Social Media Literacy to Confront Far-Right Content: Saying “No” to Neutrality

Abstract

Current conceptualizations of media literacy do not explicitly state that users should be able to identify and reject hateful, manipulative far-right content. We highlight important principles of relational developmental systems metatheory that are integral to our proposed model of anti-oppressive social media literacy. We critique current theories of digital media literacy for their political neutrality or lack of active opposition and offer a value- and action-based anti-oppressive framework for social media literacy in pursuit of social justice. We propose a model of anti-oppressive social media literacy in which we outline three potential orientation outcomes: rejection, endorsement, and ambivalence. We describe the implications and potential developmental pathways of each of these orientations in response to far-right content. We also highlight multiple layers of bidirectional mutually influential individual-context relations that may influence the development of social media users’ orientation to far-right content online. In conclusion, we discuss strengths, limitations and future directions for studying our proposed theory of anti-oppressive social media literacy.