Students Are Susceptible to Fake News

Students are highly susceptible to fake news, study finds.

Fake news and the dangers it poses to both people’s everyday lives as well as deciding who to vote are clear as it allows readers to act on a fictional reality. However, if you expected that students in middle school and above who are more tech-savvy than other generations wouldn’t be susceptible to fake news, well new study shows exactly the contrary.

Researchers from Stanford University questioned around more than 8,700 students from different ages groups about whether a specific news article they showed was a real and credible piece of information or just a fake one meant to misinform readers.

The study began with testing middle school students and found that a large majority of around 82 percent of them could not tell the difference between obvious fake and real news. The study also showed that middle schoolers couldn’t distinguish between a sponsored content post and a real news story based on their source. Around two-thirds of interviewed middle schoolers found no issue with a bank’s executive post about financial preparedness.

Although the ability to tell fake news apart from real news improves with age, researchers found that at the high school level it wasn’t a drastic improvement. However, the results varied with the type of post they were asked to identify. For example, 40 percent of questioned high-school students thought that the region near the Fukushima power plant in Japan was toxic after seeing just a photo with not source or location attribution of a deformed daisy featuring a title about the Japanese area.

Although this seems an improvement over the capacity of middle schoolers, not even all college students were able to identify fake news completely. Researchers think that most people are more focused on the appearance of legitimacy of a post or article rather than the quality of its information. For example, students thought that by adding a photo to a Twitter post, makes it more credible without any reference to the actual validity of its content.

New surveys found that 88 percent of people up to the age of 18 get their news from social media, with an overall 62 percent of US adults. Although tech companies have started to take measures against fake news, the true solution only lies with better education.

Have you ever fallen prey to fake news?

Image source: Pixabay

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Roxanne Briean

I am a geek, a gamer and a writer. I have always been fascinated with the online community. At the moment I work as a full-time writer and study interior design. When I'm not scouring the net in search of interesting new gadgets and software I spend my time in MOBAs or drawing.