Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - “The Algorithm Is Raising Our Kids — And It’s Pulling them into Deadly Rabbit Holes” - Teaching Media Literacy with Matthew Johnson

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

Here’s a run down of what we discussed in today’s episode:IntroductionWhy Media Literacy Matters Now More Than EverHow Algorithms Shape What We Think Is “True”Our Brains On MisinformationThe Influence Economy: When Content Becomes AdvertisingTeaching Kids to Question Without FearWhy Saying “Just Don’t Believe Everything Online” Doesn’t WorkHow to Tell the Difference Between Facts and FeelingsWhat Makes Some Narratives “Stick” So EasilyHelping Loved Ones Who Are Falling Down the Rabbit HoleEmpowerment & Building Critical Thinking SkillsReferences:mediasmarts.camediasmarts.ca/resources-for-parentsCheck in with today’s amazing guest: Matthew Johnsonmediasmarts.caDisclaimer: The content in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is never a substitute for medical advice. If you’re struggling with with your mental or physical health, please work one on one with a health care provider.If you have heard yourself in our discussion today, and are looking for support, contact the free NEDIC helpline at 1-866-NEDIC-20 or go to eatingdisorderhope.com.  Reach Your Weight & Health Goals - Without Dieting! Pre-Order The Hunger Crushing Combo Method, Abbey’s revolutionary additive approach to eating well to boost satiety, stabilize blood sugars, reduce the risk of disease, improve your relationship with food by providing the best nutrient bang for your caloric buck. With over 400 research citations, cheat sheets, evidence based actionable tips, meal plans and adaptable recipes, the Hunger Crushing Combo Method is the only nutrition bible you’ll ever need. Pre-Order today and submit your proof of purchase to get a FREE HCC Holiday Survival Guide here.Where to Purchase:AmazonB&N Amazon Kindle Apple Books Google PlayKobo Apple Books (Audio) Audible  More information and retailers here: abbeyskitchen.com/hunger-crushing-combo 🥤 Check out my 2-in-1 Plant Based Probiotic Protein Powder, neue theory at www.neuetheory.com or @neuetheory and use my promo code BITEBACK20 to get 20% off your order! Don’t forget to Please subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review! It really helps us out. ✉️ SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTERS ⤵️Neue Theory newsletterAbbey's Kitchen newsletter 🥞 FREE HUNGER CRUSHING COMBO™ E-BOOK! 💪🏼 FREE PROTEIN 101 E-BOOK! 📱 Follow me! Instagram: @abbeyskitchenTikTok: @abbeyskitchenYouTube: @AbbeysKitchen My blog, Abbey’s Kitchen www.abbeyskitchen.comMy book, The Mindful Glow Cookbook affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3NoHtvf If you liked this podcast, please like, follow, and leave a review with your thoughts and let me know who you want me to discuss next!

The young people say they're aware that these images are altered, but they still feel pressure to participate in that culture. Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abby Sharp, where I dismantle Diet Culture Rules, call out the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good. Today we are turning our attention to something I have become incredibly passionate about as both a mom and a science communicator online, and that is media literacy. And I'm so honored to be joined by the Director of Education at Media Smarts, which is Canada's leading Not-for-Profit Center for Digital and Media Literacy, Matthew Johnson. Matthew has spent over two decades creating resources for parents, teachers and youth, to help them understand, navigate, and challenge the messages that we see across traditional media and now social platforms. From online privacy and grooming to stereotypes and body image, his work is all about giving people the tools to think critically and engage with media in

healthier ways. Today Matthew and I will be talking about the dangers of comparison culture in an age of AI, the seemingly innocent kid content that can serve as a dangerous pipeline to extremism and misinformation, and some age-appropriate tips and tools to teach media literacy at every stage. Selfishly, I am so excited about this combo. But very quickly, before we hop into it, a quick reminder that if you are new here, I would love if you would hit that subscribe button and leave me a comment because it really, really does help me out. Also, if you would haven't heard, my upcoming book, the hunger crushing combo method, is now on pre-sale. And I would really, really, really appreciate your support on this as pre-sales make a massive difference

in the success of a book. And if you order now, you'll get my free Hunger Crush and Combo holiday e-book. So check out the description on how you can reclaim. All right, folks, let's dive in. All right. Hi, Matthew. Thank you so much for joining me today. My pleasure. I have to tell you, in preparation for this interview, I did a deep dive on your website, Media Smarts. I literally printed out all these resources, little scripts for myself. They are so helpful. I'm definitely going to be linking to that in the show notes. And actually, I have a call with my son's school next week to argue for the need to be teaching media literacy to students in school. as part of the regular curriculum because I don't as someone who works in this industry in this world I would way rather my kids have solid media literacy skills than like even learn like geography to be honest like I just think this is so important in in 2025 and as we move forward there are just so many inherent risks in online spaces and we're really just going to be able to scratch the surface today but I want to going to start with a discussion on on diet culture because that's what we talk a lot about here

on the Byte Back podcast, which diet culture is nothing new. Obviously, it's always been around. But compared to older forms of media like television and magazines, how do you feel social media platforms have intensified pressures for young people, especially as it pertains to the way they look, their appearance? Well, there are a number of different ways. One of them is that we use the same platforms now to communicate and to consume content both from celebrities and from our own peers, our friends or family. And so that makes

a real difference that we are not just looking at airbrushed or photoshopped images of celebrities, which we know do have an impact on body image, but we're seeing our own peers do the same thing. And, you know, there's evidence that actually the people who have the biggest impact on us are people who are kind of in the middle of that range because we had a sense that obviously celebrities, in most cases, they are celebrities in part because they're very attractive. Being attractive is part of their job. So we're kind of conscious that, okay, that's not a realistic way of seeing someone. Right.

And similarly with the people close to us, well, we know what they actually look like. We see them in daily life. We can tell when they're using a filter or something like that. But it's the people in between. It's the people who are friends of a friend. There are people who are classmates that maybe we don't see all that often or that we're not that close to. That seems to be what has the biggest impact when we see either carefully curated photos or filtered or otherwise manipulated photos. We don't have those safeguards that tell us that that's not real.

But there's also a pressure because we're participating as well. We're not just consuming content. We're participating in it. And so there is a pressure to present the same kinds of images ourselves. And that's something that we've seen in qualitative research quite a few times that young people say they're aware that these images are altered, but they still feel pressure to participate in that culture, in that diet culture, in that culture of presenting a particular look. And that may come from using photo manipulation. It may come from taking 100 photos and picking just the perfect one. And, of course, it also comes in the form of trying to actually change the shape of our bodies.

Right. So that's one aspect. Another aspect, of course, is that these are advertising platforms. They're designed to keep us using them to keep us engaged so that we can see more ads. And so, first of all, it means that it's a lot easier for advertising to reach us than it used to be the barrier is much lower, small companies are much more able to advertise to us than they were. So now a lot of messages, advertising messages that might not have reached us through mass media are able to reach us, but also all of these platforms are surveilling us all

the time in order to feed us content that we will engage with, that will keep us on the site, And that can have an effect that is intensifying. So we've heard again and again, and this has been shown both in qualitative research from young people, but it's also been shown quantitatively that once you start consuming a certain kind of content, consciously or not, the platform will show you more of that. And that's particularly true when it is content that has a strong emotional resonance. So we've seen it with different kinds of misinformation, we've seen it with hate content, we've seen it with violent content, and of course we see it with diet content, with content that makes us feel bad about our bodies. And so we hear again and again from young people that they maybe watch one video about a diet or even about healthy eating that the algorithm concludes is part of this cycle. and suddenly you start constantly seeing diet content and it becomes progressively more and more extreme. Yeah.

And even kids who are recovering from eating disorders, we have said, you know, it becomes so difficult to access recovery content because to the algorithm, the recovery content and the diet content or even the eating disorder, promotion content are all the same in the algorithm's eyes. Yep. It's, it is, this is the reason, like, you know, why I do what I do. And actually, there was a recent Wall Street Journal investigation where they created kind of fake accounts, dozens, a dozen automate accounts on TikTok. They label them as being 13 years old. And instantly, they were inundated by extreme weight loss content. Being told to eat less than 300 calories a day, only consume water rather than food, take laxatives. So, you know, you don't over images of, you know, you don't overimages of, you. you know, with very ultra-thin women with bones protruding. And you're right. It's really terrible. The amount of dangerous information and the lack of regulation.

And ultimately, you know, these young people are being inundated by these messages, this hyper-restrictive content. And it's just getting worse. It's so pervasive, so inescapable for kids. And now we've got the surge of AI-generated images and videos, many of which, you know, present even more unrealistic ideals. than, you know, even traditional social media did. Like, we just saw Vogue's latest cover girl is not even a real woman.

She's this blonde, thin, beautiful figment of someone's imagination. And the lines are being blurred even more in terms of what is reality and what is not. And it's very interesting that you said that, you know, kids may know this, like they may be able to articulate to you or to other adults. Like, I know that this has got a filter on it. I know that this is AI, but they still want. to emulate it. And so you mentioned just a moment ago about the algorithm kind of starting in a potentially like an Oculus place, whether it's like, you know, healthy eating. Maybe that's what

you're searching for. And it taking you down the rabbit hole into dangerous places. And I talked about this with a sociologist when the television show adolescence came out. And we were talking about how young boys interacting with this seemingly benign content related to, you know, mass like, hey, how do I get fit? How do I get a six-pack? You know, how do I get a date? Kind of very quickly led them into this misogynistic red pill manosphere content. And so, yeah, there's this, there was actually another study. I'm sure you've seen these things where researchers seed relatively benign, mild content about masculinity. And then within five days, their algorithms escalated them to this kind of extremist misogynistic content, like fourfold. So I'm curious for

from your perspective, like for boys and girls, are there any other kind of seemingly innocent genres of content that we see people get into or search terms that parents should be aware of that could or more often escalate into more dangerous territories? Unfortunately, the way that that algorithmic sorting works and the way that in particular, you know, the far right and some other. communities like anti-vaccination communities have been consciously drawing connections on the internet means that there are almost no enthusiasms that can't lead you somewhere bad. I mean, we know, for instance, you know, the modern far right has tremendous links to, you know,

the comic book and video game community. That doesn't mean that anyone who's connected to comic books and video games is going to be drawn into the far right. But it means that the far right identified those communities as areas where there are going to be people who are susceptible to their messaging. Right. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. You know, the ones I see often in my circles are like, what a eat in a day, fitzpiration, clean eating, meal prep with me, get ready with me, outfit inspoes. All these can have ED coded undertones, even motherhood content, which can go, kind of teeter into that, like, that trad wife, like that whole area, which, again, it can be a slippery slope where you get into the anti-vax space and, you know, the misinformation about foods and food safety and raw milk and all those kinds of things. You mentioned a moment ago that there are things we can do to kind of train. Like, what can we kids or parents, what can we, how can we like preemptively like

inoculate against these kind of this algorithmic escalation? Like what could that look like? Well, when we talk specifically about algorithms, there are a number of different things that we can do. So the first is if it is a platform like Instagram, for instance, where most of the content that we see is people that we follow, then we want to make a practice of regularly curating those feeds. So there's a lot of research that shows that when young people curate their feeds to follow more body neutral content, then that has a really positive impact on self-image

and can mitigate a lot of body image concerns. And that can be something that we do, not just with celebrities or influencers. It can be something that we do with people in our own social circles. Because curating doesn't necessarily mean unfollowing or blocking. It can mean muting. I think the mute button is probably the most underused tool in social media because the wonderful thing about muting is that nobody knows that you did it. So it's a great kind of mental health first aid tool where if someone is

just, you know, sharing you, sharing content that makes you feel bad about yourself, or honestly, just thinks you don't want to deal with right now, whether it is, you know, pictures of their perfect vacation or themselves in the swimsuit and it makes you feel bad about yourself, just mute them. You don't have to mute them forever. You can mute them for a little while. But we have to teach kids they have an absolute right in the same way that they have an absolute right to block anyone who is harassing them or who is sharing hate content or sexist content. or whatever, they have an absolute right to mute anyone. So beyond that, we also have the ability to train those algorithms. So we can limit in many cases what information they use to target us. Many of the social networks do have settings that you turn off the algorithmic recommendation. But in some cases, that is what people want. So we know from the research that's been done with young people that they have, have kind of a complex relationship with recommendation algorithms.

They like being served relevant content, but they don't like being served overly relevant content. They don't like the rabbit holes. So in most cases, they don't want to fully turn off algorithmic recommendation. We know, for instance, that in a case like TikTok, it is a big part of the appeal, is that it is feeding you things that you didn't know. you wanted. So when it's something like YouTube, we can recommend, you know, search, don't surf. Use YouTube the way you would use Netflix or the way you would use TV or the way you would use a library. Go out and find what you want. Subscribe to channels. Don't just watch in the up next bar. But with YouTube or with something like TikTok, that's not necessarily realistic,

similarly with Instagram Reels. So what you want to do in those cases is each of those does have a way that you can make the algorithm forget everything it knows about you. So we have a video in a tip sheet called How to Train Your Algorithm, and that's the first thing that you need to do is have it forget what it knows about you. And after that, you can consciously try to train it. And there are different ways of doing that because the different platforms weight things differently. But what is generally consistent is that they put more weight on what we call implicit input. rather than explicit ones.

So an explicit input, for instance, would be giving something a thumbs up or a like or a thumbs down. So that's when you're going out and saying, I like this, I don't like this. But they don't actually pay much attention to those. There's some evidence that on TikTok, in fact, those have no effect whatsoever. What they mostly care about because they're more honest is implicit inputs. And the biggest one of those is simply how long you watch something. So it really helps to get in the habit of if you see something that you don't want to see, get rid of it immediately. Stop watching it. Swipe it away. But if you do see something that is the kind of thing you want to watch, let it play to the end.

Even if this video itself isn't necessarily what you want to watch if it's the type of content. So if you're seeing body neutral content, or maybe you just don't want to get body related content for. from your feed at all. But if you're seeing what you want to see, then let it play. And it doesn't take long. When you start from zero every now and then I do a little experiment and I try to get it to pay just one kind of content, like just cat videos or something like that.

And when you start from zero, it never takes longer than about 15 minutes to get it to give you just that. Now, most people don't want just one kind of thing. But it shows how relatively little time it takes if you are making a conscious effort to get that algorithm, to get that feed to give you just what you want, and to largely stop showing you things you don't want. That's really, really helpful.

And I want to put social media aside just for a minute. because I kind of want to go to our younger kiddos and talk about traditional forms of media, movies, shows, because like body image messages start really young. I've got two boys, five and seven. I'm experiencing this firsthand, really. They don't have social media. They don't have phones.

But the other week, my eldest son was like flexing his muscles and his abs and saying to me like, I want to get a six pack. And my little one was like, well, I want to get a 10 pack. And my eldest, like, there's no such thing as a 10 pack. He's like, well, how many packs can I get? And I mean, it was the funniest conversation, of course, but I'm also like kind of freaking out inside because like we don't talk about bodies like that in my house ever.

I've never said anything about a six pack, eight pack, whatever. Turns out this desire for rock hard abs, they're getting from watching the K-pop demon hunters. And they're seeing other kids talk about this six pack, this eight pack in relation to just a character, a cartoon character. And so, you know, we, you know, we, you know, know it's very easy when you actually look at children's media to see that the protagonists are

always the beautiful on you know fit thin you know have muscles those are the the heroes in the story and you know then of course you get the kind of quote unquote fat you know funny sidekicks coming in um and kids learn that really quickly because of media that they want to be the hero and if the hero is always the fit and then not fat, one, they learn to fear that fatness so, so early. So there's clearly so much work we need to be doing. How early can we get media literacy skills started? And what can we do for our younger kiddos? We can get media literacy started more or less as soon as kids understand language. And the earliest message, what's really important early on, is getting across two main

ideas. And the first is that the media we consume is made by people who made choices. Because we instinctively see media as being like a window. You know, we didn't evolve with media. And so our brains think it is real. And kids as well, naturally, they just assume that it reflects reality. So it helps from really early on to highlight the fact that this was made and this was made by people. people who made choices. So you can talk about the people who made media. You can, early on, you can find, there's some great kids' books that help to highlight that idea. So one series that I really love is a series by a Canadian writer and illustrator new Melanie Watt, and the series is called Chester. And each of the books is a conflict between Chester the cat and Melanie

what, the author. And it's a really great way early on of highlighting the idea that this book was made by someone because we are seeing the conversation between the character who wants the book to go one way and the writer who wants the book to go another way. And the other idea that we want to get across from early on is the idea that most media were created for commercial purposes, that they were created to make money. So, you know, when you're in the grocery store, for instance, and your child asks you, or points out, you know, there's SpongeBob on a cereal box. You can say, well, that's because they know kids like SpongeBob, and that's going to make kids ask for that cereal. And it's that conversation that really matters.

You know, we can't shield our kids from media, nor should we. Media is a huge part of the enjoyment that we get from life. And honestly, even if you shield kids from media in the home, they're going to be exposed to it through peers and through friends. through other relatives. So we want to get in the habit of co-viewing with our kids. And co-viewing doesn't just mean watching with them. It also means being willing to pause and talk about something because just co-viewing without that conversation can actually make media effects worse.

Because when kids see something objectionable, when they see, for instance, a character with a larger body being made fun of, and you don't say anything, they think that, that's okay. So you have to be ready either with that pause button or to talk about it after, but you need to be ready to interrupt those messages and highlight. If there's a pattern, you can say, boy, this is the third time that we've seen this. And of course, when they're young, you have so much more power to curate their media. Whether that is choosing something on Netflix or Disney or something like that, or whether it's creating playlists on YouTube, you can find content that where characters with larger or frankly, just not small bodies or not muscular

bodies where they do have those hero roles. It's out there. We just have to go to a little bit of effort to find it and just particularly showing a range. It's exactly the same as how we want to address gender stereotyping. It's not just about finding works where, that have, you know, tough as nails female characters or compassionate male characters. It's about having a range of both. And that's the concern, particularly when it comes, for instance, to female characters or characters with larger bodies. It's not that there's anything wrong with a character being funny. It is that when that's the only time you see characters with larger bodies, when they're always playing that funny sidekick role, that's the problem. And so it doesn't mean you can't,

watch, you know, Scooby-Doo or something like that, but you also want to make sure that you are watching with your kids' content where there is a range of body shapes and a range of roles played by each body shape. Yeah, that's so helpful. I mean, I want to also kind of then go to our preteens and our teens, our early teens, because at this point, yeah, TikTok's the thing. Instagram's the thing. They're on it. They're likely more aware of their diet, their body, and absolutely they're more exposed to more explicit kind of di-culture messaging, gendered messaging. What kind of activities or conversations are helpful at this age, aside from, of course, doing the curation of the feed as best we can, they're going

to see it somehow. And then what do we do? Well, that's obviously an age where we have to be really careful how we talk about bodies and about our own bodies, because we know they listen to us very closely. There hasn't been as much research with boys, but certainly there's a lot of research with girls that shows that it is their parents, and particularly how their mothers talk about their own bodies, even more than how they talk about the child's body, that influences how they see themselves. So we do have to think about the messages that we're sending, and we have to think about the messages that we're sending, of course, through our own media use. And I think what you really want to do when kids start using social media, you know, it's kind of futile to

try to surveil it. You need to talk to them about it. You need to get a sense of why they're using it, of what they enjoy about it. And in exactly the same way you would with mass media, with traditional media, talk to them about the messages that they're seeing. And one thing that's really valuable is helping them understand that everybody feels pressure to look a certain way. Because one of the really interesting things that we find again and again in media is that what is really powerful is not the direct effect. It's what we call the two-step flow. And that is, we don't believe that media influences us, but we believe that media influences other people. But because of that, we respond to those social norms that we think

media has influenced in other people. So a good example, because it's really powerful in this case is pornography, where we know most young people are aware that pornography is not real. So just telling them, you know, that's not how people really have sex. It's important messaging. You need, they need to know that, but by itself, in most cases, that's not that powerful because they don't think their peers know that. They think their peers believe that pornography is real, that their peers are not as media literate as they are.

Everyone thinks they're more media literate than the people around them. And so they think, oh, well, when I have a sexual partner, they're going to expect me to behave the way people behave in pornography because they think it's real because they're not as media literate as I am or they might have had other partners who thought that pornography was real and so they would have behaved in such a way and so we see again and again where young people are saying this is not when they see pornography they're saying this is not what I want to see this is not what I want to believe sex is like but I believe that everyone else thinks that And it's exactly the same thing with how bodies in general are represented.

People, again, they're aware that these are curated. They're aware that these are filtered. We still have to tell them these things. We do have to make sure that they know that, but it's not enough. We also need to tell them everyone is struggling. Everyone is going through this. No one is happy with how they look. No, none of us.

I mean, no, everyone has flaws. everyone feels pressures. Everyone feels the need to present a positive image. So we can set a positive image or a positive model ourselves through how we share. So if we are sharing honest content, if we are sharing maybe, you know, maybe don't take 10 photos, just take one and say that's going to be good enough. Share the photo where maybe you don't look so great. Share the mundane moments of your lives because it's all tied together. It's not just our bodies.

It's our lives as well where we can. feel a pressure to make ourselves look ideal. So don't necessarily wait until you have the great news or you have the terrific event or whatever. Share the lows as well as the highs and share the mundanes as well so that we're not just seeing the highlight real because that is really what it comes down to, whether we're looking at bodies or we're looking at lives more generally. the basic issue is that social media is the highlight real, but we see everything. We see the highlights. We see the bloopers and we see the stuff that winds up on the cutting room floor in our own lives. And we're comparing that to the ideals we see in social media. I love that idea. I love that. And I also don't want to forget about us adults because as my whole career indicates, we, like you said, we are struggling to not get. swept up into the dangerous algorithms like how can we as adults you know

grown-ups even if we don't have kids who we're trying to kind of like like you mentioned like post the less flattering shot of yourself don't put a filter on I love that advice how can we build habits to critically evaluate what we're consuming for ourselves especially in high-pressure spaces like wellness fitness beauty etc so one of the big changes that we've made in media literacy or digital media literacy practice over the last few years has been the idea of information sorting. So when media literacy is a discipline was first developed in the 1980s, there was a lot of emphasis

on what we call close reading. And so people who were my generation who learned media literacy in schools because, you know, in Canada, it has been in the curriculum across the country for 25 years now. And it was brought into the curriculum in some provinces in the 1980s. So those of us who were in older generations who learned media literacy probably learned that kind of close reading where we were looking at how things like ads or news or information sources were constructed. We were looking at framing. We were looking at close details. Now, that stuff is still super important.

But it was based on a world where it was expensive and difficult to make media and particularly to distribute media. Yeah. What that meant was there was relatively little media that we had to deal with. And we could count that the people who made it had enough of an investment that they weren't just going to straight up, make things up, and lie to us. You kind of had to seek out misinformation in those days. So you might go. Someone might be handing out, you know, flyers about something.

Or if you went to a health food store, you might find some small print magazine that had some, you know, bad advice and things like that. And, of course, you would get there are all kinds of diet books. and things like that that had terrible advice in them. But you could be pretty much count on the fact that if you were buying something, a professional magazine or if you were watching something on TV, you were not going to be getting stuff that was flat out untrue and harmful. Yeah. And that's simply no longer true.

You know, be clean, not even with social media, even before social media, with just the web itself, publishing became practically free. and distribution became literally free. And so now we have what we call information sorting where that kind of close reading is the second step. The first step is what we call companion reading. And that is where we are filtering out information. We're filtering out the stuff that is just not worth our attention.

Because if we're doing that close reading on things that are not worth our attention, we're wasting our time and it just becomes overwhelming. There's no point in looking at how misinformation is framed unless you're studying it to learn how to recognize misinformation. But if you're looking at it in terms of information, all of that stuff doesn't matter if it doesn't have that basic level of trust. If you're looking at some AI generated slot video or if you're looking at a fake news site, I mean, there are perfectly believable looking websites and social media accounts. that look like news outlets that are just complete nonsense, or sometimes worse, because sometimes they're, you know, some of them are run by oil companies or sometimes they're there to, you know, push particular political messages or anything like that. So we start with what we call companion

reading and we teach in our break the fake program, which is aimed for all audiences, young people and adults. We teach four quick and easy steps to just to find out, first of all, whether something is basically true and whether a source is worth your attention. So the first of those is using fact-checking tools. A lot of people in our generation have probably heard of Snopes. It's the most famous one, but there are dozens of them around the world in different languages, in different countries that professionally verify or debunk content. And we've actually made it easier because we had made a custom search engine that searches about 30 of those all at once and it doesn't search anything else. So if you want to know if just something is true,

if you hear a health claim, oh, they've just discovered that this causes that or this helps with that. Is that true? Fact checkers are a great way of very quickly finding out. Did this really happen? Is this true? Secondly, you're seeing something. You want to know where it came from. You want to find the original source because thanks to social media, a lot of times we get things shared by influencers, by peers, by friends, by relatives, we're not going to bother verifying those people because in almost every case, they're not the source of the information. So if some influencer is saying, okay, you're going to eat 10 pounds of celery every week, if you eat 10 pounds of celery every week, you know, you'll lose 10 pounds or whatever.

It'll prevent you. You'll cure cancer. Yeah, exactly, precisely. You don't care about that influencer because you want to find out where did that original research come from. That's what matters. So find that original source, and we have a lot of different techniques for doing that. And then if it's not a source that you recognize as being reliable or unreliable, verify it. And that's where your two best friends are Google and Wikipedia, because Wikipedia often will give you an overview of the source, and it'll tell you whether or

not it's generally considered to be reliable. Wikipedia is a great source for finding out the general consensus on something. And it's generally pretty accurate in those broad strokes. But if it's not in Wikipedia, the other thing that you can do is you can Google and then one of the great Google tricks is excluding the original website. So if it was published in such and such a journal, you then do a Google search for that journal and use the minus sign and then the web address of the journal's website or whatever source it is, an institute or center or whatever. And what that will do is it will show you what other people say about them.

It will exclude their own website with that minus sign. And so obviously then you need to use a little bit of critical thinking because you want to look at those. I mean, anyone can say, oh, this person is a quack. You want to say, okay, someone says that's a quack. Who is saying it? Is that person someone I want to believe? And that sounds complicated, but we're still talking at this point about probably one or two minutes at most to verify.

And our last step is checking other sources. And that means finding sources that you already know are reliable and checking those. So we talk about that a lot in terms of news. We talk, for instance, about how the Google News tab is a much better source than the main all tab, because it's curated to just news sources. They're not all 100% objective necessarily, but they're all news sources. sources that really exist. When it comes to health or science, it's really helpful to build up a little stock, a little toolbox of sources that you know are reliable. And that's something we can do for kids as well. We can provide them with sources of reliable information about things

like diet, about body image, about health, about mental health, about sexual health, giving them reliable sources to turn to so that they don't have to go looking for information. And so when they do get a new claim, they can check it against one of these, is really powerful. And we can even make our own custom search engines. So if you are in the habit of looking up information about a certain topic, you can find five or ten or however many reliable sources that you want, you can add those to your own custom search engine, and then it will search all of those all of once. So if you hear a new claim about something, you can search for that claim using your custom search engine, and it will tell you this is what those 20 sources say about that claim

rather than searching the entire web. And so it's those four steps. You don't have to do all of them every time, but generally speaking, a couple of them are going to do the job. Those either give you enough information to decide this is basically true or not, or they give you enough information to tell you, okay, this source is sufficiently worth my attention that I'm going to go to the closed reading. So I've determined, let's say it is really, let's say this claim really did come from a paper that's been published in a reliable journal. So now I'm going to find news articles about it. Now I'm going to find the journal itself. This is when I do the close reading where I look at, oh, okay, actually it turns out, yes, this is a legitimate source. And it is a,

legitimate claim, but so far, actually, they've only found that in mice. Right. I mean, there was one study recently where it was looking at ultra-processed food. People who were on the non-autro processed food diet lost two times as much weight as the people who were eating ultra-processed food. Right. So, well, that sounds great until you find out that the difference was actually two pounds and four pounds. Yes. So in that case, the framing, by talking about it in relative terms instead of absolute terms made the difference look a lot bigger. So that's an example of the close reading that we do, but we only do that when we've confirmed that this is a source worth our attention. So in this case, you could track that story to a real study. You could track it to a story in the New York

Times. You've used those companion reading steps to determine, yes, this is worth my attention. but then the close reading tells you, maybe it's not actually that meaningful. That is super helpful. And at the end of the day, you know, those are skills that need to be honed. You know, the journalist who is reporting on that's rat study. They're not scientists. They're not science communicators. And they're seeing something, oh, that could get clicks. That could get people to listen because it could be a truthful, but also not necessarily a statement that is as alarming as they are able to spin it to make it seem. So I'll be leaving some information about that in the show notes as well. But this was so helpful. I got so much out of this. And if people are looking for more resources, where can they look? So pretty much everything that we do is available for free on our website,mediasmarts.ca. Everything we do is also available for French in our sister website, Habilomidia.

So we have many, many videos. We have workshops that people can put on, but also that are available as self-directed tutorial workshops. We have tip sheets. And we also have hundreds of classroom lessons and other material for schools because this is something, of course, it's important. that kids learn this as early as possible and we are working to get it integrated across the curriculum, not just in the places where digital media literacy has traditionally been found like language and health and tech, but in math and science and really every part of the curriculum because, of course, media is part of every part of our lives.

Yeah, absolutely. This was so helpful. Thank you so much again. Thanks for having me. Okay, I feel like I need one-on-one coaching because this world is constantly evolving and the content our kids have access to is only becoming more dangerous. So as a parent myself, I have been loving the resources on Matthews Company's websitemediasmarts.com. They offer incredible resources for parents and teachers with K to 12 curriculum integration with lesson plans, worksheets, and printable activity sheets for home use. I'm not even exaggerating when I say I've gone through like a whole pack of trees

just like printing these things off for my kids. They've been honestly so helpful. And I wanted to quote straight from one of the articles that I read called Talking to Kids about media and body image that I found particularly useful because Matthew offers some really great conversations. conversation starters for our kids that can help them think more critically about both body and gender representation in the media. Let's first talk about our girls whom we know are socialized from a very young age to desire a petite thin body, starting, of course, with the type of dolls

that they're typically exposed to. Barbie, I'm looking at you. If your daughter is wanting or playing with a Barbie-sized toy, you might ask them, What do you like best about this doll? Do the women and girls that you know look like this doll? If not, why wouldn't the people who made this doll want it to look like a real person? Now, if your daughter enjoys watching TV shows or movies that promote certain body types and suggests that it's most important for girls to be popular and attractive, you may ask them if the women that they know in real life look like the main,

character in the show. What do good characters in the show look like compared to the bad characters? And why do you think that they look different? You might also ask them which characters that they would want to be friends with and why. These are all just some ideas to get you started. As for us parents raising boys, as I mentioned in the show, so much of the media kids consume tends to portray male protagonists as being muscular. and fit. So for our younger kids, when they show interest in playing with a toy or action figure with an exaggerated stereotypically masculine body, we can engage them in questions like, is this how you or your friends or the grown-up men that you know look like? Why do you think

that the people who make action figures make them look like this? Do you have to have big muscles to be a hero? Can you think of people who are heroes, who don't necessarily use their muscles to do good things. Spoiler, some of my favorite heroic but not so muscular characters are Mario and Luigi, Harry Potter, Bay Max, Stephen Universe, and Luca. If you notice your child watching a television show or movie or playing or wanting a video game that promotes hypermasculinity through large bodies and tough attitudes, you can also ask, what's the difference between

how the good guys and the bad guys are portrayed. Do other boys or men that you know look or act like this? What is the difference between the video game world and the real world? Does the game make you solve problems by hurting people? And what might be some other ways of solving problems in the game that don't involve violence? I highly recommend checking out all of the amazing resources on MediaSmart.com. It is honestly a treasure trove of information. And on that note, I got to go co-watch Netflix kids with my kids. I have a lot of media savvy questions to ask them. But thank you again to Matthew Johnson for helping me bite back against diet culture online. Signing off with Science and Sass, I'm Abby Sharp. Thanks for listening.

Thank you.