> According to a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Centre, Americans under 30 are about as likely to trust information on social media as they are to trust national news organisations.
A real “be careful what you wish for” tale. When I think back to the advent of the World Wide Web, breaking the mainstream media’s hold on information distribution seemed like such a wonderful possibility.
Fast forward a few decades and here we are: corporate controlled social media networks are indiscriminately pushing absolutely anything that keeps eyeballs engaged in front of their users who treat it all as fact.
I can’t quite say I’m nostalgic for the days of mainstream media domination but it feels increasingly like we jumped from the frying pan into the fire. At least it was accountable: you might not like an article the Washington Post or the New York Times published but you’d know who wrote it and you’d know who published it. If you didn’t want to read it you could just not read the paper any more. Now we have faceless anonymous social media accounts pushing any old crap and the networks themselves holding up their hands and saying “who, me? Oh, that’s nothing to do with me!”.
You might not like an article in the Economist, and you will not know who wrote it.
You might not like a tweet and you can block the user or stop using twitter entirely. Yes, that might be hard, twitter might feel important, you might feel excluded if you don't keep up with it, but that's also true for mass media.
If you don't like anonymous speech, you will have to avoid certain mass media, like the Economist, and you have to choose certain social networks, like Facebook. You have choice with both social media and mass media.
> You might not like an article in the Economist, and you will not know who wrote it.
The Economist not publishing author names is a minor detail in the grand scheme of things. The point is that The Economist is in full control of what it publishes and is accountable for it. If I don't like the Economist I won't read it.
> You might not like a tweet and you can block the user or stop using twitter entirely.
IMO Twitter is a bad example here. It's very easy to give up on Twitter. But people use Facebook for a huge range of things, not just for getting news. And blocking individual accounts is a constant exercise in whack-a-mole, one I engage in frequently. New accounts always pop up.
Personally, I've found that it's best to simply not use Facebook at all as a social media site, and to only use it as a chat app. So basically, I can keep a list of friends there, and I can chat with them through Messenger (the video chat, in particular, works quite well IME and is great for keeping in touch with family across continents), but I steadfastly ignore the "social media" stuff: I don't post anything on the "wall", I don't look at other people's postings, I certainly don't follow any political groups, etc. So I don't have to worry about things like blocking anyone's account, because the only accounts I'm exposed to are the ones in my friends list.
With the proliferation of AI content creation tools as the catalyst, we're going to go from a natural decentralization cycle to a natural centralization cycle which will be bringing trust back to sources like WSJ and NBC nightly news. Obviously you still have to keep your guard up but that was never and will never be not true.
Further, many of the social media sources today will work to show "real" sources versus AI generated content, etc. and that will result in some of those sources themselves just becoming centralized authorities on what is generated and what is not, though that job is more difficult.
I guess you mean to say that we will go back to centralization since nothing decentralized can be trusted, with how easy it will become to fake facts. But that's assuming that the consumer primarily cares about truth. If that was the case, we would not be here to begin with.
I think you're right to point out whether or not citizens [1] care about the truth is important, and some do/don't but I don't think that has a large effect on the centralization and decentralization cycle here because part of the cycle is simply the proliferation of new media sources of which many will inevitably die and also because I do think people will want more authoritative sources of information instead of everything being "democratized".
[1] I'm explicitly using citizens here instead of "consumer" because I detest that characterization of people and refuse to use the term. We need to have higher standards.
Why would people trust them now? Now nobody is to be trusted. By the time the 'news' get it it's old and already on Twitter. Nobody besides boomers watch the news and 23 year olds aren't going to log off TikTok to watch boring shit they already knew 8hr ago with more detail than the 30 seconds they will hear about it from some loser talking head in a suit.
Weirdly, I don't find it as bad as it was a few years ago. There was a time when my FB and other social media feeds were full of clear disinformation. Now, I mostly just see political discussions with the usual slants. But that never really changed.
The exception might be TikTok and the reposts of TikTok on Instagram, but I have nearly zero engagement there.
More than one in five young Americans doesn't know when WWI & WWII were, what countries were on which side, why they started, or what's imortant about them. But these kids will get better, same as we did. This headline isn't good, but I wouldn't take it too badly.
Education levels != education standards. Consider that GPAs have been going up over time[0], so much so that nearly 80% of all grades at Harvard in recent years were As and A-s.
The issue is that the "young" demographic mentioned in the article is ages 18-29, and high school must have changed quite a bit in recent years if students have not actually heard about the holocaust or WWII.
Well, in my (Gen-X) high school history classes, we only got to WWI (and just after like the 1920's - 30's). I always thought that there is this weird assumption that things that happened in the teachers' lifetime or just previous are "already known" or that the culture will just implant that knowledge somehow.
Same here (also Gen-X). Here in Canada I never learned about WWII in school. I barely remember learning about WWI, and that was usually just around Remembrance Day (celebrated on the anniversary of the Versailles Treaty).
We learned a lot about early Canadian settlement and relations between Europeans and First Nations. By the time I found myself in high school we only needed to take a certain amount of "social studies" credits and, while history was included in that category, there were options that were not specific to history. My experiences learning about Canadian settlement had been so dry and boring that I had made up my mind that I didn't like history at all and so I made every choice in high school to opt out of having to take history classes. In other words, WWI and WWII, if they were taught at all were "optional."
We'd have to compare against a similar poll from decades ago to figure out if this true—it could be it used to be that 40% of kids didn't believe in it.
I recently read 'The Winds of War' and 'War and Remembrance', novels by WW2 US Navy officer Herman Wouk. It is amazing how much history he crams into the narrative, documenting, among many other things, German treatment of the Jews before and during WW2. His hope and the purpose of the books as expressed in the last sentences of 'War and Remembrance' is
'For the rest of us, perhaps. Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world’s worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women, and children, all cut down. For them there can be no new earthly dawn. Yet though their bones lie in the darkness of the grave, they will not have died in vain, if their remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace.'
Many attempts have been made to help us remember where humanity has gone wrong. I am prone to despair to see something so well documented being treated as a myth.
A lot of these stories feel like symptoms of a breakdown in trust. Authorities, institutions, and media of types have been caught lying; so from individual perspective with limited context, never been to the camps, never watched the trials, never met a survivor, there's not much to hang a belief on.
I have caught myself in some similar doubts about certain current events, it was only in connecting to real human people from both sides who lost loved ones that I remembered, ah, yeah, this stuff does happen.
For some context, they polled 1500 young adults who opted in to an online research panel. They asked them more than 100 questions, about everything from antisemitism to abortion. The "Holocaust is a myth" question comes after several about whether Israel is an apartheid state, is trying to wipe out Palestinians, the Jews have too much power, etc.
It's not a simple one off question about the Holocaust, but an entire framing about Jews, Israel and Hamas.
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I question how representative the 1500 respondents really are. Which young person is going to want to spend time answering 100+ questions on a survey about Israel? How many 18 to 35s even read or care about the Economist?
The results for most of the Jewish questions in the 18 to 35 group lined up pretty neatly pro vs anti (Israel). Maybe they just got sick of answering so many similar questions. Shrug.
I wouldn't necessarily draw too strong a conclusion from a poll like this, about a topic like this, at a time like this. It seems designed to capture the most inflamed opinions (at the expense of a more silent majority).
There is a difference in what you answer on a poll and what you believe. The most obvious answer is when you are asked a controversial political question and even though you don't agree with it your political party does so answer it according to what is in your best interest and not what you actually believe.
Yup, there was another poll that spurred bad reporting, with regards to the US and acceptability of using violence against people with different political beliefs, had it in the range of 30% for both sides iirc
Turns out the poll was really bad, with one of the contributions being people who essentially troll the pollsters for the lulz
The Economist is center-right. Those theories have nothing to do with the rational center. Only the uneducated, far-right, and far-left are espousing that kind of nonsense today.
I'm extremely suspect of how the polls were taken. Where these another one of those get paid to be surveyed things that YouGov is known for? What was their sample size? Was it voluntary identification or did they use other means for verifying information? How were the questions asked?
Recently I've met some intensely stupid kids in the city of Berkeley who keep showing up at city council hearings to shout and bang drums and demand that the city pass a pro-Hamas resolution condemning Israel. It's jarring because half these fools are somehow mixing the Palestinian scarf and rainbow flags, unaware, apparently, that Hamas would throw them off the tops of buildings for the crime of being gay.
Young people are spending way too much time on tiktok and hardly any at all on critical thinking.
I was not there, but a couple of subtleties about what you wrote that I'm sure you are aware of, but you glossed over, and are perhaps important on your narration:
- A condemnation of Israel is not necessarily pro-Hamas
- A palestinian scarf is not necessarily pro-Hamas
- A person with a rainbow flag is not necessarily gay
- A palestinian is not necessarily pro-Hamas, or pro-hanging gay people.
- opposing genocide directed at a population is not an endorsement of any, much less all, policies of any government that claims to represent that people.
> - A person with a rainbow flag is not necessarily gay
This is true in a meaninglessly technical way I guess, but any average well travelled american adult woudld agree that if you see a student-aged protester at a city council meeting in Berkeley with a rainbow flag, there is a really high probability that their rainbow flag attire is meant to show support for LGBT causes.
I'm sure you understand the difference between what you cite ("gay") and what you infer from the flag ("meant to show support for LGBT causes"), so perhaps we even are of the same opinion :)
Hamas and Israel have been continuously at war since Israel fostered the creation of Hamas to split the Palestinian opposition and have an enemy that was easier to use to justify not making peace than the PLO.
Aren't too cautious you mean? Because I've just seen how they treat their prisoners and had Flashback of ISIS.
My opinion listening to Ukrainian civilians and Palestinian civilians, the difference is that at least Russians don't claim to be 'moral' or 'careful', while cheering while an empty UN school explode.
I can be disgusted at both. I can be more disgusted at how much more terrible Israel’s destruction is AND be disgusted that Hamas attacked in the first place. And still not be pro-either-side.
The amount of death and the kind of death happening is disgusting. Period.
I think the “stupid” ones, to borrow your word, are the ones refusing to see that.
"Palestine = Hamas and being against Israel is pro-terrorism." critical thinking, indeed.
and i guess we shouldn't advocate for saving innocent lives, because some members of the same population don't support gay rights? incidentally, how do you feel when gay people in your country protest for equal rights?
> Now for the harder part: why do some young Americans embrace such views? Perhaps surprisingly, education levels do not appear to be the culprit... the proportion of respondents who believe that the Holocaust is a myth is similar across all levels of education. Social media might play a role. According to a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Centre, Americans under 30 are about as likely to trust information on social media as they are to trust national news organisations. More recently Pew found that 32% of those aged 18-29 get their news from TikTok.
Question asked. Question answered.
There is legitimate debate around the deterioration of news organizations as accurate, trusted sources of information. But TikTok and its ilk are nothing but propaganda vectors, and not in a direction we are going to enjoy going.
What counts as a 'myth'? They may ignore the mainstream information on details but I doubt many are saying nothing happened.
The media in this case makes a point that we should know about this genocide, but I wonder what effect holding genocides in public consciousness does? Will remembering that Japanese Americans lost their California land prevent further land seizure? Will knowing about the butchering of native Americans stop their mistreatment? Did denying the Armenian genocide help Azerbaijan take over?
Will knowing about the Holocaust or believing it happened prevent Jewish hatred? All the Nazis online either deny the Holocaust or want it to happen. Knowledge doesn't help.
In one survey from 2020 of GenZ + Millennials in the US (, 63% did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. In the same survey, 11% believe Jews caused the Holocaust.
But wait, it gets even worse. Top academic institutions in the US don't have moral clarity the calling for the genocide of Jews, as we witnessed over the last couple of weeks.
I mean, so were communists, anarchists, and queer folks.
The difference is that the folks who own the west agreed that those things were worth killing off, so after the war they reinstated all the folks who were in charge of fighting those things via stuff like Gladio and other anti-leftist post-war operations.
So of course they aren't going to teach that fact any more than they'd let folks teach about US chattel slavery or the genocide of indigenous folks who used to live where the US is right now.
My brain immediately translated the headline into "One in five young Americans is a trollish little asshole."
It's well known that actual belief and poll answers do not align, but here in particular I feel like there's an impish desire to give the "wrong" answer, and that's what the poll is measuring, rather than simple misinformation.
93% of teens use YouTube and 63% use TikTok, and 20% "almost constantly" [1]
Imagine if 93% of _all_ people used TikTok "almost constantly", and imagine if the content consisted almost entirely of misinformation causing instability at scale in alarming, obvious ways.
Does it matter whether this outcome is driven by malicious foreign actors or uncaring algorithms optimizing profits? Shouldn't it be restricted on principle?
Free speech should be protected for individuals and also groups at some scale. But why should entities with vast, nearly universal reach among the youth be permitted to delude them at scale to the detriment of our collective future? This can't be the right answer to free speech.
A real “be careful what you wish for” tale. When I think back to the advent of the World Wide Web, breaking the mainstream media’s hold on information distribution seemed like such a wonderful possibility.
Fast forward a few decades and here we are: corporate controlled social media networks are indiscriminately pushing absolutely anything that keeps eyeballs engaged in front of their users who treat it all as fact.
I can’t quite say I’m nostalgic for the days of mainstream media domination but it feels increasingly like we jumped from the frying pan into the fire. At least it was accountable: you might not like an article the Washington Post or the New York Times published but you’d know who wrote it and you’d know who published it. If you didn’t want to read it you could just not read the paper any more. Now we have faceless anonymous social media accounts pushing any old crap and the networks themselves holding up their hands and saying “who, me? Oh, that’s nothing to do with me!”.