How to Equip Students with Information Literacy Skills for Social Media

The ACRL Framework offers a toolkit for students' social media use

Posted on February 12, 2025 in Blog Posts

Social media is undergoing a surprising number of shifts. Twitter became X, which has splintered off into Bluesky. TikTok was banned, which sent some people off to RedNote and others to Instagram before the ban was (temporarily?) lifted. Meta has announced new content moderation policies, which have prompted some users to boycott its products in protest. All social media platforms are angling to employ more AI in the creation and curation of content—a process that is sure to have some bumps. In short, the current state and near-future of the social media landscape are in flux.

While we can’t predict what the landscape will look like a few months from now, we can prepare students by honing their information literacy skills. Michele Santamaría and A. Nicole Pfannenstiel’s new book, Information Literacy and Social Media (ACRL, 2024), offers an important application of ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy by extending it to social media. These adaptable processes promise a resilient skillset for navigating the changes of social media. With the authors’ permission, we have reprinted the first chapter below. The full book offers specific applications of the ACRL Framework to social media sites and cross-disciplinary lesson plans. The book has been a big hit, and we’re eager to share Santamaría and Pfannenstiel’s work with you.

📕 Learn more and order a copy of Social Media and Information Literacy

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Social Media and its Information Literacy Challenges

by Michele Santamaría and A. Nicole Pfannenstiel

To teach and learn on social media is to engage in public practice, open to comment—good, bad, meh, and yes, ugly. At a certain point in her semester of teaching writing, Nicole finds that the paper mill bots have “found” her students on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and the bots begin to generate a stream of paper offers. It is the case that the proliferation of bots, particularly malicious ones, has been exacerbated since the Elon Musk takeover.[1] However, even before the advent of X, bots, have been a phenomenon on this platform and have taken on a variety of forms. Rhetorical scholar Rachael Graham Lussos characterizes Twitter bots as having “practical, playful, and serious” purposes.[2] For Miles Coleman, what these bots can do falls within the purview of “computational performances” that then become part of the educational conversation which Nicole’s students engage in as reflective users.[3] When students engage with conversations around writing and use hashtags to connect with each other online, they will inevitably connect with the broader communities that are invested in those topics. Those communities include other students, writers, professors, and paper mills, some of which are bots. Through these types of experiences, Nicole has become more aware of how she guides students through writing and research practice development in the form of a social media post and with course hashtags. She has found space to reflect on her approaches as an educator and has continued to refine how she engages students on X because those engagements are not closed off in the way that they would be if they happened on a learning management system discussion board.

We do not share this story as a cautionary tale, but rather to highlight how social media makes the lifelong information literacy stakes all too clear. As such, public engagements with course dispositions, practices, and ideas model our real-world engagement as citizens working with multiple audiences. Thus, we share this example because of the overlaps with how information literacy is defined within the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: “Information literacy is the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning.”[4]

In this example involving paper mill bots, students are immediately faced with how their creation of posts has opened them up to potential participation in other communities, ones which are not invested in their ethical participation. They are exposed to how their information creation processes can be turned against them by bad actors and through this experience come to think more critically about their roles as creators and consumers in the information literacy landscape. Paper mill bots present a unique opportunity to connect digital information sharing to lifelong learning. Students see themselves recognized as active participants within the thread. At the same time, the whole class sees the arrival of the paper bots. When students worry that instructors did not see the bot posts, we receive notifications about the posts on Xand by email. Students are very concerned when these bot posts appear in our feed. Rather than ignoring this feeling-oriented or affective dimension of their learning, we take the opportunity to discuss the power of our word and hashtag choices. We also acknowledge how our community was recognized and targeted because of our conversations. In courses where the focus is writing instruction, scenarios like these provide important moments to discuss plagiarism, the construction of assignments, learning, and skill transfer. In courses with rhetorical or literary content, these are also teachable moments about how word choice can draw attention to marginalized groups. We do not want students to fear social media, but to instead engage with how their creation within the space can be commodified, and how they move forward fruitfully with awareness, with strong, transferrable information literacy practices to support them in future situations. Our use of social media spaces facilitates information literacy learning values and validates the social roles students bring with them to our learning spaces. Recognizing that valuing the real-world social media use our students bring with them and actively connecting those practices to information literacy disposition development can validate student social roles in ways that can foster a sense of belonging.

As users of various technologies and digital spaces, and faculty at a public 4-year comprehensive college, we know that technology allows for multiple conversations to overlap, simultaneously. We know and experience how technology allows for different ways of engaging with information to overlap, and how users “curate” information feeds. Both of these are practices which we will cover later on in the book. We engage with each other surrounding our research, we engage with students at our institution, and within our courses, and we engage with various family, friends, organizations, and news sources throughout the world. To better understand how the book plans to apply metaliterate learning approaches and the ACRL Framework to social media engagement, it becomes necessary to trace the research and pedagogical approaches that have been used to engage these three vital components: the ACRL Framework, social media engagement, and metaliteracy.

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Literature Review

Students’ Digital Engagement and Their Accompanying Beliefs

According to Pew Research Center’s “Social Media Fact Sheet,” 84 percent of 18–29-year-olds use social media platforms daily. While YouTube and Facebook are used more frequently by adults, other apps popular in the Pew study include Instagram, Pinterest, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Snapchat, X, and TikTok.[5]This means that a significant percentage of the students and adult learners attending our institutions regularly access social media. This access connects users with local and global conversations, often mixing updates from friends and family with political and global news. Students already access information in real life by making important decisions as they curate feeds. From an information literacy standpoint, we are concerned that our students be aware of the implications of curation, and particularly that they impact and are impacted by this curated information.

Social Media and its Algorithmic Implications

We cannot deny we live in times Project Information Literacy has coined as “the age of algorithms.”[6] The implications of this are tremendous for our lives and for our information literacy practices. All students use Google—even as some of our students may choose not to engage in specific social media spaces, finding and opening information through the Google search engine ranks high on their list of approaches.[7] As students search and choose to click-to-open, their click behavior feeds into a complex process that Barbara Cassin characterizes as a “clickstream.”[8] Clicking links adds views within the Google analytics, thereby driving the content design of most internet spaces. Their digital action carries weight and informs decisions.[9]

User-driven information paths shape and are shaped by algorithms. As argued by Safiya Noble in her groundbreaking Algorithms of Oppression, the idea that algorithms are “math” and therefore “neutral” poses serious problems for addressing the racism intrinsic to their architecture. People do not perceive math as a human construct, “made” by other people, and have a challenging time discerning how bias is encoded within search results through the work of biased algorithms.[10] To lay these practices bare and demystify how algorithms work has become a critical need in information literacy practices that seek to bear the ethical responsibility of helping to shape ethical content consumers and creators.

As Project Information Literacy’s Report on Algorithms points out, we must ask if students understand how the major platforms which dominate their lives “work” as well as how these platforms “work on society.”[11] Research such as the 2022 Pew Center Study also pinpoints that 13–17-year-olds feel a lack of control over their personal data when it comes to their social media use but are also not too concerned about social media companies having this information.[12] In contrast, the Project Information Literacy algorithm study found its college age participants to be more ambivalent about the kinds of “bargains” they made to engage with social media. Students understand they are bargaining away their privacy as well as their ability to have a “bigger picture” view of information “out there.” Some are troubled by this bargain but also acknowledge its convenience, while others welcome the opportunity to have their views catered to.[13] Given that TikTok deploys algorithms that not only cater to but anticipate what a user might want in terms of content, we are entering a new age of content curation that implies less agency for users. As observed by John Herman, the key difference is that TikTok has “stepped over the midpoint between the familiar self-directed feed and an experience based first on algorithmic observation and inference” and that this is clear from the platform’s unique feature of a page called “For You” which “builds a presumably complex but opaque model” indicative of the fact that the platform begins making assumptions about the user as soon as the user has opened the app.[14]

Unlike social media platforms which have no ethical duty of care, information literacy educators are guided by principles that emphasize the ethics that responsible digital citizens should use in these information spaces. Both search results and social media content share disaggregation in common, separated from the context of format. Therefore, they lead to “individualized presentation of information that sorts results based upon inferences drawn from personal data trails”[15] This customization of what people see in search results is exacerbated by a lack of awareness about who controls information systems and how that power is wielded.

Moreover, to compound difficulties, social media mechanisms, as explored by the scholarship of librarians such as Nicole Cooke, Thomas Mackey, and Trudi Jacobson, are uniquely adept at amplifying “fake news” and misinformation.[16] The very dimensions of adept metaliterate learners, particularly the affective domain, are readily bypassed by the ways in which social media can be leveraged to communicate, as was so dramatically and starkly illustrated by how Facebook was used to spread false election information during the 2016 presidential election cycle. Guess, Nyhan, and Reifler found that one in four Americans visited a fake news website in the months surrounding the 2016 election and that the fake news was primarily disseminated through Facebook.[17]

Information Literacy Teaching and the Avoidance of Social Media

Project Information Literacy, analyzing data collected from 2009 to 2018, found that students were asked to undertake very restrictive research assignments in their university classes. Such assignments did not go beyond a narrow path of engaging with a limited range of resources and tasks that do not resemble how they need to engage with information outside of the classroom, either now or in their future lives.[18] Moreover, this research found that some students were concerned about the implications of the new information literacy challenges created by social media on their lives. Thus, a major finding of “Information Literacy in the Age of Algorithms,” indicates students were invested in fighting back in practical ways against algorithmic control with strategies they learned from their social circles and not from the classroom. What educators can learn from students’ strategies to fight back against this algorithmic control include lateral reading techniques and strategic use of social media platforms to pierce through filter bubbles.[19]

Thus, despite changes to our approaches to information literacy that are supposed to consider the vastly different information landscape, the classroom continues to be a site that approaches information from a static perspective, more aligned with a vision of the classroom that fits the former Standards for Information Literacy rather than the newer ACRL Framework.[20] While Project Information Literacy acknowledges that the scope of their study is small, it is true that the information literacy scholarship is not consistently discussing how educator-guides are assisting their students in learning how to use social media to engage as metaliterate learners, with the emphasis instead being placed on traditional, peer-reviewed sources or occasionally on engagement with Open Educational Resources (OER).

Social Media and the Teaching of Information Literacy

Preliminary Explorations

Analysis of how to teach information literacy in the library and information science literature as it applies to the internet has ranged from early discussions of the implications of Web 2.0 to some specific analysis of how to teach with certain platforms, with greater emphasis on those that are text-dominant (Facebook, X). In this sense, the information literacy approach to engaging with social media has continued to align itself with a more traditional information literacy paradigm that prioritizes text even as it purports to be engaging with an information ecosystem that should demand more emphasis on visual literacy. To further drive home the point about text-emphasis, part of the crisis surrounding the uncertain future of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, can arguably be attributed to users’ dismay at losing a platform that is so dependent on words as the primary means of communication. While X users might use memes, gifs, photos, and videos, it is a user’s words that create a sense of who they are on the platform.

Thus, Alfonzo’s information literacy-oriented analysis of X/Twitter pedagogy emphasizes how to build off student understandings of hashtags to create deeper understanding of advanced search features.[21] For Witek and Grettano, Facebook, X, and Pinterest allow them to address dimensions of metaliteracy across an entire course sequence. In all their work, Witek and Grettano also emphasize the rhetorical dimensions of social media, distinguishing between how the platforms require different rhetorical and information literacy practices. Furthermore, Witek and Grettano also come to emphasize the evolving nature of their metaliterate understandings as educators on social media.[22]

To engage with students as metaliterate learners means to acknowledge multiple dimensions of their learner profiles, including the four metaliteracy domains: behavioral, cognitive, affective, and metacognitive.[23] These dimensions come together in the learning goals, which culminate in learners “engag[ing] in informed, self-directed learning that encourages a broader worldview through the global reach of today’s social media environment.”[24]

Social Media Information Literacy that Engages with Scientific Metaliteracy

For Brungard and Klucevek, the role of social media in effective, accurate, and ethical scientific communication cannot be understated.[25] Through social media, the authors see the unique possibility for learners of scientific content to have the previously unprecedented opportunity to take on “participant and creator roles as they interact with scientific content digitally.”[26] While Brungard and Klucevek agree that learning through social media can be passive, they also make the case for an opportunity to participate in ongoing dialogues, whereby students can add to conversations through “comments, tags, forwards, and shares,” thus resulting in students’ opinions being published and easily linked to original or related sources.[27] The post-truth movement threatens scientific literacy by bypassing the affective domain of metaliteracy to invalidate any scientific data that goes against a firmly held opinion.

In their analysis of how scientists use social media, Brungard and Klucevek found that scientists used X and Facebook, with more emphasis on X as a site of professional communication and Facebook as a more “personal” social media space. While scientists did migrate to Mastodon, many academics on X found it hard to find a substitute platform, trying out Threads, Bluesky, and others, finding it hard to duplicate what had once been the ethos of X. Nonetheless, regardless of these developments, the notion that some social media platforms are more for “personal” use and others are more for “professional” use is important to keep in mind.

Aside from the potential to engage students in citizen science through social media so they can become “teachers and translators” of scientific research to broader audiences of family and friends, there is also the possibility of teaching students how to become “citizen journalists” on social media. As Palmer explores in his chapter on how stories and pictures can “lie together,” the implications of how images can be used to support false narratives should not be underestimated in terms of thinking about the fake news cycle.[28] This is particularly important given how much emphasis information literacy has put on text over image, despite attempts in the revised Framework to have us think about more dynamic, multimodal environments.

The Gap Addressed by This Volume

There is not much exploration in the information literacy scholarship of how social media can be harnessed to engage students as metaliterate learners who can develop authentic habits of mind and dispositions within the social media environment, or how these experiences could transfer to other information environments. Where we see significant overlap between metaliteracy scholarship and our effort to bridge this with the Framework is the emphasis on habits of mind and dispositions, particularly in terms of metaliteracy’s emphasis on the importance of affective dispositions.

The curation of these various audiences within social media spaces requires users to develop meaning-making practices to curate, to read, to write, and to engage with these various conversations. We find that these everyday meaning-making practices are ripe for connection through the information literacy framework: These practices can better connect learners with information literacy practices in higher education, practices that can better prepare students for post-graduation digital citizenship life.

Our call for inclusion of technology spaces, specifically social media spaces, is deeply rooted in our interest in creating space for students to actively engage with information by shaping it as creators. This interest is rooted in our goals of supporting students with multiple, overlapping identities in finding space to meet their learning needs. This does not mean that all readers, librarians, faculty, and educators must be active participants in all the social media spaces their student frequent. This bears repeating: We do not claim that all readers, librarians, faculty, and educators need to be active participants in these spaces, nor stay up to date on the most recent trends. Nonetheless, as recent developments with X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, have indicated, and as we have reiterated earlier in the book, we do acknowledge that teaching information literacy with social media engagement creates levels of risk that educators may not otherwise have encountered. But we are after the development of habits of mind in relation to information literacy and not optimal platform use; platforms will indeed come and go but what is sought here is the potential for enduring and authentic information literacy understandings.

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Notes

[1] Josh Taylor, “Bots on X Worse than Ever According to Analysis of 1m Tweets during First Republican Primary Debate,” The Guardian, September 9, 2023, sec. Technology, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/09/x-twitter-bots-republican-primary-debate-tweets-increase.

[2] “PraxisWiki | PraxisWiki: TwitterBots,” PraxisWiki, accessed April 30, 2024, http://praxis.technorhetoric.net/tiki-index.php?page=PraxisWiki%3A_%3ATwitterBots.

[3] Miles C. Coleman, Influential Machines: The Rhetoric of Computational Performance (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2023), 7.

[4] Association of College and Research Libraries, “Framework for Information Literacy.”

[5] Sara Atske, “Social Media Use in 2021,” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech (blog), April 7, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/.

[6] Alison Head, Barbara Fister, and Margy MacMillan, “Algorithm Study (January 15, 2020) – Project Information Literacy.”

[7] “Top Website Statistics For 2024 – Forbes Advisor,” accessed May 1, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/website-statistics/.

[8] Barbara Cassin, “Google Me : One-Click Democracy / Barbara Cassin ; Translated by Michael Syrotinski.,” January 1, 2018, 33, 55, 108.

[9] “Top Website Statistics For 2024 – Forbes Advisor.”

[10] Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018).

[11]  Head, Fister, MacMillan, “Algorithm Study.

[12] Sara Atske, “Teens, Social Media, and Technology 2022,” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech (blog), August 10, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/.

[13] Head, Fister, and MacMillan, 14.

[14] John Herrman, “How TikTok Is Rewriting the World,” The New York Times, March 10, 2019, sec. Style, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/style/what-is-tik-tok.html.

[15] Head, DeFrain, Fister, and MacMillan, “Information Literacy” 7.

[16] Nicole A. Cooke. Fake News and Alternative Facts: Information Literacy in a Post-Truth Era (Chicago: ALA Editions, 2018); Thomas P. Mackey and Trudi E. Jacobson, Metaliterate Learning for the Post-Truth World (Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman, 2019).

[17] Andrew M. Guess, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler, “Exposure to Untrustworthy Websites in the 2016 US Election,” Nature Human Behaviour 4, no. 5 (May 2020): 472–80, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0833-x.

[18] Head, Fister, and MacMillan, 25.

[19] Head, Fister, and MacMillan, 18-20.

[20] Nancy M. Foasberg, “From Standards to Frameworks for IL: How the ACRL Framework Addresses Critiques of the Standards.,” Portal: Libraries & the Academy 15, no. 4 (October 1, 2015): 699–717, https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2015.0045.

[21] Paige Alfonzo, “Using Twitter Hashtags for Information Literacy Instruction: The Ubiquity of Hashtags Has Opened the Doors for the Teaching of Advanced Searching Concepts to a Much Wider Audience than in Past Years,” Computers in Libraries, September 1, 2014.

[22] Donna Witek and Teresa Grettano, “Revising for Metaliteracy: Flexible Course Design to Support Social Media Pedagogy,” in Metaliteracy in Practice, ed. Trudi E Jacobson and Thomas P Mackey (ALA Neal-Schuman, 2016), 1–22.

[23] Trudi E. Jacobson and Thomas P. Mackey, eds., Metaliteracy in Practice (Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman, 2016).

[24] Metaliteracy.org. “Goals and Learning Objectives,” Metaliteracy.Org (blog), March 12, 2013, https://metaliteracy.org/learning-objectives/.

[25] Allison Brungard and Kristin Klucevsek, “Constructing Scientific Literacy through Metaliteracy: Implications for Learning in a Post-Truth World,” in Metaliterate Learning for a Post-Truth World, ed. Trudi E Jacobson and Thomas P Mackey (Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman, 2019), 81–101.

[26] Brungard and Klucevsek, “Constructing Scientific Literacy,” 83.

[27] Brungard and Klucevsek, “Constructing Scientific Literacy,” 86.

[28] Thomas Palmer. “When Stories and Pictures Lie Together—and You Do Not Even Know It.” In Metaliterate Learning for the Post-Truth World, eds. Thomas P. Mackey, Trudi E. Jacobson, and Troy A. Swanson. (Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman, 2019).

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