The 2022 Mozilla Festival (known as MozFest) brings together stakeholders who would like to work together to see a better, healthier internet. MozFest facilitates discussions, workshops, presentations and events grouped around a range of topics – from “Trustworthy AI” and “Digital ID & privacy” to “Digitising cultures and languages”, “Power and ethics” and others.

As part of the “Misinformation & Disinformation” space, IFLA is hosting a session about media literacy on 9 March, exploring how it can be leveraged as an effective tool to empower users. The session will feature an interactive discussion with invited guest experts:

  • Jesus Lau, Professor and Director of the USBI VER Library at Universidad Veracruzana and a Co-chair of the UNESCO Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Alliance
  • Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Professor and Coordinator for Information Literacy Services at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Co-Secretary-General of the UNESCO Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Alliance
  • Anu Ojaranta, a senior library advisor in the Regional State Administrative Agency in Finland
  • Oskar Laurin, the head of the Division for Library Cooperation at the National Library of Sweden

The session programme highlights the kinds of questions this open dialogue aims to explore: what skills-based media literacy solutions to tackling misinformation can be scalable and replicable? What effective ways are there to reach underserves user groups? How to address possible skills-motivation gaps – e.g. engaging users who normally would not be interested in a media literacy training, or avoiding an “overconfidence” user fallacy? And, crucially, how does a skills-based response compare to other approaches to mis- and dis-information enabled by today’s tech landscape (e.g., content moderation, flagging and labelling, etc.).