VIDEO: Teens struggle to identify misinformation about Israel-Hamas conflict — the world's second 'social media war'
CBS News’ Tom Hanson (right) discusses misinformation and social media with a group of Texas high school students who now take media literacy courses as part of their curriculum.
CBS News
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.
In a packed classroom at Highland Park High School, Miller and about 30 other students study media literacy, a course many teens across the United States are not required to take. Texas is one of only four states in the U.S. that mandate a media literacy curriculum in all public schools beginning in kindergarten. Fourteen other states offer some form of media literacy education or online resources to public school students.
Media literacy classes
As part of every lesson, Brandon Jackson teaches students the tools needed to spot misinformation, which is false or misleading, and disinformation, which is deliberately deceptive. He also tests his students using real-world examples of fake videos that circulate 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 edge young Americans have over older generations, Stanford University researchers Sam Wineburg and Joel Breakstone say teenagers' ability to identify misinformation on social media is concerningly low.
"Video has a kind of immediacy, but we need to help people understand how to evaluate a video," Wineburg said. "Is the person who's providing the video an objective source? Does that person, are there reputational costs if that person is wrong, or are they some 'rando' that has sensationalist footage and is a rage merchant?"