In a world full of unimaginable absurdity, we spend a lot of time thinking about the future… and to where all of this insanity leads.
“Future Headline Friday” is our satirical take of where the world is going if it remains on its current path. While our satire may be humorous and exaggerated, rest assured that everything we write is based on actual events, news stories, personalities, and pending legislation.
November 24, 2027: “Media Literacy” Classes for school-Kids a Huge Success
It’s been four years since California and New York mandated “Media Literacy” classes to teach public schoolchildren how to recognize online misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.
And according to public education officials, the classes have been a resounding success.
They point to recent testing which shows students being able to accurately identify 95% of digital misinformation.
For example, students correctly understood that online content showing American or Israeli flags almost always contains misinformation and disinformation intended to advance violence and oppression.
Meanwhile, news websites which sympathetically display Palestinian flags are trustworthy sources whose claims can be completely believed without question.
Students have also learned to judge the veracity of online content by analyzing the intersectionality of its author.
The more victim groups an author belongs to, the higher the chances of the article being true. And students have learned to conduct extensive research on the matter.
Authors who list their pronouns on their social media profiles are almost always to be believed, especially when those pronouns differ from the author’s biological sex.
But students have also been trained on the nuances of intersectionality analysis.
Jews, for example, do not count as a victim group. In fact students learned that Jewish authors are far more likely to produce mis- and dis-information than atheists.
Furthermore, in accordance with the principles of #BelieveAllWomen, news articles written by persons identifying as female are far more likely to be true than other articles written by cis-males.
Yet students also learned that this principle should not be applied when the news in question pertains to sexual assault allegations against President Biden.
Students also learned to completely discard content from conservative news sources, and they were also trained on the most efficient ways to quickly report those posts to the proper authorities.
As part of their graduation requirements, students are also required to complete a capstone project to demonstrate their ability to apply media literacy skills in the real world.
For example, the graduation capstone exercise for students at Justice High School in New York City was to find a scholarly article from the past that used to be considered ‘science’, but is now obvious misinformation.
Students unearthed an old Scientific American article from 2007 which discussed how paleontologists identify the gender of various human skeletons.
The article contains a number of offensive statements, such as “Living animals have primary sexual characteristics, such as genitalia, that differ between males and females.”
Students instantly recognized that acknowledging any biological difference between males and females is extremely oppressive, and hence blatant misinformation.
Grief counselors were immediately brought in to provide emotional and mental health support to students who were exposed to the article’s offensive statements.
But the students were eventually able to continue the project. And they soon found that the article’s lead author was a white cismale. This was the final evidence required to make a ruling: misinformation, disinformation, AND malinformation.
The school’s head of Media Literacy, Miss Leed, explained, “The students were shocked that such dangerous content could have been out there for so long, especially from a purportedly ‘scientific’ publication. But we raised the issue to the editors— by posting their home addresses during a rant on TikTok— and they agreed to revise editions of the magazine going back decades. This is a huge win for our students.”
But she said students were confused about why the people responsible for spreading such misinformation hadn’t been arrested and prosecuted.
“We try to explain to the students that the First Amendment was specifically designed to help protect misinformation. But it’s up to sheroes like us to take justice into our own hands.”
Education experts say that this new media literacy skill more than compensates for the students’ steep decline in reading and mathematics proficiency.
