DIGITAL LITERACY IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FAKE NEWS IN BRAZIL

The rapid proliferation of disinformation on important topics has affected various segments of society and is therefore a cause for great concern for Brazilian authorities, as are civil society organizations that are severely affected around the world. This study adopts as its theoretical and conceptual framework the intersection between digital literacy and practices to combat disinformation, with an emphasis on combating fake news in digital environments. The objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of digital literacy applied to combat fake news in Brazil. The concept of digital literacy is based on the set of skills necessary to access, understand, evaluate and produce information on multiple digital platforms. In this context, it is a fundamental skill for exercising citizenship in contemporary society, and is considered a strategic instrument for developing critical thinking, media literacy and the ability to verify information. The concept of fake news is approached from the perspective of content intentionally produced to deceive, manipulate or cause individual or collective harm, highlighting the relevance of media education in confronting these phenomena. This is a qualitative and quantitative study with a descriptive approach, whose methodological strategy is based on the analysis of scientometric indicators and metrics to assess the progress of scientific production on digital literacy and fake news. Data collection was carried out in the main academic databases including the descriptors "digital literacy" AND "fake news", applied to the title, abstract and keywords fields, with a time frame between 2016 and 2024, based on a historical-deductive analytical method to delimit and select the relevant sample according to the research objective. The results were presented using the Wordclouds.com platform to produce lists and tables of the most cited words, generating graphs and diagrams also represented in word cloud format. The main digital literacy proposals applied to solving the problem of disinformation in Brazil were related through a hermeneutic analysis. The results highlight the importance of digital literacy in combating fake news. It is therefore concluded that the fluent use of critical thinking associated with the population's digital literacy is essential for building a more informed society that is resilient to fake news.