High-educated Digital Natives are not immune to Fake News

Blog
Alea Sophie Küppers
04/04/2017

You might assume that having grown up in a digital environment helps Digital Natives to spot Fake News more easily. Research suggests otherwise. We have interviewed four Digital Natives how they judge whether a news story is true or fake.

Fact checker Snopes checked this quote of Donald Trump from an interview with People Magazine in 1998


 

During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections this quote of Donald Trump from an interview with People Magazine went viral on Social Media. You have probably seen it as well passing by. If it’s a quote from a renowned weekly magazine, it must be true, right? One of our interviewees thought so as well. She is a 25-year old Master student, majoring in Business Communication and Digital Media, a truly Digital Native. She was shocked when her teacher told her that it was fake: “I felt embarrassed. Many in my course seemed to know, but I did not.” How come that a high-educated Communication student could be mislead so easily (and you, too)?

 

Are Digital Natives 'Fake News blind'?

Our interviewee is not the only one. Recent research has shown that people have trouble recognizing Fake News. For example, a study by Stanford University from January 2017 on the role of Fake News during the Elections showed that about 50% of people who could recall a fake news story actually believed it (Alcott & Gentzkow, 2017). Another alarming study focused on the ability of students to judge the credibility of news. The Stanford researchers found that American students of all levels were underperforming. For example, more than 80% of middle school students could not distinguish between a real news story and sponsored content. College students did not perform much better. 93% did not leave a website to check its credibility by just Googling the source (They would have found that it was a lobbyist website.) (Stanford History Education Group, 2016).

Facebook has changed the way Digital Natives consume news compared to older generations. Instead of spending time and energy on actively seeking for news, Facebook offers them an easy access to news.

“In 2016, we would hope college students, who spend hours each day online, would look beyond a .org URL and ask who’s behind a site that presents only one side of a contentious issue”, the Stanford researchers express. Their results are disappointing, which leads us to the question why Digital Natives are 'Fake News blind'. We have interviewed four Master students from four different countries to find out how young, highly educated news consumers judge the credibility of political news on Social Media. Since Facebook is the world’s biggest social media platform (Statista, 2017) and offers a wide range of different content, from personal status updates and images to videos and news stories, we have decided to focus on this social network.

 

How do Digital Natives consume news?

Our four interviewees are Master students at two Dutch universities. Their programs are all somehow related to communication: be it Business Communication, Global Communication, Marketing, or Global Management of Social Issues. Being born between 1984 and 1992 they belong to the Millennial Generation, the first generation to have grown up in a digital environment (Olson, 2009; Williams, Crittenden, Keo, & McCarty, 2012). Two of them are Asian, namely Korean and Vietnamese, one comes from Brazil, the last is from Germany. We have invited four different nationalities from three different continents to see whether their cultural background makes any difference (and see whether only American students are fools).

Our interviewees use Facebook almost daily to get news. They still follow traditional news organizations, both international and national, to stay up to date. However, Facebook has changed the way Digital Natives consume news compared to older generations. Instead of spending time and energy on actively seeking for news, Facebook offers them an easy access to news (Rosengard, Tucker-McLaughlin, & Brown, 2014), as one of our interviewees explains: “I don’t intentionally go to the page on Facebook to check their news. They pop up in my News Feed.”

 

Facebook algorithm & the filter bubble

“The stories that show in your News Feed are influenced by your connections and activity on Facebook. This helps you to see more stories that interest you from friends you interact with the most. The number of comments and likes a post receives and what kind of story it is (ex: photo, video, status update) can also make it more likely to appear in your News Feed.” (Facebook, 2017).

An algorithm allows Facebook to show only content in the News Feed that it believes to be relevant for its individual users. Due to this ‘subjective’ selection of what Facebook believes is relevant for you you will not see all the content that is available on a topic, but a selection that fits your personal interests or the interest of your friends. However, the personalization of your News Feed can be problematic because you may get isolated from a diversity of content. This phenomenon is as well called ‘filter bubble’.

Our interviewees have heard about the Facebook algorithm before and know broadly how it works. However, they disagree about the disadvantages. On the one hand they perceive it is convenient:

 “You avoid reading s*** opinions of people that you don’t have so much contact with, a person that you hardly know that you add as your friend just because you talked to her for two days. You don’t want to see the information he or she shares right?”

On the other hand, they perceive the filter bubble the Facebook algorithm creates as something negative, because the information they get in their News Feed is one-sided. One interviewee was particularly dissatisfied with the content of her News Feed:

“That Facebook algorithm really annoys me. If you like something, it will pop up again and again. I think it is problematic, because it polarizes. You will only learn about something new by accident. Otherwise you only get spoon-fed what you already know. You will get input on the same topics. You might not stay objective, but you stay in one niche. I think they should offer more different topics.”

 

How do they judge credibility?

If Digital Natives are 'passive' news consumers, how does a news story get their attention between the overload of information they see in their News Feed? What makes them stop scrolling to click on the Facebook post that will lead them away from Facebook? All our interviewees agreed that the content of the news story needs to match their interest; otherwise they will simply scroll over and ignore it. This is because we pay more attention to information that supports our way of understanding the world (Giglietto, Iannelli, Rossi, & Valeriani, 2016). Secondly, our interviewees named their Facebook friends as an important factor why they would stop to read a news story. However, they emphasized that it is important to them that this friend shares similar interests:

“The closer the friend, the earlier I know that we share the same opinions or interests. If he shares, likes or comments on something, I am more likely to have a look at it, because I assume that it interests me.”

While our interviewees all agreed that they are more likely to read a news story shared by a Facebook friend, they were more reluctant to say whether they are more likely to as well believe the news story. If they do, then because they know that this friend is knowledgeable, but they would always form their own opinion. This is contradictory to the findings of a recent study by the American Press Institute and the University of Chicago: Their online survey experiment showed that a news reader judges the credibility of a news story based on the sharer rather than the original source (The Media Insight Project, 2017).

They are convinced that they are able to recognize Fake News when they see it because they have the knowledge and have developed critical reading.

It is surprising that, while the trust in media has never been so low (Edelman, 2017), our interviewees, however, all emphasized that the source is for them by far the most important factor: “I rate the credibility of news based on the trustworthiness of the news reporting sources first”, said one of our interviewees. They trust the news story because it comes from a source they trust, and they trust these sources because they are renowned and more objective than other sources. All our four interviewees mentioned that they are aware that many news sources are somewhat biased, and that they value objectivity a lot. The reason why our interviewee from the beginning believed the Trump story was true “because it was allegedly a credible source”. Was it the only time she got fooled?

Edelman Trust Baromter 2017

 

Do Digital Natives trap into Fake News?

 

Facebook’s Fake News Checker

After facing harsh critique on its position in the fake news debate, Facebook is currently developing the Fake News Checker. Users can report posts that they believe to be false. If enough users report a post, it will be checked by a 3rd party fact-checker organization. If a post then appears to be containing false or misleading information, the post will be flagged as “disputed by 3rd party fact-checkers” and may appear lower in the news feed (Facebook, 2016; Jamieson & Solon, 2016). In general, our interviewees found that it was a useful tool that can help people to spot Fake News. However, they expressed some concerns about how news stories were judged: “What if they identify a news story as Fake News which is actually not?”

 

Our interviewees come across Fake News – news stories which contain false or misleading information - regularly on Facebook. However, the times they get fooled are rare. For our interviewee it was the only time she afterwards found out that it was a faked story. However, they acknowledge that Fake News are becoming more and more problematic and are concerned about the great extent of the problem. We show them an example of the Facebook Fake News Checker and ask them what they think about this initiative of Facebook:

“I think it’s a useful tool. It would benefit people who have limited access to information and people with low levels of education more than people who have good media literacy. This tool would not have significant impacts on the way how people with good knowledge of politics and who know how to spot Fake News read news. Personally, I do not think it would greatly affect the way I consume news via Facebook.”

They believe that the Facebook Fake News checker is a good tool, but more for the wider public than for themselves. “I have a good view and the background to notice if something is true or fake”, said one of our interviewees confident. They are convinced that they are able to recognize Fake News when they see it because they have the knowledge and have developed critical reading. If we look back to the Stanford study from beginning, this is highly contradictory. Are our interviewees more critical than their American fellows? Or do they just believe they perform better?

 

Even high-educated Digital Natives are not immune to Fake News. Are they more likely to spot Fake News because of their high education? Or does the belief that they are higher-educated – and that they know their sources – make them arrogant and even blinder for Fake News? We cannot tell right now, but we should find out. Albert Einstein once said that “the only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.” Ignorance makes Fake News dangerous, but ignorance coupled with arrogance makes Fake News powerful.

 

Shaping your News Feed

Our interviewees told us that they have shaped or are at least trying to shape their News Feed in such a way that it shows content that is credible and relevant to them: “I shaped my timeline the way I wanted, I can control what comes to my timeline”, one the interviewees said. “Let’s say from 0 to 10 about being satisfied with my timeline, I’d say 7.5.” If you are not satisfied with your News Feed either, we asked them for some tips: In general, try to let Facebook know what you find interesting and what not. How do you do that?

  • Follow persons or pages you are interested in and stop following those who you feel provide less relevant or even annoying content. If a Facebook friend of yours posts content you don’t want to see, you can unfollow that person without deleting him or her from your list of friends.
  • Try to like posts about topics you are interested in more often.
  • If you feel that a page provides content which you want to see more often, mark this page as ‘see first’. Facebook will always show new posts of this page on top of your News Feed.
  • If you feel that your News Feed is too one-sided, try to follow pages/posts that share a different view. For example, it is interesting to follow foreign news providers.

     

    References

    Edelman. (2017). Edelman Trust Barometer. Global Results. [PPT].

    Facebook. (2016). News Feed FYI: Addressing Hoaxes and Fake News. [Press release].

    Facebook (2017). How News Feed Works.

    Giglietto, F., Iannelli, L., Rossi, L., & Valeriani, A. (2016). Fakes, News and the Election: A New Taxonomy for the Study of Misleading Information within the Hybrid Media System.

    Jamieson, A., & Solon, O. (2016). Facebook to begin flagging fake news in response to mounting criticism. The Guardian.

    Olson, M. E. (2009). The “Millennials”: First year in practice. Nursing Outlook, 57(1), 10-17.

    Rosengard, D., Tucker-McLaughlin, M., & Brown, T. (2014). Students and social news: How college students share news through social media. Electronic News, 8(2), 120–137.

    Stanford History Education Group. (2016). Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning (Executive Summary).

    Statista. (2017). Most famous social network sites worldwide as of January 2017, ranked by number of active users (in millions).

    The Media Insight Project. (2017). ‘Who shared it?’: How Americans decide what news to trust on social media.

    Williams, D. L., Crittenden, V. L., Keo, T., & McCarty, P. (2012). The use of social media: an exploratory study of usage among digital natives. Journal of Public Affairs, 12(2), 127-136.