Technology

A big part of detecting bullshit is having the experience of getting burned by bullshit.

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.

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.

Same reason why people who grew up on TV (or radio, newspapers, etc, pick your medium of choice) aren't better at detecting misinformation?

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The headline answers itself! If you’ve grown up on misinformation, you don’t know anything else! WTF…

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.

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".

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.

I think education is still the missing link. We need to teach people fallacies, biases and some statistics.