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[Misleading] First misinformation susceptibility test finds 'very online' Gen Z and millennials are most vulnerable to fake news

phys.org First misinformation susceptibility test finds 'very online' Gen Z and millennials are most vulnerable to fake news

University of Cambridge psychologists have developed the first validated "misinformation susceptibility test": a quick two-minute quiz that gives a solid indication of how vulnerable a person is to being duped by the kind of fabricated news that floods online spaces.

First misinformation susceptibility test finds 'very online' Gen Z and millennials are most vulnerable to fake news

Researchers want the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app/. Selecting true or false against 20 headlines gives the user a set of scores and a "resilience" ranking that compares them to the wider U.S. population. It takes less than two minutes to complete.

The paper

Edit: the article might be misrepresenting the study and its findings, so it's worth checking the paper itself. (See @realChem 's comment in the thread).

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  • Weird. The only people I know that continually and aggressively bring up very obvious misinformation are the 50+ people in my life.

    • I think the young feel immune, and that they feel socially progressive news cannot be lies because "that is not what our side does, we have ethics".

      It's not true in practice, though. Fake news are used to sow division, and making people angry on both sides is part of it. The far-right, boomer fake news are more obvious because they are outlandish, but there's more than that out there.

    • That's anecdotal experience, I'm 50+ and I got 19/20, I 100% identified all fakes and marked fake one of the real ones, so I'm on the skeptical side of things.

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