Citizens’ Networks of Digital and Data Literacy

Abstract

Dis-/mis-/mal-information are a cause for growing concerns across the world and scholars have been discussing the spread of misinformation around such things as elections, COVID-19 or the climate crisis. They have documented how people across the world are effectively bombarded with misleading messages through various media from social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok), private messaging apps (e.g. WhatsApp, WeChat) and broadcast media. This raises the question of how citizens can respond to this? What resources (social, cultural and material) can they draw upon to identify, evaluate and respond to mis-information? This chapter focuses on this question by exploring citizens’ digital and data literacies, especially the social networks (personal and digital) that citizens depend on for support.