ABSTRACT
As high-profile examples of misinformation circulating on social media have come to public attention in recent years, calls for improving media literacy as a response have become commonplace. The chapter provides an overview of relevant studies that have looked at the relationship between news literacy and misinformation, highlighting consistencies and contradictions in this work. It argues that news literacy is particularly relevant to identifying and rejecting misinformation, given the unique relationship between news and misinformation, which is either deliberately intended to look like news or is often perceived as news by audiences. Resolving the definitional issues explored in the part of the chapter is a necessary first step to addressing some of the contradictions in existing research. Most relevant to the study of misinformation are findings that show that respondents with higher news literacy rely less on social media for news and are more discerning when using social media for this purpose.
