Political Misinformation Recognition among College Students on Social Media and Educational Responses

Abstract

Social media gives college students rapid access to political information but also exposes them to ambiguous sources, decontextualized evidence, emotionally charged narratives, and misleading claims. This article aims to explain why college students may struggle to assess political content online and to propose an educational response grounded in research on misinformation, media and news literacy, civic online reasoning, and digital source evaluation. Using an integrative narrative review and conceptual synthesis of empirical and theoretical literature, the article thematically analyzes barriers to online political judgment and derives pedagogical design principles. The review identifies five connected barriers: weak attention to provenance, confusion between factual and interpretive claims, reliance on familiarity and social endorsement, limited verification at the moment of sharing, and a mismatch between open social media environments and classroom materials whose authority has already been established. In response, the article proposes a staged educational framework based on source investigation, lateral reading, claim–evidence reconstruction, contextual verification, independent corroboration, and calibrated judgment. It also recommends performance-based assessment using realistic, mixed-quality cases rather than relying on self-reported confidence or generalized skepticism. The article defines political information literacy as the ability to assign confidence in proportion to source credibility and verifiable evidence. Its main contribution is to integrate previously separate literatures on misinformation, literacy, and civic online reasoning into a coherent pedagogical account of political information literacy. The implications are that political and civic education should connect subject knowledge with the information conditions under which students encounter public affairs, and that assessment should evaluate students' calibrated judgments in realistic digital environments rather than generic skepticism or confidence alone