The model begins with a distinction that is easy to lose in the fast-moving debate over deepfakes: a photograph’s pixels are not the same thing as the claim made with that photograph. The authors define a “journalistic visual claim” as the image together with its caption, headline, placement, timing, spatial framing, and the proposition advanced by the surrounding report. Veracity concerns whether that entire claim accurately represents the relevant event, including the people, place, date, scale, and any implication about prevalence. Authenticity instead concerns whether the asset and its stated production history are genuine, while provenance is the inspectable record of who or what created it, what transformations occurred, and which parties attested to those facts. Credibility is an audience member’s judgment that the material is believable; trust is a broader willingness to rely on journalists, publishers, platforms, and verification systems despite uncertainty.

These distinctions explain why the same file can carry different evidential value in different contexts. An untouched photograph may be authentic yet become misleading through a false date, selective crop, or placement beside a headline that overstates what the scene shows. A synthetic illustration can be procedurally acceptable if its generated status is disclosed and its role is clear, although an attractive image may still make a false accompanying claim easier to imagine. Cryptographically signed history can strengthen confidence that a camera captured a particular scene, but it cannot prove that the caption is correct, that the scene was not staged, or that the visible crowd represented an entire event. Conversely, an image without credentials is not automatically false: metadata can be stripped during platform processing, copied through screenshots, or originate from a camera that does not support credential technology.

The LVTM’s five layers trace an evidential chain from the depicted world to public judgment. At the referential layer, verification asks whether the full image-caption-report proposition is supported by independent photographs or video, eyewitness accounts, geolocation, chronology, public records, and evidence about representativeness. At the production layer, investigators establish whether a work was captured, corrected, enhanced, reconstructed, illustrated, or fabricated, and whether the published asset differs materially from the captured scene. The provenance layer asks whether creation and editing histories can be inspected through mechanisms such as C2PA manifests, Content Credentials, signed camera files, original files, and edit logs. The institutional layer identifies the photographers, editors, agencies, fact-checkers, and other actors willing to explain what was checked and who bears responsibility for errors. The audience layer examines how platform framing, source reputation, comments, political identity, prior knowledge, and visual realism affect acceptance or rejection.

To demonstrate the model’s diagnostic reach, the authors selected two maximum-contrast episodes from U.S. political news rather than conducting a representative survey. In March 2023, synthetic images depicting Donald Trump being arrested circulated as news-like scenes while attention centered on a possible indictment. The creator said the images had been generated with Midjourney and initially presented as parody, but reposts stripped away that context and emphasized their resemblance to spot-news photography. No corresponding arrest occurred, and no accountable newsroom originated the images. Because expectations about an imminent indictment made the invented scenes narratively plausible, the authors characterize the episode as false acceptance: surface realism and contextual expectation substituted for missing evidence at the referential, production, and institutional layers.

The contrasting episode occurred in August 2024, when an authentic photograph of a crowd at a Harris-Walz campaign event in Michigan was falsely accused of being AI-generated. Reuters compared the disputed image with its own photographs and other records of the event; the campaign identified the staff photographer; and a forensic analyst found no indications of AI generation. A follow-up assertion about the crowd’s supposed absence from reflections on the campaign plane was also rebutted with additional photographs and an explanation involving distance, viewing angle, and telephoto compression. Independent evidence supported the bounded claim that the photographed crowd and event existed, although broader assertions about the rally’s size, unanimity, or character would still require separate evidence. Here, partisan suspicion and misread optical features encouraged false rejection: interpretive distrust overrode convergent referential and institutional support.

Technical repair systems are central to the proposed framework, but the analysis treats them as one component rather than a solution. C2PA, a cross-industry standards initiative, specifies cryptographically signed, tamper-evident assertions about an asset’s origin, editing, participating tools, and signers; its user-facing Content Credentials can be attached to media or linked through recoverable manifests. Camera-based signing can begin the chain of custody at capture, as demonstrated by the Leica M11-P, which was promoted as the first commercial camera able to attach Content Credentials. Yet credentials are not universal, and their value depends on confidence in the signer, device, and account. They can establish production facts without settling semantic truth, while missing credentials can reflect unsupported devices or platform processing rather than deception.

The authors also examine professional and legal controls. The 2026 World Press Photo Contest requires camera-made entries and prohibits synthetic images and generative fill, using identifiable photographers, original files, captions, and review procedures to define an acceptable documentary process. European Union rules under Article 50 of the Artificial Intelligence Act, applicable from August 2, 2026, add obligations for machine-readable marking of certain AI-generated or manipulated content and disclosure of deepfakes in relevant contexts. Research cited in the article suggests that provenance labels can increase trust in digital news platforms across several Western countries, but also that label design matters: a generic “AI” badge may fail to distinguish deception, illustration, or ordinary editing. Disclosure therefore needs to state what is known, what was certified, what remains uncertain, and what independent evidence supports the associated claim.

Governance responsibilities differ by layer. News organizations must corroborate the event, caption, crop, scale, and representativeness; retain originals and edit histories; distinguish correction, enhancement, reconstruction, illustration, and fabrication; and issue corrections that identify the exact layer that failed. Platforms should preserve and validate credentials through uploads, transcoding, and reposting, display publisher and signer identities, retain caption context, and resist collapsing all provenance information into a binary badge. Regulators and standards bodies should support interoperable disclosure, privacy, source protection, accessibility, independent audits, and due process, rather than making credentials a compulsory passport that automatically delegitimizes evidence from older or unsupported devices. Audiences, meanwhile, need to reconstruct evidential chains rather than merely hunt for visual defects: who first published an image, what proposition it advances, whether the event and its claimed scope are independently documented, and which organization stands behind the verification.

The comparison is deliberately illustrative and does not establish how often false acceptance or false rejection occurs, their causal strength, or their effects across populations. The article contains no preregistered corpus, independent coding, inter-coder reliability assessment, audience experiment, or newsroom ethnography, and the five propositions derived from the model remain untested expectations. The framework may also behave differently across media systems, cultures, genres, and political contexts: institutional reputation may carry greater weight in high-trust environments, while official signatures can be distrusted or endanger sources where political repression is high. Future work would need distinct measures for each layer and trials across platforms, countries, and audience groups. Until then, the central conclusion is that visual trust is not a property hidden inside photographic appearance. It is a coordinated judgment that emerges when referential evidence, production transparency, technical traceability, accountable institutions, and contextual explanation reinforce one another.

Subject of Research: A conceptual framework for evaluating trust in AI-generated and authentic journalistic images

Article Title: From daguerreotype to deepfake: a layered model of visual trust in AI-era photojournalism

Article References: Ruiz San Miguel, F. J., Torres-Toukoumidis, A., Hinojosa-Becerra, M., & Marín-Gutiérrez, I. (2026). From daguerreotype to deepfake: a layered model of visual trust in AI-era photojournalism. Frontiers in Communication, 11, Article 1959537. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1959537

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2026.1959537

Keywords: visual trust, generative AI, photojournalism, deepfakes, image provenance, C2PA, Content Credentials, misinformation, media literacy, news verification, daguerreotype, deepfake

The research, conducted by a team at the University of Al Dhaid in Sharjah, used a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. First, a survey of 300 UAE residents aged 18 to 35 who consume digital news at least three times per week measured how strongly participants felt their feeds were personalized, how diverse they perceived their news exposure to be, and how much they trusted the news they encountered online. Then, 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews explored how participants interpreted and navigated these curated environments in daily life. The sample, recruited through university mailing lists and professional networks, had a mean age of 24 years, was 66 percent female, and comprised undergraduate students and early-career professionals — a deliberately focused group of young, highly connected news users rather than a representative slice of the population.

The quantitative results revealed a consistent and statistically robust pattern. Perceived personalization intensity — the degree to which users felt their feeds were shaped by their past clicks, likes, searches, and viewing time — was the strongest negative predictor of perceived news diversity, with a standardized beta of −0.41 (p < .001). In other words, the more tailored a feed felt, the narrower it seemed. The regression model predicting perceived diversity explained 43.2 percent of the variance, while the trust model explained 48.8 percent, though the authors caution that shared method variance likely inflates these figures. Platform differences also emerged: TikTok-primary users reported significantly lower perceived diversity than Instagram users (beta = −0.28, p < .001), while YouTube-primary users reported higher diversity (beta = +0.21, p = .012). TikTok users also faced roughly twice the odds of being classified into an echo-chamber category compared with Instagram users (OR = 2.45, p = .028).

Trust followed a parallel logic. Perceived diversity was the strongest positive predictor of trust in online news (beta = +0.38, p < .001), suggesting that users who felt their feeds exposed them to varied viewpoints also trusted the news more. Perceived personalization, by contrast, was negatively associated with trust (beta = −0.22, p < .001). Perhaps most intriguingly, algorithmic awareness — participants’ self-reported understanding of how their digital footprint shapes feed content — was negatively associated with trust (beta = −0.12, p = .041). Knowing how recommendation systems work did not reassure users; it deepened their skepticism. The authors interpret this as evidence that awareness without transparency or accountability may intensify rather than resolve distrust.

Proactive news practices emerged as a consistent protective factor. Fact-checking frequency was positively associated with both perceived diversity (beta = +0.16, p < .001) and trust (beta = +0.25, p < .001), and was associated with meaningfully lower odds of echo-chamber classification (OR = 0.61, p = .004). Consulting more news sources showed similar positive associations. The interviews clarified why: these behaviors were not merely verification habits but deliberate tactics for disrupting recommendation loops — searching headlines in private browser tabs, switching between Arabic and English sources, deleting watch histories to reset algorithms, and maintaining separate accounts dedicated solely to news.

The qualitative phase identified three recurring themes that explain the human logic behind the statistics. The first, the useful but opaque algorithm, captured a persistent tension: participants found personalization genuinely efficient and sometimes impressive in its accuracy, yet that very accuracy bred unease because it occurred without visible logic, explanation, or recourse. One 22-year-old TikTok user explained: I know TikTok gives me exactly what I want to hear about regional politics. It is smart. But because it is so tailored, I trust it less. I always wonder what the algorithm is intentionally hiding from me. Another participant described the feed as feeling like someone already knows what I think and just keeps confirming it — convenient, but also a bit like being managed.

The second theme, informational narrowing and algorithmic fatigue, described a gradual rather than sudden constriction of variety. Participants reported that small engagement decisions could lock them into an informational lane for weeks. One Instagram user noted that engaging with a single economic news reel transformed her entire feed, calling it an illusion of choice. Another admitted deliberately avoiding clicks on stories they cared about to prevent the app from flooding them with more of the same. A TikTok user described realizing only after about two weeks that almost nothing in the feed surprised them anymore — everything simply confirmed what they already felt.

The third theme, tactical evasion and digital agency, revealed that many participants saw themselves as active managers rather than passive recipients of their information environments. Their strategies were deliberate and often laborious: opening private browser tabs to search for headlines on international news sites, switching between Arabic and English sources because each language yielded a noticeably different version of the same event, deleting YouTube watch history every few weeks to reset the algorithm, and maintaining separate news-only Instagram accounts to keep recommendation profiles clean. One participant described checking every story on at least two platforms before forming an opinion, reasoning that each platform shows a different piece of the picture.

Theoretically, the authors argue that the Algorithmic Perception Paradox is not merely a local finding but a structural dynamic rooted in what Zuboff (2019) calls surveillance capitalism. Three components define it: a relevance signal, where the feed feels accurate and calibrated to the user’s interests; an exclusion inference, where users recognize that curation involves omission and suspect the omission may be commercially motivated; and a trust deficit, where perceived accuracy fails to translate into confidence in completeness or balance. The paradox is distinct from filter bubble theory, which concerns objective feed diversity, and from echo chamber theory, which concerns social reinforcement within homogeneous networks. Instead, it addresses how users evaluate the epistemic status of personalized news environments — a question that becomes especially acute where personalization is salient, transparency is limited, and commercial optimization is assumed to shape visibility.

The UAE context adds theoretical weight beyond geographic extension. Unlike Western frameworks built around partisan ideological polarization, perceived informational enclosure in the multilingual, transnationally connected Gulf operates through language segmentation, expatriate diversity, and platform-specific content cultures. Participants who moved between Arabic and English sources described linguistic switching as deliberate diversity work rather than a quirk. The authors acknowledge limitations — the cross-sectional design cannot establish causality, common method bias likely inflates model fit, and the small X subsample warrants caution — but the pattern held consistently across both phases. Their conclusion is clear: trust in personalized news depends not only on perceived accuracy but also on perceived opacity and perceived completeness, and meaningful transparency, diversity-sensitive design, and user controls remain structural necessities that individual tactics alone cannot replace.

Subject of Research: Algorithmic news personalization, perceived diversity, and trust among young UAE news users

Article Title: The algorithmic perception paradox: personalization, news diversity, and trust among young UAE news users

Article References: Al-Zoubi, A., Setoutah, S., Farhi, F., & Belghitia, S. (2026). The algorithmic perception paradox: personalization, news diversity, and trust among young UAE news users. Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 8, Article 1931633. https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2026.1931633

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fhumd.2026.1931633

Keywords: algorithmic personalization, news diversity, trust in news, UAE, filter bubbles, echo chambers, surveillance capitalism, TikTok, media literacy, digital platforms, algorithmic, perception

The study, led by Yongjian Lin of Ningbo City College of Vocational Technology and Jianchao Ni of Xiamen University’s Institute of Education, arrives at a moment when idealized, digitally enhanced imagery saturates the feeds of young people worldwide. Filters, retouching, and curated self-presentation have transformed social platforms into environments where appearance is not merely displayed but continuously evaluated — through likes, comments, and follower counts that turn looks into a measurable form of social currency. Unlike traditional mass media, which delivered ideals as distant cultural messages, social media embeds those ideals within students’ own peer networks, where they are enacted, endorsed, and socially rewarded in real time.

To capture the phenomenon, the team administered a single-wave online questionnaire to students from more than 20 institutions across eastern, central, and western China, spanning undergraduates, master’s students, and doctoral candidates. Of 2,000 collected questionnaires, 1,640 remained after quality screening — an effective response rate of 82 percent. Participants completed four validated instruments: an adapted Social Media Use Intensity Scale measuring how deeply platforms are woven into daily life, the Social Appearance Anxiety Scale assessing worry about negative evaluation of one’s looks, an upward social comparison measure drawn from established online-comparison questionnaires, and an envy scale derived from the Dispositional Envy Scale. All measures showed strong internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from 0.900 to 0.951.

The statistical architecture of the study was deliberately layered. Confirmatory factor analysis verified that the four constructs were psychometrically distinct, with heterotrait-monotrait ratios between 0.678 and 0.749 — all comfortably below the conservative 0.85 threshold for discriminant validity. Correlation analysis then revealed significant positive associations among all variables: social media use correlated with appearance anxiety at r = 0.642, with upward comparison at r = 0.693, and with envy at r = 0.680. Variance inflation factors stayed below 5, ruling out serious multicollinearity before the team proceeded to the centerpiece analysis: PROCESS Model 6, a chain mediation framework estimated with 5,000 percentile bootstrap samples, controlling for gender, educational level, and average daily social media time.

The results were striking in their coherence. The direct effect of social media use on appearance anxiety was significant (B = 0.5700, p < 0.001), but when the two mediators entered the model, the direct effect shrank while the total indirect effect — 0.4294 — carried 75.333 percent of the total association. Three separate pathways emerged. Social media use predicted appearance anxiety through upward comparison alone (effect = 0.2182), through envy alone (effect = 0.1069), and through the full chain in which comparison first sparked envy and envy then fed anxiety (effect = 0.1043). All three confidence intervals excluded zero, confirming each pathway as statistically meaningful.

What makes the chain pathway theoretically important is that it separates levels of explanation that earlier research often blurred. The authors ground the overall association in the tripartite influence model, which holds that media, peers, and family shape body-image outcomes through internalization of appearance ideals and appearance-related comparison. Social media, in this framing, is a hybrid sociocultural setting: commercial imagery supplies culturally recognizable standards, influencers present those standards as achievable lifestyles, and peer photographs make them locally and socially relevant. Visible engagement metrics then signal which appearances receive approval, making a narrow ideal appear both descriptively common and socially expected. Once internalized, that standard becomes a personal criterion against which ordinary variation in looks is read as inadequacy.

Upward comparison, by contrast, is the cognitive engine that converts an external ideal into a judgment about one’s relative standing. Social media makes superior targets unusually accessible — a single swipe delivers curated, digitally enhanced images of peers and influencers who may share the user’s age or social position, making the comparison feel fair and the target’s advantage personally diagnostic. Crucially, platform feeds strip away the contextual cues that would normally qualify a comparison: the effort, lighting, editing, and failed attempts behind a polished image. Users end up comparing their ordinary, continuously experienced selves against other people’s most favorable moments, skewing their reference group toward the exceptional and making idealized appearances seem ordinary. A 2023 meta-analysis of 48 experiments found that exposure to upward comparison targets on social media produces a small but reliable negative effect on body image, and a 2025 meta-analysis of 83 studies reported a moderate association between online social comparison and body-image concerns.

Envy, the emotional terminus of the chain, is subtler than hostility. Drawing on cognitive appraisal theory, the authors describe envy as a painful response that arises only when another person’s advantage is appraised as relevant to one’s own goals and self-worth — exposure to an attractive image does not automatically produce it. Contemporary envy research distinguishes benign envy, which motivates self-improvement, from malicious envy, which breeds hostility toward the advantaged other. The envy measure used here primarily captured the striving, achievement-oriented form. Yet even benign envy carries painful awareness of relative disadvantage, and when the ideal is digitally enhanced or resistant to personal effort, that discomfort can be sustained rather than resolved. Envy keeps the comparison target and the perceived shortfall mentally active, fueling appearance monitoring, self-doubt, and heightened sensitivity to how others might judge perceived flaws.

The authors are careful about what the data can and cannot show. Because the design is cross-sectional, the

Subject of Research: The psychological chain linking social media use to appearance anxiety among college students through upward social comparison and envy.

Article Title: The impact of social media use on appearance anxiety among college students —the chain mediating effect of upward social comparison and envy

Article References: Lin, Y., Li, Z., Li, L., Lv, Z., Song, T., Zhou, X., & Ni, J. (2026). The impact of social media use on appearance anxiety among college students —the chain mediating effect of upward social comparison and envy. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 17, Article 1962984. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1962984

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1962984

Keywords: appearance anxiety, social media use, upward social comparison, envy, chain mediation, college students, body image, tripartite influence model, media literacy, digital mental health, bootstrap mediation analysis, China

The study, published in Frontiers in Communication by Abdullahi Mohamud Mohamed of the Institute of Communication Studies at Communication University of China, surveyed 393 students at three universities spanning Somalia’s principal regions: Somali National University in Mogadishu, the University of Hargeisa in Somaliland, and East African University in Garowe, Puntland. It combined an online questionnaire with semi-structured interviews and, crucially, a five-item performance task in which fifteen students were shown real posts drawn from Somali Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram circulation and asked to judge whether each was reliable or misleading. The design was cross-sectional and purposively sampled, so the findings describe the participating students rather than Somali university students as a population — but the pattern they reveal is stark.

On paper, the students looked reasonably well equipped. They rated their general media literacy at 3.82 on a five-point scale, with strong internal consistency, and their awareness that unverified information harms society scored highest of all, at 4.15. Understanding of how fake news circulates on social media (3.84) and confidence in distinguishing reliable from unreliable information (3.72) followed close behind. Then the gradient set in. Actively seeking information from multiple outlets scored 3.58. Checking a story across traditional sources scored 3.12. Verifying before sharing scored 3.08 — the most dispersed item in the instrument. And awareness of which websites are most likely to spread fake news scored lowest of all, at 2.91. The distance between knowing misinformation is harmful and reporting any habit of checking it exceeded a full scale point.

The performance task turned that self-reported gap into a measured one. Because each judgement was binary, chance performance was 50 per cent. Across the 75 judgements made by the fifteen participants, 32 were correct — 42.7 per cent overall. On the four misinformation items alone, accuracy fell to 35 per cent, well below the guessing benchmark. Yet the same participants rated their confidence in detecting misinformation at 3.61 out of five, equivalent to roughly 72 per cent. The gap between what students believed they could do and what they did was around 30 to 37 percentage points.

The error profile is more revealing than the aggregate. Participants performed best on a verified factual item from an established outlet, but their success rested on recognising a familiar logo, not on any checking procedure — a useful heuristic that offers no protection against false content carrying a familiar look. The health rumour was judged somewhat more accurately, but almost entirely by medical students drawing on subject knowledge that does not transfer to other domains. The two weakest results, both at 27 per cent, involved an out-of-context image re-shared as current conflict footage and a clan-targeted rumour designed to inflame division. Only four of the fifteen participants used any systematic verification tool — cross-referencing, reverse image search, or a fact-checking site — on any of the five posts. Nearly all accepted the decontextualised image as genuine without questioning its origin or date.

That image result matches what the recent literature on visual disinformation would predict. Researchers have argued that images carry a presumption of evidence that text has to earn: they are judged faster, remembered longer, and granted credibility on sight. The cheapest form of visual falsehood is not a deepfake but an authentic photograph stripped of its date and place — and in Somalia, where conflict footage circulates constantly, that exploit costs almost nothing to whoever reposts it. The clan-targeted rumour, meanwhile, points to a second weakness of particular consequence: participants’ explanations of their judgements on that post referred to identity rather than evidence, and identity-based reasoning appeared to switch off evaluation altogether.

Within the survey sample, media literacy was strongly and positively associated with self-reported misinformation-fighting competency, r = .62, p < .001, with the two indices sharing 38.4 per cent of their variance. Given the cross-sectional design and non-probability sampling, this is a statistical association among these respondents rather than a causal or population-level relationship, and some inflation from shared method and conceptual overlap between the instruments is likely. Still, the coefficient is large by conventional benchmarks, and it coexists with the 0.37-point gap between the index means: students feel more competent with media in general than with the specific task of resisting false content. The study distinguishes declarative literacy — knowing what misinformation is and that it harms — from procedural literacy, the ability and disposition to verify. The declarative component scored well. The procedural component lagged.

Interviews suggested why the gap persists, and the explanations are distinctly Somali. Students described a forwarding culture in WhatsApp groups that rewards being first over being right: people share something interesting or outrageous immediately, without taking a moment to think. They described a clear functional division of platforms, in which Facebook serves as the default news infrastructure — used by 87.3 per cent of respondents — while WhatsApp carries private rumour, TikTok provides entertainment, and YouTube is for learning. Facebook’s centrality is consequential because it is the platform on which Somali political and clan contestation is most visibly conducted, and page identity, rather than claim verification, was students’ dominant credibility cue. Most strikingly, students described clan affiliation operating as an informal credibility filter: information originating from one’s own clan or close network was accepted faster and questioned less, and emotionally charged content tied to clan identity was believed and forwarded because it arrived through trusted channels.

That clan filter is not irrational in a country where formal institutions have been absent or contested since the collapse of central government in 1991, and where credibility has traditionally been vested in persons and lineages rather than institutions. Social platforms have not displaced these networks; they have digitised them. A WhatsApp group of kin reproduces online the trust structures that governed oral communication — with the difference that content can now be fabricated, decontextualised and forwarded to thousands in minutes. In a society where a single rumour framed through clan identity can reactivate old grievances, and where fact-checking capacity is limited to a small number of organisations and Somali is a low-resource language for which automated detection tools barely exist, the social cost of error is high. The study aligns this finding with work from South Sudan suggesting that in post-conflict settings, literacy efforts must engage intergroup trust directly rather than treat misinformation as a knowledge deficit alone.

The students themselves were clear about what they wanted. Fourteen of the fifteen interviewees called for workshops and seminars on misinformation; twelve wanted media literacy embedded as a compulsory part of the curriculum —

Subject of Research: Media literacy and misinformation resilience among university students in Somalia

Article Title: Aware but not verifying: media literacy, verification behaviour, and misinformation resilience at three universities in Somalia

Article References: Mohamed, A. M. (2026). Aware but not verifying: media literacy, verification behaviour, and misinformation resilience at three universities in Somalia. Frontiers in Communication, 11, Article 1986584. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1986584

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2026.1986584

Keywords: media literacy, misinformation, Somalia, verification behaviour, university students, clan credibility filter, visual disinformation, Frontiers in Communication, Aware, verifying, media, literacy

The stakes of this research extend well beyond academic curiosity. Gaming disorder, recognized by the World Health Organization in the International Classification of Diseases, and unspecified internet use disorder describe patterns of digital behavior in which gaming or online activity takes on a compulsive quality, crowding out other interests and continuing despite negative consequences. In adolescents, such patterns can lead to reduced mental and physical health as well as serious impairments in important areas of life, including school performance, family relationships, friendships, and leisure time. Excessive use of social media falls into the same problematic category. Against the backdrop of ongoing debates about how to protect the mental health of young people in the digital age, Lindenberg emphasizes that the question of effective interventions is highly relevant.

The policy landscape makes this urgency concrete. Alongside much-discussed regulatory measures such as age restrictions, there are parallel calls for approaches designed to empower young people to use video games and the Internet responsibly. These include prevention programs built on behavioral therapy principles and programs rooted in media education. Until now, however, robust empirical evidence comparing these two approaches head to head in real school settings has been scarce. Our research provides important empirical insights into which programs and content are particularly effective and which target groups benefit the most, Lindenberg notes, underscoring the practical orientation of the study.

To generate that evidence, the Heidelberg team designed a comparison between two interventions developed specifically for the school setting: PROTECTtraining, a behavioral therapy-based program, and PROTECTinfo, a media education program. The two interventions were deliberately engineered to be identical in duration and implementation effort, differing only in content. This methodological decision is what gives the study its analytical power. When two programs demand the same time, the same staffing, and the same logistical footprint, any difference in outcomes can be attributed to what the programs actually teach rather than to how they are delivered. In total, 1,793 students aged 11 to 18 took part in a four-week intervention consisting of four 90-minute sessions each.

Half of the participating adolescents completed PROTECTtraining, the behavioral therapy program. Its curriculum drew on well-established clinical techniques: among other elements, it explained the vicious cycle of addiction — the self-reinforcing loop in which short-term relief from negative emotions drives escalating use, which in turn deepens those emotions — and provided practical training in behavior change and emotion regulation. These components reflect the core machinery of cognitive behavioral therapy, which aims to interrupt maladaptive patterns by giving individuals concrete tools to recognize triggers, restructure their responses, and manage the emotional states that fuel compulsive behavior.

The second group participated in PROTECTinfo, the media education program, which covered a broad and socially relevant set of topics including media literacy, gaming, cyberbullying, and legal aspects of online behavior. This represents the approach most commonly deployed in schools: educating students about the digital world, its risks, and its norms, with the expectation that knowledge and awareness will translate into healthier habits. Both programs were delivered in the same format — four weekly sessions of 90 minutes over four weeks — ensuring that the comparison tested content, not delivery.

The researchers assessed participants’ online addiction behaviors and mental well-being at four points: at the beginning of the programs, at the end of the programs, and at follow-up intervals of four and twelve months. This longitudinal design allowed the team to distinguish short-term effects from durable ones, a critical distinction in prevention research where early gains often fade. In addition, the team conducted a separate analysis for adolescents who had been identified as having a comparatively high risk of addiction at the start of the study — a subgroup analysis that would prove decisive for interpreting the results.

The final survey, conducted one year after the programs began, revealed a nuanced picture. Among adolescents without a risk of addictive behavior, who constituted the majority of study participants, there was hardly any measurable effect on their symptoms. In other words, for the broad population of students who are not at risk, neither program produced substantial lasting change — a finding with significant implications for how prevention resources are allocated. In contrast, for adolescents at high risk of addiction, both interventions proved effective, but the behavioral therapy intervention was significantly more effective than its media education counterpart.

The magnitude of that difference is the study’s headline finding. In a direct comparison, the behavioral therapy program is 50 percent more effective against gaming disorder and other problematic online behaviors than the media education program, Prof. Lindenberg stresses. This effect size is substantial for a prevention intervention, particularly one delivered in a standard school setting with modest time investment. The result suggests that teaching at-risk adolescents the specific psychological mechanisms of addiction and equipping them with regulation and behavior-change skills does more to shift long-term outcomes than general education about media and its risks.

Beyond the head-to-head comparison, the Heidelberg researcher draws a broader structural conclusion from the data: targeted measures tailored to at-risk groups in the school setting achieve significantly better results and are more resource-efficient than prevention programs implemented on a broad scale. The pattern in the data supports this reading — the majority of students, those without addiction risk, showed hardly any measurable symptom change, while the high-risk subgroup, a smaller population, responded meaningfully to intervention, especially to the behavioral therapy approach. Concentrating effort on identifying and treating at-risk students, rather than delivering universal programs with diffuse effects, may therefore deliver more benefit per unit of investment.

The research was funded by the then Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the former Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration, reflecting the policy significance attached to the question at both the national and state levels. The study, titled Cognitive Behavioral Therapy vs Media Literacy for Prevention of Gaming Disorder and Unspecified Internet Use Disorder, appeared in JAMA Network Open on 4 September 2026. For schools and health authorities weighing how to respond to growing concern about adolescent screen use, the message from Baden-Württemberg’s 44 secondary schools is clear: behavioral therapy-based prevention works, works best for those at highest risk, and outperforms media education by a wide margin when the two are measured against each other over a full year.

Subject of Research: School-based prevention of gaming disorder and problematic internet use in adolescents

Article Title: School-based prevention programs for gaming disorder and problematic online habits

Article References: School-based prevention programs for gaming disorder and problematic online habits. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: gaming disorder, internet use disorder, adolescents, school-based prevention, cognitive behavioral therapy, media education, media literacy, randomized controlled trial, Heidelberg University, JAMA Network Open, Baden-Württemberg, mental health

The study, conducted between March and July 2025, used a retrospective qualitative cross-sectional design, asking participants to look back on their pandemic experiences. The research team layered three complementary methods. They carried out 28 in-depth interviews with women living with HIV, the group with perhaps the most at stake when health services wobble, since uninterrupted antiretroviral therapy is the bedrock of viral suppression and prevention of mother-to-child transmission. They then convened 14 focus group discussions, two per study site with six participants each, gathering 84 HIV-negative community members to capture the wider social fabric in which health decisions are made. Finally, they conducted 24 key informant interviews with health workers, policymakers, Community Advisory Board members and HIV activists, the professionals who stood on the front lines of the information battle. This triangulated structure matters methodologically: by comparing what women experienced, what communities believed, and what officials observed, the researchers could cross-check accounts and build a picture more robust than any single vantage point could provide.

Analysis followed Braun and Clarke’s six-phase thematic framework, a rigorous inductive approach in which codes emerge from the data rather than being imposed upon it. The team then mapped the resulting themes onto Kleinman’s explanatory model, a classic framework in medical anthropology that examines how patients, families and clinicians each construct their own understanding of illness. That theoretical choice is telling. It signals that the authors view pandemic misinformation not merely as a technical failure of message delivery but as a clash between competing explanatory systems, in which a WhatsApp rumor about vaccines causing infertility can carry as much explanatory power for a pregnant woman as an official Ministry of Health bulletin, particularly when the rumor arrives in her own language and the bulletin does not.

Six themes crystallized from the data. The first concerned access to maternal and HIV information through digital and media channels, revealing a landscape of stark inequality. Radio and television remained lifelines for many, but smartphone ownership and reliable connectivity were unevenly distributed, leaving some women dependent on secondhand information relayed by neighbors. The second theme explored how participants understood and evaluated health information, and here the study surfaced a critical gap: many respondents lacked the practical skills to distinguish credible sources from fabricated ones, to cross-check claims, or to recognize the hallmarks of manipulated content. Digital and media literacy, the capacity to access, analyze, evaluate and create media messages, was not a luxury in this context. It was the immune system of public health communication, and for many it was compromised.

The third theme documented a more hopeful counterpoint: digital media as a tool for health communication and service continuity. Where connectivity existed, it kept care alive. Telephone calls, text messages and social platforms allowed health workers to check in on patients, remind them of appointments, and deliver antiretroviral refills through adapted mechanisms when lockdowns made clinic visits hazardous. The fourth theme, however, catalogued the challenges in accessing, understanding and using health information, and it is here that the study’s most sobering findings reside. Participants described inconsistent messaging from authorities, content that arrived in English rather than local languages, and the sheer velocity of rumor compared with the deliberate pace of official correction. Misinformation about COVID-19 shaped risk perceptions, deterred care-seeking, and disrupted treatment adherence, particularly for antenatal care and HIV services, where continuity is everything.

The fifth theme examined social and contextual influences on information use, and it underscores why health communication can never be reduced to broadcasting. Decisions about whether to attend an antenatal visit or continue therapy were filtered through household power dynamics, religious beliefs, cultural understandings of illness, and the opinions of trusted figures in the community. A message from a distant official voice competed against a message from a mother-in-law, a pastor, or a village health team member known personally for years. In Kleinman’s terms, the explanatory models of family and community often outweighed the biomedical model in determining behavior. Any communication strategy that ignores this social architecture, the study implies, is shouting into a storm.

From the sixth theme emerged concrete recommendations, and they read like a blueprint for pandemic-resilient health communication. Participants called for strengthening digital and media literacy itself, so that citizens are equipped not just with information but with the evaluative skills to judge it. They urged improvements in digital access, recognizing that literacy without connectivity is hollow. They demanded local-language content, so that vital guidance about antiretroviral therapy or danger signs in pregnancy does not evaporate at the boundary of a language barrier. They asked for consistent messaging, since contradictory guidance from different authorities corrodes the trust on which all compliance depends. And they proposed integrating digital channels, mass media and community-based approaches, a hybrid model in which a radio broadcast, a WhatsApp reminder and a village health team visit reinforce one another rather than compete.

The study’s authors are candid about its limitations. Because participants reflected on experiences from 2020 to 2022 during interviews conducted in 2025, recall bias was possible; memories of a crisis period can blur or be reshaped by subsequent events. The team mitigated this through careful probing, contextual prompts and triangulation across the three data sources, but the retrospective design remains a constraint worth noting. Ethical safeguards were thorough: approval came from the Makerere University School of Public Health Research and Ethics Committee and the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, written informed consent was obtained from all participants with thumbprint provisions for those unable to sign, and confidentiality was protected through anonymized identifiers and pseudonyms in group discussions. The research was supported by the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, with additional funding from the NIHR Global Health Research Professorship.

Why does this Ugandan study resonate far beyond its borders? Because its central finding is universal: misinformation does not merely spread false facts, it disrupts the continuity of care on which chronic conditions depend. HIV is the paradigmatic case. Antiretroviral therapy demands near-perfect adherence, and prevention of mother-to-child transmission demands that pregnant women remain engaged with services through pregnancy, delivery and breastfeeding. A pandemic that simultaneously overwhelms clinics and floods the information environment with noise strikes precisely at that continuity. The study shows that misinformation, social and cultural beliefs, and limited access to digital health information together influenced how Ugandans understood COVID-19 and used health services, eroding trust in health messages and deterring care-seeking for maternal and HIV care specifically.

The implications for future pandemic preparedness are direct. Low- and middle-income countries, where smartphone penetration is partial and health literacy varies widely, cannot rely on digital-first strategies alone. The study’s vision is instead one of layered redundancy: digital tools for those who can reach them, mass media for broad reach, and community health workers, including Uganda’s village health teams, as trusted human translators of official guidance. Investing in digital and media literacy before the next crisis, the authors argue, is as much a part of pandemic preparedness as stockpiling oxygen or training intensivists. Clear communication, reliable information and digital inclusion are not soft accessories to a public health response. They are the connective tissue that keeps a pregnant woman attending her antenatal visits and a woman living with HIV taking her tablets, day after day, even when the world outside the clinic has gone quiet and strange.

Subject of Research: Digital and media literacy in health communication for maternal and HIV care during pandemics in Uganda

Article Title: Leveraging digital and media literacy for effective health communication in maternal and HIV care during pandemics in Uganda

Article References: Twimukye, A., Waitt, C., & Olungah, C. O. (2026). Leveraging digital and media literacy for effective health communication in maternal and HIV care during pandemics in Uganda. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29746-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29746-3

Keywords: COVID-19, misinformation, health communication, digital literacy, media literacy, maternal health, HIV, antiretroviral therapy, Uganda, pandemic preparedness, qualitative research, digital inclusion

The study, led by Ana Pérez-Escoda of Universidad Francisco de Vitoria in Madrid, together with Eglée Ortega-Fernández of the Complutense University of Madrid and Laura Martínez-Otón of Universidad Nebrija, forms part of a European Union-funded Erasmus Plus project called WISE-ME. The project’s premise is simple but urgent: disinformation spreads fastest on social networks, and that is precisely where teachers need to be equipped to intervene. Nearly two decades have passed since digital competence was written into European education legislation, yet the researchers argue that the rapid evolution of social media among minors and the explosion of fake news demand a continuous renewal of what teachers know and how they teach it.

To map the landscape, the team surveyed 1,186 students aged 12 to 18 and 166 secondary school teachers in Spain, Austria, Greece, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Denmark. Because the data did not follow a normal distribution, the researchers turned to non-parametric statistics, applying the Mann–Whitney U test to compare the two independent groups at a significance threshold of p < 0.05. The questionnaire itself was a substantial instrument: 35 variables and 150 items organized into four blocks covering sociodemographics, social media use, information management and disinformation management. A panel of experts from all six countries refined the items, and the instrument achieved a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.847, comfortably above the 0.70 threshold conventionally accepted as evidence of high internal reliability.

The theoretical backbone of the work is DigCompEdu, the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators, which has been adopted by every EU member state. The framework organizes teacher digital competence into six domains and 22 sub-competences, and the study concentrated on three of them: supporting teaching and learning, empowering learners, and facilitating learners’ digital competence. It is this last domain that places responsibility on teachers to develop students’ skills in media literacy, communication and digital citizenship, content creation, responsible technology use, and problem solving. In Spain, the framework has been adapted into a national reference model, and recent curriculum reforms under Royal Decree 217/2022 explicitly require students to identify disinformation and assess the reliability of sources.

The statistical comparison exposed deep generational divides. On trustworthiness, the differences were significant for every major platform tested: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, WhatsApp, YouTube, Be Real, Discord, Pinterest and Snapchat all showed p-values below 0.05. Students placed notably more trust in the platforms they used most heavily, particularly Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp, a finding the researchers describe as a departure from earlier studies in which young people tended to be skeptical of the very services they frequented. Both groups, however, reported obtaining most of their information from the internet and social networks, confirming that the news habits of adults and adolescents have converged even as their critical habits have not.

When it came to recognizing fake news, teachers expressed far more confidence: six out of ten said they often or always recognize disinformation, compared with only four out of ten students. Sharing behavior told a more troubling story. While 64.5 percent of teachers said they had never shared fake news, only 52.3 percent of students could say the same. More than 32 percent of students admitted to sharing false content unknowingly, versus 20 percent of teachers, and 15.4 percent of students acknowledged having shared fake news at some point, more than double the teacher figure of 7.2 percent. Perceptions of why fake news is created also split along generational lines: teachers were significantly more likely to attribute it to malicious intent, political interest and economic gain, while students and teachers agreed on boredom and fun as motivations, a divergence the authors link to adolescents’ still-developing ideological awareness.

Perhaps the most revealing results concerned how the two groups judge information. Students were significantly more likely than teachers to assess content based on the number of likes it received or whether an influencer had shared it, while teachers leaned on the credibility of the source. Both groups, however, were influenced by messages received privately from friends, a pattern the researchers interpret through Social Influence Theory and the filter bubble phenomenon, in which social environments shape beliefs and reinforce existing views. Verification habits were weak across the board: only about 18 percent of students said they fact-check information often or always, compared with nearly 38 percent of teachers, and while most students in both groups reported using some strategy or tool to confirm what reaches them, systematic fact-checking remains far from routine.

These findings became the blueprint for a set of training modules designed in the study’s second phase. Module 1 gives students a framework for understanding disinformation and information disorders, identifying the sources and motivations behind them and evaluating credibility. Module 2 addresses information consumption patterns, and Module 3 tackles the psychological dimension, training students to identify the cognitive biases that color their perception of social media content and to recognize common manipulative techniques. Module 4 promotes responsible digital citizenship and respectful, informed online behavior. When teachers reported difficulty fitting the materials into their formal curricula, the team added a sixth, methodological module to help educators adapt the content to their own subjects, including guidance on building a classroom Personal Learning Environment.

The researchers are candid about the study’s limitations. The convenience sample was designed to recruit committed school communities rather than to be nationally representative, the cross-sectional design precludes causal inference, and no factor analysis was performed to confirm the dimensional structure of the 150-item questionnaire. The training modules themselves have not yet been implemented, so their effectiveness remains untested, though an interactive bot to support teachers and students is planned as a next step. Even so, the team argues the work represents a meaningful advance by confronting two challenges that curricula formally acknowledge but classrooms often fail to deliver: the pervasive use of social media by minors and the spread of disinformation.

The broader message is one of structural urgency. The authors contend that the digital divide between teachers and students is not merely a matter of literacy but a generational and methodological gap that demands rethinking initial and ongoing teacher education, revising school curricula, and building training programs that go beyond instrumental technical skills toward security, content creation and critical engagement. As long as young people navigate digital spaces with ease but without pedagogical support, the researchers warn, the online environment remains a risky one, and the paradox of trusting the platforms that spread the lies will persist. Equipping teachers to turn social media from a threat into a teaching tool, they conclude, is a social responsibility that requires sustained and unwavering commitment.

Subject of Research: Teacher digital competence and media literacy for combating disinformation and fake news on social media in secondary education

Article Title: Enhancing teachers’ digital competence for combating disinformation and fake news through the use of social media in classroom

Article References: Pérez-Escoda, A., Ortega-Fernández, E., & Martínez-Otón, L. (2026). Enhancing teachers’ digital competence for combating disinformation and fake news through the use of social media in classroom. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00051-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00051-6

Keywords: digital competence, teachers, disinformation, fake news, social media, media literacy, secondary education, DigCompEdu, fact-checking, teacher training, digital divide, critical thinking

At the heart of the research is a critique of the dominant message that underpins most pornography education in schools: that porn is dangerous and must be avoided at all costs. This simple warning model, the study finds, bears little resemblance to the evidence emerging from youth sexuality research. Studies of how young people actually interact with sexual media suggest that many of them interpret such content critically, question its realism, and compare what they see online with their own experiences of relationships and intimacy. Far from absorbing sexual media unthinkingly, teenagers frequently approach it with scepticism, curiosity and a desire to talk about what it means. The problem, the researchers argue, is that the education system is not built to harness that critical instinct.

The mismatch between what policy prescribes and what young people experience creates a serious challenge for teachers on the front line. Current classroom approaches tend to rely on warnings, scripted lessons and moral messaging designed to prevent harm before it occurs. These methods are well-intentioned, and safeguarding remains an essential priority, but the study suggests they often have the unintended effect of closing down discussion rather than opening it up. When lessons present pornography solely as a threat to be avoided, students who have already encountered sexual content, which is nearly all of them, learn quickly that honest questions are unwelcome. The result is that young people are left to make sense of complex issues about sex, consent and relationships on their own, without adult guidance or structured support.

To reach these conclusions, the research team analysed current policy frameworks, with particular attention to the UK government’s Independent Pornography Review, and compared them against interdisciplinary research into young people’s experiences of sexual media. The methodology combined a critical policy analysis with a synthesis of existing studies covering youth engagement with pornography, media literacy and sex education. By mapping how educational responses are shaped at the policy level and then testing those responses against the accumulated evidence of what young people actually report, the team was able to identify precisely where the current system falls short and why repeated calls for caution-based teaching have not resolved the underlying tensions.

Dr Emily Setty, lead author of the study and Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Surrey, explained the central problem with prevailing assumptions. The way pornography is currently taught in many schools assumes that young people simply absorb what they see and are harmed by it, she noted, but in reality their experiences are far more varied. Many young people question what they see, recognise unrealistic portrayals and want space to talk about relationships, consent and ethics. When education shuts down those conversations, she warned, it risks leaving them to make sense of these issues alone, at precisely the moment in their lives when structured guidance could make the greatest difference.

As an alternative, the research proposes a new educational framework the authors call safe uncertainty. Rather than pretending that educators can eliminate risk or that simple prohibition will work, the approach encourages open, structured discussions about pornography that acknowledge its complexity while still maintaining clear safeguarding and ethical boundaries. The framing is deliberate: safe signals that protective boundaries remain firmly in place, while uncertainty admits that sexual media is a complicated phenomenon that cannot be reduced to a single warning. Under this model, teachers act as facilitators of critical inquiry rather than enforcers of moral messaging, guiding students through difficult questions in a managed and supportive environment.

In practical terms, the safe uncertainty model would transform what happens in the classroom. Instead of lessons built around warnings, teachers would guide students to critically explore how sexual media represents consent, power, gender and relationships. Lessons might include analysing media portrayals to identify unrealistic or harmful depictions, discussing ethical dilemmas raised by the production and distribution of sexual content, or comparing online representations with the realities of intimacy and communication in actual relationships. This kind of active, analytical engagement, the researchers argue, develops what is termed porn literacy, a specialised form of media literacy that allows young people to question the production, realism and ethics of sexual content rather than simply being told to avoid it.

Dr Setty emphasised that pornography should not be viewed in isolation, since it is only one part of a much broader landscape of sexual messaging that includes social media, television, advertising and peer culture. Focusing narrowly on porn, she cautioned, risks exaggerating its influence while ignoring the other powerful cultural forces that shape how young people understand relationships and sex. A young person navigating the digital world today encounters sexualised and gendered messaging across nearly every platform they use, and an education system that addresses only one slice of that landscape leaves students poorly equipped for the whole. The broader goal, she argued, should be to equip young people with critical thinking skills and ethical awareness so they can navigate a complex digital environment in which sexual content is increasingly visible and increasingly difficult to avoid.

Importantly, the researchers are not arguing that concerns about potential harm should be dismissed. Addressing potential harm remains essential, and the safe uncertainty framework is explicitly designed to operate within safeguarding structures, not against them. The distinction the study draws is between harm prevention as the sole purpose of education and harm awareness as one component of a richer critical curriculum. Rather than relying solely on warnings or prohibition, the authors contend, education should also develop young people’s ability to interpret media, reflect on their own relationships and engage in honest conversations about sex and consent. In a media environment where young people will almost certainly encounter sexual content regardless of what schools say, the question is not whether they will be exposed but whether they will be prepared.

The findings arrive at a moment of intense debate about relationships, sex and health education in England, with policymakers under pressure to respond to rapid changes in digital culture. By grounding its critique in both policy analysis and the lived experiences of young people, the study offers a concrete alternative for educators and officials willing to move beyond fear. The research suggests that the most effective protection schools can offer is not silence or alarm, but the confidence and critical capacity that come from honest, well-structured dialogue. If the goal of education is to prepare young people for the world as it actually exists, the authors conclude, then teaching them to think critically about sexual media, in all its complexity, is not a risk to be avoided but a responsibility to be embraced.

Subject of Research: Pornography education and youth media literacy in England

Article Title: Fear-based education around porn is failing young people, say researchers

Article References: Fear-based education around porn is failing young people, say researchers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: pornography education, young people, media literacy, porn literacy, sex education, safe uncertainty, University of Surrey, safeguarding, consent, digital culture, Porn Studies journal, critical policy analysis