a new survey reveals where more than genz teens get their news and according to deoe it's mainly on social media on those platforms a CBS News investigation found misinformation about the conflict between Israel and Hamas is widespread and it can be tough to distinguish what's real National correspondent Tom Hansen explains the consequences of being misinformed and what can be done to help find the truth the sphere in Las Vegas with over 1 million lights countless tourists have traveled to this architectural Marvel to Feast their eyes on a giant eye or spectacular views of the Moon
and this viral Instagram post claims to show after the war started the sphere even transformed into a massive Israeli flag in solidarity but did that really happen real or fake that's exactly what these students at Highland Park High School in Dallas Texas are trying to figure out raise your hand if it's real this is a fake now when you're pulling information off of social media how do you know that it's accurate if from the first past I truly can't tell if it's real or not usually put it into a reverse image search Brandon Jackson leads
this media literacy course it focuses on misinformation which is incorrect or misleading and disinformation which is deliberately deceptive is there any part of you that's like if that's fake then what's actually real all the time you have this feeling in your chest almost where oh that was fake I totally thought that was real makes you feel stupid I thought I was smarter than that the lessons are a counter offensive to the information Wars playing out on social media bringing the shock and horror of a bloody conflict more than 7,000 Mi away directly to the screens
of American teenagers are you guys seeing the same war that your parents are seeing definitely not these students tell us what they see on their phones whether real or fake shapes how they see world events it can cause like someone to like pick a side or even change their mind about what they previously thought since it's so like polarizing video has a kind of immediacy but we need to help people understand how to evaluate a video Stanford researchers found teens are not evaluating enough to recognize the Deluge of misinformation online and that can have dangerous
consequences we are in a new economy and we need to understand that the goal of this economy is to enrage us as an experiment we wanted to see for ourselves just how challenging it is to find the truth online with the help of my investigative producer we created three profiles on Instagram and Tik Tok I think we're curious when you start from a blank slate what comes at you when you search certain terms so how are we going to set it up we we have three different phones and along with that we got three separate
SIM cards we posed as gender neutral 17-year-olds interested in learning more about the Israel Hamas conflict our first account tailor searched these terms about Israel 19.7 million posts Andy our second account searched these terms lots of Palestinian flags and our third Alias Sam typed in both searches we also started following accounts 81.2 so we're going to follow that one and liking three posts for each one if this works the way it seems in the background now the algorithm should be curating things on that topic today we're going to see what the algorithm gives us back
oh that is graphic you can see a bone sticking out of his leg it's hard to watch those really hard to watch videos became a pattern on the accounts where we included Search terms like the Palestinian flag after adding a couple more searches on each account our feeds were full of false information on all three I can't believe I'm doing this like this video of someone claiming to work in a Gaza hospital I had to fix a fra for a five a 5ye old boy without Mor and analysis revealed this video was staged that video
has already been widely debunked if I am searching for information about this conflict that still pops up yeah no matter if the video gets debunked it gets reposted and that they can still go viral the same thing happened with this video that popped up on our account where we searched Israel Centric terms it reported to show an Iranian war plane landing on an Israeli aircraft carrier in an attack obviously that would generate Global headlines the way that that looked it looks like a video game to me Dan Evan at the news literacy project had some
doubts as well the nonpartisan organization teaches students how to tell fact from fiction on social media the same tip that I give every single time is to slow down look for authenticity look for the source look for evidence uh look for reasoning and to look for the context Evan calls it pre-b in other words doing your own fact checking before you form an opinion when you're developing you know your views about the world these false claims alter that they drag people down more dangerous paths right now 18 states in the US offer some form of
media literacy education or resources for students but only four of them require a media literacy curriculum for all students K through 12 people are recognizing how unprepared we were for the internet and we're catching up and we are trying to get this stuff into schools and I think more schools are being open to that schools like the one we visited in Dallas where students believe this kind of curriculum could make a difference not only in the classroom but also in the world I hope that people in our generation start to want to become more educated
about issues and like it can just be really dangerous if we don't seek out the real information Tom h CBS News and so you might be wondering can you make these algorithms actually stop Tik Tok now allows users in Europe uh Europe to outt out of its algorithm and so far Tik Tok and Instagram do not offer that option here in the us both say that they're fighting the spread of information and working with fact checkers
