Media Literacy: Critical Thinking for an AI World

A 21-month U.S. State Department–funded program trained 17 Palestinian educators, reached 138 youth through youth workshops, and amplified young Palestinians’ media literacy creative work to reach 4.9 million views on Instagram.

KINGSTON, R.I. — July 30, 2026 — For young people growing up amid war in the West Bank, learning to question a viral image or a trending influencer is not a classroom exercise. It can be a matter of safety. That is the central finding of “Media Literacy: Critical Thinking for an AI World,” a new report from the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island documenting a professional learning community that helped Palestinian educators teach youth to navigate propaganda, manipulated imagery, and AI-generated content in a time of conflict.

Across interviews and workshop observations, Palestinian educators consistently described media literacy in existential rather than academic terms, calling it “a survival skill,” “a civic competency,” and “a form of social resilience.” In an information environment saturated with emotionally charged political narratives, where conflict is monetized and even a reliable internet connection cannot be assumed, the program reframed media literacy from a media-studies elective into a defensive necessity.

The Program at a Glance

Running from October 2024 through June 2026, the program engaged 44 highly qualified Palestinian educators, 39 of whom began an online professional learning community; 17 completed the full 22 hours of instruction, an implementation plan, and the co-delivery of a youth workshop. Working in pairs through a “power of two” model, faculty adapted media literacy key concepts and instructional practices into nine distinct, culturally grounded teaching frameworks, from a “Stop, Think, Verify” golden rule to a focus on “conflict entrepreneurs” who profit from polarization.

Nine three-hour online workshops reached 138 West Bank youth ages 15–25, after war forced a pivot from in-person to online delivery in spring 2026. A social media campaign featuring young Palestinians’ creative work reached an additional 4,904,355 views on Instagram, and combined with the recruitment campaign, the program’s total documented reach exceeded 6.1 million.

Key Findings

The program’s most striking result was a shift in how educators understood their own work. “In the West Bank, media literacy is not an academic exercise: it is a survival skill,” said Renee Hobbs, Professor at the University of Rhode Island’s Harrington School of Communication and Media. “When young people can recognize the point of view embedded in every message, they gain agency over an information environment that is otherwise structured against them.” Palestinian faculty and youth alike came to treat critical media analysis as a condition of safety and social resilience rather than merely a media-studies elective.

The report also found that the approach worked best when it was hands-on and grounded in learners’ own world. “The evidence was unambiguous: participation rose with open questions, group work, and real Palestinian examples, and it fell during long lectures,” said Yonty Friesem, Associate Professor at Columbia College Chicago. “‘Learning by doing’ was not a slogan for these educators — it was the measured difference between a workshop that reached young people and one that did not.” Observers found engagement climbed with visual stimuli, group work, meme creation, and real-life Palestinian examples, and dropped during instructor-dominated lectures.

A central strand of the program helped faculty and students confront the “unreal realities” of AI-generated media. As deepfakes, edited images, and fabricated news erode the old equation between seeing and believing, participants learned to recognize the mechanics of manipulation, from generative-AI fabrications to the “conflict entrepreneurs” who profit from polarization and the electronic armies of bots and fake accounts that drive online debate. In their own words, one youth participant wrote that “AI today does not only produce images; it produces a parallel reality that deceives the senses,” capturing a theme that recurred across the youth-created work. A stance of curious skepticism is endemic to media literacy learning.

Those qualitative shifts were matched by measurable gains. Faculty participants significantly increased their knowledge, confidence, and skills, with the strongest growth in collaborating to advance media education (+1.24 on a 7-point scale) and using storytelling to promote civic participation (+1.02). They rated the program’s quality near the top of every scale, giving it a near-perfect recommendation score of 9.9 out of 10. Youth reported strong competencies as well: the highest-rated statement was that they could apply what they learned in life or at school (mean 4.20 of 5), and most agreed the program would positively affect their educational journey. An inductive analysis of 210 youth-created posts surfaced eight recurring themes, including media literacy as a personal “shield” and the discipline to “pause before you share.”

A distinctive finding was that trust, for Palestinian youth, is relational before it is institutional. Asked who actually influences them, young people most often named family, then friends and peers, then teachers. Social-media influencers are part of the mix, of course, but this pattern of respect for intimate trust networks has direct implications for how media literacy should be taught in the region.