The qualitative study was presented on Monday at a conference in the lower house of the Polish parliament.
The event, titled “Between Fact and Feed,” was held under the auspices of the parliamentary Commission for Children and Youth together with Korczak University – Academy of Applied Sciences in Warsaw.
One of the report’s co-authors, sociologist Anna Buchner, said that young people tend to check information in an intuitive way rather than through systematic fact-checking.
“They increasingly use ChatGPT for this, assuming that it always provides true information,” she warned.
ChatGPT is a chatbot developed by the US artificial intelligence company OpenAI, widely used around the world as a quick source of answers.
Buchner added that the teenagers interviewed did not see truth as a fixed state. “In their view, truth has to be produced through action,” she said.
Young people described a process in which they look at different sources, read comments under posts to sense the “trend,” and then filter everything through what feels most convincing to them personally.
The report suggests that while many teenagers are aware that disinformation exists, they feel unable to defend themselves against it.
Co-author Katarzyna Fereniec-Błońska said that respondents talked about “trolls” and political parties using online tactics to win voters.
“They often feel that it is very hard to say what is true and what is false, what is opinion and what is fact,” she said. “Their defensive strategy is sometimes to stop asking that question at all.”
Another co-author, Konrad Ciesiołkiewicz, drew attention to the role of social media platforms and messaging apps in the radicalization of young people. He noted that much of this happens on encrypted services, where the state has no access.
He said that creators of extremist or manipulative content often use highly polished formats that make heavy use of images and humor. This combination, he argued, makes such material attractive and easy for teenagers to absorb.
In his view, children as young as 10 or 11 can already meet the criteria of radicalization, which makes them “a critically important group, a soft underbelly of the social security system from the point of view of psychosocial resilience.”
The researchers also described how young people understand conspiracy theories.
Fereniec-Błońska said respondents saw them in several ways, including as anti-scientific explanations based on belief and opinion, as unlikely but still possible interpretations, as “X-Files-type” alternative stories that are creative and engaging, and as tools used for political, destabilizing, or financial purposes.
“If young people devote their time to conspiracy theories, even if they do not believe them, the algorithms learn from this and show them more and more of that content,” she said. Over time, she added, such theories start to feel normal.
The study found that social media play a central role in how teenagers get information.
Co-author Maria Wierzbicka-Tarkowska said that young people rely heavily on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok and often do not seek out news themselves. Instead, information “falls into their laps” through feeds curated by algorithms.
Researchers referred to this as the “news-finds-me” effect, a term used in media studies to describe people who feel that important news will reach them without active searching.
The report also suggests that teenagers are aware that visual content can have a stronger impact than text.
Because algorithms decide what appears in the feed, Wierzbicka-Tarkowska noted, young users see “a mix of entertainment content with political and serious content,” which can blur the line between the two.
She pointed to research by US psychologist Gloria Mark showing that average attention spans for a single message have shrunk from around two-and-a- half minutes in 2004 to under 1 minute in 2023.
In this context, she said, it is no surprise that the dominant formats on social media last between 15 and 60 seconds, and that keeping a teenager’s attention even for 5 seconds can count as a success.
Despite their heavy reliance on digital tools, young people still look to trusted adults when deciding whether to believe something. Buchner said that “significant adults,” such as parents, teachers and well-known figures seen as knowledgeable on a subject, remain “very important authority figures” that can confirm whether information is credible.
“That shows it is worth talking with young people about issues that we might assume do not interest them,” she said. “By doing so, we give them space to ask questions.”
Ciesiołkiewicz listed several cognitive biases that influence how young people process information, including the tendency to follow their own group, to trust perceived authorities, and to give more weight to images than to written words.
Humor, he added, plays a special role because it lowers defenses and makes messages easier to accept.
The research was carried out in March by the Center for Social and Information Analysis at Korczak University – Academy of Applied Sciences, in cooperation with the parliamentary Commission for Children and Youth.
The team conducted 30 in-depth individual telephone interviews with young people aged 14 to 19 living in six different locations across Poland.
Three of the co-authors, Buchner, Fereniec-Błońska, and Wierzbicka-Tarkowska, also run the independent research agency Empowermind, which specializes in qualitative studies on young people and groups at risk of exclusion.
(rt)
Source: PAP