Guidelines for teachers and educators on tackling disinformation and promoting digital literacy through education and training

The updated Guidelines for teachers and educators on tackling disinformation and promoting digital literacy through education and training published in June 2026 presents a comprehensive pedagogical framework for teachers and educators who need to address disinformation while strengthening digital literacy through education and training.

This task is it treated not as a narrow fact-checking exercise but as part of a broader educational responsibility that includes safeguarding, emotional safety, civic participation, critical reflection, and the development of digital citizenship in a rapidly changing media environment shaped by platforms, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

It advises teachers to begin from the actual media habits, backgrounds, sensitivities, and prior knowledge of their students, to coordinate with school leadership, parents, counsellors, and other relevant actors, and to create a safe classroom atmosphere through class agreements, clear expectations, respectful language, careful handling of confidentiality and disclosure, and awareness of child-protection and reporting protocols, especially when controversial issues, harmful content, or student vulnerabilities may arise.

Throughout, the guidelines favour interactive and inclusive methods such as peer learning, project-based work, gamification, role play, debate, active listening, small-group work, and structured discussion, while also warning that teachers should maintain professional boundaries, admit when specialist knowledge is needed, and prepare carefully before engaging students with polarising themes such as racism, migration, gender-related issues, climate change, historical injustice, or conspiracy narratives.

A central part of the Guidelines is the development of digital literacy as a learned and evolving set of competences that goes beyond device use and includes finding information, judging credibility, recognising AI-generated or manipulated material, creating and sharing content responsibly, understanding copyright and licensing, protecting privacy and data, managing digital footprints, and balancing well-being and online behaviour. The text distinguishes misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, and it explains that disinformation is characterised by intentional deception, emotional manipulation, simplification, exclusion of context, visual manipulation, false or imposter sources, misleading headlines, amplification through bots or coordinated networks, and the use of apparently credible authorities or celebrities to gain trust and spread influence. It also situates disinformation within technical, ethical, financial, cognitive, and emotional dimensions, explaining that false or misleading content may be spread for ideological, strategic, or commercial reasons, that platform business models and targeted advertising can intensify its circulation, and that human tendencies such as confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, false consensus, bandwagon effects, and naïve realism can make corrective information less effective than educators may expect.

The later sections extend this framework to generative AI, social media, influencers, cyberbullying, and prebunking, showing that online environments offer genuine opportunities for connection, creativity, participation, and learning, but also expose young people to harassment, manipulative recommendation systems, weaponised comments, synthetic media, deepfakes, foreign information manipulation and interference, and pressures that may affect mental well-being, self-esteem, and judgement.

In response, the guidelines recommend that teachers help students separate fact from opinion, test influencer claims with structured methods such as SIFT, the Three Filters Test, or the 5Ws, reflect on digital footprints, practise ethical and responsible self-expression, and engage in meaningful media creation that is evidence-based, source-checked, and attentive to possible social effects.

Prebunking is presented as a particularly important preventive approach because it prepares students in advance to recognise manipulation techniques such as logical fallacies, fake experts, impossible expectations, cherry-picking, and conspiracy narratives, and the document therefore combines conceptual explanation with learning objectives, classroom activities, tips, cautionary notes, assessment guidance, and a resource section so that educators can integrate this work into regular teaching rather than treating it as a one-off intervention.

The revision of the guidelines has been carried out through the Working Group on Updating the Guidelines for teachers and
educators on tackling disinformation and promoting digital literacy through education and training, convened through
the European Digital Education Hub (EDEH).