# media literacy

Appeal to Emotion

Using feelings rather than evidence to persuade - bypassing the argument and going straight for the heart.

Appeal to False Authority

Using an expert's opinion as evidence when they have no relevant expertise - fame and credentials aren't the same thing.

Argument from Ignorance

Claiming that something must be true because it hasn't been proven false, or false because it hasn't been proven true.

Attentional Bias

The tendency for your perception to be shaped by what you're already thinking about, worrying about, or primed to notice.

Authority Bias

We give disproportionate weight to the opinions of people we perceive as authorities - even outside their expertise.

Automation Bias

Automation bias is trusting a machine's judgement over our own - following its advice, or missing what it fails to flag, even when we could see better.

Availability Heuristic

We judge how likely something is based on how easily we can think of an example - not on how often it actually happens.

Base Rate Fallacy

Ignoring general statistical information in favour of specific but less reliable details about an individual case.

Blind Spot Bias

The tendency to recognise cognitive biases in others while failing to see them in yourself.

Burden of Proof

The obligation to provide evidence rests with the person making the claim - not with the person questioning it.

Capitalist Realism

The pervasive sense that capitalism is the only viable system - not because it's the best, but because alternatives have become unthinkable.

Circular Reasoning

An argument that uses its own conclusion as one of its premises - going round in circles without proving anything.

Commodification

The process of turning things that aren't naturally products - ideas, identity, relationships, rest - into things that can be bought and sold.

Conceptual Gentrification

When ideas are stripped of their challenging, uncomfortable, or radical parts and repackaged for comfortable mainstream consumption.

Concern Trolling

Disguising hostile opposition as caring advice to undermine a cause from within.

Confirmation Bias

We seek out information that supports what we already believe, and ignore what doesn't.

Controlling the Narrative

The power to decide what a story is about - and, just as importantly, what it isn't about.

Cultural Hegemony

When the dominant group's ideas become everyone's 'common sense' - accepted as natural rather than constructed.

DARVO

A manipulation pattern where the offender denies wrongdoing, attacks the accuser, and reverses victim and offender roles.

Dead Internet Theory

Dead internet theory claims bots and AI now generate most of the internet, with humans at the margins. What is true in it, and what overreaches.

Deepfakes

A deepfake is AI-generated video, audio or imagery showing real people doing things they never did, and why it breaks our trust in recordings.

Psychological Phenomenon

Desensitisation

When repeated exposure to something shocking, disturbing, or morally uncomfortable gradually reduces your emotional response to it - until it barely registers at all.

Digital Amnesia

Digital amnesia is forgetting what we let our devices remember for us. The 'Google effect', why it happens, and what it costs.

Dog Whistling

Using coded language that sounds innocent to most people but carries a hidden message to a specific audience.

False Consensus Effect

We tend to assume that most people think the way we do - and we're usually wrong.

False Dilemma

Presenting only two options when more exist - forcing a choice between extremes and ignoring everything in between.

False Equivalence

Treating two things as equally valid or important when they clearly aren't.

Fascism

A revolutionary, anti-democratic movement built on the myth of a nation reborn from decline, by purging its enemies and rallying behind one leader.

Firehose of Falsehood

Overwhelming audiences with a rapid, continuous flood of disinformation so that truth becomes impossible to defend.

Framing Effect

The way information is presented changes how we respond to it - even when the underlying facts are identical.

Frequency Illusion

Once you notice something for the first time, you suddenly seem to see it everywhere - not because it's more common, but because you're now looking for it.

Gaslighting

Manipulating someone into doubting their own perception, memory, or sanity.

Gish Gallop

Overwhelming an opponent with a rapid flood of arguments, regardless of accuracy, so that none can be adequately addressed.

Hasty Generalisation

Drawing a broad conclusion from too few examples - treating a small sample as though it represents the whole picture.

Illusory Correlation

Perceiving a relationship between two things when no meaningful connection exists - or when the connection is far weaker than it appears.

Independent Evaluation

Forming your own judgement about an idea or claim before looking at what everyone else thinks.

Left and Right

The two broad families of political belief, born from where people sat in 1789 - and still tracking, underneath, your attitude to equality and hierarchy.

Liar's Dividend

The liar's dividend is the advantage liars gain once fakes are known to exist: they can wave away genuine, damaging recordings as just a deepfake.

Lump of Labour Fallacy

The mistaken belief that there is a fixed amount of work available in an economy, so one group's gain must be another's loss.

Manufactured Consent

When media systems produce public agreement with elite interests - not through censorship, but through structure.

Map is Not the Territory

Every model, theory, or description of reality is a simplification - useful, but never the whole picture.

Mere Exposure Effect

The tendency to develop a preference for things simply because you've encountered them before.

Psychological Phenomenon

Moral Hypocrisy Judgement

We punish the contradiction between someone's stated values and their behaviour more harshly than we punish the behaviour alone.

Moral Panic

Intense public fear about a perceived threat, amplified by media, disproportionate to the actual danger.

Motte-and-Bailey

Defending a controversial claim by retreating to an uncontroversial one, then acting as if they are the same thing.

Neoliberalism

The political project that made free-market competition the default logic of everything, from public services to how we see ourselves.

Normalisation

The gradual process by which the previously unthinkable becomes acceptable, then expected, then invisible - the slow drift of what a culture treats as normal.

Occam's Razor

When you have competing explanations for the same thing, the simplest one - the one with the fewest assumptions - is usually right.

Overton Window

The range of ideas the public considers acceptable at any given time - and how that range can be deliberately shifted.

Paradox of Tolerance

A tolerant society that tolerates intolerance will eventually be destroyed by it.

Poisoning the Well

Discrediting a person or source before they've even spoken, so that anything they say is automatically dismissed.

Populism

A way of doing politics that pits 'the pure people' against 'a corrupt elite' - and claims to be the one true voice of the people.

Post Hoc

Assuming that because one thing happened after another, the first thing caused the second - confusing sequence with causation.

Probabilistic Thinking

Thinking in terms of likelihoods and ranges of outcomes rather than certainties, so you make better decisions under uncertainty.

Recuperation

When radical ideas are absorbed by the system they opposed and sold back as products - neutralising dissent by turning it into commerce.

Red Herring

Introducing an irrelevant topic to divert attention from the original issue.

Psychological Phenomenon

Relative Deprivation

Feeling worse off based on who you compare yourself to, not on what you actually have.

Repetition as Persuasion

The rhetorical strategy of making a claim more believable, more familiar, and more powerful simply by saying it again and again.

Salience Bias

The tendency to give disproportionate weight to prominent, vivid, or emotionally striking information while overlooking quieter details.

Sealioning

Disguising harassment as polite, persistent requests for evidence and debate that are never made in good faith.

Slippery Slope

Arguing that one small step will inevitably lead to a chain of increasingly extreme consequences, without evidence that the chain is likely.

Source Laundering

Passing unreliable information through a chain of increasingly credible-looking sources until it appears legitimate.

State of Nature Assumption

The unconscious belief about whether people are fundamentally selfish or fundamentally cooperative - and how that shapes everything else you think.

Straw Man

Misrepresenting someone's argument to make it easier to attack.

Survivorship Bias

Focusing on the people or things that succeeded while overlooking those that didn't - and drawing false conclusions from the incomplete picture.

The Attention Economy

A system in which human attention is treated as a scarce resource to be harvested, bought, sold, and competed for - reshaping culture around it.

The Big Lie

A falsehood so enormous that people struggle to believe anyone would fabricate it - which is precisely why they accept it.

The Dialectic

A way of reaching the truth through the structured clash of opposing ideas, where the aim is not to win the argument but to be changed by it.

The ELIZA Effect

The ELIZA effect is our habit of reading real understanding, empathy or intelligence into a machine, simply because it answers us in fluent language.

Weaponised Hopelessness

When despair is deliberately cultivated to stop people from acting - because people who believe nothing can change won't try to change anything.

Whataboutism

Responding to a criticism by pointing to someone else's wrongdoing instead of addressing the original point.