Digital Literacy, Misinformation and Governance – DIGILITERACY

The unprecedented pace of innovations and the widespread adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) worldwide have given rise to a unique set of opportunities for governance. Governments have harnessed these technologies to streamline processes and enhance online access to public goods and services. Concurrently, citizens have benefited from increased internet accessibility, allowing them to access these services and stay informed about their leaders' activities and performance.

However, alongside these promises, ICTs also present significant societal challenges for governance. The extensive sharing of information online, combined with inadequate quality checks, has given rise to a proliferation of misinformation. This misinformation has been linked to a decline in trust in institutions and science, as well as an increase in polarization, xenophobia, and foreign interference in the political sphere. Similarly, the lack of transparency and oversight in technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning has raised concerns among experts and policymakers regarding their potential misuse.

Confronted with these challenges, the international community has called for widespread digital literacy training to maximize the benefits of ICTs while mitigating the risks mentioned above. The "DIGILITERACY" initiative aims to explore the potential of digital literacy to enhance the economic and social well-being of both advanced and developing countries that have implemented this policy. In particular, it seeks to understand the distinct effects of this policy on two key stakeholders in the governance sphere that can disproportionately benefit from it: civil society and bureaucrats. The project will employ state-of-the-art quasi-experimental and experimental methods to assess its causal effects and evaluate its impact on digital media skills, misinformation consumption, political polarization, and the provision of public goods, all of which will be measured using a combination of originally collected and administrative data.