Most Latvian teenagers are not taught media literacy / articles in school

In Latvia, 1,000 children and adolescents between the ages of 11 and 17 were interviewed. In total, more than 5,000 young people from the Baltic States, Finland and Sweden took part in the study.

The survey results show that a third or 34% of children and adolescents in Latvia are often presented with incorrect information on the Internet. Almost half or 47% of respondents say they are sometimes confronted with such information. The most common is clickbait, and in most cases it is gossip about famous people. 62% of respondents said they sometimes check the information before giving it away, 28% do it often, and 10% say they never do.

Almost half of the Latvian respondents (45%) said they trust Wikipedia as a reliable source of information, but only 39% said they trust news portals. For comparison: In Finland and Sweden children trust news portals significantly more, while social media trust significantly less than in Latvia.

Parents play a key role in the fight against misinformation, as 64% of the children surveyed trust their parents’ opinion, as the results show.

More than half, or 57%, of children say they were not taught how to check information on the Internet in school. Among the countries surveyed, this value was only higher in Lithuania at 63%. For comparison: in Sweden only 29% of respondents said they had not been taught about it in school.

Half of the Latvian respondents (51%) think that their school teaches enough about reliable information on the Internet, while 49% think the opposite.

The study was carried out in Latvia with the support of Telia Latvija.

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