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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.
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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.
And how exactly do you think they do that…
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.
Why would they be better in the first place?
I think that I’m better simply because of my early exposure to the internet (as this article assumes would be true of the next generation). I think the difference is in how the internet is being presented to children now versus a decade ago. Many kids today can hardly install an application to a computer, I believe because they see technology as just a part of life to take or leave, not the “exciting new thing”.
Why try to use a computer when you can use a chromebook, and now that the internet is so cushy, lets click some links!
But that’s like when I started to learn computers and we had to know how to configure IRQ channels for our SB16 and all sorts of other long obsolete nonsence. Natural language computing is going to be ubiquitous by the time they enter the workforce, it will be a lot more useful to know what to a ask it to do than any understanding of obsolete file system structures and memory management.
I take your point, and it’s a good one, but I’m also a pedantic ass, so I just wanted to say that a Chromebook is a computer. I know I’m sorry I’ll show myself out
Lmao true, the reliance on the cloud and inability to install applications makes them feel like an entirelty different machine.
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.
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.
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
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.
Sounds like they are just going to make sure they don’t slander anyone. Still a ton of room to push bullshit.
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.
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.
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
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.
Not to mention they’re kids… you know, with limited life experience compared to adults.
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.
Social engineers?
Very often this shit is designed by people with psychology degrees.
I thought marketing and media people generally have communication degrees.
User researcher is a job that’s becoming more common at tech firms, and usually requires a psychology degree or similar
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.
You don’t need a full penetration of psychology degrees, just a sufficient amount.
The specific field is marketing psychology, it’s a subset of industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology.
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.
Because unless they browse websites other than social media, all they read will be misinformation.
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.
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.
I mean, if you’ve been grown in misinformation you accept it as the norm.
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”.
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.
A big part of detecting bullshit is having the experience of getting burned by bullshit.
This^
this just in: kids are worse than adults at stuff! wow!
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.
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.
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…
Mostly boomers?
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.
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.
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.
I think education is still the missing link. We need to teach people fallacies, biases and some statistics.
