Study: Most Students Can't Spot Fake News (engadget.com)

Even those who think that the U.S. Presidential election wasn't affected by the swath of fake news articles swirling on Facebook and other social media networks, they tend to agree that there is a lot of misinformation on the web. At Slashdot, it's hard to say that anyone here will not be able to tell fake news from a real one. But what about kids? How is our future generation doing? Not so well, apparently. An anonymous reader shares an Engadget report:A Stanford study of 7,804 middle school, high school and college students has found that most of them couldn't identify fake news on their own. Their susceptibility varied with age, but even a large number of the older students fell prey to bogus reports. Over two-thirds of middle school kids didn't see why they shouldn't trust a bank executive's post claiming that young adults need financial help, while nearly 40 percent of high schoolers didn't question the link between an unsourced photo and the claims attached to it. Why did many of the students misjudge the authenticity of a story? They were fixated on the appearance of legitimacy, rather than the quality of information. A large photo or a lot of detail was enough to make a Twitter post seem credible, even if the actual content was incomplete or wrong. There are plenty of adults who respond this way, we'd add, but students are more vulnerable than most.

Comments

Clearly We Need Government Intervention

[KalvinB]

This obsession with "fake" news is all about one thing: government censorship.

All this study proves is that young kids are gullible (duh) and our public education system is one of the worst in the world (not news).

First liberals complained about Citizens United endlessly. And now that Trump won with far less spending than Hillary, suddenly they're concerned about "fake" news while ignoring the false editorializing of the liberal media and rampant lead burying.

Liberal Fascists just can't stand that they no longer control the narrative. And it's really a thumb in their eye whenever Trump tweets out something they don't like. Historically, if the President wanted to say something, they had to go through the filter of the press.

Not anymore.

And good riddance.