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Sunday, February 13th, 2022

Schoolkids Are Falling Victim to Disinformation and Conspiracy Fantasies

Author:     Melinda Wenner Moyer
Source:     Scientific American
Publication Date:     February 1, 2022
 Link: Schoolkids Are Falling Victim to Disinformation and Conspiracy Fantasies
Stephan:   Over the last 20 years the American culture has undergone a dramatic, but far too little remarked cultural transformation. It is a major anthropological event: The rise of social media and commercial digital media, coupled with the decline and often demise of local newspaper coverage, has allowed for the weaponization of disinformation and fantasies. This trend is far enough along that, as this article describes, it now encompasses children. The American culture has become one of manipulated ignorance. whole industries have developed specifically to spew out this crap, in order to accomplish political purposes. Fox, NewsMax, Infowars are examples.
Credit: Taylor Callery

When Amanda Gardner, an educator with two decades of experience, helped to start a new charter elementary and middle school outside of Seattle last year, she did not anticipate teaching students who denied that the Holocaust happened, argued that COVID is a hoax and told their teacher that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Yet some children insisted that these conspiracy fantasies were true. Both misinformation, which includes honest mistakes, and disinformation, which involves an intention to mislead, have had “a growing impact on students over the past 10 to 20 years,” Gardner says, yet many schools do not focus on the issue. “Most high schools probably do some teaching to prevent plagiarism, but I think that’s about it.”

Children, it turns out, are ripe targets for fake news. Age 14 is when kids often start believing in unproven conspiratorial ideas, according to a study published in September 2021 in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. Many teens also have trouble assessing the credibility of online information. In a 2016

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1 Comment

  1. Dariel Garner on Sunday, February 13, 2022 at 10:55 am

    I view the growth of the internet including social media and on-line information transmission as the greatest facilitation of truth and democracy since the Gutenberg press.

    Our media has been held captive by a tiny number of hands drawn from a tiny group of societal mindsets for far too long.

    Unfortunately the democratization of media still suffers as NYT, WaPo, Reuters, FoxNews, AP, Sinclair Radio/TV , and a very few companies use their financial power to continue their domination.