Responsible News Consumption in the Digital Age: Strategies for Citizens of Post-Soviet States

This five-week HSE course gives you the critical thinking techniques for the conscious work with increasing flood of misinformation, viral cliches, ad and propaganda in media. Also, it covers the internal principles of production and distribution of quality news - the main journalism product that helps the democratic system to resist such diseases as a crisis of confidence, populism or radicalism. These skills are quite useful for any responsible citizen but they are crucial for civil societies.

In the idea of responsible consumption, a driven force is the maturity of consumers and their responsibility to preserve the planet's ecosystem. Our distant course proposes you a concept of responsible news consumption that puts the integrity of the information ecosystem of civil society at the forefront. In this ecosystem, each participant - a citizen - realizes not only the importance of receiving reliable information for making decisions and taking actions but also the responsibility to members of his or her large and small communities for the credibility of information shared with them.
In today's digital age of deceptive information abundance, news consumers can be lost in a flood of misinformation, viral cliches, ad and propaganda. This five-week course gives you the critical thinking techniques for the conscious work with this increasing flood. Also, we'll cover the internal principles of production and distribution of quality news - the main journalism product that helps the democratic system to resist such diseases as a crisis of confidence, populism or radicalism. These skills are quite useful for any responsible citizen but they are crucial for civil societies in the post-Soviet space, where independent journalism is still quite young and often unable to fully counteract pressure from corporations and authorities.

• Responsible news consumption as the basis for the development of civil society
• News in post-soviet realm
• Journalistic verification: how it works
• Between fairness and balance
• Fake news and post-truth as alternative vision of news