How good are adolescents in spotting fake news?

There has been a lot of research into what we as adults can do to avoid falling into the trap of fake news – but what about adolescents? In a recent study, researchers from ELTE PPK investigated what factors help or hinder adolescents in filtering out misinformation.

Research in recent years has shown that adolescents from all around the world are showing a declining interest in news consumption and have difficulty in recognising misinformation. Fake news poses a number of risks to democracy: it may undermine political participation, damage informed decision-making, and reduce trust in institutions. The adolescents of today will become voters in a few years’ time and will have a major role to play in shaping democracy, which is why it is particularly important that they are able to filter out fake information when consuming news, the authors of the study pointed out.

Adolescents spend a significant amount of time browsing social media platforms, and they typically “stumble upon” news rather than intentionally search for it. Besides, they prefer to read opinion pieces rather than those containing objective information; as a result, they tend to gather information from biased or one-sided sources. When it comes to news, they pay more attention to influencers and celebrities than to journalists, and researchers found that they tend not to check the reliability of the news source and the information they receive.

In their research, Laura Faragó, Gábor Orosz, Benedek Paskuj and Péter Krekó analysed what factors help and hinder adolescents from recognising fake news. A total of 1582 Hungarian high school students from 25 schools participated in the study. Among other things, the researchers showed them headlines of real and fake news in the form of a Facebook post and asked them to judge how real they appeared. They also had to decide whether randomly generated, nonsensical sentences had any meaning to them, since attributing meaningful depth to such quotes also increases the chances of falling for fake news.

According to the results of the research, teenagers who think analytically and are motivated to engage in careful deliberations are better at identifying fake news.

Analytical thinking also reduces the credibility of fake news for adults, regardless of whether the news matches the ideology of the reader. As a matter of fact, the cognitive effort in itself – i.e. thinking carefully and deeply about the truth content of the news we read – can be a safeguard against misinformation. The researchers also point out that young people who belong to the ethnic majority and have parents with higher education qualifications are less likely to believe nonsense quotes and fake news.

The authors claim that cognitive abilities are overall more important than socio-economic and ethnic factors for spotting fake news. This means that regardless of an adolescent’s social and ethnic status, analytical thinking and motivation to engage in analytical thinking can provide protection against fake news.