Black Teens Can Sniff Out This Kind of Social Media Disinformation Better Than Their White Peers Can

“White genocide” in South Africa was a conspiracy theory put forth on X’s ai platform Grok last year. Before that, ChatGPT was found to give racist responses when asked certain questions about African Americans. Those examples are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the flow of disinformation found online, say experts, and teens can often have trouble discerning exactly what’s trustworthy and what’s not.

But a new study has found that Black and Latino teens may have significantly more digital literacy skills than their white peers, particularly when it comes to content related to race and ethnicity. These teens are not only identifying false claims and racist propaganda more quickly, but they’re more likely to verify posts with credible sources and respond with fact-based corrections.

According to the study, recently published in the journal New Media & Society and announced on Feb. 2 by the researchers’ University of California Riverside, high schools are teaching students about media literacy but are not addressing racial aspects of online disinformation. This is especially true now, the researchers say, as U.S. instructors have been hampered by political backlash for teaching about critical race theory and other aspects of systemic racism.

“This work reveals that adolescents of color are already engaging in sophisticated forms of digital literacy,” Avriel Epps, ai expert, assistant professor in UC Riverside’s School of Education, and lead author of the study, said in a press release. “They have developed these critical skills in many cases from their lived experiences navigating online racism, not necessarily from school-based instruction.”

The findings run counter to long-held assumptions and earlier research asserting that Black teens are less digitally literate than other youths, which left Epps suspicious. 

For this study, Epps joined forces with Brendesha Tynes, a University of Southern California professor of education and psychology and the principal investigator of the National Survey of Critical Digital Literacy, a longitudinal research study examining the critical digital literacy skills among youth ages 11 to 19.

Then they asked more than 100 Black adolescents and comparable numbers of Latino and white peers to track daily how often they analyzed, responded to, or ignored race-related digital content. The responses showed clear racial differences in what the study defines as Critical Race Digital Literacy, or CRDL.

“It is essentially being able to recognize, critique, and evaluate digital media that young people consume with a lens that’s focused on race and how it manifests racism,” Tynes said.

The findings showed a clear pattern: Many Black and Latino teens were more likely to challenge racist content, either by calling out false information on their own social media posts or by sharing articles from reputable sources to counter the false narratives.

“These teens are often doing this work for their communities,” Epps said. “It’s very possible they’re posting accurate information about social justice movements or correcting harmful stereotypes because they feel a sense of responsibility.”

The results suggest that lived experiences are making Black and Latino youths savvier online. 

“They keep their eyes open and are hyper vigilant,” Epps said. “They have absorbed these skill sets from having to navigate a world where a racial microaggression could happen at any time. So, it makes sense that would translate to their digital spaces.”

White youths were less likely to question misleading posts about race—not because they are less intelligent, said Epps, but because they haven’t had to be as vigilant. “They aren’t the targets of digital racism in the way that youth of color are.”

Their goal with the findings, say the researchers, is to honor the skills of these young people and to add such lessons into education, making it “more relevant and just,” says Epps.

The main takeaway for educators, she says, is to understand that making lessons culturally relevant matters no matter what you’re teaching. “Culturally responsive pedagogy matters in math. It matters in English and language arts. It matters for digital literacy and digital citizenship,” she says.