ABSTRACT
After three years of constant work on disinformation, during the additional and unexpected COVID-19 pandemic, the task of debunking remains a herculean labour for fact-checkers as they must choose among the daily fare of fakes to spend time and energy on the few they have selected. For media and information literacy (MIL) practitioners, the labour is different as they provide people with the strategies and tools for dealing with the bulk of fakes on their own, aiming at user agency and autonomy. This labour is not “inoculation” (Compton, 2019), a misnomer that may give the sense that only a “booster” from time to time is enough to stave of the infodemic (Frau-Meigs, 2022), thereby minimising the work to build resilience. This labour is a sustained and scaffolded process, whose performance and efficacy lays on the critical thinking competences more even than the outcome of debunking.
