**Preface to "Research, Literacy, and Communication Education: New Challenges Facing Disinformation"**

This Special Issue offers sixteen articles related to Literacy, Communication Education and New Challenges Facing Disinformation or Misinformation. The amount of information that comes through digital media and social networks is increasing. This potential access to almost infinite information makes it difficult to select relevant content with good understanding. For this reason, it is necessary to extensively investigate the phenomenon of communication and information in the digital age. Increased literacy and media education are needed to prevent the existence and spread of fake news. Citizens must know how to deal with disinformation and be able to detect the origin of bad intentions behind the information. Therefore, people must be aware of the new communication challenges to determine what is important, which communication media they can trust, and where information has been misused or manipulated. In short, society must be prepared to face new challenges related to disinformation. A digitally educated and literate society will be able to face these problems and could be prepared to face the new communication challenges, including interaction with social networks, new audiences, new media, fake news, etc.

This Special Issue focuses on the subject area of Communication, New Media, and Educommunication. Therefore, this Special Issue offers sixteen interesting and outstanding articles focused on fake news and disinformation with different points of view about the following topics:


literacy and higher education during COVID-19 lockdowns in Spain, Italy, and Ecuador. Furthermore, there is one study focused on the analysis of video production for massive open online courses (MOOC) from an informative, narrative, and aesthetic point of view.


The main motivation and inspiration for coordinating this Special Issue are to provide and construct a critical view of disinformation, fake news, and the role of education in the fight against the misuse of mass media today. In conclusion, media literacy is more necessary than ever, but with the added challenge of mistrust; it may be time to rethink media literacy.

> **Bel´en Puebla-Mart´ınez, Jorge Gallardo-Camacho, Carmen Marta-Lazo, Luis Miguel Romero-Rodr´ıguez** *Editors*
