Consider these scenarios.

An influential political commentator posts a reel on social media, cherry-picking facts to manipulate a situation for political gain. His post gets no likes, no shares, and no angry emojis from users.

A scammy online ad using a celebrity’s image pops up on people’s social media feeds. Nobody clicks on it.

A wellness influencer shares disproven health advice and is entirely ignored. And a deepfake artificial intelligence (AI) video is downgraded by the algorithm because nobody believes it.

Instead, people are fact-checking before sharing or commenting. They’re consulting experts and scrolling beyond the AI summary at the top to seek out reliable information sources that abide by the standards of accuracy, independence and ethics.

These situations may seem laughable in our algorithm- and AI-driven online world where emotion is key to engagement.

But they are, in fact, the simple practical outcomes of a media literate society. And our report on a newly developed media literacy course shows there’s a cheap and effective solution to the scourge of misinformation at the heart of our overwhelming, and often polarised, online environment.

Misinformation is a global risk

We live in a world where anyone with an internet connection can publish instantly to the world – with few guardrails for accuracy or ethics.

Misinformation has been ranked first or second in the top short-term global risks by the World Economic Forum for three years running. Misinformation is often at the heart of fear campaigns and hate speech that can help fuel extremism and polarisation. It erodes trust in governments and institutions. It’s a public health hazard and a threat to public order and disaster management.

And now it’s being supercharged by low-effort generative AI. These tools spit out plausible and convincing content, but can also be wildly inaccurate and biased. As such, Australians are deeply concerned about misinformation. More so than many of their counterparts around the world.

Children have for many years been the focus of media literacy programs and research, such as Civic Online Reasoning in the US. Meanwhile adults – particularly those who were raised in the pre-internet era of landlines and snail mail – have been left floundering.

Educating adults is now an urgent priority. We found just 60 minutes of media literacy training makes a measurable difference to people’s ability to apply critical thinking skills to deal with misinformation.

A spoonful of adult education

To find solutions through media literacy, we focused on older people (aged 55+) who are known to be more vulnerable to misinformation, have fewer media skills, and feel less confident in their media abilities. We recruited our study participants from across Australia through libraries, the news media, and social media.

Through a simple short course delivered online and in person, we taught 79 participants how to:

• identify misinformation
• fact check and verify
• find reliable sources, and
• be self-aware while navigating the online world.

The media literacy levels of the participants grew by 23% on average, regardless of their background and political beliefs. Their ability to determine the reliability of information improved especially – by 27% – as did confidence in their ability to critically navigate the online world (by 32%).

Importantly, our course – the first known empirically-validated resource of its kind targeted at older Australians – helped people who are socially excluded the most.

We tested participants’ media literacy before the short course, immediately after, and three months later. Older, regional, less educated, and culturally and linguistically diverse groups maintained their gains for longer.

But our research also confirmed what others before us have fretted over: media literacy training is not a one-off. Overall, advances from education diminished over time among our study participants, although scores remained 11% higher on average than pre-course levels even after three months.

This suggests media literacy programs must be embedded in people’s everyday lives as a life-long learning process. It would help us keep pace with new platforms, digital systems and social trends.

Where to next?

The outcomes from the short course led to the development of the Stay Smart Online program, a toolkit to provide a simple and flexible way of teaching media literacy.

We conducted a pilot using an adapted version of the short course with libraries and their patrons throughout Australia with impressive results: 97% of patrons said they would recommend the course to a friend.

Libraries are ideal institutions to deliver this training to the public, especially older Australians. Among library staff nationally 99% see media literacy as essential work, but just 10% feel adequately equipped to support that mission.

What sets our research apart from many other misinformation and media literacy interventions (and is, perhaps, among the reasons for its success), is that it incorporates through the course materials the concept of intellectual humility.

Put simply, this is the acceptance that each person’s knowledge is limited, that we may be wrong, and we are open to revising our views based on evidence. As the term suggests, it’s a humbling notion. However, as we’ve found, it’s essential to media literacy.

In order to embrace evidence-based facts, we need first to acknowledge how our life experiences, upbringing, education, friends and family, community, language and culture have shaped our world view. All of these influence how we approach and process information and media.

Being conscious of our own inherent biases helps us apply the critical thinking skills we need to build resilience to misinformation.

Saffron Howden, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra; Janet Fulton, Research Fellow, News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra, and Sora Park, Professor of Communication, News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Reforming Australia’s gambling industry has been one of the most high-profile political issues of recent years. Constantly in the headlines, there are high levels of public support to bring in tougher rules, including gambling advertising bans.

But the federal government has been reluctant to act. It has introduced its new gambling legislation to parliament, but the bill has been criticised as not going far enough to address the problem.

There’s been a lot of speculation as to why there’s been so little political appetite to bring in tougher measures. One key reason is governments have a clear conflict of interest: they rely on gambling revenue while also being responsible for reducing gambling harm.

Years of resistance

Momentum for changing Australia’s gambling laws has been building since the 2023 release of the Murphy report. Handed down by a cross-party parliamentary inquiry and chaired by the late Labor MP Peta Murphy, the report made 31 recommendations, including limitations on gambling advertising and the appointment of a national online gambling regulator.

The government was slow to respond to the report. Three years later, it finally did.

The proposed legislation makes some attempts to protect people from gambling harms. If passed, this legislation would restrict when and how frequently gambling ads may air and ban the use of celebrities in those ads, among other changes.

Last week at Labor’s 50th National Conference, the party’s draft national platform acknowledged the public health benefits of reducing tobacco consumption. It described the tobacco industry as coercive and stated the party would not engage with anyone with financial links to tobacco.

This raises the obvious question: why has the Albanese government taken a markedly different approach to the gambling industry?

Put simply, the federal government’s reluctance to push for stronger regulation can be linked to the revenue gambling generates.

Imbalances in funding

To understand how this situation came about, we need to consider a concept called vertical fiscal imbalance, as we did in our new research.

Vertical fiscal imbalance is the financial mismatch between the federal and state governments. Under the Constitution, the federal government is more able to raise revenue, but the responsibility to deliver public services is largely left to the states, leading to an imbalance. It first started when the federal government assumed control over collecting income tax after the second world war.

With this imbalance, the states became increasingly dependent on federal funding grants. These grants are distributed through the horizontal fiscal equalisation grants process: a process designed to share government money fairly across the country.

While all states receive grants from the Commonwealth, horizontal fiscal equalisation aims to provide each state with the financial capacity to provide services to its population at a comparable level.

But this process cannot fully account for differences in land areas or resources.

For example, Western Australia argues it has been effectively penalised for having ample mineral resources that create revenue, which negatively impacts their share of the equalisation funding.

What does this have to do with gambling?

The current grants don’t provide enough funding for the states to support vital public services such as education, health, transport or social services. State governments have sought different ways to make up the shortfall.

This includes gambling taxes. Gambling revenue isn’t taken into account when the Commonwealth Grants Commission decides how much money each jurisdiction should receive. Every dollar states raise from gambling, they get to keep.

Our study looks at how the vertical fiscal imbalance led to New South Wales embracing the idea of gaining revenue from gambling taxes, including from poker machines.

Based on records of parliamentary debates, our research shows gambling went from a moral issue in the early 1900s, with parliamentarians stating gambling was a “material evil”, to a new revenue source.

In 1956, extreme budget pressures caused NSW Premier Joseph Cahill to declare not allowing poker machines into clubs would put the government in a “parlous financial position”.

Yet, another MP argued the government had “sunk to the depths, was desperate for money, and was capitalising upon the most vulnerable members of the community”.

But despite earlier concerns about morality, new legalised forms of gambling proliferated, particularly poker machines.

In terms of bringing in money for the state government, it worked. According to the most recent state budget, revenue from all gambling taxes in NSW was $3.6 billion in 2024–25, making up about 7% of the state’s $48 billion total tax revenue. Gambling revenue is forecast to surge to $4.7 billion over the next four years.

NSW is now home to about half the poker machines in the country. There are almost 90,000 machines across the state.

In May, the Labor party unanimously passed a motion at its NSW state conference to significantly reduce the number of poker machines in the state in the next ten years. But the parliamentary party isn’t compelled to legislate accordingly.

What about beyond NSW?

Other states and territories, with the exception of WA, have also come to rely on gambling revenue.

In 2022–23, the Queensland government collected $1.9 billion in gambling taxes and levies. In Victoria in 2024–25, it was more than $2.4 billion.

Even in Tasmania, a much smaller state, gambling generated more than $120 million for state coffers in 2023–24.

On a national level, the Albanese government’s reluctance to impose stronger regulation on advertising for the gambling industry, or establish a national gambling regulator, is likely driven by concerns about what this would mean for the federal budget. Weaning the states off gambling revenue would necessitate fundamental changes to federal-state fiscal relations.

At a time when the government is already under pressure given the nation’s ballooning debt, such fundamental economic reform would be a courageous path to take.

From this perspective, the Albanese government’s response to the Murphy report is less an isolated policy decision than the continuation of a longstanding pattern in which structural reform gives way to more politically and economically acceptable measures.

Our findings suggest an important solution to the gambling crisis lies in reforming the current federal funding model to the states. Doing so would reduce the states’ dependence on gambling revenue and enable them to fund essential services without relying on the gambling losses of everyday Australians.

Barbara Kinder, Adjunct Fellow, Lecturer, Southern Cross University and Michael B. Charles, Associate Professor, Management Discipline, Faculty of Business, Arts and Law, Southern Cross University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.