Just like the fight against smoking, combating misinformation will be a complex and ongoing effort, ... [+] involving a mix of sensible regulation, content moderation, and warnings, along with education.

If you are a parent of a teenager, you have heard and maybe even worried about the rise of TikTok. The social media platforms users are mostly teens and younger kids, who use it to share short videos. Kids often imitate dances from the site, using a flurry of hand and arm movements. Think handjive meets hip hop.

TikTok is perhaps best known for Trumps ill-fated attempt to ban it because of its ties to China, but it has a large fake news problem too. Election misinformation was prevalent on the platform; and this summer, the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory exploded on TikTok.

This is alarming since young users are often not yet media savvy, but it also raises some broader questions about why exactly fake news on social media spreads. More specifically, is the main problem political bias or is it just a lack of thinking? Should I be worried about my child visiting TikTok given its fake news problem?

In todays highly polarized political environment, with fragmented media constructing alternative realities for their readers and viewers, it might seem obvious that the main culprit behind the prevalence of misinformation is motivated reasoning, or types of tribalistic thinking. In other words, people believe what they want to believe and disregard countervailing evidence, and social media platforms like TikTok just make the problem worse by pushing certain messages via algorithms.

But a new paper, synthesizing previous research, suggests the fake news problem extends beyond partisan actors and ultimately implicates the social media environment of apps like Tik Tok and the type of thinking they foster or fail to foster.

According to the authors Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand, It seems that people fall for fake news because they do not stop and reflect sufficiently on their prior knowledge and not because their reasoning is hijacked by political motivations.

If true, the research can have important implications since it suggests education and small nudge interventions can be an effective perhaps the most effective tool in countering misinformation.

Just as important, the research also helps explain why kids, who usually dont yet have particularly strong political biases, are more susceptible to misinformation on TikTok and other social media sites.

First, a bit about one of Pennycook and Rands experiments. They asked subjects to judge the accuracy of fake news headlines and then set out to determine whether their competence correlated with political identification. What they found was that poor news judgment correlated much more strongly with poor performance on Cognitive Reflection Test than with political ideology. (CRTs measure takers ability to step back from immediate, intuitive answers and do more reflection.)

Other experiments suggest similarly that sharing fake news on social media is driven more by inattention and emotion than ideology. The social media context itself, write Pennycook and Rand, distracts people from prioritizing the truth when they decide what to share.

The bizarre reemergence of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory on TikTok seems to at least partially validate Pennycook and Rands research. The spread of the theory amongst younger users doesnt seem to be motivated by hatred and suspicion of elites like it was in its initial iteration, but simply by entertainment value, inattention, and the desire to share.

This may make it seem relatively harmless, but as weve seen time and again, no matter how bizarre and even humorous these theories seem on their face, they can still carry real-world impact down the line.

There are few important caveats to Rand and Pennycooks research. It pertains to explicitly false news, rather than simply hyperpartisan sources that can be extremely misleading without being fake. Also, it is difficult to know how the experimental conditions influenced the participants performance.

Then again, that is part of the point of this research. It suggests that changing the frame of mind of news consumers making them more active and attentive may be enough to improve their behavior around certain content. Pennycook and Rand favor nudges like having participants rate headlines for accuracy, or asking them to explain how they know something to be true or false. These might be introduced by social media platforms themselves or by third-parties through ads. Reboots own research on fake news has similarly found that quick educational interventions like a short video can also have a beneficial impact.

As the researchers point out, these interventions avoid turning Facebook and Twitter into censors or arbiters of truth. Instead, they leverage users own (often latent) ability to make such determinations themselves.

In other words, people are more capable of good reasoning than we are sometimes prepared to give them credit for. The key is to put them in a position to put that reasoning into action. With young people, this means providing them with the education early in life to think critically and develop media literacy skills something were hard at work on at Reboot. And it means disrupting the social media environments that lead both adults and kids to think poorly or not think at all.

So, is Tik Tok safe? Parents should keep their childrens critical thinking skills in mind as they begin to use sites like TikTok. This doesnt mean banning the app outright, but it might mean talking through the problems of misinformation on social media and the ways in which social media can distort our thinking more generally.

As for fake news more broadly, education is not the only piece of the puzzle. Just like the fight against smoking, combating misinformation will be a complex and ongoing effort, involving a mix of sensible regulation, content moderation, and warnings, along with education.

We cant expect to ever stamp out misinformation completely or to regulate it out of existence, as attractive as those options might seem. Rather, to overcome the misinformation crisis, we have to believe in each other and in the power of human reason. Thinking, in this case, can make it so.

Go here to read the rest:

The TikTok Of The Fake News Clock: Thinking Our Way Out Of The Fake News Crisis - Forbes