To make children better fact-checkers, expose them to more misinformation — with oversight. Instead of attempting to completely sanitize children’s online environment, adults should focus on equipping children with tools to critically assess the information they encounter.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/10/10/to-make-children-better-fact-checkers-expose-them-to-more-misinformation-with-oversight/
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I’ve linked to the press release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
Exposure to detectable inaccuracies makes children more diligent fact-checkers of novel claims
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01992-8
To make children better fact-checkers, expose them to more misinformation — with oversight
“We need to give children experience flexing these skepticism muscles and using these critical thinking skills within this online context,” a UC Berkeley psychology researcher said.
New research from UC Berkeley suggests that instead of attempting to completely sanitize children’s online environment, adults should focus on equipping children with tools to critically assess the information they encounter.
Orticio knows that not every parent has time to constantly monitor a child’s media habits. Rather than trying to create the most sanitized corner of the internet, he said parents should have discussions with their children about how to check claims and to talk about what they’re seeing.
This is so incredibly important moving forwards – it’s criminal the amount of people that believe everything they see on social media these days. A quick 30 second internet search would do these folks WONDERS.
We learned this in school. We’d get multiple articles and opinion pieces on a topic and had to write a nuanced essay on it where we analysed the truthfulness, quality and language of various sources. Ofc education quality varies greatly, but it’s sad to hear this is not the norm in educating children.
Problem is you can’t do that because if you teach critical thinking and the theoretical ability for the scientific method to weed out bias then it very quickly becomes clear that politicians and scientists are some of the most corrupt and financially interconnected people on the planet. A “think tank” is literally just a medium between them, designing studies for their scientists for their politicians to quote from.
First somebody has to teach the adults
Today’s misinformation can be identified by a critical eye, knowing what sorts of things are easy to fake (videos of a person talking to the camera) or hard to fake (someone turning their head), and comparing different sources of information.
But future misinformation I believe will be impossible even for experts to tell.
I therefore don’t think training people is the long term solution.
And now, with ai in EVERYTHING, good luck.