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.

  • FMT99@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    206
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • fidodo@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      38
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

          • Blake [he/him]@feddit.uk
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            30
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            User researcher is a job that’s becoming more common at tech firms, and usually requires a psychology degree or similar

          • ANGRY_MAPLE@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            8
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            I’m not going to mention the company I work for, but I can verify that psychology is being used to advertise to kids. Mass manufactured food industry.

            They will pick out very specific colours, mascot attributes, shapes and more to draw kids attention.

            I shit you not, there’s a certain cookie brand with a happy bear on the box that has eyes that look upwards. The entire purpose of this is to subconsciously make kids think that they’re making eye contact with the happy mascot, so they’ll trust it more. Certain colours are also believed to trigger more hunger in consumers. They play on so many factors in advertising that it isn’t funny.

            This is just one example, but this is definitely a thing that is happening in many companies.

    • PorkSoda@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Not to mention they’re kids… you know, with limited life experience compared to adults.

  • mwguy@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    91
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    A big part of detecting bullshit is having the experience of getting burned by bullshit.

      • mwguy@infosec.pub
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • justhach@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    69
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

    • audiomodder@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      54
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        18
        ·
        1 year ago

        It also doesn’t help that we literally have decades worth of media indoctrinating kids (now parents) into thinking “teachers don’t teach you anything useful”. How many nicklelodean kid sitcoms involved mean teachers who “don’t even understand what they are teaching?”

        I don’t know what current kid shows are teaching. But I know my sister’s husband very much likes to “make jokes” about his kids’ teachers to them. I do what I can when I visit but I can already see them shifting from “Wow, school is cool… why is everyone staring at me?” to “Ugh. I hate having to do homework. I am never going to use any of this in real life”.

        • audiomodder@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          16
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          This isn’t helped by the fact that in many school districts it isn’t possible to hold a child back. We literally have students entering high school that haven’t done anything since 3rd grade but have been advanced to the next grade anyways. Then we get surprised Pikachu face when they can’t do the things they need to graduate.

          That actually ignores the whole “make up credit” classes where answers to every question are literally a google search away.

          I literally had a student in one of my math classes who pasted a “couldn’t find results for…” as an answer to a homework question because they had mistyped the question.

          • Chriszz@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Curious: What is the root cause of students/less intelligent people like this? Poor upbringing? Genetics? Effort? Somewhere down the line there’s a cause.

            • audiomodder@lemmy.blahaj.zone
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              There’s no motivation to do the work. Students that work hard get a diploma. Students that don’t do anything…still get a diploma.

              We have students who can barely read and can’t do basic math, but they still get a diploma. Why do work for the same result?

        • 30mag@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          How many nicklelodean kid sitcoms involved mean teachers who “don’t even understand what they are teaching?”

          I don’t know, how many?

      • Redredme@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        16
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • don@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 year ago

        Quality education is locked behind a very expensive paywall.

        • Xiaz@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          13
          ·
          1 year ago

          I went to a public high school in the renaissance of MySpace and Angelfire and Geocities. My Current Events class was entirely breaking down political speech and recognizing the undercurrents. World History was as much about what happened but also how the situation developed, including a stint on understanding modern journalism through the development of Yellow Journalism.

          Public school can do exceptionally well if it’s actually funded like it’s supposed to be.

        • 30mag@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          I think you mostly get out of education what you put into it. You don’t need a ton of resources to educate someone who is intelligent, wants to learn, and is willing to put in time and effort.

          If someone doesn’t care or isn’t interested, more money allows for more resources to be allocated to working with that individual. More resources may improve that person’s education compared to what it would have been without those resources, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that their education is superior in quality relative to others because it consumed more resources.

      • astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • DMmeYourNudes@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Bobby Turkalino@lemmy.yachts
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • DMmeYourNudes@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Considering I learned how to type from playing RuneScape, not from the 4 separate typing classes they put us through, I don’t really think most students would learn tech literacy from public education if they teach I or not. Look at the people complaining that no one taught them how to do their taxes dispute the mathematics required do your taxes being taught to 100% of the US population before they enter high school. It’s not the education system, kids don’t care. The only fix is to kake the kids care, but if you just push them through regardless of their qualifications for the next classes, no one cares if they fail. People would benefit a lot from learning how video games retain players because it’s exactly the same philosophy behind policies like no child left behind. They give out rewards to everyone regualrdless of performance or difficulty of content and people become complacent and comfortable. Unless you give incentive for progression, in this case probably the pressure of not going to the next grade with your peers, everyone will find a spot to spin their tires and do so until they run out of gas or the tire explodes. Meritocracies might not be perfect, but they’re core to a proper education system.

          • Bobby Turkalino@lemmy.yachts
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Again, I don’t think your experiences from 20 years ago are relevant to the current day. With how far smartphones have come, it’s actually very common for families to not own a single laptop or desktop computer. Modern children game on phones/tablets and consoles/handhelds way more than they do on computers. For many, school is really the only place they have access to a computer.

            The above isn’t just relevant to typing - young kids are becoming increasingly ignorant of concepts that smartphones abstract away, e.g. filesystems

            • DMmeYourNudes@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              The experience from 20 years ago is that all of these people instantly forgot everything they learned and complained that they were never taught it. I don’t think you understand the problem here.

    • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • 30mag@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Because media litteracy and critical thinking are not subjects taught being taught in schools.

      It appears spelling has been dropped from the curriculum as well.

  • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    55
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Kethal@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • zepheriths@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    47
    ·
    1 year ago

    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

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      Considering kids have been groomed on Roblox, I wouldn’t be shocked if kids were being primed for believing in nonsense conspiracies there either.

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    37
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    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?”

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Those are still related. Critical thinking has nothing to do at all with “using the Internet”.

    • DrMango@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      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

  • T156@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    34
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Ilflish@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      No one taught gen x and millenials how to discern misinformation, but we figured it out. Why didn’t gen Z?

          • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            Most of the ones I’ve come across have been GenX or younger.

            Boomers are in their 60s now, they’re not really going on the internet spreading rumours.

            • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              You must be young. Or never went on Facebook.

              People in their 60s and 70s are the driving force behind a lot of the stupid on the internet.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • minusthink@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      Critical thinking is not the same as being immersed in a medium. This article conflates the two.

      There maybe a correlation at some level, because you cant critically think about a medium without any exposure.

      Especially early adopters might have more critical thinking skills, in general, because they seek out new things and aren’t subject to everyone just having a phone. Thinking the status quo isn’t good enough or could be better is a critical thought.

      • btaf45@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        There maybe a correlation at some level, because you cant critically think about a medium without any exposure.

        On the flip side, there is also a counter correlation. Younger people do not have a lifetime of background memories to compare things to. If they hear a politician is “corrupt”, they have little idea how it compares to others on the scale between grave and trivial. And if judging if a president is good or bad, they don’t know how to compare them to previous presidents.

        • minusthink@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Absolutely.

          The US does not teach much critical thinking, as another poster pointed out. We de-emphasize the humanities and make STEM rote memorization based.

          Why they think kids should just be better at it than grown adults idk

  • Gianmarco Gargiulo@feddit.it
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          They fired Tucker Carlson, but put Jesse Watters, who is just as racist and pushes just as many conspiracy theories, in his place. What Tucker talked about was not why he was fired. It was what went on behind the scenes.

        • phillaholic@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Sounds like they are just going to make sure they don’t slander anyone. Still a ton of room to push bullshit.

    • torpak@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • skymtf@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • ANGRY_MAPLE@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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.

  • scarabic@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    1 year ago

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