This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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!
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.
Misinformation targets confirmation bias. Simple as that.
Ah ha! I always suspected as much!
That made me laugh more than it should have.
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.
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 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 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
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.
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.
Sounds like they are just going to make sure they don't slander anyone. Still a ton of room to push bullshit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
The headline answers itself! If you’ve grown up on misinformation, you don’t know anything else! WTF…
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.
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.
