The corona pandemic in particular has greatly changed information-seeking behavior. People are increasingly looking for important information online. But how literate are Germans in online behavior to be able to distinguish between serious and non-serious information ?
To determine how literate users are in differentiating actual important from unimportant and serious from dubious information, we considered five core issues :
We assigned points depending on the relevance of a particular piece of information, so that we could also assess and compare the actual skill level of the users. A total of 30 points were to be achieved, of which, however, only very few penetrated this spectrum. The result in brief : One-third of users are in the middle range. Only 19% receive high or very high competence scores and 56% are in the (very) low digital news and information literacy range. A more detailed look at the figures reveals that the results vary according to socio-demographic factors such as age, gender and, above all, education, as well as media usage and certain attitudes.
In general, men are at least somewhat more capable cognitively than women of distinguishing important from unimportant information (about 9 percent on average). Older age groups (here especially the 50-69 year olds) score best with almost 16 out of a possible 30 points, while users between 18 and 29 are the most „impetuous“ and receive information from any source. We already noticed this in the same assessment in the U.S., especially since younger people are more receptive and far more flexible in their travels, whereas older users search for information almost exclusively on their primary sources.
This may be especially due to the fact that young people are more open to new sources and blindly trust them without thinking about it. Older people, on the other hand, have already gained more experience in this regard, which makes them far more critical of new sources and media, so that their trust is only given if this is verified by already known, trustworthy sources elsewhere.
In addition, effects are apparent when age and gender are considered together. As our analysis shows, the differences are particularly large among women over 60 and men under 30, which is not least related to the media use of both groups ; after all, women over 60 use television in particular as their main source of news, while men under 30 are electronic in their use but rely primarily on the online offerings of news portals.
There are also major differences in terms of school education. While individuals with a low and medium level of education barely pass the 10-point mark, the score of those with a high level of education is almost 17. However, it is particularly worrying when age is taken into account here, as the lowest level of competence is found among those under 40 and with a medium level of education. If the level of education is correspondingly higher, their ability to select important information also increases.
This means that younger people are only literate if they have a higher level of education. This problem is rooted in the school years and can hardly be made up afterwards. There are only minor differences in regionality, with no cognitive dispersion between east and west, south and north. The only noticeable difference is between rural and urban areas.
Clear differences in the cognitive ability to distinguish the value of information are also particularly evident in the type of media use. Individuals who search for information offline and online have a far greater diversity in their subsequent memory store, which is then also expressed in language production and reproduction. In contrast, individuals who commit themselves exclusively to one type of information search have a one-sided perspective, which makes them far less likely to examine the information they perceive and thus more susceptible to misinformation.
Furthermore, the ability to select information depends on which online medium we use. Twitter users, for example, are far more capable of finding important information and using it for their own benefit than users of Facebook-based networks. This is because Twitter was once developed purely as a news network, and entrepreneurs, journalists, academics and people interested in these groups are particularly active there, and these mostly have a higher level of education than, for example, influencers, who prefer to romp around on Facebook and Instagram and do not require any kind of training for their activity.
Moreover, the activity of online users (and social media users in particular) shows a clear discrepancy : individuals who actively post, share, and comment have a significantly lower level of information discrimination skills than those who only passively surf through social media and inhibit this active behavior. In other words, the more activity that takes place on a profile, the less educated and more incompetent a user usually is. Due to their inhibition, passive users also take more time to look at the content of posts and validate whether the content is correct and important – or not.
We wanted to know whether the concrete skills of news and information literacy are also compatible with or related to certain value attitudes that can be described as basic democratic attitudes. These include, for example, the motivation to inform oneself about sociopolitical issues and to become active in this area (i.e., to become involved in society), a basic trust in democratic values and the media, and the ability to tolerate other opinions.
The analysis shows : Individuals without these kinds of motivations and attitudes mentioned above, are less able to select information and news between important and unimportant than individuals with them. This relationship persists even when controlling for other relevant influencing factors, such as age, education, gender, domestic net income and media use.
In conclusion, we cannot yet determine exactly why individuals with high motivation and interest in improving society are also more news literate. But we assume that these individuals are better able to perceive and process information due to their higher diversity density, identify trustworthy sources more easily, find their way around the media landscape better and are more capable of tolerating opinions other than their own.
Finally, we wanted to find out whether digital news literacy also varies according to political attitudes. And indeed, there are two trends here : Individuals who tend to lean left politically (e.g., vote for the party „Die LINKE“ or „Bündnis 90/Die Grüne“) are more information and news literate than those who lean right (e.g., the AfD). Those who subjectively belong to the mainstream are the most incompetent in this respect.