Researchers want the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app/. Selecting true or false against 20 headlines gives the user a set of scores and a “resilience” ranking that compares them to the wider U.S. population. It takes less than two minutes to complete.
The paper
Edit: the article might be misrepresenting the study and its findings, so it’s worth checking the paper itself. (See @realChem 's comment in the thread).
Weird. The only people I know that continually and aggressively bring up very obvious misinformation are the 50+ people in my life.
I think the young feel immune, and that they feel socially progressive news cannot be lies because “that is not what our side does, we have ethics”.
It’s not true in practice, though. Fake news are used to sow division, and making people angry on both sides is part of it. The far-right, boomer fake news are more obvious because they are outlandish, but there’s more than that out there.
Ironically the study ignores the arguably most important part of facing fake news: being critical of sources. And as a reportedly “vulnerable” millennial myself, I have to say I’m critical of this one.
I agree, but they need to start someone. They’ll submit for review, get some errors pointed out there. Publish in a journal and get some more constructive criticism. The next study can learn from that to make improvements.
It’s already published in Behavior Research Methods. I might be too critical and focusing on the wrong things as a political scientist judging a psychology piece, but at least to me the test does not seem to be that convincing in measuring susceptibility to misinformation. The claim of the article (which I admittedly haven’t read carefully) seems to be that “it is feasible to develop a psychometrically validated measurement instrument for misinformation susceptibility”, which might still be the case.
They were targeted and blasted in the past decade or two, via the internet. The 60-70somethings got targeted and blasted in the 90s, via murdoch and limbaugh… the snake and the pig.
That’s anecdotal experience, I’m 50+ and I got 19/20, I 100% identified all fakes and marked fake one of the real ones, so I’m on the skeptical side of things.
I got the exact same result, and am the same age. Therefore we must band together against those who are older than us, and also those younger than us. :)
How can you tell which answers were which?
Oh, I see that I got 90% fake news but have no idea which ones I got wrong.
You can tell by the results “real news detection” and “fake news detection”, they don’t tell you which one is wrong, probably to avoid other people “copying” the correct answers.