For Teens Online, Conspiracy Theories Are Commonplace. Media Literacy Is Not.

EdSurge/November 7, 2024

By Nadia Tamez-Robledo

How often do you come in contact with a conspiracy theory?

Maybe on occasion, when you flip through TV channels and land on an episode of “Ancient Aliens.” Or perhaps when a friend from high school shares a questionable meme on Facebook.

How confident are you in your ability to tell fact from fiction?

If you’re a teen, you could be exposed to conspiracy theories and a host of other pieces of misinformation as frequently as every day while scrolling through your social media feeds.

That’s according to a new study by the News Literacy Project, which also found that teens struggle with identifying false information online. This comes at a time when media literacy education isn’t available to most students, the report finds, and their ability to distinguish between objective and biased information sources is weak. The findings are based on responses from more than 1,000 teens ages 13 to 18.

“News literacy is fundamental to preparing students to become active, critically thinking members of our civic life — which should be one of the primary goals of a public education,” Kim Bowman, News Literacy Project senior research manager and author of the report, said in an email interview. “If we don’t teach young people the skills they need to evaluate information, they will be left at a civic and personal disadvantage their entire lives. News literacy instruction is as important as core subjects like reading and math.”

Telling Fact from Fiction

About 80 percent of teens who use social media say they see content about conspiracy theories in their online feeds, with 20 percent seeing conspiracy content every day.

“They include narratives such as the Earth being flat, the 2020 election being rigged or stolen, and COVID-19 vaccines being dangerous,” the News Literacy Project’s report found.

While teens don’t believe every conspiracy theory they see, 81 percent who see such content online said they believe one or more.

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Bowman noted, “As dangerous or harmful as they can be, these narratives are designed to be engaging and satisfy deep psychological needs, such as the need for community and understanding. Being a conspiracy theorist or believing in a conspiracy theory can become a part of someone’s identity. It’s not necessarily a label an individual is going to shy away from sharing with others.”

At the same time, the report found that the bar for offering media literacy is low. Just six states have guidelines for how to teach media literacy, and only three make it a requirement in public schools.

Less than 40 percent of teens surveyed reported having any media literacy instruction during the 2023-24 school year, according to the analysis.

Credible Sources

As part of gathering data for the report, teens were asked to try their hand at distinguishing between different types of information they might encounter online. They were also challenged to identify real or fake photos and judge whether an information source is credible.

The study asked participants to identify a series of articles as advertisements, opinion or news pieces.

More than half of teens failed to identify branded content — a newsy-looking piece on plant-based meat in the Washington Post news app — as an advertisement. About the same amount didn’t realize that an article with “commentary” in the headline was about the author’s opinion.

They did better at recognizing Google’s “sponsored” results as ads, but about 40 percent of teens said they thought it meant those results were popular or of high quality. Only 8 percent of teens correctly categorized the information in all three examples.

In another exercise, teens were asked to identify which of two pieces of content about Coca-Cola’s plastic waste was more credible: a press release from Coca-Cola or an article from Reuters. The results were too close for comfort for the report, with only 56 percent of teens choosing the Reuters article as more trustworthy.

Brand recognition could have played a role in teens’ decision to choose Coca-Cola over Reuters, Bowman says, a feeling that a more-recognizable company was more credible.

“Whatever the reason, I do think news organizations engaging young people on social media and building up trust and recognition there could have the potential to move the needle on a question like this in the future,” Bowman said.

Checking the Facts

Where teens did feel confident spotting hoaxes was with visuals.

Two-thirds of study participants said they could do a reverse Google image search to find the original source of an image. About 70 percent of teens could correctly distinguish between an AI-generated image and a real photograph.

To test teens’ ability to spot misinformation, they were asked whether a social media photo of a melting traffic light was “strong evidence that hot temperatures in Texas melted traffic lights in July 2023.”

Most teens answered correctly, but about one-third still believed the photo alone was strong evidence that the claim about melting traffic lights was true.

Bowman said that the fact that there was no difference in students’ performance when results were analyzed by their age leaves her wondering if teens “of all ages have received the message that they can’t always believe their eyes when it comes to the images they see online.”

“Their radars seem to be up when it comes to identifying manipulated, misrepresented, or completely fabricated images,” Bowman continued. “Especially with the recent advancements and availability of generative AI technologies, I wonder if it may be harder to convince them of the authenticity of a photo that is actually real and verified than to convince them that an image is false in some way.”

When it came to sharing on social media, teens expressed a strong desire to make sure their posts contained correct information. So how are they fact-checking themselves, given a minority of teens actively follow news or have taken media literacy classes?

Among teens who said they verify news before sharing, Bowman said they’re engaged in lateral reading, which she described as “a quick internet search to investigate the post’s source” and a method employed by professional fact-checkers.

Given a random group of teens, Bowman posited they would most likely use much less effective ways of judging a source’s credibility, based on factors like a website’s design or URL.

“In other words, previous research shows that young people tend to rely on outdated techniques or surface-level criteria to determine a source’s credibility,” Bowman explained. “If schools across the country implemented high-quality news literacy instruction, I am confident we can debunk old notions of how to determine credibility that are no longer effective in today’s information landscape and, instead, teach young people research-backed verification techniques that we know work.”

Actively Staying Informed

While conspiracy theories surface commonly for teens, they’re not necessarily arming themselves with information to stave them off.

Teens are split on whether they trust the news. Just over half of teens said that journalists do more to protect society than to harm it. Nearly 70 percent said news organizations are biased, and 80 percent believe news organizations are either more biased or about the same as other online content creators.

A minority of teens — just 15 percent — actively seek out news to stay informed.

The study also asked teens to list news sources they trusted to provide accurate and fair information.

CNN and Fox News received the most endorsements, with 178 and 133 mentions respectively. TMZ, NPR and the Associated Press were equally matched with 12 mentions each.

Local TV news was the most trusted news medium, followed by TikTok.

Teens agree on at least one thing: A whopping 94 percent said schools should be required to offer some degree of media literacy.

“Young people know better than anyone how much they are expected to learn before graduation so, for so many teens to say they would welcome yet another requirement to their already overfull plate, is a huge deal and a big endorsement for the importance of a media literacy education,” Bowman said.

Throughout the study, students who had any amount of media literacy education did better on the study’s test questions than their peers. They were more likely to be active news seekers, trust news outlets and feel more confident in their ability to fact-check what they see online.

And, in a strange twist, students who get media literacy in school report seeing more conspiracy theories on social media — perhaps precisely because they have sharper media literacy skills.

“Teens with at least some media literacy instruction, who keep up with news, and who have high

trust in news media are all more likely to report seeing conspiracy theory posts on social media at least once a week,” according to the report. “These differences could indicate that teens in these subgroups are more adept at spotting these kinds of posts or that their social media algorithms are more likely to serve them these kinds of posts, or both.”

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