The concept of media literacy was first proposed by British scholars, initially to counter the impact of popular culture on traditional education caused by the popularity of movies. Media literacy refers to people’s ability to select, comprehend, question, evaluate, thoughtfully adapt, and create and produce media messages in the face of various messages from the media.

From the beginning, media literacy was proposed with the core of cultivating the public’s ability to reflect on and resist the negative effects of mass media; in the Internet era, various types of emerging media have emerged, media empowerment and audience subjectivity have come to the fore, which also makes public media literacy enhancement an important issue.

Taking online public opinion as an example, driven by selective psychology, technological preferences, and algorithmic recommendations, individuals tend to choose only information that meets their interests or is consistent with their own views, which leads to the limitation of the public cognitive horizon and the lack of dialogue among different subjects in public opinion events. Further, in a pluralistic value system society, each group has its own perspective and interests, and if we only stick to our own perspective to perceive and judge public opinion events and lose the ability to receive and perceive diversified information, it will easily lead to the polarization of public opinion groups, compression of rational, open and inclusive public space, and loss of the possibility to dialogue and reach consensus with other subjects, and the online public opinion field will become more and more torn. The Internet opinion field becomes more and more torn.

If people want to improve media literacy in terms of its connotation, one is to develop the ability to use media, and the other is to accept media messages critically. Firstly, we should use new media technologies and applications reasonably, legally and with restraint; secondly, we should have the ability to sift through the vast amount of information and the ability to recognize, analyze and criticize information, and consciously resist negative content; then we should carefully choose who to communicate with, maintain our own PLN and respect the rights of others; in addition, we should use the online public sphere to participate in public affairs discussions and rationally express our own opinions.