Teens and Conspiracy Theories Study

 About 80% of teenagers encounter conspiracy theories online, and many believe at least one, according to a recent report. Many teens also struggle to distinguish between advertisements and opinion, independently reported news and digital marketing campaigns, the survey found. And most think professional news organizations are just as biased as other content creators, according to the survey that formed the basis for the report. The findings underscore the need for stronger media literacy education to help students navigate misinformation. 

News Literacy Project. (2024). News literacy in America: A survey of teen information attitudes, habits and skills. NLP.  https://newslit.org/news-literacy-in-america/

Teens and Health Fake News Study

 A new study has found that teenagers have a hard time discerning between fake and true health messages. Only 48% of the participants trusted accurate health messages more than fake ones. Meanwhile, 41% considered fake and true neutral messages equally trustworthy and 11% considered true neutral health messages less trustworthy than fake health messages.

“Superlatives, clickbaits, appeals to authority, poor grammar, or boldface: Is editorial style related to the credibility of online health messages?” by Radomír Masaryk et al. Frontiers in Psychology

Digital Literacy Curriculum and Learning Study

 A recent study found that high school students who received only six 50-minute lessons in digital literacy were twice as likely to spot questionable websites as they were before the instruction took place, using a Stanford-created curriculum. 

Wineburg, S., Breakstone, J., McGrew, S., Smith, M. D., & Ortega, T. (2022). Lateral reading on the open Internet: A district-wide field study in high school government classes. Journal of Educational Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000740

News literacy study

In a report released in November, the researchers evaluated the ability of 3,446 students – from 16 urban and suburban school districts in 14 states – to judge the credibility and accuracy of digital sources of information.  Overall, on four of the assigned six tasks, over 90 percent of students received no credit at all. Out of all of the student responses, fewer than 3 percent earned full credit. Students continued to display a troubling tendency to accept websites at face value. A few of the lowlights from the report:

• Fifty-two percent of students believed a grainy video claiming to show ballot stuffing in the 2016 Democratic primaries constituted “strong evidence” of voter fraud in the U.S. The video was actually shot in Russia. Among more than 3,000 responses, only three students tracked down the source of the video –  even though a simple Google search would have quickly exposed the ruse.
• Two-thirds of students couldn’t tell the difference between news stories and ads (set off by the words “Sponsored Content”) on Slate’s homepage.
• Ninety-six percent of students did not consider why ties between a climate change website and the fossil fuel industry might lessen that website’s credibility. Instead of investigating who was behind the site, students focused on the site’s aesthetics, its top-level domain (.org or .com), or how it portrayed itself on the About page.

 Breakstone, J. et al. (2019). Students' civic online reasoning. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University. 
https://sheg.stanford.edu/students-civic-online-reasoning

Social Media and Fake News Credibility

This major Yale University study addresses the issue of political misinformation, specifically through social media and fake news. This study found that tagging false news stories as “disputed by third party fact-checkers” has only a small impact on whether readers perceive their headlines as true. Overall, the study showed that the existence of “disputed” tags made participants only slightly more likely to correctly judge the headlines as false. The implications of this study are that there can be more awareness for potential issues surrounding acquiring news and information through social media platforms, where fake news can become reality.

Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2017). The implied truth effect: Attaching warnings to a subset of fake news stories increases perceived accuracy of stories without warnings. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3035384

Social Media Opposition Amongst Younger Generation

The study provides evidence of a growing backlash among young people who wish social media did not exist due to negative aspects such as online abuse and fake news. In assessing students’ opinions on social media, a survey of 5,000 students was conducted by Digital Awareness UK at various schools in England. According to the study, such negative perceptions of social media were due to the impacts it had on the emotional wellbeing of participants. Two thirds of schoolchildren in this study said they would be happy if social media had never been invented, and 71 percent said they had taken temporary digital detoxes to escape it. Nearly half of the participants mentioned receiving abusive comments online. Roughly half of the participants also admitted to being on the edge of addiction and that social media lowered their self-images. Many young people are rebelling against having constant social media access by adopting the outdated “brick” phones that are no longer widely used.

Robertson, C. (2017). Tech control of your future on special media. Paper presented at Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, Belfast, Oct. 2-5. http://www.hmc.org.uk/blog/young-people-rebelling-social-media-survey-reveals/

News and Teens Study

In a newly released study, 66% of the children surveyed nationally said they trust "a lot" of the news they receive from their family, compared with 25% who said they trust news organizations.  Just 44% of the children surveyed agreed they can tell fake news stories from real news stories.Youth  consume a wide range of news, often as a byproduct of their frequent use of the mobile devices and social media applications they carry around in their pockets. But they view much of the news they encounter as biased and unreflective of their own experiences. Some other findings about 10-18 year olds' new behaviors follow:
Children often receive news information from their families, friends, and teachers.
Still, children—especially teens—prefer to get their news via social media.
Fake news is still a big problem, not not the only one. What they see and read often makes them feel afraid, angry, and depressed.

Common Sense Media (2017). News and America's Kids: How Young People Perceive and Are Impacted by the News.