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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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?
How many nicklelodean kid sitcoms involved mean teachers who “don’t even understand what they are teaching?”
I don’t know, how many?
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.
Blue state or red state?
Very red.
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.
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.
Egads, an typo! My hole point is ruined!
It supports the idea that the education system you are a product of needs improvement, if that was your point.
Misinformation targets confirmation bias. Simple as that.
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.
No one taught gen x and millenials how to discern misinformation, but we figured it out. Why didn’t gen Z?
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.
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.
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I sense next level shitposter in you
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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.
The problem isn’t the outrageous claims, the problem is subtle nudges one way or the other. Enough subtle undetected nudges and the pendulum can swing a great deal. The outrageous claims are planted so you get distracted and fool yourself into thinking you’re such an awesome bullshit detective and you don’t notice the subtle nudges.
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.
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.
The headline answers itself! If you’ve grown up on misinformation, you don’t know anything else! WTF…
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.
