Last week the UK saw the biggest far-rightA range of ideologies that emphasise social order, racial purity and the elimination of opponents. mobilisation on its streets since 1935. While people feared for their lives, 5,000 miles away a right-wing billionaire was fanning the flames.

At the height of the unrest, Elon MuskA South African-born entrepreneur whose companies have included the online payment service PayPal. helped spread a false claim that British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer was building detainment camps on the Falkland IslandsA remote South Atlantic archipelago with a population of just over 2,800. It is a British Overseas Territory. to imprison rioters.¹

It has sparked a debate over how best to stop misinformationIncorrect or misleading information unintentionally presented as fact. It can be contrasted with disinformation or deliberate lies.. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan called for the Online Safety ActA UK law regulating "harmful" online speech and media, passed in October 2023. introduced last year to be beefed up.

Meanwhile, Bridget Phillipson, the secretary of state for education, is bringing in changes to the curriculum to teach students critical thinking skills to help them spot extremistPeople or groups which have extreme ideas, often relating to politics. content and misinformation in newspapers and online.²

Phillipson's announcement, experts say, is based on the understanding that there are only two ways of cutting off the flow of misinformation.

The traditional method is to prevent misinformation from being published at all. This is one of the purposes of the Online Safety Act.³

But social media has made this task much harder. Lies spread on X and Facebook too quickly for the police to catch.

That makes stemming the flow of misinformation nearly impossible. So the other option is to inoculateImmunise or protect against disease. web users.

If we teach people critical thinking skills, experts say, they will question everything they read and be more likely to spot falsehoods.

Some say this is simply restoring centuries of wisdom. In the past we knew that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.⁴

For hundreds of years, the Church forbadeDid not allow. ordinary people to read the Bible because it thought that without proper training and education they would only misinterpret it.

Then with the invention of the printing press and the ReformationA major movement in 16th Century Europe in which the Western Church split into Protestantism and the Roman Catholic Church. , there was an explosion of popular learning. In the 18th Century, thinkers and scientists began to argue that the more information people had, the better the world would be.

But while the idea that ordinary people should not read the Bible was stuffy and elitistRegarding other people as inferior because they lack power, wealth, or status., it is true that without specialist knowledge it is easy to misinterpret things.

So the answer, some say, is to promote not just knowledge but wisdom, and ensure that everyone has the skill to tell good knowledge from bad.

Has critical thinking become life's key skill?

Yes: We can no longer hope to stop misinformation at its source. It travels too quickly, crosses borders too easily. Our only defence against its deadly influence is critical thinking.

No: Critical thinking is not enough to defeat misinformation. Even the most clear-thinking of us is still vulnerable to falsehoods that confirm our prejudices about the world.

Or... Critical thinking is an important weapon in our armoury, but it cannot be the only one. We need a more holisticIn medicine, it is a rounded approach to healing that considers mental, social, and physical factors as interconnected. approach to online misinformation. So far, politicians have been slow to catch up with this reality.

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