“Taylor Swift is joining the Kansas City Chiefs’ cheerleading squad for the next season because of her boyfriend, Travis Kelce.” – an Instagram post reads.

One person scrolling past doesn’t think too hard about it, but mentions it to a friend. Another runs around their neighborhood on FaceTime with five of their best friends making sure that everyone knows about it.

Either way, neither of them fact-checked it and the word spreads like wildfire.

Media literacy is a necessity in today’s digital world, especially for teenagers. Ensuring that the information a person is sharing is accurate is imperative in making fully informed decisions. This applies to all aspects of life.

Almost everyone these days is on social media. Whether it’s Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, at some point most people have seen a social media site that uses advertisements. According to a study done by Stanford University, 82 percent of students couldn’t tell the difference between a sponsored post and a legitimate news article on the same site.

Plenty of major decisions in life can be made much easier and more solid just by doing a bit of research. These decisions include everything from who to vote for to where to go to college. It even involves things as important as career choices and simple things like where to eat dinner on any given day.

To be more media literate is simple. A quick Google search of the person who posted information or a search of the topic itself can immensely help reduce the amount of misinformation that can be spread.

There are even websites that can help fact-check information along with media bias charts that show if a source is skewed heavily in a political direction, or if it stays consistently objective.

Not every instance of fake news is going to be as harmless as Taylor Swift gossip, though. When it comes to politics, some people are willing to say or do anything to make themself or their favorite candidate look better and make their opposition look worse.

Much of this false information is posted on social media websites. Studies from the Pew Research Center shows that younger adults are more likely to trust information from news sources on social media than the actual news websites.

This means young adults spend more time on social media trusting the information they’re given, without realizing it may be harming or misleading them. Another study from the Pew Research Center shows that Americans who mostly get their news from social media are less engaged and less knowledgeable, especially when it comes to hearing and sharing false or unproven claims.

A more media-literate world is essential for continuing to have the freedom of speech and expression. Making sure that future generations are prepared to protect themselves is the best way to do that. Media literacy is an important life skill, just like learning to balance a checkbook or how the human body works and should be treated as such.

Being able to understand that Taylor Swift isn’t actually joining the Chiefs’ cheerleading squad for Travis Kelce isn’t a deal-breaking situation. That rumor could travel around the world and back and likely wouldn’t do much other than annoy some Chiefs fans and freak out a few Swifties.

On the other hand, there are things that can affect peoples’ lives, especially as high school students. Reading an article ranking the top 25 colleges in the world that claims that Awesome University is the number one and has a 90 percent acceptance rate seems like an amazing deal, prompting many to apply.

Those who conduct further research find that the school costs $60,700 per year for tuition alone, the application cost is well over $300 and the post itself was sponsored by Awesome University itself.

While that’s a made-up example, things like this happen in real life all of the time. When it comes to the media today, remember to search before you scroll past and treat the first thing you see as 100 percent true.