Finding Reliable News Sources Research Guide

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The misinformation people see on TikTok and other social media ranges from nefarious to absurd: Famously, there was a period when some young people on the app seriously questioned the life story of Helen Keller, who found success despite being deaf and blind (“Did she get any kind of money for lying her way through life??” one user asks). Just last year, when Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton hit North Carolina and Florida, claims the government was “geo-engineering” the weather gained traction on social media, as people suggested that Democrats were behind the ravaging of Republican-dense areas. Beef tallow as skincare is the latest trend. If some teens next to you smell like fryer grease, they might have fallen victim to videos that claim beef fat is good for your face, despite warnings from dermatologists.

The common thread in all these viral conspiracy theories on TikTok is that they are fueled by distrust of institutions — from schools to the National Weather Service to the medical establishment. And that sentiment carries over to the media: Only 16 percent of Gen Zers have strong confidence in the news. It’s no surprise then that so many young people are shunning traditional publications and seeking their news on social media, often from unverified accounts that do little fact-checking.
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These echo chambers help explain Gen Z’s growing affinity for conspiracy theories. We’ve moved beyond the stereotype of the loner in the basement with the tin-foil hat; today it’s the TikTok addict enclosed in their political cocoon who is particularly vulnerable to misinformation.

Young people aren’t solely to blame for their lack of digital literacy.
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Gen Zers are uniquely vulnerable to misinformation compared to older age groups not just because of their social media habits, says Rakoen Maertens, a behavioral scientist at the University of Oxford, but because they have fewer lived experiences and knowledge to discern reality.

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For instance, it found that 41% of surveyed teens reported being misled by fake images online, 35% were misled by fake online content in general, and over a quarter (28%) wondered if they were talking to a bot or a human. A third of teens also said that GenAI would make it even harder to trust the accuracy of online information. That figure rises to 40% if the teens had previously been duped by fake or misleading content.

Overall, the report points to a lack of uncertainty over online content, though that’s hardly a new problem for the web.

This article discusses the evolution of ambient information and its role in the 2024 United States Presidential Election.

Selected quotes about ambient information from that article can be found below:

In a country where more than half of adults have literacy below a sixth-grade level, ambient information, however thin and wrong, is more powerful than actual facts.
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Planting ideas this way isn’t argument, and it’s not emotional persuasion. It’s about seeding the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn. Notions must add up to a unified vision but also be able to travel on their own, because that’s how information moves in a viral age.
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The communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski has noted that people increasingly take in news by incidental encounter—they are “rubbed by the news”—rather than by seeking it out.