Ok, this is not going to be a well formulated question, because the concerns behind it are nebulous in my own head.
Some assumptions I have, that clearly inform the question that follows: I believe commercial, state, and others have sophisticated methods of influencing what I see on social media and thus, in part, what I think. I also believe that someone more willing to believe in the types of conspiratorial beliefs I’ve just expressed are more likely to be manipulated by information they’re exposed to. And, yes, I fully appreciate the irony of those beliefs.
My child is adult enough that belief patterns I encourage are very unlikely to become deep patterns. That is, I’d have to work to indoctinate my son, and he’d actively resist if my indoctrination was outside of societal norms.
He didn’t grow up exposed to the social media I suspect children do now.
How does a parent inoculate a child to the influence of social media without also creating a mindset willing to believe in a nebulous “them” that controls things—a mindset, I believe, that makes a person more likely to be controlled?
Well, there’s not just one Them.
The Them who wrote your American history textbook and glossed over the centrality of slavery to the Confederate cause, aren’t the same Them who write TV sitcoms that propagate stereotypes of bumbling clueless men entitled to dump all the emotional labor on their hyper-competent women partners.
The Them who fund intrusive social media, aren’t the same Them who dial down the yellow-light time on your traffic lights to catch more people with red-light cameras.
And the closer you look, the less it looks like a Them at all.
The individual TV writers were really trying to be good TV writers, in the social & economic context of TV studios.
The history textbook people were mostly actual professors. They want you to have a good history textbook. But the Texas Board of Education is giving them a hard time.
Heck, the social-media programmers mostly just wanna launch cool stuff.
The yellow-light people, though? They have no goddamn excuse.
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I totally see your point with “starting off with empathy”. I think it’s very noble. I don’t think I could do it myself though. At least not 100% of the time. I’ve been metaphorically shat on so many times in so many different ways over the years that it’s difficult to not immediately be suspicious of a lot of things. For example, it’s hard to think critically about where the opinion is coming from/empathize with the writer of an article explaining why a gender-affirming care ban is Good Actually, when you yourself are some form of trans. It’s hard to think critically about an article like that, when you know that 90% of the other people reading said article are reading it at face value and agreeing with it, & not thinking things like ‘where is the basis for this opinion coming from’. My empathy battery is so constantly drained so quickly nowadays that trying to use the empathy thinking ways for every bigoted article I see would cause my brain to explode I think, lol.
It’s so hard to see from your perspective sometimes. Feels like everything’s a conspiracy haha. But you are 100% correct.
The “them” we feel is the sum of all human outcomes, personified as a discrete organism. Maybe all of humanity is one big mega-organism and thats the “them”.
Yeah, but in the end all those people get their orders from higher up, and in the end they execute the vision of the people in charge. All of this only to get their pay to be able to afford to live with a roof over their head and food on the table.
I feel the “order” is more in line with “make me a sitcome that targets young man and will make me a lot of money” rather than “propagate misogyny and stereotypes”. Both lead to Big Bang Theory though.
Encourage critical thinking skills and empathy. 👍
My son was taught in school (UK) how to research on the web. You can never be sure how much they take in but he asked us one day why we were still watching the main stream news broadcasters - BBC, Sky, ITN. In a space of a couple of minutes he produced the original from the web for most of their stories, alternative views and pros and cons for most of the views. I learnt a lot that day and can honestly say I think his school did an excellent job. He does his own research and forms his own opinion - sometimes I don’t agree but that’s OK - the key is he can articulate his reasoning and provide evidence to support his view. I’m not sure as a parent if I’d have been as good a teacher or as impartial. I’m happy it’s part of the syllabus in UK - I’m really not sure I’d be so happy if we lived in Florida for the school to teach it. Too much state intervention.
For some reason this feels really strange to hear from the uk. I was under the impression things where moving more authoritarian with face detection cameras, encryption forbidden and id for pornsites. Usually those kind of government hate informed citizens and push propaganda. But maybe its just me who has been propagandized about the uk ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The government is also made up of different groups. Whilst one hand (security) may get more authoritarian, another hand (education) may encourage more liberal(?*) concepts, like knowing your source.
*I couldn’t think of the right word for this.
Teach him early and remind him often about how to vet his sources. Things like making sure you know who’s funding what you’re reading, what the political reputation of the sites you’re reading on are, and so forth.
Honestly, this is probably the single most important internet skill that exists, second only to (maybe) information security / data privacy, and I didn’t get my first serious classroom lesson on this until I was in my Master’s degree program. This is a skill people need from goddamn grade school these days.
Yes, it can be tedious, yes it can be exhausting, but if you want to understand who is, or could be, pulling your strings, you have to understand how to vet your sources. Never learning to do this is the path to Fox News viewership.
I would agree with the other comments here and say the best thing to do would be to vet sources. Things like ‘looking through a commenter’s history’ or ‘reading the About Us section of a news site’ and ‘looking at more than just the top 3 results from Google for sources’.
I found that Minecraft is actually a pretty good teacher. There are servers (like hypixel.net) out there where kids can play different games or buy plots of lands with coins to run shops and stuff.
My kid has seen people advertising bullshit, scams, manipulation, but also genuinely good and nice people but also betrayal from people he thought to be good.
The manipulation isn’t as good as in the real world. But it’s good enough for discussions on how it’s done in the real world.
Interesting concept to have Minecraft as a kind of safe space to learn about idiots and necessary precautions on the internet. My kids are 3 and 4, so the age of Minecraft is right around the corner and I’m looking forward to it :)
Instead of focusing on specifics (online, “they”) focus on the basics.
Where does any piece of information come from? What are the underlying assumptions in it? How is it framed? How is it circulated? What effect does it have? Etc. If people automatically think critically, they are way less susceptible.
This comment reminds me of CrashCourse Navigating Digital Information which taught me fact checking and how to look up info on the internet. Playlist Here
I have no experience in teaching kids these concepts but I’m interested in them.
The key concepts to look at are information literacy, media literacy and when it comes to online things it’s dark patterns when it comes to user interfaces. https://youtu.be/kxkrdLI6e6M
I have read that Estonia has started “inoculating” kids in school against misinformation, this article touches a bit on some strategies. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220128-the-country-inoculating-against-disinformation
What I have found is that there are a lot of really good paid magazines and blogs that are really fun to read and are full of lots of accurate information instead of, well, you know. When I was a kid my dad would subscribe to discover magazine, popular science, popular mechanic, and national geographic and I would eat them all up, a lot of those stories have shaped me as an adult.
I wonder if I was in your position if I would gift my child whatever paid subscriptions were reasonable for magazines or blogs that encompasses their interests. My local library actually gives me most of these magazines in digital format for free and I still like reading them on my tablet. I suppose more modern versions of this would be. If you want to replace YouTube, I would look into giving them a nebula subscription and they’ll never have to hear another ad again.
Good luck, I remember being a teenager and I remember hating almost everything my parents proposed so I hope you can find a way to inspire your children and I don’t think it’ll be easy.
There’s no magic bullet. Manipulation exists, and manipulation based on claims of manipulation exists.
I recommend you explain but don’t force your view of the world onto kids, and tech kids how to think well for themselves instead. So, just steer them towards things like history, social sciences and to a degree hard sciences and let them make sense of the world for themselves.
You cannot control what someone does or doesn’t believe but you can teach ways to deal with an abundance of information and political agendas.
To teach a person to correctly look behind the curtain without falling into conspiracy is the greatest gift. My parents failed to do so because they hated discussing topics in a neutral way. They also knew nothing about philosophy or propaganda.
Same way parents can teach stoic wisdom without raising an emotionless kid. Same way we can teach morals and responsibilities without the need of any religion.
I would summarize that parents just should be parents. Kids mirror parents and being calm and focused is so important. My parents were and are always angry and this got imprinted in my subconsciousness, which sucks. (Bully target) Thankful most people grow up fast school age.
For example last weekend I talked to my cousin about some good news sites, that are as unbiased as possible. (In Germany we thankfully have independent press). I think it’s important to grow up not drifting in desperation of “all news fake. Voting doesn’t matter”, it makes one feel helpless and thats the last thing a kid should have to endure.
Understanding how to identify wrong information, as the fake news they are, with examples and exposition is so important.
I am not a parent. I have a little sister who’s quite young, and everything I do with her i try to do with intent and presence, making her think. Its all i can do personally. I think mindfulness should be taught, since it needs practice to achieve. It helps that she’s a little smart ass.
Great topic btw
I really agree with a lot of this. Especially information literacy, using libraries, and simply paying for the better services.
But also simply said. World is always changing and we do not have well understood, well documented strategies for shaping kids as their information/threat landscape evolves. Especially tue disinformation and other online threats were just not a topic until … 2017 or so. We there is a lot to learn.
I have a few thoughts on that one. First, I‘d try and teach that changing one‘s opinion based on new information is good and admirable and that not knowing something or not having an opinion on something one doesn‘t understand is fine.
Specifically for media, something like this paper is excellent though obviously not child friendly, I think even way too little adults are aware of this sort of framing that media and companies regularly do:
So trying to show/explain, how does framing something differently change the perceptions of people?
Another important thing in my mind is teaching something like Plato‘s allegory of the cave, so how we are presented the world is how we see the world and nobody knows everything about it because we only see a small part of it. That ties back in with my point about it being good to question one‘s beliefs from time to time.
The abstract for that paper is very interesting. Thanks for that link.
I agree that developing critical thinking skills, a willingness to question one’s beliefs, and a comfort with not knowing enough to have an opinion are all ways to help protect from manipulation, and likely ways that don’t lead to conspiratorial thinking.
In my mind there is no them, but individuals, trying to achieve their own goals. Everyone has some incentive to misinterpret and twist truth. It might be just so it fits with their own biases and world view little better. The only reasonable way to use information online is to follow evidence based information and look for trusthworthy official sources.
If you already know you have the correct worldview, then just present the data to him that would lead someone to believe in your worldview. You can’t be immune to ideology without having one of your own. Someone who drifts through life believing nothing will believe anything.
Part of what prompted my question is that I doubt I have the correct worldview because I believe I’m influenced.
Who’s to say whose world view is “correct”. I’d say it’s more important to do as other commenters have said, encourage critical thinking and research.
The child is their own person, not an extension of the parent to be influenced.
