> In another exercise, teens were asked to identify which of two pieces of content about Coca-Cola’s plastic waste was more credible: a press release from Coca-Cola or an article from Reuters. The results were too close for comfort for the report, with only 56% of teens choosing the Reuters article as more trustworthy.
So, at the end of the day, you're concerned over which article they're choosing to uncritically put their faith in? If this is the case then I'm not sure `news literacy` is worth anything.
I think you'd want "information literacy." The ability to find studies and understand them, to ask questions about them, and to do their own follow up work based off of them.
If all you're doing is asking them to choose between two articles then their world view is entirely controlled by publishers, and we've reduced them down to deciding which publisher is more credible, and given them no tools to ask important questions on their own. I can't think of anything less valuable for an education system to involve itself in.
IIUC this is from page 40 [1] with the two articles being coca-cola's [2] and reuters [3].
With the key question being "% of teens who say the image on the ___ is more credible (reliable or trustworthy) than the other".
I'm not actually sure Reuters is more trustworthy here. The claim being made is that Coca-Cola has a goal to use reusable packaging 25% of the time. Why is a third-party more reliable source of a companies's goals than the company? Hell, if we read the articles, Reuters is bunch of glued together quotes; at least coca-cola has coherency.
Like, if we change this to Telsa and ask whether Tesla has a goal of FSD by 2012. I would also think Tesla is more credible in that they had a goal of FSD. Sure, they might not achieve it but the titles are about "pledging" not "achieving".
This is an easy example because one is a press release. It should be well known to everyone that press releases are advertising. They don't even claim to be factual or trustworthy. It's marketing. They're telling you outright that it's company propaganda. You can trust it if you want to, but you can't claim you were fooled. Further investigation is unnecessary. There's nothing to investigate since they've already told you up front it's a press release. The education system's responsibility is to let kids know what a press release is, and how it's different from journalism.
Not that all journalism is automatically trustworthy, no. With journalism you also have to take into account track record, and reputation, and so on.
If a young person doesn't know what Reuters is, they can use Wikipedia to find out what kind of entity Reuters is, their history, their reputation, etc.. That's how the responsibility of education is involved.
The 'reputable' news(collectively) did this to themselves. They figured out at some point you could get more viewers by confirming their biases one way or another. So much so that ask about anyone, and they'll claim the other side's news sources are a joke.
It's not surprising people are all skeptical, and that other sources of varying reputation have entered the fray.
I don't think "uncritical faith" comes into it. Or publishers' inherent credibility. The idea is to consider the motivations and vested interests of the publishers in this specific comparison.
The education system and the media was traditionally tightly controlled or monopolized by a handful of interests. With few players on the field they could weave together a more-or-less coherent story. But was that actually the truth? We only know that the stuff that was debunked was false.
As for "information literacy", it's an ideal to strive for, but impossible in practice. It's simply not possible for everyone to be literate at everything. For the topics a person is not familiar with, they need to trust a source at some point.
A bit of knowledge is often a hindrance than helpful. With modern tools at hand and sufficient motivation, one with an agenda can fool anyone except the best experts.
TBH I think "objective truth" is going down the drains and it's not coming back. The version of truth you believe in is actually real, other people will vehemently disagree, and there will be no mechanism to objectively decide who is right. It might sound pessimistic, but this kind of "diversity" in subjective beliefs can be very useful for other reasons (which is mostly off-topic).
99% of people are not going to genuinely do their own research. Their “own research” usually consists of the last thing they heard about it from some influencer. In this paradigm it’s important to be able to have trustworthy information providers and for people to be educated on who those are.
Honestly, at least with the Coca-Cola press release, I know what their agenda is, so I can at least decide which parts to believe or be skeptical of. News agencies have much more complex agendas, and purveying objective truth isn't part of them.
At rock bottom a reader needs to make value judgment between several sources. The Coca Cola v Reuters case is absurd but it is absurd in that it should be blatantly obvious to trust a press release less than an investigative publication.
No one said they had to believe everything in the Reuters article. It asked which is more credible.
It’s awful seeing people think themselves into a corner like this.
This stuff is my jam now. It’s insanity all the way down.
1) This article is more about media literacy, and has a longer headline which conveys this.
2) There are countries that successfully teach media literacy. Finland comes to mind.
3) Conspiracy theories are virulent. If they get their grips into someone, or if someone is convinced of it, almost nothing will get them out. Conspiracy theories always have barbs that make removal difficult - at their outset, they discredit the proof and sources that show it’s incorrect.
4) America has a relatively unique situation, which is much worse today than it was even a few years ago.
The best analogy I have no longer mechanistically analyzes the media machine.
Instead you have 2 information markets in America (and the English speaking world in general).
One of them is captured utterly, and sets the media and political agenda.
The consolidation of local news channels, and then much later, the rise of the net, were a problem for both the media hemispheres. But post the launch of Fox News, the market on the right failed in a far more insidious manner than the left.
This has been achieved by using conspiracy techniques. The intentional decimation and degradation of trust in institutions has been a specific goal since before the 90s.
The internet has absolutely succeeded in expanding access to information. The problem is that disinformation is still information and it's spread just as easily, except it's more "exciting".
> While teens don’t believe every conspiracy theory they see, 81% who see such content online said they believe one or more.
Its really hard to make a judgement on this without concretely knowing what they actually believe. "one or more"? Who knows? maybe these kids are just really well read on the Gulf of Tonkin or something.
Tracking down all the civilians targeted during the Lavon Affair to strongly warn them against conspiratorial thinking and the spread of misinformation
> About 80% of teens who use social media say they see content about conspiracy theories in their online feeds
Where conspiracy theory means what, exactly? Did they define this term for the teens (or even just for the survey)? Why is 'disinformation' (itself undefined) conflated with the hilariously ambiguous 'conspiracy theory'?
It's really just a terribly weak article, and the source "study" doesn't look much better. It really looks like it is a study set forth to push a particular agenda with "numbers".
Too many people confuse data with science, and perhaps that is what schools should actually be teaching; probably when they teach statistics, which all students should take. Pseudo-science like "critical thinking" can't really be taught, but actual science can.
Agreed that the author doesn't seem to understand what is and is not a conspiracy theory. The article starts off by calling the ancient alien astronauts "theory" a conspiracy theory. Who are the conspirators? I don't mean Tsoukalos, he just spreads the myth. But if it's a conspiracy theory, there had to be conspirators. And there weren't, because there is no conspiracy. A conspiracy is not the same thing as a myth.
> Pseudo-science like "critical thinking" can't really be taught, but actual science can.
Arguably critical thinking is the express purpose of English and Language-Arts. Media literacy falls into that, too. People often discredit schools, but they already teach a lot of this stuff, it's just that Billy Bob was blowing snot bubbles.
I mean, a huge part of school is just reading pieces of text and trying to formulate an understanding, as well as gauging the Author's intent and the larger social context. That, to me, is just critical thinking.
Most of the garbage you see on TikTok is not data, unless you consider disinformation valuable, I personally do not. It seems on TikTok and twitter when I dare venture there is pure competition to get clicks and have the most outlandish stories to get there. I know legacy media has its issues, but there is no comparison to the drivel that is firehose’d on twitter and TikTok (amongst the worst on the internet) short of right-wing cesspool channels on telegram and discord.
I'd be curious to know if being exposed to more conspiracy theories correlates to believing them. At the extremes, if I'd never seen a conspiracy theory before, it would be hard to identify it. And if everything I heard claimed to be a conspiracy, I imagine I might just block them all out. I imagine there's a goldilocks zone where conspiracy theories are most palatable.
From what I seen myself and what my son is sharing with me, Iit is a culture war, people are filled with hate and they will believe the shit that matches their side of this war, even if the conspiracy is retarded like Earth is flar or "Israel invented the Covid vaccine to make people gay"
Personal one: Cloudflare is a US intelligence gathering operation and the largest wiretap in the world. Their extremely generous free tier combined with their tendency to host sites that no other company would serve (but are of special interest of 3 letter agencies) like 4chan, daily stormer, pirate sites, script kiddie webforums etc makes me think they are not stripping TLS because they are pro free speech or whatever.
Some people deliberately post conspiracy theories, especially political ones. (Think Russian disinformation.) These people are smart, and hard workers. If you create any kind of automated filter, they will find ways of saying it that won't get caught by the filter, or they will create new conspiracy theories.
The only way around that is, rather than blacklisting conspiracy theories, you have to whitelist the truth.
[+] [-] akira2501|1 year ago|reply
So, at the end of the day, you're concerned over which article they're choosing to uncritically put their faith in? If this is the case then I'm not sure `news literacy` is worth anything.
I think you'd want "information literacy." The ability to find studies and understand them, to ask questions about them, and to do their own follow up work based off of them.
If all you're doing is asking them to choose between two articles then their world view is entirely controlled by publishers, and we've reduced them down to deciding which publisher is more credible, and given them no tools to ask important questions on their own. I can't think of anything less valuable for an education system to involve itself in.
[+] [-] lesuorac|1 year ago|reply
With the key question being "% of teens who say the image on the ___ is more credible (reliable or trustworthy) than the other".
I'm not actually sure Reuters is more trustworthy here. The claim being made is that Coca-Cola has a goal to use reusable packaging 25% of the time. Why is a third-party more reliable source of a companies's goals than the company? Hell, if we read the articles, Reuters is bunch of glued together quotes; at least coca-cola has coherency.
Like, if we change this to Telsa and ask whether Tesla has a goal of FSD by 2012. I would also think Tesla is more credible in that they had a goal of FSD. Sure, they might not achieve it but the titles are about "pledging" not "achieving".
[1]: https://newslit.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/NLP-Teen-Surv...
[2]: https://www.coca-colacompany.com/media-center/coca-cola-anno...
[3]: https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/coca-c...
[+] [-] Lendal|1 year ago|reply
Not that all journalism is automatically trustworthy, no. With journalism you also have to take into account track record, and reputation, and so on.
If a young person doesn't know what Reuters is, they can use Wikipedia to find out what kind of entity Reuters is, their history, their reputation, etc.. That's how the responsibility of education is involved.
[+] [-] silisili|1 year ago|reply
It's not surprising people are all skeptical, and that other sources of varying reputation have entered the fray.
[+] [-] n4r9|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hnfong|1 year ago|reply
As for "information literacy", it's an ideal to strive for, but impossible in practice. It's simply not possible for everyone to be literate at everything. For the topics a person is not familiar with, they need to trust a source at some point.
A bit of knowledge is often a hindrance than helpful. With modern tools at hand and sufficient motivation, one with an agenda can fool anyone except the best experts.
TBH I think "objective truth" is going down the drains and it's not coming back. The version of truth you believe in is actually real, other people will vehemently disagree, and there will be no mechanism to objectively decide who is right. It might sound pessimistic, but this kind of "diversity" in subjective beliefs can be very useful for other reasons (which is mostly off-topic).
[+] [-] dyauspitr|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] commandlinefan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] llamaimperative|1 year ago|reply
No one said they had to believe everything in the Reuters article. It asked which is more credible.
It’s awful seeing people think themselves into a corner like this.
[+] [-] JohnClark1337|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hartator|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] intended|1 year ago|reply
This stuff is my jam now. It’s insanity all the way down.
1) This article is more about media literacy, and has a longer headline which conveys this.
2) There are countries that successfully teach media literacy. Finland comes to mind.
3) Conspiracy theories are virulent. If they get their grips into someone, or if someone is convinced of it, almost nothing will get them out. Conspiracy theories always have barbs that make removal difficult - at their outset, they discredit the proof and sources that show it’s incorrect.
4) America has a relatively unique situation, which is much worse today than it was even a few years ago. The best analogy I have no longer mechanistically analyzes the media machine.
Instead you have 2 information markets in America (and the English speaking world in general).
One of them is captured utterly, and sets the media and political agenda.
The consolidation of local news channels, and then much later, the rise of the net, were a problem for both the media hemispheres. But post the launch of Fox News, the market on the right failed in a far more insidious manner than the left.
This has been achieved by using conspiracy techniques. The intentional decimation and degradation of trust in institutions has been a specific goal since before the 90s.
[+] [-] burnte|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lifestyleguru|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hartator|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tengbretson|1 year ago|reply
Its really hard to make a judgement on this without concretely knowing what they actually believe. "one or more"? Who knows? maybe these kids are just really well read on the Gulf of Tonkin or something.
[+] [-] FactKnower69|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] carabiner|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] metalman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] etc-hosts|1 year ago|reply
"Disinformation" or "Misleading" is no longer a field in the list of reasons you can report a Tweet.
[+] [-] EasyMark|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _hyn3|1 year ago|reply
Where conspiracy theory means what, exactly? Did they define this term for the teens (or even just for the survey)? Why is 'disinformation' (itself undefined) conflated with the hilariously ambiguous 'conspiracy theory'?
It's really just a terribly weak article, and the source "study" doesn't look much better. It really looks like it is a study set forth to push a particular agenda with "numbers".
Too many people confuse data with science, and perhaps that is what schools should actually be teaching; probably when they teach statistics, which all students should take. Pseudo-science like "critical thinking" can't really be taught, but actual science can.
[+] [-] area51org|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] consteval|1 year ago|reply
Arguably critical thinking is the express purpose of English and Language-Arts. Media literacy falls into that, too. People often discredit schools, but they already teach a lot of this stuff, it's just that Billy Bob was blowing snot bubbles.
I mean, a huge part of school is just reading pieces of text and trying to formulate an understanding, as well as gauging the Author's intent and the larger social context. That, to me, is just critical thinking.
[+] [-] commandlinefan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] EasyMark|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] newfocogi|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] noncoml|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] simion314|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] JSDevOps|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] no_time|1 year ago|reply
Tech related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McAfee#Death
Most unhinged: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transvestigation
Real conspiracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
Personal one: Cloudflare is a US intelligence gathering operation and the largest wiretap in the world. Their extremely generous free tier combined with their tendency to host sites that no other company would serve (but are of special interest of 3 letter agencies) like 4chan, daily stormer, pirate sites, script kiddie webforums etc makes me think they are not stripping TLS because they are pro free speech or whatever.
[+] [-] disambiguation|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] JSDevOps|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|1 year ago|reply
The only way around that is, rather than blacklisting conspiracy theories, you have to whitelist the truth.
If that doesn't give you pause, it should.
[+] [-] stonethrowaway|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ccheney|1 year ago|reply