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05 July 2021
Since the onset of the global pandemic, there has been a surge in demand for trusted news and information. In times of crisis, people look for a constant, a source of stability as fiction and speculative theories attempt to discredit fact-based journalism. The way that people obtain and absorb information has evolved rapidly in recent years.
Disinformation as a term, is one that has become increasingly common in our daily lexicons. According to data collected from the Dow Jones Factiva platform, the number of media articles mentioning the term has steadily grown over the past decade. For example, last year, in Asia Pacific, there were over 1,700 mentions of disinformation in English language media stories. This compares to an annual regional average of 250 mentions or less between 2010 and 2017. As the spread of misinformation appears to grow, so does the importance of news literacy in the fight for trust.