You are way, way overthinking this. The entire study is multiple results all pointing to kids not understanding how incentives distort content.

> They did better at recognizing Google’s “sponsored” results as ads, but about 40% of teens said they thought it meant those results were popular or of high quality.

Emphasis mine

It's both, these results are paid for, but also they are the ones most likely to receive the clicks aka most popular. Ad Rank = Max CPC Bid x Quality Score. You can pay, but still your ads won't be shown, while if you have good ads they will be clicked most at shown in front most frequently.

They really should word these exercises better.

Here 80% of the kids got it right, because both of those factors influence it. You need both.

I suspect you don't spend much time around your average kid, do you?

I am a kid myself however.

Right, and you're completely deluded about what this study is saying.

I think it's making the age old claim every generation makes that "the youth nowadays are ruined".

The correct rebuttal to that claim is not "they say that all the time!" but "the claim is untrue and here is why."

That is what you attempted to do, so credit there, but you failed in that effort because fucking obviously the surveyed teens are not pointing to secondary or tertiary effects of micro-optimizations in ad auctioning algorithms when they say "Sponsored post means more trustworthy content!"

Sometimes bad things do happen. Sometimes things get worse for people. You can't brush it all of by just saying, "well yeah they said bad things were happening before though and actually they're still pretty good."

It totally is worth applying a bit of discount factor due to the effect you're pointing to, but that should not be even close to a 100% discount. The article isn't "making the claim that x," it's showing data.

I'll make more arguments:

1. The questions / answer options are flawed and there's multiple interpretations.

2. The study itself looks to have certain biases on what is right or wrong. Binary biases when life and World is much more complex than that.

3. The study based on the structure seems set out to prove the point they wanted to prove.

4. Many teenagers don't even care about the questions/answers or are edgy and will respond however they want without thought. And that's fine, that's normal for teenagers.

5. Countless of unfounded speculative statements based on those metrics.

Here's one more example of the study that seems ridiculous to me:

The highlighted conclusion:

"""More than 8 in 10 teens misjudge strength of U.S. press freedoms, compared with the 2024 Reporters Without Borders ranking"""

The scoring method

---

Notes: Results based on the 1,102 teens who responded to this question. Items may not sum exactly to 100% due to rounding. Rankings of 1-10 were categorized as "much stronger," rankings of 11-44 were categorized as "somewhat stronger," rankings of 45-65 were categorized as "close to/exactly," rankings of 66-100 were categorized as "somewhat weaker" and rankings of 101-180 were categorized as "much weaker." Source: SSRS survey for the News Literacy Project conducted online from May 17 - 28, 2024, with 1,110 teenagers ages 13-18 nationwide.

---

Basically they had to pick US as the 45th to 65th out of all the countries in the World for press freedoms ranking. And if they didn't pick in that range, it's counted as "misjudging". That's ridiculous. Why did they pick this range specifically?

It's ironic to me that this is a study on media literacy.

These seem like conclusions you've arrived at, not arguments supporting those conclusions.

Do you think that the statement

"""More than 8 in 10 teens misjudge strength of U.S. press freedoms, compared with the 2024 Reporters Without Borders ranking"""

Is a logical conclusion to categorize you to misjudge the strength if you don't put US in the 45th to 65th position from all the countries in the World?

E.g. you put it as 40th or similar, it means you are "misjudging strength of US press freedoms"? I imagine they don't even know half the countries in the ranking beating US, and even less so would they know how the press is for each and of those countries.

What position would you have guessed yourself?

This is a fair critique! I think that's a badly designed question. The questions most people are talking about in this thread, however, are not.

I get these kind of thoughts about most of the questions there, and starting from the headline picked by fastcompany.

E.g. the first task where they had to ID an ad based on there being certain text such as “WP BrandStudio” and “Content from Safeway.” and then "Only 50%" of teens specified it's an ad. While 30% thought it was opinion, which is a valid and harmless guess to me if you have never heard of those terms. So 80% picked the harmless option in my view.

Next task as well. In my view 86% had the harmless option.

So overall I think depending on the questions you can get very different results, from which you can make very different conclusions.

And based on the overall "vibe" I get from the study it seems like they were set out to prove this and not do a fair study on the topic.

There being a title like "Commentary: Could Taylor Swift be the biggest election influencer of them all?" and the correct answer being an "opinion". It just seems like a "pondering essay" of some sort rather than opinion. I wouldn't call an essay an opinion. I understand that it is labelled as "opinion piece", but I don't see it to be harmful to not be able to label it as such when to me the label intuitively doesn't seem accurate.

Only 12% marked it as news.

The distinction between ad and opinion in that example is very strong and extremely clear. The fact that you think it's a blurry distinction is... exactly what the study is arguing.

> And based on the overall "vibe" I get from the study it seems like they were set out to prove this and not do a fair study on the topic.

I would caution against arbitrarily discounting information because you don't like its "vibe." Even if the vibe is off or unfair, it turns out good information can come from unfriendly sources.

To me ultimately all of these are "labels". It doesn't necessarily matter how you label something. I can tell you with high certainty that when I was a teenager, it wouldn't have made any practical difference whether I thought the piece about "Vegan meat being as good as the real meat" was an ad or it was an opinion. Neither of those would've been "the truth" for me. Even if it it's an ad, it is still an opinion. And if it's an opinion, it could just be opinion from a vegan propagandist. I may have marked it as opinion just because I have no good way to tell for sure that it's paid for, based on that screenshot, unless I know exactly what the terms above mean and I'm familiar with. I assume I wouldn't have been able to Google during the survey. All of these survey questions are about how you label something, while ignoring common sense completely. And you could orchestrate any sorts of metrics results depending on what content you provide and how you form the question. Whether the above is an ad or an opinion, I wouldn't as teen have believed that vegan meat was as good as the real thing unless I've tried it myself.

The label doesn't matter, what matters is what do you start to take as fact or belief based on the content given. The correct question should've been "To what extent does this article change your belief/opinion about vegan meat being as good as the real thing?".

If you want to test the true thing, ask questions where answers to those questions actually matter in implicating certain beliefs, not just how good people are knowing at exact definition of certain labels. That's anti common sense and literacy.

> I would caution against arbitrarily discounting information because you don't like its "vibe."

I mean I looked at the questions and tried to figure out how I would've approached them as a teen, and what I would've answered. I did it on the basis of a skeptical vibe, because of the initial titles and everything was trying to portray a certain narrative which is not very scientific. So then of course I was biased to play devil's advocate, but none the less, I believe that these results don't carry much meaning and the conclusions that are made, is not something that can really be made from this particular data. It would be harmful to consider an AD an actual factual news report, but this is what very few did. Also considering opinion as a factual news report would've been bad, but again only very few did. If you look at harmful vs harmless labelling then the stats don't look that bad at all. Someone considering the piece about elections and Taylor Swift an entertainment instead of opinion. This is pretty harmless.

I do still remember what I was like as a teen, I remember my thought process, and I can still relate to myself at that point.