Most young people have relatively good knowledge and make appropriate efforts to find out whether certain news or other media content contains misinformation, however, examinations into their ability to think logically and careful reading, show that only 1 out of 100 meet the criteria for such a matter.
This was demonstrated by new research conducted through the “Critical Thinking for Citizens with Media Dexterity – CriThink” project, by the Foundation for Internet and Society “Metamorphosis” and “Eurothink” – Center for European Strategies, supported by the European Union.
With a survey carried out on 301 students aged 18.5 to 23 years old, in which male and female gender were almost equally included, interesting results were obtained regarding how young people are informed, which media outlets they follow, but mostly interesting, was whether they can recognize misinformation and determine whether something is true or not. Students from the Faculty of Law at UKIM, the Faculty of Security at Bitola University and students of legal, political and technical sciences at the South East European University gave the answers.
Aleksandar Stojanovski, senior researcher at “Eurothink” – Center for European Strategies, explained, the respondents, who are mostly predominated by freshmen, answering questions gave an interesting picture of how young people really perceive themselves, that is, although they generally say that they meet the intellectual effort and generally check that some information they receive from social networks and the media are correct or not, only 1 out of 100 responded correctly to the four logical questions aimed at monitoring how they thought.
“Only three out of 301 responded correctly to all four logical questions, which are not connected either with language skills or with some special knowledge, but only how they think. One of the questions showed that they did not even devote themselves to reading the question properly, but only started to read it. If a person reads the whole question, he will immediately understand the correct answer. It speaks to how much young people actually read,” said Stojanovski.
The survey found that most young people said they wanted to check things they read, but most often they did not. When it comes to the places where they reach the information, social networking sites and websites are predominant, then television. However, what the survey did find was that young people prefer foreign content versus domestic ones, and almost all of them do not watch call in TV programs, ie only one respondent reported that he does. Then on the list of popularity among adolescents is the printed media, and the radio is the last one, although the number of students who follow these two types of media are very small and can counted on one hand.
When it comes to the popularity of social networks, 92.4% of the respondents chose Instagram, and 91.7% Facebook, and then for other social networks – Snapcat, Twitter and Linkedin.
