Sixteen-year-old Andie Murphy isn’t on TikTok. She turned off tracking on YouTube and deleted Instagram months ago over its artificial intelligence policy and concerns about posts being used to train AI. The rise of generative AI makes news literacy more important than ever before, particularly for children and teens.

As much as possible, the high school junior has tried to set up guardrails on rapid-fire social feeds to limit scrolling and the allure of algorithms’ suggestions. “For my own self control,” she said.

Murphy may be an outlier among her peers, but increasingly many teens share her feelings of information overload and awareness that they can’t trust everything they read on social media. “There’s just so much bad information out there that it sometimes gets jumbled up,” Murphy said. “It’s just hard to discern what someone’s intent is with something.”

As members of Gen Z — born between 1997 and 2012 — high school students like Murphy have grown up with smartphones and social media. It’s a digital world where algorithms fuel endless scrolling and conspiracy theories feel like the norm.

That’s particularly true for Murphy and her classmates at Owasso High School in Owasso, Oklahoma, a quickly growing Tulsa suburb of 39,000. It’s a place that last year felt the intense glare of going viral and the chaotic flow of news, half-truths and hate following the death of Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old nonbinary student who died a day after an altercation in the girls’ bathroom.

As a news literacy expert working to support educators, I recently spoke with 12 students at Owasso High School about their news habits and what it’s like trying to find credible information in an online environment that constantly tests their ability to know what’s true.

Here are four takeaways from our conversations.

1. Teens are drawn to conspiracy theories — and may not realize they can lead down dangerous rabbit holes.

A fall 2024 study by the News Literacy Project found that eight in 10 teens on social media say they encounter conspiracy theories, with 81% of those teens reporting that they are inclined to believe at least one of them.

Read the full article about news literacy for teenagers by Hannah Covington at The 74.