This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Social engineers?
Not to mention they're kids... you know, with limited life experience compared to adults.
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.
this just in: kids are worse than adults at stuff! wow!
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.
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.
Quality education is locked behind a very expensive paywall.
I went to a public high school in the renaissance of MySpace and Angelfire and Geocities. My Current Events class was entirely breaking down political speech and recognizing the undercurrents. World History was as much about what happened but also how the situation developed, including a stint on understanding modern journalism through the development of Yellow Journalism.
Public school can do exceptionally well if it’s actually funded like it’s supposed to be.
I think it's less that "media literacy is not taught" but that media literacy is not learned. Like @audiomodder said, everyone is graduated regardless. So, on one hand, there are students who either will not or cannot learn the material (for one reason or another, such as disability, stress, family, etc.) and teachers who get a laundry list of things to teach and not enough time or support to teach it.
Ultimately, the problem is a lack of focus on education as a society. Children are pulled in too many directions, and teachers aren't given the resources needed, so we end up with a broken educational system.
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.
Granted, I didn't read the study, but the question in the title is so silly. Do they think misinformation first appeared online? Why would anyone expect being online more would result in better ability to detect misinformation?
When I was a kid, there was no Internet. All of the misinformation was on TV and product labels. I learned it's misinformation from people explaining it. If you're young, you won't have the experience yet and if you're in a bubble, online or otherwise, you'll never gain the experience.
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
Same reason why people who grew up on TV (or radio, newspapers, etc, pick your medium of choice) aren't better at detecting misinformation?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 headline answers itself! If you’ve grown up on misinformation, you don’t know anything else! WTF…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
