Tldr: Mr. Caulfield is upset that seemingly not enough people use control-F (or command-F on Macs) to quickly check whether a webpage actually says what another person linking to it claims it does.
He claims that 90% to 96% of people don’t know what control-F does; his estimate of 90% is based on the results of a survey done nearly ten years ago (one of those terrible annoying Google surveys that everyone clicks through as quickly as possible with random answers to unlock access to the webpage or video they are actually trying to view), and his estimate of 96% is based on assumptions from looking over the shoulders of his students to witness how they behave, although maybe they’re just nervous because he’s watching them and they want to look like they’re taking the material more seriously so they start reading more intently instead of “cheating” with control-F.
Regardless of whether people actually know about using control-F on websites or not, I think reliance on it for fact-checking will actually start to cause serious problems. All of these terrible Web 4.0 page scrolling hypermanagers that completely remove DOM content located outside of the current scroll view often make control-F fail to find content that is actually on the page. Reddit does this now; you need to use old.reddit.com for control-F to actually work. Twitter does this now; good luck using control-F to scroll back up to that specific tweet in a 300 tweet chain which you only remember a few words from, you can’t do it anymore. A lot of news sites do this now.
He claims that 90% to 96% of people don’t know what control-F does; his estimate of 90% is based on the results of a survey done nearly ten years ago (one of those terrible annoying Google surveys that everyone clicks through as quickly as possible with random answers to unlock access to the webpage or video they are actually trying to view), and his estimate of 96% is based on assumptions from looking over the shoulders of his students to witness how they behave, although maybe they’re just nervous because he’s watching them and they want to look like they’re taking the material more seriously so they start reading more intently instead of “cheating” with control-F.
Regardless of whether people actually know about using control-F on websites or not, I think reliance on it for fact-checking will actually start to cause serious problems. All of these terrible Web 4.0 page scrolling hypermanagers that completely remove DOM content located outside of the current scroll view often make control-F fail to find content that is actually on the page. Reddit does this now; you need to use old.reddit.com for control-F to actually work. Twitter does this now; good luck using control-F to scroll back up to that specific tweet in a 300 tweet chain which you only remember a few words from, you can’t do it anymore. A lot of news sites do this now.