“In the new school year, thousands of Oklahoma students will be required to learn about 2020 election fraud conspiracy theories as part of a new curriculum developed by the state’s controversial superintendent, Ryan Walters. Walters, who has come under fire in recent months for an effort to require Oklahoma classrooms to stock Bibles and display the Ten Commandments, has said that the addition “empowers students to investigate and understand the electoral process.”
Under the state’s new curriculum, high school students will be taught to “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.”
While it’s not necessarily unreasonable to want students to learn about the dispute over the 2020 election, the standards’ framing of the controversy (which turned up no evidence of election interference) and Walters’ comments about it make it clear that teachers are meant to shed doubt on the veracity of the election.”
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“The standards also contain passages directing teachers to ensure that students can “identify the source of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Chinese lab,” and “explain the effects of the Trump tax cuts, child tax credit, border enforcement efforts.””
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“The curriculum change is just one of a battery of recent attempts to inject partisan politics into public school curricula. While blue states have faced criticism from the right for injecting critical race theory into the classroom, many red states have engaged in far more galling efforts to politicize classroom instruction.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/06/new-oklahoma-curriculum-requires-students-to-learn-2020-election-fraud-conspiracies/
“It’s a startling reality about Gen Z, backed up by multiple studies and what we can all see for ourselves: The most online generation is also the worst at discerning fact from fiction on the internet.
That becomes an issue when the internet — and specifically, social media — has become the main source of news for the younger generation. About three in five Gen Zers, from between the ages of 13 and 26, say they get their news from social media at least once a week. TikTok is a particularly popular platform: 45 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 29 said they were regular news consumers on the app.”
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“although people of all ages are bad at detecting misinformation — which is only getting harder amid the rise of AI — members of Gen Z are particularly vulnerable to being fooled. Why? There’s a dangerous feedback loop at play. Many young people are growing deeply skeptical of institutions and more inclined toward conspiracy theories, which makes them shun mainstream news outlets and immerse themselves in narrow online communities — which then feeds them fabrications based on powerful algorithms and further deepens their distrust. It’s the kind of media consumption that differs drastically from older generations who spend far more time with mainstream media, and the consequences can be grim.”
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“Only 16 percent of Gen Zers have strong confidence in the news. It’s no surprise then that so many young people are shunning traditional publications and seeking their news on social media, often from unverified accounts that do little fact-checking.
The ramifications are potentially huge for American politics. Without some sort of course correction, a growing piece of the electorate will find itself falling victim to fake news and fringe conspiracy theories online — likely driving the hyperpolarization of our politics to new heights.”
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“Gen Zers are uniquely vulnerable to misinformation compared to older age groups not just because of their social media habits, says Rakoen Maertens, a behavioral scientist at the University of Oxford, but because they have fewer lived experiences and knowledge to discern reality.
Maertens, who helped create a test that measures a person’s likelihood of being duped by fake headlines, says that while Gen Zers were most likely to fall for fake news now, there is hope that as time passes, they’ll become better at detecting falsities, just like the generations before them.
There’s also another, far more depressing alternative that may be just as likely — that the rest of the population will go the way of Gen Z.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/04/23/gen-z-media-tiktok-misinformation-00287561
Joe Rogan spreads false and misleading information about USAID.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ5rdhXUzl4
“In the hours after the Hamas attack on Israel began, users subscribed to X Premium — whose accounts show a verified check mark and get boosted engagement in exchange for a monthly fee — spread a number of particularly egregious pieces of misinformation. According to a running tracker by Media Matters, these accounts amplified a fake White House memo claiming the US government was about to send $8 billion in aid to Israel; circulated videos from other conflicts (and in some cases, footage from a video game) while claiming they showed the latest out of Israel and Gaza; falsely claimed that a church in Gaza had been bombed; and impersonated a news outlet. These posts were shared by X users with huge followings and viewed tens of millions of times. The Tech Transparency Project said on Thursday that it had identified X Premium accounts promoting Hamas propaganda videos, which were viewed hundreds of thousands of times.”
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/10/17/23921219/x-twitter-europe-disinformation-investigation