“If you take your phone and then go to TikTok, you will see a lot of activities, dancing, you know, happy things… But in the background, I personally was moderating, in the hundreds, horrific and traumatizing videos… I took it upon myself. Let my mental health take the punch so that general users can continue going about their activities on the platform.”
Mojez, a former Nairobi-based moderator who worked on TikTok content
“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… 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.”
Kim Bowman, News Literacy Project senior research manager.
Remember when the internet was going to be the great information equalizer? I know I couldn’t begin to write this blog without the research access afforded online, but I approach that world with growing skepticism. The information resources I trust usually have substantial credibility, vetted over years. But when you realize that today’s youth are slammed with a need to fit in with their peers combined with media patterns that rely heavily on sites and texts that are superspreaders of misinformation, you might wonder what happened... and what can be done about it.
In a world where “influencers” are the new peer leaders, often equally unprepared to deal with the very subject matter they tout, and professional ISP “monitors” are charged with ferreting truth from falsehoods, often for filtered and biased sites, parents are at the mercy of outside sources they do not control… or worse… conspiracy driven sites that they themselves believe. Anonymity and indirect communications add severe harshness to so many messages.
There is also the extreme and ultra-dark content – images of beheadings, mass killings, child abuse, hate speech, and propaganda intended to recruit new adherents – that seep through the cracks, a tsunami of bleak horror that even the most diligent professional monitors cannot stop. We’ve faced the addictive nature of online content, the drive to aggregate more eyeballs to expand ad revenues at almost any cost, the profound negativity to self-image of evolving teens, the absence of revulsion (literally “legitimization”) at some of the most anti-social statements and behavior. Those professional monitors are themselves frequently traumatized by what they are forced to filter. AI has not solved the problem, and there is a severe shortage of such professional monitors.
That’s the darkest online content, but what is more pervasive are mind-shifting conspiracy theories in a world where the President-elect is the king of “alternative facts” and dehumanizing content. As illustrated by Nadia Tamez-Robledo, published in the November 10th FastCompany.com, American children and teens with smartphones are exposed to conspiracy theories with increasing frequency. They are largely untrained in their ability to spot false posts and how to process those misstatements. Separating fact from fiction takes real effort, particularly when their peer group embraces the false information: “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.
“About 80% of teens who use social media say they see content about conspiracy theories in their online feeds, with 20% seeing conspiracy content every day… While teens don’t believe every conspiracy theory they see, 81% who see such content online said they believe one or more... 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… 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% said news organizations are biased, and 80% believe news organizations are either more biased or about the same as other online content creators… A minority of teens—just 15%—actively seek out news to stay informed...Local TV news was the most trusted news medium, followed by TikTok…
“Teens agree on at least one thing: A whopping 94% 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.’”
It’s not surprising that the online sites that benefit the most from ad-friendly traffic based on conspiracy theories, or are in fact supercharged biased platforms, are the ones testifying before legislative bodies to stave off increased regulation, often supported by elected officials desiring to spread their own conspiracy theories. But there are real life consequences to those who believe such theories… plus the unraveling fibers that hold our democracy together.
I’m Peter Dekom, and the fragility of life, the bastions of society and the mental health of our citizens are and will continue to be defined in substantial part by how we learn to deal with conspiracy theories.
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