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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.”
Most students want media literacy instruction
One data point educators find heartening: The vast majority of students—94 percent—want at least some media literacy instruction in schools. In fact, more than half of teens surveyed—57 percent—believe that schools should “definitely” be required to teach media literacy.
“My kids loved it,” said Miriam Klein, a school librarian for Pennsylvania’s Cornell school district near Pittsburgh who conducted a three-week media literacy unit with middle schoolers. “They were so excited to do it. They made posters about scams, and they talked about the news.”
In fact, she added, “they are still talking about it.” One student, she said, bragged to her about saving a parent from falling for an internet scam.
But most students don’t get media literacy instruction, the report noted. Just three states—Connecticut, Illinois, and New Jersey—require schools to teach media literacy, according to the report. And just six states—California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Ohio, and Texas—have news-literacy standards.
Thirty-nine percent of teens surveyed reported having at least some media-literacy instruction in the 2023-24 school year.
That may be because some districts have piled too many other required lessons on teachers, said Amy Palo, a social studies teacher in the Cornell school district.
“It can be especially difficult if a teacher has very rigid scope and sequence that’s kind of dictated to them,” she said. She feels lucky to be in a district “where it’s not as rigid, so it is easier to find places to fit this in.”
Teens are ‘constantly, constantly’ online but lack critical thinking
Most students have a lot to learn when it comes to media literacy, the survey results revealed.
- About half of teens surveyed failed to correctly identify branded content appearing on a news website—in this case, an article about imitation meat sponsored by the grocery chain Safeway—as an advertisement.
- A little over half—52 percent—accurately concluded that an opinion article with the word “commentary” in the headline published in The Sun Chronicle (a news site based in Attleboro, Mass.) was an opinion piece.
- Forty-four percent of teens said they found a company press release about a news event—in this case, Coca-Cola’s plan to increase its reusable packaging—more reliable than a reported story on the same topic.
- A third of teens incorrectly agreed that an out-of-context picture of a damaged traffic light was “strong evidence” for a bogus claim—circulated online—that high temperatures in Texas last summer caused traffic lights to melt.
Students have trouble distinguishing between different types of content—even when they are properly labeled—in part because the way that they consume news is very different than how past generations of teens were exposed to it, Klein said.
“My middle schoolers are just constantly, constantly online, constantly on devices, constantly on different social media platforms,” Klein said. “They’re not looking at the news in the way that we looked at the news. You know, they’re getting their news in quick snippets on their social media accounts. And so, it seems like what they’re seeing should be truthful” because it may be shared by people they may know.
To help students learn how to sort fact from opinion or a manipulative advertisement from carefully reported news, the Cornell school district teaches skills such as lateral reading, which encourages students to use trusted sources to corroborate information from an unfamiliar or suspicious platform.
And Cornell teachers have worked with students to do what’s called a “reverse image search,” looking up an image to get more information about the context behind a picture posted online.
Many teens do not trust professional news organizations
Teens also don’t necessarily trust professional journalists working for standards-based news outlets more than other types of online content creators. In fact, nearly half of teens—45 percent—say professional journalists and the outlets that they write for are doing more to harm American democracy than to protect it.
More than two-thirds of teens surveyed—69 percent—said they believe “news organizations intentionally add bias to their coverage and only present the facts that support their own perspective,” according to the report.
Eighty percent of teens say they find professional journalists to be as biased or more biased than other types of content creators—such as TikTok influencers, the survey found.
Learning more about how professional reporters do their jobs could help, Klein said.
“I think that there does need to be definitely more interaction between journalists, teachers, students,” she said. That could include bringing reporters to classrooms to talk about their work or field trips to local newsrooms and TV stations, she added.
“It would be very helpful for them to see what it looks like,” Klein said. “It’s not just someone in their basement putting stuff out online. The people that are doing this are working really hard to make sure [their work] is accurate and informative.”