Is This Fake or Credible? A Virtual Learning Companion Supporting the Judgment of Young Learners Facing Social Media Content

Today’s young generation uses a variety of social media as part of their everyday life. This can be seen as an enrichment, but it is also the source of various threats: Filter bubbles and echo chambers are general phenomena that counter-balance free communication and exchange and can lead to toxic radicalization confirmation bias and polarization. Conspiracy theories, fake news are two phenomena that can change the social media user perspective about the facts. This paper reports on the development of a web-based learning environment that includes a dedicated “learning companion” to help students in raising their understanding, resilience, and critical thinking related to such social media threats. The point is not to protect young people from such threats through a type of censorship but to help them develop their own strategies to identify and counteract such influences. The web-based learning environment mimics Instagram as a well-known social medium. The actual companion is realized as a browser plugin with an underlying architecture that supports xAPI logging as well as the connection to intelligent backend components.