Educating Language in the Digital Age: Critical Thinking and Media Literacy for the Prevention of Hate Speech

Juan Pedro Rivero González^*

• University of La Laguna, San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Spain

The expansion of digital environments has intensified information flows and profoundly transformed social communication, generating educational challenges linked to discursive polarization, disinformation, and the proliferation of hate speech (sometimes referred to as hateful language). Although critical thinking and media literacy have become established as key competences for democratic digital citizenship, predominantly technical or instrumental approaches are insufficient to address the ethical and relational complexity of these phenomena. This article proposes an integrative theoretical framework that articulates critical thinking and media literacy on the basis of Alfonso López Quintás's theory of levels of reality. From an anthropological–relational reading of digital communication, hate speech is interpreted as a manifestation of impoverished ways of relating to language and to the other, characterized by the reduction of communicative experience to instrumental levels. Against this backdrop, education is framed as a process aimed at fostering a transition toward deeper levels of encounter, ethical discernment, and communicative responsibility. Using a theoretical–conceptual methodology, the article examines media literacy as a pathway for recovering the dialogical dimension of digital communication, and critical thinking as a competence oriented toward ethical judgment and the responsible evaluation of language. As a contribution, it offers a relational model that makes it possible to understand hate speech not only as a problem of content or informational veracity, but as a deterioration of communicative bonds and the recognition of the other. Finally, it derives implications for designing educational interventions focused on language, dialogue, and communicative responsibility, complementary to fact-checking and digital competence approaches.