High Schoolers’ Struggles with Source Verification

[Dr. Joel Breakstone] During the last election cycle, Politico published a piece in which they said, “To be sure, Gen Z doesn’t need lessons on how to use the internet. They aren’t falling for the same fake news stories that may have duped their parents back in 2016.” And my colleagues and I were pretty struck by that statement, because, as that came out, we were in the midst of a national study in which we were asking students all across the United States to evaluate real online sources. In total, it was more than 3,000 students, a sample that represents the population of high school students in the United States. And one of the tasks that we asked students to complete was to examine a social media video which claimed to show voter fraud in a previous American election. And if students had just opened up a new tab in their internet browser and searched for information about the video, they could have almost immediately found out that the video was entirely false. How many of them were able to identify the Russian source of that video? A grand total of three. Less than one-tenth of 1% identified the Russian source.