Lisbon, Sept. 11, 2025 (Lusa) - ISCTE researcher Vítor Tomé warned, at an Iberifier event, of the importance of continually updating media literacy, which must go beyond combating disinformation and adapt to different contexts.
Reflecting on the challenges posed by disinformation and the role of media literacy in today's society was the motto for the academic meeting on media literacy organised by the Iberian Digital Media Observatory (Iberifier), which took place on Wednesday in the Spanish capital, Madrid.
At the meeting, ISCTE researcher Vítor Tomé emphasised the need to prepare citizens for continuous and autonomous learning: "We must prepare people to think and learn on their own throughout their lives," he said.
In this sense, he said that media literacy must be constantly updated, because "a course on Artificial Intelligence (AI) today will not be the same in a few years. Media literacy is much more than just studying disinformation".
Vítor Tomé also explained that media literacy is contextual and varies between regions, so it is necessary to find an agreement that allows everyone to carry out media literacy projects in different regions, but following a common methodology, so that the results can be more effective.
The academic from the University of Navarre, Charo Sábada, also took part in the initiative and warned that in recent years it has been precisely disinformation that has driven the urgency of strengthening media literacy, an essential skill for better understanding today's technological environment, he said.
Iberifier also emphasises on its website that media literacy has become a fundamental challenge for digital citizenship and for the future of the media, since in "an environment increasingly saturated with information, and also with disinformation, training people to consume content critically, responsibly and consciously is more urgent than ever".
Iberifier is a project that aims to combat disinformation, involving 23 Iberian research centres and universities, the Portuguese news agency Lusa, and the Spanish news agency EFE, as well as fact-checkers such as Polígrafo and Prova dos Factos - Público from Portugal, and Maldita.es and Efe Verifica from Spain.
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