1y ago

They’ve grown up online. So why are our kids not better at detecting misinformation?

www.thestar.com They’ve grown up online. So why are our kids not better at detecting misinformation?

Recent studies have shown teens are more susceptible than adults. It’s a problem researchers, teachers and parents are only beginning to understand.

They’ve grown up online. So why are our kids not better at detecting misinformation?::Recent studies have shown teens are more susceptible than adults. It’s a problem researchers, teachers and parents are only beginning to understand.

92 comments

Because on one side you have a kid and on the other side you have hordes of psychologists paid millions for devising better ways to trick them into clicking.
- Calling them psychologists is giving them too much credit, but you're right that the companies trying to trick them are putting tons of resources into it.
  
  Very often this shit is designed by people with psychology degrees.
  
  Social engineers?
  
  The serious stuff is increasingly nation states, and there are for sure psychologists involved in that.
  The influence operation was the seventh from China that Meta has removed in the last six years. Four of them were found in the last year, said the company, which published details of the new operation as part of a quarterly security report.
  The effort appeared to “learn and mimic” Russian-style influence operations, Meta said. It also appeared aimed at a broad audience. At times, posts were in Chinese on websites such as the Chinese financial forum Nanyangmoney. At other times, posts were in Russian, German, French, Korean, Thai and Welsh on sites such as Facebook and Instagram, which are banned in China.
  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/us/politics/russia-intelligence-propaganda.html
  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/technology/meta-china-influence-campaign.html
  https://www.engadget.com/doj-alleges-china-used-a-troll-farm-to-target-chinese-government-critics-in-the-us-201403325.html
- Not to mention they're kids... you know, with limited life experience compared to adults.

A big part of detecting bullshit is having the experience of getting burned by bullshit.
- Not necessarily. People keep being burned by the same scams over and over.
  
  Sure but if you take a population of people and expose them to the same scam over and over; in theory less will fall for it each time. Some might fall for it every time to infinity, but < 100% of those who failed on round one will.
- this just in: kids are worse than adults at stuff! wow!
- This^

Because media litteracy and critical thinking are not subjects taught being taught in schools.
Inquisitive and skeptical minds do not make for good worker drones.
- I’m a teacher. This is very false. The issue is that being taught in schools and being learned in schools are completely different things. Between No Child Left Behind and IDEA, schools are being incentivized to graduate students regardless of the learning done in the school.
  I know for a fact that these skills are taught in 6-8th grade social studies classes, as well as digital literacy classes. Hell, I teach 2 classes that are entirely based around critical thinking.
  
  My experience as a parent:
  It has nothing to do with education. It had nothing to do with knowledge.
  It has everything to do with trust. They trust youtube/insta/Tiktok. They trust the influencers.
  This is nothing new or exclusive to kids. Don't believe me? The antivax movement. You know: "educate yourself." That. Grownups are not immune.
  This is nothing new.
  
  Quality education is locked behind a very expensive paywall.
  
  I think it's less that "media literacy is not taught" but that media literacy is not learned. Like @audiomodder said, everyone is graduated regardless. So, on one hand, there are students who either will not or cannot learn the material (for one reason or another, such as disability, stress, family, etc.) and teachers who get a laundry list of things to teach and not enough time or support to teach it.
  Ultimately, the problem is a lack of focus on education as a society. Children are pulled in too many directions, and teachers aren't given the resources needed, so we end up with a broken educational system.
  
  Blue state or red state?
- I had a class in 2nd grade back in like 2002 that taught us about how to spot fake websites, what TLDs meant, and witch ones we could probably trust. One of the examples was a fake site made either as a joke or for these kinds of lectures about tree squids. It was photoshopped octopuses high up in a tree. As with everything in the education system, it's not that theyre not being taught these skills, the students are not interested in learning them. There are classes that taught me things that people who sat next to me in those classes denied beging taught.
  
  Have you talked to a parent or child recently about current grade school? Tech literacy education has basically vanished, at least in US public schools. They pretty much expect kids to have figured out tech literacy in their own time, since computers and smartphones are so ubiquitous now.
  I, too, had classes like what you described when I was in grade school, in addition to typing and Microsoft Office classes. The school I went to doesn't have any of that anymore, just a couple carts full of Chromebooks that the students share for writing papers.
- They were taught in school in the 00's but they discontinued them because "kids already know how to use the internet." This was evidently a mistake.

Kind of a flawed way to do the study. "Why aren't people whose brains aren't done developing better at critical thinking than people whose brains are done developing?"
Do it longitudinally. Measure boomers now, then measure gen z when they're at the age boomers were when they were measured.
- Granted, I didn't read the study, but the question in the title is so silly. Do they think misinformation first appeared online? Why would anyone expect being online more would result in better ability to detect misinformation?
  When I was a kid, there was no Internet. All of the misinformation was on TV and product labels. I learned it's misinformation from people explaining it. If you're young, you won't have the experience yet and if you're in a bubble, online or otherwise, you'll never gain the experience.
  
  I guess they think that being online means that you can quite easily search to see if that thing the TV host said is BS or not in 1 minute. What they didn't consider is that firms pay millions to create studies and then boost those in google so that the 1 minute search only return misinformation.
  This is just my personal guess though.

Maybe because they are kids? I can assure you I am better at detecting misinformation than my previous generation. I don't want to be that guy, but kids are still learning, until they experience it they don't understand what to do. No one wastes their time on Roblox ranting about mind control vaccines
- Considering kids have been groomed on Roblox, I wouldn't be shocked if kids were being primed for believing in nonsense conspiracies there either.

Same reason why people who grew up on TV (or radio, newspapers, etc, pick your medium of choice) aren't better at detecting misinformation?
- You mean x-ray glasses don't work!?

Because no-one taught them to. Just because they have access to the internet doesn't mean that they're automatically better at using it. Like how they're not automatically experts at typing or using the computer, just because they cannot remember a time before internet access was almost ubiqituous.
And since media literacy classes aren't taught as much as they used to be, they have no easy way to learn to properly critique media, and detect Misinformation. If they're left to their own devices, they don't have the skills to not fall into the Misinformation vortices when learning to critique media.
Couple that with the rise of anti-intellectualist views, and that's just a recipe for trouble. Yes, sometimes the curtains are blue because the author picked it for fun, but sometimes, the author specifically went out of their way to mention the curtains, and their colour, and there is a reason for that.
- I think they do learn, just learn the wrong messages. Areas spreading misinformation usually are very accepting of those who agree with them, it's an easy way to feel accepted. Doom scrolling is a very easy way to feel included and feed your dopamine receptors, but when the rush is gone, it just leaves you depressed.
- No one taught gen x and millenials how to discern misinformation, but we figured it out. Why didn't gen Z?
  
  You think? Look at the ages of the antivaxxers and trumpers..

Because they're stupid as fuck, just like everybody else (me included). If you read something you agree with, you're inclined to believe it more than something you don't.
Truth takes effort to hunt down. Ain't nobody got time for that in a world of 5 second Tiktok soundbites.

But if you thought that native fluency in the worlds of Wi-Fi and social media was an inoculation against the misinformation spreading across the digital world, you’d be...
...an idiot. What does "knowing how to use the Internet" have to do with "knowing how to spot bullshit?"
This is like thinking "kids these days grow up with cars, why aren't they better at math now?"
- I think a closer analogy would be "kids these days grow up with cars, why aren't they all amateur mechanics?" Because you don't have to know how a car works to drive one.
  
  Those are still related. Critical thinking has nothing to do at all with "using the Internet".
- Also teens aren't really known for being the most rational or making good decisions. In many ways they're still learning about the world. Comparing their overall capability to adults' is kind of weird to me

I mean, if you've been grown in misinformation you accept it as the norm.

Because unless they browse websites other than social media, all they read will be misinformation.

Whenever they come up with the excuse of "digital natives" or "they've grown up online so they know about tech" I want to throw up in my mouth because kids and people of my age who are supposedly knowledgeable about tech are actually idiots. They're just as ignorant and exploitable as older people, but without the stiffness of older people that have been doing things without tech for decades.

They are bad at detecting misinformation because of interference from the 5G chips that Hillary put in the all the pedo-pizza's that Obama gave away for free to all the trans children. The only cure is colloidal dick pill serum that you can buy exclusively from my Facebook page.
"Just one squirt of this man-serum made me a real stud!" -Lindsay Graham
- I sense next level shitposter in you
  
  Thank you so much! I'd like to thank the Academy... for letting me sit in their parking lot and use their unsecured wifi to make these shitposts.

Misinformation is anout what you want to believe. As FOX News is moving away from its far-right misinformation content program, its audience has been complaining. It liked the lies because they justified the belief systems in which they are entrenched. They want the apologetics that allow them to hoard their wealth and blame lower classes for their own suffering.
They need the assurance the people they exploit are lesser persons than themselves.
- Fox News is changing its content? To what?
  
  Fox News is changing its content? To what?
  A better question is how much? to which the answer is as little as possible. But after the settlement with Dominion for $787 million, Murdoch came in, fired Tucker Carlson and threatened everyone that if further misinformation suits cost him anywhere near that much again he's going to start piranha-tanking talk-show hosts by the handful. (Proverbially, I assume.) So there is an internal effort to roll back guidelines regarding some of the more extreme rhetoric, especially when it involves misinformation that could lead to a successful lawsuit.
  Note that the Dominion suit isn't the last lawsuit against FOX news regarding the election and the aftermath of January 6th.
- To be fair: not pushing lies that are big enough to provoke a successful lawsuit any more is not the same as telling the truth.
  
  No argument. Telling the truth wasn't marketable during the cold war either, and news programs had to actually contain a minimum news content and follow accuracy standards. Those got lost during the rise of cable and CNN became the leading news channel.

I kinda wondered how true this is, I'm gen Z and my friends are and I would say were pretty good at dismissing outragous claims expessly political ones.
- Everyone should remember that no one is immune to this stuff. Anyone who truly believes that they are immune to is probably more susceptible to it. No one is right 100% of the time.
  As a generation, we don't all share the same headspace. What you or I might be good at spotting might not be so easy for someone else to spot. I would love to agree with you that our generation as a whole is good at seeing this stuff, but I've also seen some pretty shocking things over the last 5 years. Some people will believe things blindly, if it makes them feel better than someone else. Some people have even been taught to do so.
  As much as I love gen Z, I think that a lot of people within it really struggle with empathy and critical thinking. Unfortunately, I think that those missing traits also make them much more susceptible to believing random things. They give the rest of us a bad name when they do that, and I really hope that they seriously work on verifying information, if nothing else.
  We need to do much better, overall, if we want to legitimately claim that we're better for this stuff as a generation. We need to properly hold people accountable if/when bad stuff happens, especially if those bad things happen because someone didn't bother to verify something before they acted.
  Almost all of us know how to use the internet ffs, it should really be easy to just take the 10 seconds to search something.

The headline answers itself! If you’ve grown up on misinformation, you don’t know anything else! WTF…

Misinformation predates the internet. I would bet it even predates written words. Humans are bad at detecting misinformation unless they are tought a scientific mindset and even that is not a 100% fix.

Another angle to approach this from is the point of reference for trust. There is no good place to put foundations of trust past elementary school. Kids are told by parents to be wary of the liberal / conservative agenda in their schools.
When I was in elementary school the feeling was I could trust adults generally, and big news stations like CNN, FOX, MSNBC. There was a sense that It may be biased, but it was not straight propaganda.
Middle and high school things started shifting. The internet became more mainstream. I knew I could check information I received against trusted adults and news sources.
These days, out the gate kids are taught that half of the adults in their lives are morons being led astray by propaganda. That most news is propaganda. They don't have anywhere they can trust because they know the side their parents on is also heavily propaganda. There is no starting point of trust for kids these days from what I can tell.

Because they've grown up online...
For corporations trying to control our online lives, the ability to think critically is the absolute last attribute they want their users to have.
And so not only is the experience designed to appeal to the dumbest of the dumb, it's algorithms are designed to keep them dumb so that they can have them chasing the next tiktok trend, buying everything they them to, and, in the case of politics, directing their collective naivete at your own perceived enemies.
An army of mindless zombies who don't give a shit about anything except the latest social media content to consume is a powerful tool to be used.
At best, they can be mustered to your "cause" with a few bullshit viral posts, and at worst, they're too busy staring at their phones to notice you're fucking over their futures. Win Win.
- For corporations trying to control our online lives
  Prime example of buying into bullshit lol
  
  Yeah, large organisations are more interested in influencing our real lives, how we spend money, how we vote etc.

Because it's something you need to be taught. That's it. You need to teach people how to spot misinformation. It doesn't matter where it is.
The tragic irony is that the people who are currently falling for misinformation the worst? They're the same people that taught all of us (at least us Gen Xers) that you can't believe everything you see on TV.
Apparently the Internet is 100% facts though. For some stupid reason.

People under the age of 25 tend to be really bad at the Internet. The number of times high schoolers or college kids are mystified by how I'm able to get information quickly from search engines is beyond me.
I'm not surprised they can't tell what's real, they can't search for tiny details like "transmission time to Mars" or "gravity on mercury".

I think education is still the missing link. We need to teach people fallacies, biases and some statistics.

I think to really solve this we will need to wait for the kids from this generation to grow up, and those who "figure it out" teach others how to do it, through a (hopefully adapted) educational system or otherwise. Because, to be honest, we don't really know what this is like. We think we do, but we don't, not really.
- I'm sorry. Before that adapted educational system is ready, civilization will already be doomed by climate change. We have the next 15 to 20 years to act and we are already much to late to prevent some really bad stuff.

Because misinformation is subjective

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