Reclaiming Critical Consciousness: Literacy for Digital Oppression

ABSTRACT Digital information landscapes and communication platforms are controlled by algorithmic curation and polarized content that serve larger societal systems. The need for a reimagined approach to literacy education has never been more urgent. Drawing on Freire's foundational concepts of critical consciousness, dialogic pedagogy, and the rejection of the banking model, this paper defines and sustains digital oppression or the ways digital platforms reproduce prescriptive, extractive relationships between institutions and users and offers key instructional strategies organized around resisting it. This analysis examines how youth engagement with digital texts requires pedagogies that are experiential, dialogic, and attuned to power, identity, and meaning‐making. By situating literacy as a tool for empowerment, resistance, and transformation, this paper calls for a renewed commitment to critical pedagogy as both the “word” and the “world” are increasingly mediated by digital infrastructures. It concludes with a call to educators and researchers to co‐construct emancipatory practices that support young people in becoming critically literate agents capable of remaking their social realities.