these challenges, MIC conducted a survey on related policy trends overseas, and with the participation of experts with related knowledge, MIC studied challenges and their solutions regarding initiatives to improve media and information literacy, focusing on measures to counter disinformation and misinformation in Japan, and the future direction of initiatives to improve media and information literacy. In addition, based on the discussion among the experts, MIC developed teaching materials for raising awareness of disinformation and misinformation and the methods of verifying the effects of these materials, and implemented lectures using these materials as model demonstrations.

2. Materials published

MIC publishes a report of the results of the survey, and the teaching materials for raising awareness of disinformation and misinformation, titled "How to Deal with the Internet: What You Should Do to Avoid Being Deceived by Dis/Misinformation" (with the guidelines for teachers).

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  The published material is in Japanese only.