The world is flat. Aliens exist. The 2020 election was stolen. The NFL playoffs last season were rigged to help Taylor Swift’s boyfriend—and ultimately President Joe Biden’s reelection efforts. The COVID-19 vaccine is dangerous. An overwhelming majority of teenagers not only encounter these sorts of conspiracy theories online, they believe at least one similarly unfounded story, according to a report released Oct. 21 by the News Literacy Project, a nonprofit organization that works on media literacy. Eighty percent of teens see conspiracy theories on social media—and about half reported seeing them at least once a week. Of the teens who reported seeing conspiracy theories, 81 percent said they believed at least one, the report found. The findings are just the latest evidence that teenagers—like adults—struggle to recognize accurate, unbiased information in a chaotic digital media landscape. Conspiracy theories have long been appealing, said Peter Adams, the News Literacy Project’s senior vice-president of research and design. That’s because they give “people simple explanations for complex, incomprehensible events,” he said. A generation ago, such untruths were spread slowly in living rooms or by “people handing out fliers on the street,” he said. With the internet, and especially social media, he said, “there’s a way for these ideas to fester. There’s a lot more sharing of digital content that’s passed off as evidence, some of which is authentic, some of which is fabricated or doctored or just out of context.” Teens may find these stories credible, in part, because they have trouble judging the accuracy, and even the intent, behind information they encounter in the digital world, the report found. 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. That survey was conducted in May and included a nationally representative sample of 1,110 teenagers aged 13 to 18. Teens are “inheriting the largest, most complex, most frenetic information environment in human history, and they’re getting information in streams that actually impede” their understanding of it, Adams said. “Ads and user-generated content and posts from Reuters look the same on Instagram or TikTok. You just scroll, scroll, scroll.”
via edweek: Most Teens Believe Conspiracy Theories, See News as Biased. What Can Schools Do?
