Young people are tomorrow’s news creators and news consumers, and will soon make future-shaping decisions based on what they believe to be true. High school students are also teenagers, though, and while they may be technologically savvy, they are often psychologically unsophisticated and eager to be part of a cause or group — making them easy marks for the purveyors of misinformation. In this piece for the Hechinger Report, Reboot President Helen Lee Bouygues argues that we need to teach teenagers that there are people on the web whose goal is to manipulate and deceive them and offer them tools to outsmart the trolls.
