Most digital media literacy research treats misinformation as a purely cognitive problem: teach children to reason better, and they'll spot the fake. But critics argue this framing neglects the social, emotional, and cultural contexts in which mis/disinformation is actually created and spread — the peer pressure, the parasocial trust in influencers, the financial incentives baked into platforms.
This study expands beyond the cognitive model by examining how children conceptualize mis/disinformation through socio-emotional learning (SEL) and sociocultural (SC) lenses. Over a 2.5-year period, we conducted 26 co-design workshops with children ages 6–11, letting them articulate how misinformation feels and circulates in their world — not just how it's identified.
We used Cooperative Inquiry, a participatory design method built on equal design partnerships between children and adult researchers. Rather than testing children's literacy with pre/post measures, sustained co-design partnerships let children talk honestly about complex emotional topics over time.
Eight sessions with a long-term university co-design team (21 children, 2022–2023) and eighteen sessions across two urban public library sites (28 children), where pre-service librarians facilitated the design work.
Children co-designed play-based misinformation activities — fake viral videos, influencer skits, posters debating online claims — surfacing beliefs that interviews alone rarely reach.
Analysis surfaced six themes spanning the emotional, social, and economic life of misinformation for children:
Children struggled to imagine that others could fall for claims they themselves found obviously false — a theory-of-mind gap that purely cognitive training doesn't address.
Peer dynamics and the desire to belong influenced what children shared and endorsed, sometimes against their own judgment.
Children used view counts, subscriber numbers, and celebrity as proxies for trustworthiness rather than source quality.
They recognized 'YouTube voice,' sponsorships, and financial ties as emotionally manipulative tactics — and satirized them in their designs.
False claims circulate through family and community — even parents tell 'watermelon seed' stories — so children's trust networks are both the problem and the resource.
When unsure, children reached for parents, librarians, and peers rather than verification tools.
We propose a community-based model of design for youth misinformation resilience.
If conspiracy theorizing is collective sensemaking — where emotion, identity, and storytelling beat accuracy — then resilience must also be built collectively, not one fact-checker at a time.
The model ties cognitive, socio-emotional, and sociocultural supports together, giving designers concrete direction for building children's epistemic resilience with their communities rather than for them.