Nearly half of teenagers cannot tell the difference between the real and the false information that circulates about health.
- According to the authors, 71% of young people in the world use the Internet.
- According to Unesco, disinformation corresponds to “false information and deliberately created to harm a person, a social group, an organization or a country”.
- Misinformation also represents false information, but not created with the intention of harming.
It’s one of the most connected generations, and yet: teenagers have trouble telling the difference between real and fake health information online. In the specialist journal Frontiers in Psychologya study shows that many of them place the same trust in verified information as in fake news.
Messages tested with teenagers
Dr Radomír Masaryk, researcher at the Comenius University of Bratislava (Slovakia), and his team have developed an evaluation method to estimate the perception of the reliability of information among adolescents. They recruited 300 young people, aged 16 to 19, to whom they presented seven messages on the beneficial health effects of different fruits and vegetables. Of these, some were false, others true but neutral, and others were true but with additional editorial elements, such as grammatical errors, superlatives, use of bold typeface. Each of the participants had to rate the reliability of the message.
48% of participants trusted true neutral health messages more than fake information. But 41% of participants considered fake and real neutral messages to be equally trustworthy, and 11% rated real neutral health messages less trustworthy than fake health messages. “As teenagers are regular Internet users, we generally expect them to already know how to approach and evaluate information online, but it seems to be the opposite”analyzes Dr. Radomír Masaryk.
Editorial elements are not always well identified by adolescents, the authors also note. “Poor writing of health messages was not perceived as a sign of low reliability“, they find. When the health messages seem to be plausible, the editorial elements do not influence the analysis of the young people concerning the reliability of the information. “The only version of a health post that was significantly less reliable compared to a real health post was a post with a clickbait title“, emphasizes Dr. Masaryk. The term ‘click bait‘ designates the so-called click-catcher messages, which are soliciting to encourage the user to click on the page in question.
A major problem
For the authors, these results illustrate the need for better training for adolescents so that they have the right reflexes when browsing the Internet. According to them, they should be better trained in scientific literature, but also learn to decipher the different media, while developing their reasoning skills. “Analytical thinking and scientific reasoning are skills that help tell right from wrong when it comes to health.”concludes the main author of the research.
These skills are essential at a time when false health information is widespread on the net. “Misinformation and misinformation about health is a major public health problem, comment the authors. With an increased spread of fake health news on social media in recent years.“This misinformation can be dangerous: some people may believe it and make bad decisions about their health, or they may no longer trust health professionals and health authorities.