Asklemmy

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.

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.

Encourage critical thinking skills and empathy. 👍

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

It all tastes practice. Critical thinking and learning what to look out for will go a long way. Search for digital literacy, which are being taught in some schools now

https://www.learningforjustice.org/frameworks/digital-literacy

https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/digital-media-literacy/what-is-fake-news/1/

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:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334400431_Controlling_the_Narrative_An_Initial_Investigation_of_Doublespeak

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 teach 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.

Research. Verification. Take in each story knowing that there is a possibility it could be fabricated, then use objective sources and/or common sense to discern their veracity. Stories from sources that prove themselves trustworthy can (generally) be trusted in the future.

Or put simply: do your homework, trust but verify.

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.

Critical thinking can be a pain for life, I have great power in critical thinking and I'm always in tremendous pain. Let your son be happy instead of becoming who you want him to be.