Decimated neighborhoods. Injured children. Terrorized festivalgoers running for their lives. Since the brutal war between Israel and Hamas began nearly three months ago, Maddy Miller, a 17-year-old high school senior in Dallas, Texas, has been trying to make sense of the horrific scenes unfolding daily on her phone.
"I'll just open TikTok or Instagram and it's like, 'here's a clip from inside Israel or inside Palestine,'" Miller said. "Sometimes I just need to sit down for like 10 minutes and actually figure out what's happening. It's hard to know what's real and what's fake."
In February 2022, the war in Ukraine began to play out on Tik Tok and Instagram. The conflict in the Middle East is now the second war to be viewed in vivid, and often intimate, vignettes on social media, where 51% of younger Gen Z teens get their news, according to a Deloitte survey. The war between Israel and Hamas has also sparked a tidal wave of misinformation and disinformation, which is reaching American teens like Miller.
Media Literacy in Schools
In a packed classroom at Highland Park High School, students are engaging in media literacy education. Unlike many teenagers across the United States, these students are required to take a media literacy course. Texas is one of only four states in the U.S. that mandates a media literacy curriculum in all public schools starting from kindergarten. Additionally, 14 other states offer some form of media literacy education or online resources to public school students.
Media Literacy Classes
Brandon Jackson, the teacher of the media literacy class, focuses on teaching students how to spot misinformation and disinformation. He provides real-world examples of fake videos that circulate on social media to test his students' ability to identify false or misleading information. The goal is to help students analyze large international news events and understand how information can be manipulated on social media.
"The whole point of this is to analyze large international news events," Jackson told his students. "How does information change when you're looking at it on social media? Is it manipulative?"
Despite the technological advantage that young Americans have over older generations, researchers from Stanford University, Sam Wineberg and Joel Breakstone, express concern over teenagers' ability to identify misinformation on social media. They emphasize the need to teach students how to evaluate videos and determine if the source is objective or sensationalist.
Study Reveals High Schoolers' Difficulty in Identifying Misinformation on Social Media
A recent study conducted by Wineberg and Breakstone aimed to assess the ability of high school students to recognize misinformation on social media platforms. The study involved over 3,000 students whose backgrounds were representative of the U.S. population. The participants were tasked with determining the authenticity of an anonymous video.
The video in question claimed to show voter fraud in the United States. However, a simple internet search would reveal that it actually depicted voter fraud in Russia. Shockingly, out of the 3,000 students, only three were able to make this connection, accounting for less than one-tenth of 1%.
The Experiment
A recent investigation by CBS News shed light on the rapid spread of misinformation among teenage social media users. To conduct the experiment, a team of journalists created three different profiles on Instagram and TikTok.
The first profile searched for simple terms related to Israel, the second profile searched for simple Palestinian terms, and the third profile searched for both. Each profile also followed multiple accounts with over 1,000 followers and engaged with their posts by liking them.
Initially, the fake teenage accounts were fed typical content related to high school and makeup tutorials. However, the platforms' algorithms quickly adapted to the search terms and flooded the feeds with war-related content, including misinformation.
In one widely debunked video, a person, who claimed to work at a hospital in Gaza, alleged Hamas had overrun the facility. She said she had to perform surgery on a child without morphine. An analysis revealed the video was staged and even the explosions were manufactured. Another now-debunked video claimed to show an Iranian warplane landing on an Israeli aircraft carrier.
"It looks like a video game to me," said a media literacy expert at the News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan group that advocates for media literacy in schools.
This expert has spent his career deciphering fact from fiction on social media. He also teaches young people how to spot mis- and disinformation. Key to that is what he calls "pre-bunking": equipping them with the tools to help identify misinformation before they fall for it.
"The same tip that I give every single time is to slow down," said the expert. "Look for authenticity; look for the source; look for evidence; look for reasoning and to look for the context."
"More dangerous paths"
From the highly publicized resignation of the president of the University of Pennsylvania, to high school walkouts in San Francisco and New York City, the war has undeniably created a tense climate in schools nationwide. Reports of antisemitic and Islamophobic threats and violence have soared.
"It doesn't feel like we're living in 2023. Feels like we're living in Nazi Germany," one student said.
Experts like the media literacy expert mentioned earlier said false or misleading information can intensify the already heated debates about this conflict.
Statement from TikTok
Following the release of the experiment findings, representatives from TikTok addressed the issue. When provided with examples of false information, the company promptly removed those posts.
A spokesperson from TikTok stated, "Our team is committed to tirelessly removing harmful misinformation from our platform. We also collaborate with independent fact-checkers who evaluate the accuracy of content in over 50 languages. Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, we have already taken down more than 131,000 videos containing misinformation and redirect users searching for related content to Reuters."
Additional statements from TikTok representatives:
- According to Meta, they have implemented a three-part strategy to combat the spread of misinformation on Instagram. This strategy includes removing content that violates their Community Standards, flagging and reducing the distribution of stories marked as false by third-party fact-checkers.
- Meta spokesperson stated that they also label content and provide information to users so they can make informed decisions about what to read, trust, and share.
- Meta is collaborating with third-party fact-checkers in the region to debunk false claims. They have the largest third-party fact-checking network among platforms, with coverage in both Arabic and Hebrew through AFP, Reuters, and Fatabyyano. When content is rated as false, it is moved lower in the feed to limit its visibility.
- Recognizing the importance of speed, Meta has made it easier for fact-checkers to find and rate content related to the war by using keyword detection to group related content in one place.
- To provide users with more information, Meta has added warning labels to content rated as false by third-party fact-checkers and applied labels to state-controlled media publishers.
