ABSTRACT
The disinfodemic in France brought together two media panics around the slaughter of a history teacher by a young Chechen salafist immigrant: the youth radicalization via social media panic and the disinformation panic via mass and social media panic. It put to test the relevance of media and information literacy in emergency situations such as the confinement crisis, doubling up with a “fake news” crisis. It also generated tensions in the educational world between the arena of formulations (the top–down administration decisions and rules) and the arena of realizations (the implementation on the ground of such decisions and the resources at hand) as both teachers and administrators saw their missions threatened. The analysis points out the need for new theories of media and information literacy (MIL) that accommodate the complex information cultures that recombine media and data and foster productive and adaptive strategies when evaluating manipulated images and texts. It points to transliteracy as a much-needed theoretical and pragmatic approach to MIL, with intercultural explanatory schemes added to the understanding of how media and data construct information in the digital era.
