Identifying Fake News: Why Children Are Bad At This

Children have innocent minds and they believe what they see. This is probably not good news, especially taking into consideration that they spend most of their time on social media apps.

To distinguish a sponsored content, a true news story on a website and just some made-up story is not an easy task for young kids. Most of the middle-schoolers fail to tell whether news that appears on their screens are true or not.

Surveys were conducted and evaluated by The Parents magazine to let the children judge which tweet was the most reliable one. Around eighty-two children failed to decide which one was true.

It was found out that they did not look up the source of the news. Instead, they were considering things like how detailed a note was written or if a picture was attached along with it or not. With that said, the results were quite alarming as anyone can misguide their young minds easily.

Children have a bleak ability of reasoning when it comes to deciding whether a thing is reliable or not. They don't tend to go into the depth of things; instead, they believe what's just on the surface. So, this is not a good news as they find it very challenging to determine if the articles are indeed true mentor or they are just misleading them.

Fortunately, Google and Facebook are now vowing to eliminate unreliable content from the web, which could be responsible for spreading the unreliable content. But steps are also required to make the children aware of the fake news as they usually believe without giving it their second thoughts. They should be taught how to examine the correctness of a particular news.

Meanwhile, educators and parents have a big role to play in helping their children identify if the news they're reading is fake or not. They also have to build the children's mind to understand and learn the concept of judging the reliability of the knowledge they encounter on social media.