Every generation has its own: “I read it on the Internet” today is like “I saw it on TV” some time ago. The sign of passive acceptance for everything that a medium tells, even if it were false news, disinformation or the blatant hoaxes that invade every day, shared and re-shared without the slightest verification (and very often it would be enough simply to read the article in question to see its gross falsehood) on our Twitter or Facebook feeds.
This is confirmed by a study by Stanford University (, promising the Wall Street Journal article about it), according to which the82% of students Middle school students wouldn't be able to tell the difference between an AD marked as "Sponsored Content" and real news from a news site. For many students, the yardstick of online news would be the amount of detail or whether a large photo is attached, rather than the source. Or that more than two-thirds of middle school students see no reason not to trust a post written by a bank executive who argues that young adults need more help with financial planning. And so on.
Worrying numbers, which are part of a debate fueled by the latest US presidential elections, in which disinformation dominated and after which one wonders what was the role of false news, from unfounded accusations to alarmism, in Trump's election.
The giants of the web, from Facebook to Google via Twitter, have begun to announce their countermoves against the spread of fake news, but even their efforts will not free us from the spread of online disinformation, rooted in a thick, and varied, theory of sources.
The cure, proposed by the experts cited in the Stanford study, appears to be mindfulness education. An increasing number of schools are teaching students to be aware of the choice of information sources, teaching the so-calledmedia literacy“, but in any case we are talking about a subject on the margins of most classes.
Then there is the role of the family, which should teach its children a healthy skepticism by also relying on those companies, especially non-profits, which provide lists of browsers and safe searches for children and adolescents. But often, judging by what many adults share on social media, it seems that they too have more to learn than to teach.
In such rapid and entropic times of consumption, the risk is that of not having the patience, or even more the mental predisposition, to take a deeper and more critical look at information. We often stop at the clickbaiting tittle and share it blindly, mostly to take a position in the eternal, and sterile, debate that fuels social media.
The further risk, then, is that of finding oneself, within social media, in a vicious circle of false information, since the users' feed is filled with contents similar to those they have already read. The importance of sources, and of a lateral and at the same time in-depth approach to information, seems to have disappeared, in the name of speed. Also because, often, hoax sites (and sometimes even the newspapers themselves, in which certain deontological principles seem to be increasingly diluted) provide us with exactly the kind of news we are looking for. easy, Manichean, which clearly and in a few words say who we are and which side we are on for our social audience. And it doesn't matter if none of this is true.
