2.3: » Takeaway 3- Trust is Dead for many Students, and Skepticism Lives.
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The way information is delivered today, with political propaganda and opinion mingled with traditional news sources, and with algorithms highlighting sources based on engagement potential rather than quality, many students expressed concern about the trustworthiness of online content. Almost all of the students in our focus groups were critical of the current news environment. Some complained about the difficulty of knowing where to place trust. Another put it this way, “You’re getting people’s opinion on what happened versus what actually happened.”
At the same time, several students in each focus group were cynical almost to the point of believing their concerns and actions had little meaning, and that it was not possible to change things.75 These students usually questioned the trustworthiness of news and information online but within a broader global context.
We’re kind of a nihilistic generation, we’re more existentialist, more so than the younger generation after us. We have a feeling kind of like, we’ve basically got a fascist leadership of the country, the climate is screwed, and I could go on for an hour about the millions of problems that we’re facing, so there’s this feeling like, whatever, we’ll just suck it up.
Given the choice
The theme of choice was mentioned repeatedly in our sessions. That seemingly simple word was filled with complexity and nuance when used to discuss perceptions of online content today. Some students said they had too many choices in navigating the crowded news landscape, where credible coverage is mixed in with a deluge of poorer-quality online content and misinformation. According to students, accepting algorithmic sorting was complicated by the number of news channels and sources now available, and this required additional work to parse out:
People have an autonomy and a free will to participate in the distribution of information. And it’s not that we’re lacking credible information. It’s that we’re drowning in like a sea of all these different points out there, and people are willingly giving themselves up to participate in that sea.
Some students had strategies for navigating the plethora of choices by relying on crowdsourcing to keep up with important news. They used Reddit to point them to the most important headlines of the day. Others preferred to curate their news feed by selecting who to follow on Twitter. As one student described it, these social media sites functioned like a news editor. Still other students pushed back against algorithmic tailoring of news content, saying it amounted to “taking away personal choice unless you make a new account, like a blank slate, of your internet personality.”
One student highlighted broader social concerns, by seeing the potential of predictive algorithms to reduce choice; presenting the illusion of personalization while actually reinforcing a more homogeneous view of the world:
I’m more concerned about, like, the larger scale trend of predicting what we want, but then also predicting what we want in ways that push a lot of people towards the same cultural and political endpoint. I feel like that’s talked about less than, like, individual privacy aspects.
As this student insightfully pointed out, there are social harms beyond the loss of personal privacy that have the potential to influence society at scale. An example is the ways extremists have promoted radical ideas to a wide audience (see sidebar, “The mainstreaming of extremism”). Altogether, issues around choice and agency appear closely related to trust and skepticism and to students’ suspicions about being manipulated by invisible forces.
These findings suggest that taking a skeptical approach to all information has become a reflex for many students, with many considering lateral reading as the default defense. Though one student said sticking to “big trustworthy sites” like CNN and The New York Times was the best way to navigate news, another student took a more cynical stance, asserting, “I don’t consider any news source to be credible anymore.”
Schooled for skepticism
An important theme to emerge from our sessions was that no news source could be trusted at face value. This viewpoint did not appear to be a symptom of political partisanship so much as being a pervasive belief among students that they should rely on themselves to decide what to believe.76 Students attributed this outlook to having come of age as the web has evolved from a collection of dubious websites to a dominant news portal and focal point for their social lives. Many felt they had been schooled to be critical of everything they encountered.
One student suggested skepticism in her age cohort accompanied the growth of the internet:
When we first started, we didn’t have to filter through what was a credible source, and now you kind of got to filter through everything. We have different eyes as we’re looking at everything, like literally everything on the internet. We’re skeptical.
Still another student suggested they were disposed to doubt even the authority of their teachers: “We’re all super cynical and untrusting of information to the point that we want to find it out ourselves, so if a teacher says, ‘There’s five rows, then we actually look, and, yep, there’s five rows.’” This skepticism, as one student described it, was a generational trait.
It’s different between students and professors, because they come from a pre-social media age and they’re used to being able to trust kind of different resources that they’ve always gone to. Whereas we grew up with untrustworthy sources and it’s drilled into us you need to do the research because it can’t be trusted.
As a whole, we found that the lack of trust in traditional authority figures meant trust was placed in Google as the arbiter of truth, sometimes to a ridiculous extent. One student who is also a parent described how he had tried to explain to his child that the bogeyman was not real, but his child had not believed him until a Google search confirmed it.
Some students said learning to approach all information critically was a valuable feature of their college education. And yet, they seemed to distinguish the reflexive skepticism they developed when sorting through websites for high school projects from the kind of critical thinking encouraged in college. This practice of discernment in college involved analysis of complex texts as well as applying social and historical context to current events, as they often did when teasing out the social implications of algorithms.
The mainstreaming of extremism
Students in the focus groups were aware of how popular platforms used algorithms to shape what information they received while utilizing their engagement – their clicks and likes and shares – for profit.
What they were less aware of were the details of how companies like Facebook harness engagement by giving customers, including those promoting radical ideologies, the tools to target individuals using a menu of attributes including ethnicity, income, political orientation, hobbies. Investigative journalists have even found filters that enable clients to promote content to certain fringe factions, such as “Jew-haters” or fans of Joseph Goebbels.* These invisible fine-grained filters enable extremists to find and cultivate potential allies.
Students are not immune to such extremist appeals. During our interviews, a professor said she had been approached about a classmate posting messages about White supremacy with swastikas on his social media newsfeed. This situation was resolved, but the instructor was shaken by the incident: “We’re becoming a much more heterogeneous society in terms of worldviews and beliefs because access to that information is so easy to find to support your worldview.”
Technology is not the sole culprit in the amplification of fringe ideologies. There is a perfect storm brewing of the news industry, the attention economy, and coordinated actions of certain idealogues that have coalesced to drive extremist views into public prominence. White supremacists have become adept at harnessing the power of virality to find susceptible audiences and push their ideas and conspiracy theories into the mainstream. They have capitalized on long-term trends undermining trust in government and in those truth-seeking institutions we once turned to for authority: journalism, science, and the academy.†
Fixing the mechanisms that amplify distrust will not eliminate the underlying structural drivers of extremism. Students need to learn about the social and historical context of extremist beliefs as well as how extremism is mainstreamed technologically. Information literacy is more than knowing how to use technology and which buttons to push. It must also address how our emotional buttons are pushed, who is doing the pushing, and why.
* Sam Dean (21 February 2019), “Facebook decided which users are interested in Nazis - and let advertisers target them directly,” Los Angeles Times, https://www.latimes.com/business/tec...221-story.html; Julia Angwin, Madeleine Varner, and Ariana Tobin (14 September 2017), “Facebook enabled advertisers to reach ‘Jew haters’,” www.propublica.org/article/f...ach-jew-haters
† Jessie Daniels, Mutale Nkonde, and Darakhshan Mir (May 2019), “Advancing racial literacy in tech: Why ethics, diversity in hiring, and implicit bias trainings aren’t enough,” Data & Society, https://datasociety.net/wp-content/u...Final_0522.pdf; Yochai Benkler (17 October 2019), “Cautionary notes on disinformation and the origins of distrust,” MediaWell, https://mediawell.ssrc.org/expertref...ation-benkler/
References
- This finding is consistent with PIL’s 2018 news study. Op. cit. Head, et al. 2018, How students engage with news: Five takeaways for educators, journalists, and librarians.
- In the 2018 PIL News Study, political affiliation was found to be positively correlated with distrust of news, as it is in the general population. However, in this qualitative study most, though not all, students discussed skepticism as a trait they shared without regard to their political beliefs. Op. cit. Head, et al. 2018, How students engage with news: Five takeaways for educators, journalists, and librarians.