Jameela Jamil Advocates For Media Literacy With Ground News Partnership

Instagram/@jameelajamil

The media literacy advocate is trying to lead her own Instagram followers on that journey. Not least because the actress and activist also announced her collaboration with Ground News, intent on dismantling media bias to prying eyes.

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In a lengthy post, Jamil explained how the app was useful for her in the process of unearthing sources and agendas behind the news she consumes.

The ever-brilliant Jamil went on to rant about Ground News, the lack of media literacy, and transparency in the current set-up of information. “The platform gives you headlines, but then it also breaks down the political leanings of each news outlet, who funds them—details you rarely get in your average news reporting. It really is hard to find transparency and due diligence done to uncovering sources of information,” go on and start questioning what you read or hear from now.

Jamil’s followers echoed her call for media literacy with fervor. The community supported it en masse and were loudly agreeing and describing it as “most excellent” and “useful.” There was even joking about throwing in a few expletives to “Al Gor Ithm”—the algorithm gods of social media. Others, including one who self-declared himself as a part of the education sector, voiced their despair over how grossly lacking media education for critical thinking currently is.

Some were all right with it; others, not immediately. One asked, “How long will the promotional discount last? A couple more months, at least, and then I can make my choice.” While the other asked in sarcasm, “Nothing for algorithm daddy today, huh?”—throwing a jibe in regards to some manipulative nature of social media feeds.

In fact, rather than merely engaging in a seeding act of celebrity chit-chat, the groundwork the collaboration is trying to set for Ground News is really about drawing attention to a significant issue. Promotion of media literacy looks tragically timely and necessary given the shelf life of fake news far longer than that of the truth. Whether or not the 40% discount among Jamil’s followers pulls through, the importance of the topic she has put up to debate definitely goes further in the world.

For the curious: she did not entertain those weird DM get-rich-scheme-on-unrelated-campaign requests. Some things, I suppose, are just better left to rot.

In short, what Jamil wants is for you to question and dig for sources instead of just taking info at face value. And if just a few of us manage to do that, then maybe everybody becomes a little bit better at recognizing blatantly obvious agendas staring at us boldly from the front.

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Would that these arms moved as fast as these thoughts, these strangely huge fat fingers, and updates from Apple with malware, notwithstanding.