Establishing best practice media literacy design principles

Making sense of media

We want to establish what works well and what does not, in order to identify good media literacy design principles and inform our thinking about our future online safety duties.

Building a consensus around best-practice principles will require input from experts with varying perspectives. We will create a space for conversation, challenge and action, bringing together firms, academics, and advocacy groups.

Whether it’s social media, search, video-sharing or gaming services, millions of us are online every day, enjoying the experiences that these apps and platforms offer.  Online services have an unrivalled opportunity to promote media literacy to the millions of people that use their services. What happens on-platform at point of use – be that a notification about the source of the information, or a prompt to think about whether you really want to post something – must be part of the solution to the media literacy challenges in the UK.

To encourage platforms of all sizes to consider how they might promote media literacy, Ofcom – with the support and engagement of the academics, platforms and interest groups represented on our External Working Group (see section below for members’ details) – have created a suite of Best Practice Design Principles for Media Literacy (PDF, 501.1 KB). These principles are designed to encourage and support platforms to:

  1. Become accountable for making media literacy a priority and increase transparency surrounding the development and impact of media literacy interventions,
  2. Ensure the development of timely media literacy interventions that put user needs at the centre of the design process,
  3. Monitor and evaluate media literacy interventions on an ongoing basis.

We are keen to get further views on how these principles can be refined and made more useful for a range of online services and so invite you to contribute to this call for input.

To have your say please get in touch with the team by 23:59 Monday 18 December.

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