# Practicing Information Sensibility:
How Gen Z Engages with Online Information

Amelia Hassoun  JigsawUnited Kingdom<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,  Ian Beacock
GemicCanada<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,  Sunny Consolvo  GoogleUSA
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,  Beth Goldberg  JigsawUSA<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,
Patrick Gage Kelley  GoogleUSA<EMAIL_ADDRESS>and  Daniel Russell
GoogleUSA<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
(2023)

###### Abstract.

Assessing the trustworthiness of information online is an increasingly
complicated task. Literacy-based paradigms are widely used to help, yet have
also been widely critiqued. We conducted a study with 35 Gen Zers from across
the U.S. to understand how they assess information online. We found that they
tended to encounter—rather than search for—information, and that those
encounters were shaped more by social motivations than by truth-seeking
queries. For them, information processing is fundamentally a social practice.
Gen Zers interpreted online information together, as aspirational members of
social groups. Our participants sought information sensibility: a socially-
informed awareness of the value of information encountered online. We outline
key challenges they faced and practices they used to make sense of
information. Our findings suggest that, like Gen Z’s information sensibility
practices, solutions and strategies to address misinformation should also be
embedded in social contexts online.

information literacy, teens, youth, GenZ, online, search, social media,
misinfo

††copyright: acmcopyright††journalyear: 2023††doi:
XXXXXXX.XXXXXXX††conference: Computer Human Interaction; April 23–28, 2023;
Hamburg, Germany††price: 15.00††isbn: 978-1-4503-XXXX-X/18/06

##  1\. Introduction

Assessing the trustworthiness of information online is an increasingly
complicated task in the current era of information abundance. Schools,
governments, and online platforms use literacy-based paradigms111 We use the
term “literacy-based paradigms” to describe a range of normative, pedagogical
paradigms that define and measure core individual competencies for assessing
and processing different kinds of information (see Section 2.1). in an attempt
to tackle the growing problem of online misinformation (e.g., (UNESCO, 2013;
Breakstone et al., 2022; Twitter, 2019; Bulger and Davison, 2018; Garcia et
al., 2013)). From their earliest origins in the mid-20th-century fight against
propaganda (Hobbs and McGee, 2014), such approaches have been linked to civic
education for democracy and the public interest (Mihailidis and Thevenin,
2013). Despite significant investments in individual information literacy
skills, however, people remain vulnerable to misinformation online
(Livingstone et al., 2019), and such literacy-based paradigms have been widely
critiqued in academic literature (boyd, 2018).

Against the backdrop of this information crisis, we sought to understand how
members of Gen Z222We follow the Pew Research Center definition of Gen Z as
people born between the years of 1997 and 2012 (i.e., who were between the
ages of 10 and 25 during our data collection) (Dimock, 2019). (“Gen Zers”)
engage with information online. To do so, we performed a qualitative study
with 35 Gen Z internet users to investigate:

  1. RQ1:

Seeking information — Why, where, and how do Gen Zers seek information online?

  2. RQ2:

Assessing information — Under what circumstances do Gen Zers attempt to assess
if information they engage with online is accurate, credible, and high-
quality? How do they perform such assessments?

  3. RQ3:

Susceptibility to misinformation — What factors affect the susceptibility of
Gen Zers to misinformation?

We found that our participants understand information as referring to more
than facts or news. To them, it means a much wider array of stories,
statements, facts, attitudes, beliefs, and commentary from institutional and
personally relatable sources. This kind of information is found in different
media formats including text, images, videos, and audio. We follow Bates’
(Bates, 2005) second definition of information as patterns of organization
which have been given meaning by a living being, focusing our analytical
attention on the emergent meaning attributed by our participants to these
multi-media messages. We adopt a shared information behavior (IB) and human-
computer interaction (HCI) approach to studying information-as-process, which
”includes all aspects of needing, seeking, searching for, encountering, and
using information,” expressed in terms of ”sense-making” and ”meaning-making”
(Gorichanaz and Venkatagiri, 2002; Bates, 2017).

We initially set out to investigate literacy-based frameworks among Gen Zers
with questions like: What are the core competencies for evaluating online
information? Can Gen Zers recognize logical fallacies and biases? How can we
help them be better researchers and fact-checkers, to protect them against
misinformation? Yet we found that these questions led us to focus on
individual strengths and weaknesses, occluding the factors that most affected
our participants.

Our Gen Z participants repeatedly expressed more socially-oriented concerns.
When engaging with online information, they asked questions like: What would
my parents think? Do I feel a personal connection with this source or
influencer? Is this information based on first-hand experience? What do people
“like me” think about it? Why are so many people sharing it? How could it help
me establish who I am? For them, information-seeking was motivated by more
than a desire for fact or truth; social motivations shaped how and why Gen
Zers sought and interpreted information. Social motivations also helped them
evaluate the significance and relevance of information—a process in which
credibility and accuracy were only one part of the equation. Rather than
information literacy, our participants sought what we term information
sensibility: a socially-informed awareness of the value of information
encountered online, relying on folk heuristics (Wash, 2010; D’Andrade, 2005)
of credibility. While other work has cited the role of social influence on
misinformation evaluation, we argue it is not just that social ties affect
users when they evaluate online information—social belonging itself is often
the primary motivation for (mis)information engagement.

In order for the HCI community to develop solutions that effectively equip Gen
Z—and potentially others—with strategies to identify misinformation, we argue
that a contextual understanding of their information sensibility practices is
needed (Saltz et al., 2021). Our research yielded 3 key implications:

  1. (1)

Gen Zers’ informational and social needs are inseparably entangled.

  2. (2)

Gen Zers’ information journeys often do not begin with a truth-seeking search
query.

  3. (3)

Gen Zers use information to orient themselves socially and define their
emerging identities.

We begin by situating our work at the intersection of literatures about online
information, information literacy, and Gen Zers’ online behavior. We describe
our methodology, then transition to results, outlining challenges participants
faced. We present four practices that participants used to make sense of
information and the trust heuristics underlying them. Finally, we discuss
which of these challenges, practices, and heuristics may increase
susceptibility to misinformation—and how an information sensibility framework
could help interventions better reach Gen Zers. We also hypothesize which of
our findings are period, age, and cohort effects, suggesting where findings
may have wider implications to guide future research. We conclude that since
Gen Zers use information to orient themselves socially, solutions and
strategies to reduce their vulnerability to misinformation should also be
socially embedded.

##  2\. Related Work

This paper reframes discussions about Gen Z susceptibility to misinformation
in two ways. First, it shifts the focus from individuals to socially-
positioned subjects to better account for the social motivations behind
information-seeking and evaluation. Second, it adopts an inductive,
ethnographic, and ecologically-valid methodological approach to questions that
have often been studied deductively and/or experimentally. Our work most
directly builds upon the HCI literature about online information-seeking and
vulnerability to dis/misinformation, including literacy-based approaches to
information evaluation. We also relate our research to an interdisciplinary
literature on the digital practices of Gen Zers.

###  2.1. How Users (Should) Seek & Evaluate Online Information

This study adjusts the focus of prior HCI work on information-seeking by
investigating the in situ social motivations that users bring to their
engagement with online information, an underexplored but critical topic in a
literature that emphasizes practices and behaviors. Our findings contribute to
a body of work (shaped by early internet tools like search engines and desktop
browsers) about how users seek and evaluate online information. This work
often defines “information” as news (Qayyum et al., 2010; Edgerly, 2017;
Bentley et al., 2019) or specialized facts, like health information (Hargittai
and Young, 2012; Jia et al., 2021), rather than interpretations or arguments,
beliefs, and opinions. Areas of focus include web page affordances (e.g.,
visualization of search results), user credibility judgments (Wathen and
Burkell, 2002; Hong, 2006; Giudice, 2010; Westerwick, 2013; Lurie and
Mustafaraj, 2018), and offline social determinants (e.g., age, race,
education) shaping information-seeking practices (Harrington et al., 2022;
Ragnedda et al., 2022). Although one 2019 study found only 16% of desktop
news-seeking journeys starting with social media (Bentley et al., 2019),
rising mobile and social media usage has remade the information landscape in
ways HCI researchers are only starting to understand. Our work validates much
earlier findings from Evans and others that online searching is more social
than often assumed (Smith et al., 2008; Evans and Chi, 2008, 2010; Evans et
al., 2010; Eynon and Malmberg, 2012; Jeon and Rieh, 2013), but it shifts
attention from sociality of behavior to sociality of motivations. In other
words: even as the social practices of internet search grow clearer—via an
emerging body of work on social media searching behaviors (Lampe et al., 2006;
Kulshrestha et al., 2017; Neely et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2022), passive
information exposure on social media (Fletcher and Nielsen, 2018), and the
role of online communities in enabling nonlinear information-seeking (Patel et
al., 2019; Lee et al., 2021)—the varied and socially-informed motivations that
users bring to information-seeking (beyond fact-finding or verification)
remain understudied.

While we focus on the social influences that shape information-seeking, recent
work into online misinformation and disinformation has stressed the social
influences affecting the evaluation and circulation of misleading or low-
quality information. From “fake news” to the COVID-era “infodemic”
(Lewandowsky et al., 2012; Flintham et al., 2018; Zarocostas, 2020), this work
has convincingly demonstrated that such phenomena must be understood socially:
from the distributed “collaborative work” that goes into producing
mis/disinformation (Starbird et al., 2019; Lee et al., 2021) to users’ use of
social cues—like consensus and crowdsourcing heuristics (Babaei et al., 2018;
Pennycook and Rand, 2019; Giudice, 2010) or social endorsements (Messing and
Westwood, 2014; Geeng et al., 2020)—to make credibility judgments and decide
whether to share information (Lottridge and Bentley, 2018; Herrero-Diz et al.,
2020). Scholars like Phillips & Milner (Phillips and Milner, 2021) have
applied this approach further downstream, showing how effects of
mis/disinformation are also intersubjective phenomena. Our work applies this
social approach to online information generally, explicitly focusing on users’
motivations, seeking behaviors, and evaluation practices in the context of
their holistic information ecologies (rather than pre-defining and analyzing
their evaluations of specific content like ”news”). We argue that a
contextual, socially-attuned sense of what users treat as information, why
they engage with it, and what they use it for alters our understanding of
misinformation susceptibility, as well as the interventions needed to support
Gen Zers.

Adjacent to this literature on how users engage with online information is a
body of work about how they should do so: identifying and evaluating the
competencies needed to resist false or misleading information. Researchers
have developed several frameworks grounded in the metaphor of language
literacy (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Mason et al., 2021) which frame
information consumption as a rules-based decoding process. The highest-order
framework is often thought to be media literacy—defined as a person’s ability
to “access, analyze, and produce information for specific outcomes”
(Aufderheide, 1993). Beneath it sit the technical skills of digital and web
literacy (Allmann and Blank, 2021; Caulfield, 2017; Eshet, 2004; Hobbs, 2010;
Martzoukou et al., 2020) and the critical reading/research skills of news
literacy (Klurfeld and Schneider, 2014; Vraga and Tully, 2021; Chang et al.,
2020) and information literacy (Association et al., 1989; De Paor and Heravi,
2020; Jones-Jang et al., 2021).

In this work, however, we follow Mackey & Jacobson (Mackey and Jacobson, 2011)
in treating information literacy as the metaliteracy that captures three
features common to all literacy-based approaches to engaging with online
information. First, information literacies tacitly rely on an individual
linear model of engagement and evaluation: a single consumer encountering a
discrete piece of information and critically evaluating its quality and/or
veracity. Second, these approaches assume that this can be done most
effectively by mastering core competencies, from fact-checking to lateral
reading (comparing one piece of information with other sources (Breakstone et
al., 2021a; Wineburg et al., 2022; Caulfield, 2017)). Finally, these paradigms
assume that the most accurate information is also the highest-quality or
highest-value information for any given individual, and that validating
accuracy is the primary way in which people engage (Marwick, 2018). Despite
the dominance of information literacy, its weaknesses are well-rehearsed. Most
salient for our work are critiques by scholars like Marwick and boyd
(discussed further below), who note that information literacy relies on a
flawed vision of human beings as rational individuals (boyd, 2017, 2018;
Phillips, 2019a, b; Phillips and Milner, 2021; Marwick, 2018).

Our work moves beyond these critiques by adopting a wider (and more
ecologically-valid) definition of information than most literacy-based
approaches, while focusing on the motivations and needs that help users find,
engage with, and make sense of the information that is meaningful to them. In
these ways, we aim to better account for the sociality of information-seeking
and evaluation in a networked age of social media, from Reddit to TikTok. We
do so by examining the cohort most associated with this information landscape:
Generation Z.

###  2.2. The Digital Information Practices of Gen Zers

By adopting an ethnographically-informed approach to Gen Zers’ online
practices rather than evaluating competencies, we suggest an alternative way
of understanding—and reducing—Gen Zers’ susceptibility to online
misinformation.

Although some sociological accounts (Katz et al., 2021) have offered positive
interpretations of Gen Z and their digital capabilities, most (building on a
tradition of skepticism about how the internet may cause social or
psychological damage (Turkle, 2017)) argue that Gen Zers are risk-averse and
safety-focused, unable to manage in-person social interactions, withdrawn from
others, and unprepared for adulthood (Twenge, 2017; Lukianoff and Haidt,
2019). Optimists and pessimists agree, however, that Gen Zers do not recognize
a sharp boundary between “online” and “offline”, highly value markers of
identity and authenticity, face an unprecedented deluge of information, and
feel simultaneously empowered and powerless (Katz et al., 2021; Stahl and
Literat, 2022).

Most work on Gen Zers’ digital practices focuses on how they evaluate online
information using the skills and competencies of relevant literacy frameworks
(news, digital, media, information, etc.)333These findings emerged as a subset
of a wider interdisciplinary discussion (e.g., HCI, media studies, sociology,
political science, behavioral sciences) focused on reducing susceptibility to
misinformation. Accordingly, many studies that are relevant for our purposes
here do not explicitly adopt “Gen Z” as a category of inquiry, but instead
focus on “adolescents,” “teenagers,” “youth” and/or “young people” whose birth
years overlap with the cohort represented by Gen Z.. This research is largely
defined by the evaluation of predetermined behaviors and competencies (e.g.,
(Chi et al., 2021)), the performance of those competencies in controlled
settings, and a focus on practices of online information-seeking (e.g., web
browsing, search-engines) established before the rise of social media
(Breakstone et al., 2022).

Studies have found that despite high levels of confidence in their own digital
abilities (Nygren and Guath, 2019; Porat et al., 2018), Gen Zers exhibit
severe information literacy deficits and perform poorly at evaluating the
credibility of online sources, finding accurate information, differentiating
news stories from advertisements, and overcoming motivated reasoning to
critically judge the accuracy of truth claims (Breakstone et al., 2022, 2021b;
McGrew et al., 2018; Kahne and Bowyer, 2017; Hargittai and Young, 2012). In
many cases, Gen Zers have been found to deploy what one study (List et al.,
2016) terms “nonepistemic” criteria when evaluating, selecting, and sharing
online information (including relevancy, accessibility, social significance,
and interactional elements like search-engine rankings), rather than strictly
epistemic criteria, like credibility or reliability (e.g., (Wolf, 2022; John,
2021; Herrero-Diz et al., 2020; Lurie and Mustafaraj, 2018)). It is not clear
whether these patterns are more pronounced for Gen Zers than earlier cohorts
(Hargittai, 2010; Pan et al., 2007).

Gen Zers have most often been tested on their “civic online reasoning”
abilities (e.g., (Breakstone et al., 2022, 2021b)), but similar deficits have
been found when seeking health information (Hargittai and Young, 2012) and
content relating to race (Tynes et al., 2021). These deficits have also been
identified in Gen Zers outside the U.S. (Gui and Argentin, 2011; Nygren and
Guath, 2019). Pedagogical interventions have been shown to improve the ability
of Gen Zers to judge the credibility and evaluate the truth value of
information online (e.g., (Wineburg et al., 2022; Breakstone et al., 2021a;
McGrew, 2020) but cf. (Kohnen et al., 2020)).

With this paper, we join a recent shift to focus not on pedagogy but rather on
practice: that is, how Gen Zers engage with information in their daily lives.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed, for instance, that Gen Zers exhibit strong
levels of digital and information literacy when confronted with public health
misinformation (Feng et al., 2022; Volkmer, 2021). A global study from the
World Health Organization found Gen Zers using classic information literacy
strategies plus novel tactics (like algorithmic manipulation or
“domestication” (Simpson et al., 2022)), but they also reported skepticism,
exhaustion, frustration, and withdrawal in response to the overwhelming volume
of online information (Volkmer, 2021).

Researchers have also found that Gen Zers are frequently familiar with
literacy strategies but do not always use them, due to family pressures,
social sanction, or judgments about relevancy or significance (Feng et al.,
2022; Almeida et al., 2022). For Gen Zers, mockery or satire can mask a
sophisticated understanding of information literacy (Vacca et al., 2022;
Perovich et al., 2022; Literat et al., 2021; Lorenz, 2021). As Almeida et al.
note (Almeida et al., 2022), the key question may not be about knowledge and
its enactment, but rather: when does that knowledge matter for young
people—and when does it not? We analyze this question throughout the rest of
this paper.

In sum, understanding the social dynamics and motivations of engaging with
information online is crucial to the study of misinformation susceptibility,
especially for Gen Zers navigating social media in the age of TikTok. This
study combines the inductive ethnographic approach taken by recent work on
digital youth cultures with questions pioneered by HCI researchers interested
in online search behaviors, credibility, and information literacy. Our
contribution thus lies in offering a rich, ecologically-valid account of the
many social lives of online information (Brown and Duguid, 2000)—what users
believe to be meaningful information to begin with, how and with whom they
seek it, and for what reasons young people choose to seek, metabolize, or give
meaning to particular information—in order to improve our ability to design
interventions that can effectively and sustainably reduce user vulnerability
to misinformation.

##  3\. Methodology

We conducted a mixed-methods study in Spring 2022 with 35 Gen Z internet users
aged 13–24 from the U.S. In this section, we describe our participants,
research and analysis methods, ethical considerations, and study limitations.

###  3.1. Participants & Recruiting

We partnered with a market research firm to recruit Gen Z internet users from
across the U.S. using typical qualitative recruitment methods (e.g., posting
ads and invitations online, snowball recruiting, etc.). At the time of data
collection (March and April 2022), participants were 13–17 years old ($n=17$)
and 18–24 years old ($n=18$). Each of the four U.S. regions was represented:
South (11), West (10), Midwest (7), and Northeast (7). Participants were from
a mix of self-reported urban (9), suburban (22), and rural (4) areas, and
spanned a range of education levels and self-identified political viewpoints
(see Table 1).

We recruited a mix of mainstream ($n=19$) and alternative ($n=16$) media
users444Eleven of the 13–17 year olds were classified as “mainstream” and 6
“alternative”; 8 of the 18–24 year olds were “mainstream” and 10
“alternative.” When classifying participants as ”alternative,” we acknowledge
the challenges of self-reporting non-normative behavior and the role of
parents in mediating responses from minors. to explore whether platform use
informed information literacy beliefs and practices555For this work,
alternative platforms were defined as congruent with the “alt-tech” ecosystem
(Ebner, 2019). These included in-house “safe haven” platforms developed by
far-right extremists; ultra-libertarian platforms; and alternative social
forums popularized due to the perception that alternative hosts provide less
stringent content moderation than mainstream platforms. To classify
participants as mainstream or alternative, we asked whether they used 4chan,
8kun, Gab, Parler, or Rumble 3+ times/week. We then refined classifications
based on their answers to: “Do you use any apps, platforms, sites, or channels
that your friends don’t? What are they? Do you have any opinions or views that
you would describe as alternative or non-mainstream? Are you part of any
online communities that you don’t tell anyone about? Do you have any political
opinions that you don’t feel comfortable sharing with others?”4 were
reclassified, 2 in each direction.. We first recruited a set of participants
representing half of our sample, and then asked them to invite someone they
knew from within their 13–17 or 18–24 year old age bucket to join them for the
study (which included a dyad interview, described below), completing our
sample of 35 participants.666Forty-one participants—including direct recruits
and those who joined via friend or family invitations—started the study, 35 of
whom completed the study. Data collected from the 6 participants who did not
complete the study was deleted and not used in our analysis. The 6 non-
completions were due to scheduling difficulties; no one formally requested to
withdraw. To maintain sample diversity, we tracked the details of participants
who were invited by another participant to join the study against our quotas.

Highest Level of Education Completed |  $n$ | Political Leaning (self-identified) | $n$
---|---|---|---
Some High School | 16 | Very Conservative | 2
High School Diploma | 1 | Conservative | 4
Some College | 9 | Moderate | 14
2-Year Associate Degree | 4 | Liberal | 10
4-Year Bachelor’s Degree | 4 | Very Liberal | 5
Prefer to Not Say | 1 |  |
Table 1. Participants’ education levels & political leanings. Highest levels
of education completed by and self-identified political leanings reported by
the 35 participants.

###  3.2. Research Methods

Our methods were informed by the foundational anthropological insight that
people do not always do what they say—or say what they do (Rosaldo, 1993). We
sought to understand information literacy through the perspectives of our
participants, contextualized in their socioculturally-mediated values. Our
study included three phases of data collection. Each participant provided
informed consent before their first session.777For minors, informed consent
was provided by parents or legal guardians in writing and verbally. The study
was verbally explained to the minor. Researchers ensured that both
parents/guardians and minors understood the study and reminded them that they
could discontinue participation at any time without consequence. Informed
consent was again obtained during the dyadic session, and participants were
empowered to end the interview or redirect the conversation at any time.

##### Phase 1 – Dyadic Interviews.

We began with interviews in which we asked pairs of participants who knew each
other about their life histories, family values and influences, and the
effects of social and economic context on their online behaviors, information-
seeking practices, and trust heuristics.888We employed dyadic interviews at
the suggestion of several experts—including those with experience conducting
research with minors—consulted during study planning. During these sessions,
participants shared their screens as they demonstrated information-seeking.
These methods surfaced participants’ attitudes around information literacy as
well as their actual behaviors. They also helped us uncover meaningful
differences between reported and observed behaviors, which we unpacked with
the participants.

Dyad partners—often siblings, romantic partners, or friends—were from the same
age bucket (i.e., 13–17 or 18–24); some were a mix of mainstream and
alternative media users. In three cases, they were from different U.S.
regions. Each session was conducted remotely and lasted 90 minutes. We
collected 70+ hours of video recordings from phase 1.999Phase 1 consisted of
18 dyads, 1 triad, and 2 1:1s.

##### Phase 2 – Digital Diary.

The second phase documented participants’ daily routines and practices. Over 1
week, they each completed 3 exercises about how they engage with information:
(1) how they found news/information on social media; (2) how they used search
engines; and (3) how they related to information shared with them by others.
Participants uploaded screenshots of social media and digital news content,
and their own voice recordings and text responses to research prompts,
describing their online information habits and views on information
quality/credibility.

##### Phase 3 – 1:1 Interviews.

In the third phase—conducted within one month of phase 1—we interviewed each
participant one-on-one. We probed deeper into their information experiences,
followed up on themes emerging from phases 1 and 2, allowed participants to
revisit topics of their choice from phase 1 (e.g., discussions they preferred
to have without their dyad partner), and tested 3 information literacy
intervention concepts.101010Concepts were: accuracy prompts on a search
engine, short information tips on TikTok, and longer videos explaining
information literacy concepts. Each session was conducted remotely and lasted
60 minutes. We collected 40+ hours of video recordings from phase 3.

##### Incentives.

Each participant received $425–$500 USD as a thank you for their 5 hours of
participation; parents/guardians of participating minors received $75–$100
USD. This reflects best practices from our market research partner.

###  3.3. Analysis Methods

Our analytic approach used the principles and methods of constructivist
grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006; Mills et al., 2006). Rather than testing for
deficits or evaluating participants against preset frameworks, we adopted an
emic (from-the-inside-out) lens (Scarduzio, 2017) to learn about what
participants did with online information and why—from their perspective and in
their words.

Preliminary analysis began immediately following phase 1. Researchers who
observed the sessions took detailed notes, identifying insights and portions
of the session that related to our RQs. During and after phases 1 and 2, we
iteratively refined areas of inquiry and identified dataset gaps. This
informed phase 3, allowing us to tailor 1:1 interviews to each participant,
dig deeper into what dyadic interviews missed or occluded, and explore
emerging hypotheses.

We coded insights from interview data using an iterative, inductive, and
reflexive qualitative analysis method (Saldaña, 2021). We used descriptive
coding in a series of thematic analysis coding passes, then tabulated each
discrete code (e.g., Admitting mistakes is a sign of trustworthiness) against
every participant whose interviews or diary submissions generated that code.
In the codebook, we separated participants by age bucket as well as mainstream
or alternative. Through collaborative discussion, we then performed several
theoretical coding passes, iteratively clustering insights into 4 categories:
social context, content, design and usability, and medium. We used the
codebook to ensure data saturation, engage in rigorous collective qualitative
analysis, and reflexively mitigate cognitive biases. We reached data
saturation on the findings presented in this paper and suggest for future work
to confirm reliability in Section 5.

Once data collection and coding were complete, we held several collaborative
analysis sessions. Research team members wrote short memos to propose
overarching arguments or explanations, and we iterated those interpretations
through discussion. We referred regularly to the codebook to ensure that our
analysis reflected the full dataset, draw conclusions about how insights
applied to groups within our dataset, and identify new themes and meta-
insights.

###  3.4. Research Ethics

When working with any population—especially one involving minors—ethical
considerations are essential. Though our organizations do not require IRB
approval, we adhere to similar standards. Our study went through review to
ensure that participants and parents of minor participants provided informed
consent and were protected from undue risk. Our study plan was reviewed by
experts in ethics, human subjects research, human subjects research with
minors, legal, security, and privacy. Before finalizing our methods and
instruments, we conducted an interdisciplinary literature review and consulted
academics who specialized in engagement with information online, including by
adolescents.

When interviewing minors, two adults were always present. A parent/legal
guardian completed consent forms on behalf of their child and provided verbal
consent. We verbally explained the study to the minor and parent/guardian,
confirming each understood. We also reminded them that they could withdraw at
any time without consequences.

We maintained strict data privacy controls for all participants. The market
research agency’s recruiter assigned participants a pseudonym; all data
collected (e.g., notes, recordings, etc.) referred only to the pseudonyms.
Participants were instructed to withhold personally identifying information
(PII) during the study, and chose a pseudonym for the research team to use
during interviews. Raw interview and diary data was scrubbed of PII during
transcription. Raw research data will be deleted within 30 days of the final
reporting and publication of results from this study.

To mitigate the risk of participant identification, we have omitted personally
identifying details, phrases, or words from quotes in this paper. Further, the
pseudonyms used below are not the same pseudonyms used in data collection.

###  3.5. Limitations

This study analyzes a small sample of experiences in-depth. Our sample is not
statistically representative. Demographic information was used to ensure that
our sample did not significantly skew toward any single demographic (except
possibly mainstream/alternative viewpoints, the frequency of which should not
be taken as representative).

Known challenges with dyadic interviews include one person dominating the
interview, pairs hesitating to discuss topics where they don’t share values,
and individuals self-censoring to avoid impacting the relationship (Szulc et
al., 2022). To mitigate these, each participant completed phases 2 and 3
without their dyad partner. This study was also affected by standard
limitations of self-reported data, including recall, observer, and social
desirability biases. Pairing diary exercises with interviews should have
helped mitigate such bias, since the multiple formats and phases enabled us to
cross-reference and ask probing questions. Dyadic interviewing is known to
help reduce social desirability bias (Szulc et al., 2022). A further strength
is that the shared understanding between dyad partners from pre-existing
relationships can lead to insights the interviewer might not otherwise be able
to elicit (Christensen, 2004).

In some cases, the presence of others (e.g., parent/guardian) may have
affected responses. To account for this, we took notes during interviews that
indicated the minor’s awareness of a parent’s or guardian’s presence,
capturing bodily and vocal cues, and any active participation from the
parent/guardian (Christensen, 2004). This also helped us analyze the social
effects of family influence on information-seeking practices.

Finally, none of the authors are from Gen Z and therefore do not share the
same subjective generationally-mediated experiences as participants. We
mitigated this through weekly research discussions, including reflexive
interpretations of our generational frames. We also consulted Gen Zers to help
shape our study instruments.

##  4\. Results

In this section, we describe 3 key challenges Gen Z participants experienced
when trying to make sense of online information: information overload,
misrecognition, and social error. We then present 4 information sensibility
practices that they used in the face of these challenges—crowdsourcing
credibility, everyday experience, surrogate thinking, and ”good enough”
reasoning—discussing the implications of and trust heuristics underlying each
(Table 2).

###  4.1. Challenges

####  4.1.1. Information overload

Gen Z participants felt deluged by facts, opinions, and ads throughout their
daily information encounters. They wanted short, emotionally-manageable,
personally-relevant, and uninterrupted experiences in information ecosystems
that they could curate with little extra effort. Participants sought
information in quickly absorbable forms. They also felt emotionally
overloaded, attempting to control their information ecosystem to reduce
encounters with information presented in a negative tone. This often meant
curating an information ecosystem where they would only encounter such
content; they also preferred to search for information within that ecosystem
when searching felt necessary. Many felt that they would naturally encounter
truly important or personally-relevant information in their daily information
ecosystem, rather than needing to search for it.

First, participants sought ways of finding information in short, digestible
forms that could be easily and swiftly consumed. When encountering a long-form
article in his diary exercise, Zak (18-24, Mainstream) noted: “It was too long
to read, so I didn’t even read all of it.” Leo (13–17, Mainstream) expressed a
sense of information overabundance: “Sure, you can look on your own, but no
one has time for that.” Many participants explained that search engines often
ranked long-form articles highest, but those articles often felt like too much
information to absorb. Nayeli (18–24, Alternative) preferred to encounter and
search for information on social media instead: “I like Twitter, just because
it’s quick to scan through information.” Many sought short-form content on
social media, where they could swipe to the next video or scroll when
overwhelmed or uninterested.

This desire for speed cut across the video/text binary, contradicting the
popular hypothesis that Gen Zers universally prefer video (e.g., (Education,
2018)). Several participants told us that they preferred a quick news article
(from any source) to a 10-minute video, because they could skim one but not
the other. When encountering new information on websites or by creators they
were not intimately familiar with, they preferred short text news-bites and
short-form video to longer video explanations or long-form articles. During a
screenshare exercise, Sami (18–24, Mainstream) explained that she skims
articles to “save time” because she “doesn’t have time to read it all. I need
to get down to the point.” She said she rarely even clicks on longer videos:
“I get bored really fast. I’m a very quick reader, and I don’t have patience
for video.”

Challenges |  Practices |  Heuristics
---|---|---
Information Overload |  Surrogate Thinking |  Convenience
too many articles, facts, opinions, and ads, often too wordy, too long, and too negative |  finding a trusted go-to source, and relying on their opinions |
—Period |  —Period & Age |
Misrecognition |  Everyday Experience |  Tone, Aesthetic
lack of ability to speak to their generation, seen in tone, lack of controls, vibes |  privileging on-the-ground crowdsourced reporting, lived experience, first-person narratives |
—Age |  —Cohort |
Social Error |  Crowdsourcing Credibility |  Tone, Aesthetic
fear of making mistakes, taking unpopular positions, or actions that lead to social harm |  using comments, likes, and other peer discussions to evaluate content |
—Age |  —Cohort & Period |
|  Good Enough Reasoning |
|  limiting effort to finding just enough, a few facts, numbers, whatever is easy, and then moving on |
|  —Period |
Table 2. A summary of the three information challenges we found our Gen Z
participants encountered, the four practices they used to navigate these
challenges, the heuristics they applied, and, in blue, a summary of our
hypotheses on the age, period, and cohort effects we discuss in Section 5.3.

Second, participants often chose information sources based on their assumed
ability to manipulate algorithms and filter information sources present on
their feed. Using routine engagement to tailor their feeds was perceived to
reduce the strain of sifting through information. Gen Zers also believed that
the information they encountered in those tailored information ecosystems—as a
result of their repeated engagement—was more likely to be personally
interesting or meaningful. Tyse (13-17, Mainstream) trusted that if something
was important, it would come across his feed. He explained that there was no
need to search or follow news and politics, because “When stuff is important,
it gets shared. When lots of people share, there has to be a reason.” Mo
(13–17, Mainstream) said: “The more videos you ’like’ of that topic, it will
show you more, so you can decide what to interact with.”

This preference for algorithmically-tailored information sources reflected a
desire for emotional management as well as relevance. Most participants
expressed needing to periodically “take a break” from online
information—particularly political information—because it negatively affected
their mental health and well-being. Tyse (13–17, Mainstream) told us: “I just
want to go online to have a good time […] I usually just scroll, and since
TikTok personalizes your #ForYou page, I just block [people who want to argue]
because I don’t really care to see that.” As we discuss further in 4.2.5,
controlling tone was critical for many participants.

Finally, encountering pop-ups felt disruptive, frustrating and overwhelming to
many participants, so they avoided long-form news sites—including mainstream
news sites. Describing her frustrations, Rosa (18–24, Alternative) told us:

> “Clickbait is super annoying! Especially when I click on something hoping
> it’ll tell me something, and then it’s nothing related to the title. It’s
> super misleading. They make those strong titles so you click on their page,
> you see the ads, they get paid for that. It seems like clickbait to get the
> views.”

Long-form news sites were often populated with pop-ups asking participants for
donations, advertising, and GDPR/consent requests. As one participant put it,
“Any ad is super-annoying when it takes my attention away. The ones that are
distracting are definitely the most annoying.” Most felt social media ads were
more seamlessly integrated into the scrolling and swiping experience, rather
than being an attention-grabbing imposition. Matt (13-17, Mainstream) said he
liked a source if “it’s not pushing you to sign up with an email to look at
the article.” Like Rosa, “clickbait” demanding his attention also reduced
credibility, as he continued:

> “Anything that’s even remotely clickbaity I ignore. It completely loses all
> credibility to me. Because to me, if you’re making clickbait, you have zero
> faith in your content—you know, your content isn’t actually clickworthy—so
> you’re the bait. And news sources—even CNN and New York Times—do clickbait.
> I throw those articles away immediately.”

####  4.1.2. Misrecognition

Many participants felt misrecognized as a generation by major internet
platforms and mainstream media. They disliked sources that did not “speak
their language,” were aggressive in tone, or were not relevant to their
interests. First, the aggressive, politicized language and content of
mainstream media, and a lack of identification with presenters and pundits,
pushed many to seek sources that “speak their language.” This often meant they
avoided mainstream media in favor of more personally relevant content. As Mari
(18-24, Mainstream) articulated: “I’ve seen the New York Times trending on
Twitter for having silly things that don’t matter. That makes me not want to
visit the New York Times or USA Today.” Her dyad partner said she would watch
the news when she was “really an adult,” but not now.

Filtering for tone was also a common response to misrecognition. Dina (18–24,
Mainstream) explained that Gen Zers feel alienated from mainstream news
sources due to the political partisanship, punditry, and agendas, calling it
“noisy.” As she explained, “I want to know Russia invaded Ukraine, not whether
it’s the Democrats’ fault or the Republicans’ fault.”

Participants noted that they could not control the tone of results on search
engines, but they could manipulate their social media algorithm to only show
certain types of content, lowering the likelihood that “noisy” sources would
appear in their feed. As Nella (18-24, Mainstream) put it:

> “Currently where I’m located on the algorithm, it’s pretty light-hearted. So
> to try and beat it, I’d end up in a spot where I’d be extremely
> uncomfortable and be surrounded with things I’d rather not interact with…
> [The creators she follows on TikTok] know how to balance the bad news with
> the good news. I find if I’m too much exposed to bad news I get down and
> feel really drained. I just don’t take in as much information when I’m
> feeling drained. I scroll past. Anything that has to do with real life, I
> will 100% scroll past.”

Second, the tone and style of many information literacy interventions (e.g.,
videos explaining information literacy concepts, automated fact-checks, etc.)
felt patronizing to participants, reinforcing their belief that they did not
need help identifying misinformation. As young people on the cusp of
adulthood, most participants felt completely misrecognized by infantilizing
and/or pedantic language, images, style, and music. This belief was
exemplified by a participant who reacted to one information literacy video by
saying that it “isn’t for me. This is for someone who doesn’t understand
information. Who doesn’t have basic information literacy? Who doesn’t know how
to search for things?”

Many thought grandparents or younger children would be good recipients for
information literacy training, seeing it useful only as a tool to teach those
who were less informed. As Zak (13–17, Mainstream) asserted, “Gen Z knows all
of the ’invisible rules’ of the internet.” Even if technology companies had
something to teach his peers, he said, they “haven’t found the right way.” He
disparaged animated video interventions by saying: “My generation sees this as
an attempt to relate—[but] if you’re making an attempt to relate, you’re
fundamentally unrelatable.”

Finally, news and information found via social media or discussion boards was
appealing to participants because it was accompanied by an apparatus for
gauging social context, meaning, and significance. We discuss this next.

####  4.1.3. Social error

Finally, we found that for participants, the social cost of being wrong—social
error—could be steep, leading to risk-aversion. To cope with their fear of
social error, they checked comments for social orientation and searched for
answers validated by peers. To avoid being “cancelled,” they often remained
anonymous online.

The fear of not belonging drove them to check comments to orient themselves
socially. They worried about sounding misinformed, so they searched for signs
that answers were not just “true,” but had been accepted and validated by
their peers. They found it difficult to find these peer validations using
search engines and traditional news sites (many of which have limited or
removed comment functions and/or lack detailed profile information attached to
the commenter) but easier on discussion forums and social media. As Matt
(13–17, Mainstream) put it, “if you’re out of the loop, you’re out of the
group.”

The threat of being “cancelled” also caused some participants to hide posts
from friends and family, instead staying anonymous online. The stakes of
“being right” in social terms when assessing and sharing information feel
extremely high. This threat was poignantly exemplified by Kyle (13–17,
Alternative) who had posted content that he was pretty sure “people online
liked.” Soon, however, he discovered that not everyone at his school agreed.
After being doxxed and then intimidated on the street by people he had never
met, he transferred schools. Still in his early teens, he wanted to “get back
to the earlier days” when things were simpler. Expressing a similar sentiment,
Dani (18–24, Alternative) said: “I don’t post, because it’s horrifying to post
something and then get 30 people telling you why you’re wrong.”

Illustratively, the clearest example of a positively-altered information
practice that we heard from participants occurred through a social
intervention that responded to a participant’s need for social belonging, not
for higher-quality information. Kelly (18–24, Alternative) told us how they
started getting into a Neo-Nazi movement. They had multiple people along the
way online try to argue with them, debunk their reasoning—but they ignored all
of it. If anything, it fueled their sense of opposition. The only friend they
kept in touch with, they explained, did not try to dissuade them. Instead, she
invited them to play Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). It was this social experience
that pulled them out of Neo-Nazi rabbit holes, they explained, because they
got really into the D&D community. That community replaced the sense of
community that they had been looking for from the other movements. They also
said that D&D helped them learn empathy because it was a role-playing
exercise.

Next, we share the practices and trust heuristics participants used to
navigate the challenges detailed in this section.

###  4.2. Practices & Trust Heuristics

Participants used specific practices and trust heuristics to overcome the
challenges detailed in Section 4.1. We argue that Gen Zers interpret
information as aspirational members of social groups, not as isolated
individuals. They use and seek online information to help navigate their
social environments, not just to establish truth or find facts. Here, we
present 4 practices—crowdsourcing credibility, surrogate thinking, ”good
enough” reasoning, and everyday experience—and describe how Gen Zers rely on
the trust heuristics of convenience, aesthetic, and tone while using those
practices.

####  4.2.1. Crowdsourcing credibility

Gen Z participants crowdsourced their credibility judgments111111The term
”crowdsourcing credibility” was first used by Giudice (Giudice, 2010) to
describe user interactions with web pages that visualize crowd evaluations of
the credibility of news content. We offer an extended version of this concept
here, finding it to be an ecologically-valid practice that is actively and
dialogically undertaken by users across a range of platforms and online
spaces, not simply in response to particular affordances. by observing how
others reacted to the same information. By reading comments or tallying likes
on a post, they relied on the judgment of their peers and a sense of “the
discourse” to socially orient themselves and decide what they should think.
Beyond truth-seeking, they wanted to know what beliefs were normative around
them. As Evan (13-17, Mainstream) explained:

> “It’s important to get the bigger picture, because you might want to confirm
> that what you’re thinking is the widely accepted opinion, or maybe you want
> to go into the comments to see if other people are thinking differently…that
> could give you a better view on the subject.”

They liked to take the social temperature of how users “like them” were
responding to a piece of content. As they encountered information, they
contextualized their interpretations by looking for markers of social
similarity and validation. They asked: What do people like me think about
this? As Shelly (13–17, Mainstream) articulated:

> “Most of the time, I use the comments to see what other people are saying,
> if they’re confirming it or denying it or correcting it. I try to double-
> check my sources with the comments, by Googling, and with other content
> creators and what they say.”

Note that her practice is to go to the comments first and then Google to
confirm what she finds there, using a search engine as a supplement to
multiple social checks—a behavior that has also been seen in adult users while
fact-checking (Geeng et al., 2020). Shelly then checks with her surrogate
thinkers (a practice described in 4.2.3): content creators. We observed this
practice frequently in interviews and diary exercises. Many participants
heavily weighted comment sections alongside formal web page content,
dialogically reading between them. This ”back-and-forth” between comments and
content illustrates how Gen Zers use a form of lateral reading (Wineburg et
al., 2022; Breakstone et al., 2021a; Caulfield, 2017) to pursue the social
aims of information sensibility rather than information literacy.

Max (18–24, Alternative) also illustrated her trust in this comment-checking
practice–as well as her potential susceptibility to misinformation. She
explained: “I go into the comments just to verify if it’s true or not, because
usually if I go into the comments and something’s fake, somebody knows about
it.” As Adam (18–24, Mainstream) put it, “If people in comments are saying it
a lot, it gets more validated. If all these people have the same info, it had
to come from somewhere.”

Likes were another means of crowdsourcing credibility, even if participants
knew it was only one part of the equation. As Isabel (18–24, Mainstream)
explained:

> “This is bad to say, but if the video has more likes, then I’ll probably
> believe it more. If it’s just a random person who showed up on my feed and
> they have no likes, then it’s like ‘who even is this person?’”

For participants, the most useful searches were shared experiences, when they
could connect with others (in-person, virtually, or asynchronously) while
seeking and evaluating information. Searching “does water get dusty?” during a
screenshare exercise (a query chosen by the participants), one 13–17
Mainstream dyad told us they love Google’s People also ask feature. They
explained that sometimes other people’s wording is better, that their
questions can be “super smart.” The dyad appreciated that this feature
resembles the crowdsourcing they already practice.

####  4.2.2. Everyday experience

Participants valued everyday experience when evaluating information online. As
they felt traditional gatekeepers and authorities losing trust and social
traction, participants used markers of ”authentic” experience to judge
credibility over markers of expertise. Participants looked for evidence that a
source was “on the ground” or had relevant personal experience. They valued
what people could see, hear, and feel for themselves.

One of our diary exercises illustrates this valuing of everyday experience.
Ari (13–17, Mainstream) was eager to learn what Russians thought about the
invasion of Ukraine. He shared a Reddit source (Figure 1) as an example of a
source he deemed to be reliable. He wasn’t concerned that he didn’t know this
reporter’s name, background, or credentials. It sufficed that the reporter
was, in his words, “on the ground … [talking to] everyday Russians.”

Personal accounts felt more genuine and relevant to participants’ everyday
lives. As Sami (18-24, Mainstream) articulated: “People of my generation and
younger prefer TikTok and real people talking… It’s more personal [and] feels
more genuine.”

Figure 1. A source from Reddit where an unknown reporter was interviewing
people on the street in Russia, increasing credibility from the perspective of
the participant who shared this with us.

One 13–17 Mainstream dyad told us when investigating the rumor that Katy Perry
killed a nun (screensharing with us a query they chose), they were
disappointed to find no stories from major news sources that definitively
answered this question. They went to TikTok and concluded that if Katy Perry
fans hadn’t weighed in, the story must not be true. They trusted Katy Perry
fans, who engaged with and reported on her activities daily, to know the
truth. A lack of information on trending topics on search engines led several
participants to turn to social sources of information.

####  4.2.3. Surrogate thinking

Many participants, especially the alternative media users, had a “go-to
source” that they felt they could trust: a person with similar values who
could filter information and clarify points of view. Gen Zers trusted that
this person had done the work of researching and thinking for them. This
helped offset the uncertainty participants felt about institutional agendas
(e.g., media, corporate, partisan, etc.) while also providing them with a
sense of social community and belonging. We term this practice surrogate
thinking. Often these surrogates were those with everyday experience, as
discussed earlier; others were selected because they helped protect against
social error.

Participants used go-to public personalities and influencers as surrogate
thinkers to help them filter and interpret information. As Ryan (13–17,
Mainstream) summarized: “In our generation, [people] tend to align with
information because they align with the people giving it to them.” This was a
direct response to the challenge of information overload: many participants
preferred a go-to source because they were overwhelmed by the volume of online
source material, felt generalized skepticism, and were uncertain about
unfamiliar sources. One participant (18-24, Alternative), for whom Jordan
Peterson was a go-to source, said:

> “You know, I generally take him [Jordan Peterson] at his word. I know he’s
> intelligent and well-read, but I guess now [after participating in this
> study] I’d be more inclined to fact-check than in the past. I’ve just taken
> him at his word because I know he’s very well-read.”

We heard this sentiment expressed about a range of surrogate thinkers. Joe
Rogan was a repeated example:

> “I’ll usually watch Joe Rogan to get more information. I can tell when he’s
> genuine because he does bluff on himself. You can tell when he’s lying. He
> will also call himself out to say that he’s wrong—he’ll say that, he’ll
> admit it.”

Surrogate thinkers were not necessarily famous online figures or influencers;
they were often family members. Some participants heavily weighted the
opinions of authority figures in their own family while gathering information
and developing their opinions. Family members often played a significant role
in helping participants triage information and judge the appeal or credibility
of other media sources. As Bella (18–24, Alternative) articulated:

> “[My uncle] likes being up-to-date about what’s going on, so I ask him, and
> he sends me the videos that he found, the articles that he found. A lot of
> my messages with [him] are just back and forth articles.”

Go-to sources themselves were often trusted based on input from family
members. These shaped the searching practices of participants, limiting where
they might look for validation. As Cris (18–24, Alternative) shared, speaking
about a source shared by a family member: “I go to ZeroHedge because they
basically have everything I’m looking for. If I go to Google, usually I’ll
type ZeroHedge into the search box too.”

Many participants emphasized that the news consumed by older family members
shaped their own sense of what was credible online, as well as what might be
socially acceptable or valuable. Whether watching Newsmax with grandparents or
listening to NPR with parents before school, home experiences with news media
shaped how participants judged information online. As Melissa (18–24,
Mainstream) explained, expressing a position we heard from many participants:
“When my mom has an opinion, then I’ll probably agree with her […] that’s just
how I’ve been raised.” Over time, several participants traveled away from
family influences when they encountered a strong enough ”pull” from another
social influence (e.g., new friends, college professors, etc.).

In these ways, selecting a surrogate thinker addressed participants’ fears of
social error, because the go-to source aligned with their values and could
help them find what positions might be more socially acceptable. Participants
practicing surrogate thinking who used family members as go-to sources
experienced a stronger pull toward the orbit of their immediate social circle.
If this worldview was shaped by misinformation, they were reluctant to reject
it for fear of social error.

####  4.2.4. “Good enough” reasoning

Gen Z participants used a practice we term “good enough reasoning” to
calibrate the effort necessary to find and verify information. This
calibration depended on the social purpose and meaning of the information
(what they wanted to do with it) and the degree to which participants were
willing to tolerate uncertainty. Few Gen Z information journeys end with a
definitive “true” or “false” answer. The social use of that information
matters. For participants, having “good enough” information meant knowing
enough to win an argument with a parent or on Twitter, learning enough about a
topic or debate to feel confident talking with friends about it, or
understanding enough to avoid making a mistake or sounding out-of-the-loop.

Alexa (18–24, Mainstream) spoke at length about her process of information-
seeking, explaining that she mostly searched for news to win arguments with
her father. Since moving away from home, her politics have shifted, and she
reported getting into arguments via text message with her father about a range
of topics. She explained that when she actively uses a search engine for
content, it’s always in response to a specific article her father sends her
(“usually his articles are blatantly biased; they’re full of insults like
‘sleepy Joe Biden”’ ), and she’s searching for a quick, unbiased response
(“something fact-based, a number-type thing” ) that can end the argument. She
stops searching when she finds a fact that she deems as being ”good enough” to
share with her father.

Social utility shaped the importance and purpose of information-seeking for
participants. As Shantal (18–24, Mainstream) said when discussing the
importance of having the “right” information:

> “Back up what you say. Make sure you don’t look like an idiot on the
> internet spewing something and then it turns out that you’re completely
> wrong. You could definitely have a very non-factual take on something, that
> could affect the way people view you […] But it’s also OK to just not know
> or care if it’s not relevant to you.”

The use of information to signify social belonging and perform impression
management (not “looking like an idiot” or “affecting the way people view
you”) is clearly demonstrated. Further, getting accurate or factual
information often only mattered to participants if it was “relevant” to their
specific interests. For Mo (13-17, Mainstream), information was important if
“it has an effect on me, or something that is going on around me […] you make
your own call on how important it is to you.”

Importantly, participants had different stopping-points on information
journeys based on their individual comfort with uncertainty, since many of
their journeys did not quickly yield definitive answers. The more comfort they
felt dwelling in that uncertainty, the more likely they were to conclude a
search with a decision that not knowing for sure was “good enough.”

####  4.2.5. Trust heuristics

In this section, we describe the trust heuristics Gen Z participants used to
determine whether sources were credible, useful, and/or meaningful. Trust
heuristics are sets of informal criteria, or shortcuts, that people use to
assess information. These shortcuts, like folk models (Wash, 2010; D’Andrade,
2005), do not necessarily lead to accurate information and can make
misinformation seem compelling. Conversely, they can also help expedite
decision-making and serve important social functions. Participants used three
key trust heuristics: convenience, aesthetic, and tone.

##### Convenience

The degree to which the information is easy to access and share. Convenience
is a response to information overload, as Maya (13–17, Mainstream) said:
“Searching on Google is a hassle, it’s more for school. TikTok is more fun.
The videos are more interesting and relatable […] On TikTok I don’t have to
read mounds of paragraphs.”

##### Aesthetic

The degree to which the information “feels right.” Pop-up ads were a key
negative aesthetic, as Clio (13-17, Mainstream) articulated: “When there are a
lot of ads, you can tell that they just care about making money and not the
actual news.”

##### Tone

The degree to which the information is affectively charged or not – especially
negatively. As Shay (18-24, Mainstream) explained: “I think the news is
negative. Sometimes I tell him [my granddad] that and he doesn’t understand.”

Multiple participants highlighted @underthedesknews on TikTok (shown in Figure
2) as an example of a trusted news source; it showcases all 3 heuristics.
Convenience: it gives quick and snappy overviews. Aesthetic: young, informal,
relatable individuals report the news in place of ”the usual” talking heads on
mainstream media. Tone: it is gentle and reassuring, making upsetting news
easier to handle. As Jax (18–24, Mainstream) described: “It’s not
condescending. It’s bringing you the day’s news in a calm way from a safe
space.”

Figure 2. Example from @underthedesknews on TikTok providing calm, quietly-
spoken news from underneath a desk, about a recent shooting in Buffalo.

##  5\. Discussion

The central finding in this work is that online information processing is
fundamentally a social practice for Gen Zers. Therefore to be effective,
information literacy interventions should treat individuals as aspirational
members of social groups. While other works have noted the role of social
influence on credibility judgments, we argue that it is not simply that social
ties affect users when they evaluate online information—social belonging
itself is often the primary motivation for information engagement. In this
section, we relate these findings to our original RQs as well as prior work,
and we consider implications for intervention. We also hypothesize which
phenomena are period, age, and cohort effects, suggesting where our findings
have more general implications.

###  5.1. Implications of Information Sensibility

Here, we discuss 3 key implications of our work: (1) Gen Zers’ informational
and social needs are inseparably entangled; (2) Gen Zers’ information journeys
often do not begin with a truth-seeking search query; and (3) Gen Zers use
information to orient themselves socially and define their emerging
identities. These implications address our first and second RQs (how Gen Zers
seek and assess online information); we handle RQ3 (susceptibility to
misinformation) in 5.2.

##### Gen Zers’ informational and social needs are inseparably entangled.

Other works have called attention to the importance of social influences on
news consumption (Messing and Westwood, 2014; Giudice, 2010; Qayyum et al.,
2010). We take this work on social influence a step further, arguing that it
is difficult to disentangle the process of searching for facts from the
process of seeking social support. Much existing literature assumes a clear
distinction between online truth-seeking (looking for factual information) and
online support-seeking (using the internet to find community). Yet as Patel et
al. have shown (Patel et al., 2019), such a distinction often does not hold.
Like the participants in that work—who came online to make sense of their
medical diagnoses, simultaneously seeking health information and social
support or belonging—Gen Zers practice information sensibility, personalizing
and socially-interpreting ostensibly factual information to process it
meaningfully. Work on communication ecology (Wenzel, 2019; Ball-Rokeach et
al., 2012) using communication infrastructure theory (Ball-Rokeach et al.,
2001; Kim and Ball-Rokeach, 2006) instructs a similar attention to users’
goals and information pathways as they engage resources within multimodal
environments to meet their needs.

We therefore call for further attention to questions of motivation and meaning
when analyzing young people’s susceptibility to misinformation: why (in
addition or adjacent to validating truth claims) young people encounter, seek,
and metabolize information online; and in what contexts or circumstances
information becomes meaningful and relevant for them. For Gen Zers, navigating
online information is challenging because they seek social belonging as much
as they seek truth, in many cases not marking a clear distinction. Our
participants mostly valued information based on its relevance to their social
relationships. As they encountered information, they assessed it in relation
to their peers, family, and go-to sources, interpreting (or disregarding)
information based on the pull of these social influences.

Citing the classroom as a key influence, boyd (boyd, 2018) has argued that
“perverted” media literacy, as students learn it in school, teaches students
to “question everything” without filling resulting gaps with new frameworks to
make sense of the world. We observed similar “perversions” of media literacy
principles in our participants’ interpretations: the belief that Wikipedia is
universally unreliable, the push to “question everything” and “consult a wide
range of sources” leading our participants to fringe (mis)information sources,
and the belief that many mainstream media sources have hidden agendas. boyd
argues that misinformation peddlers online weaponize critical thinking and
easily manipulate the gap created by “questioning everything,” leaving youth
susceptible to misinformation.

Yet we found that rather than school being a uniquely destabilizing moment,
where students learn critical thinking which unseats their prior beliefs and
leaves a vacuum, young people are constantly being influenced by their social
ties. They dialogically use information to make sense of their social place in
the world (and vice versa), making their truth-seeking processes largely
inseparable from their social validation-seeking process. Lifestage changes
that bring new social influences (e.g., going to college, starting a new job,
entering a romantic relationship) appear to be moments when reorientation of
social and informational needs is possible. These are often gradual shifts, as
new social motivations may begin to draw Gen Zers into other interpretive
frames.

Our findings about the entangled nature of Gen Zers’ informational and social
needs lead us to value solutions less strictly focused on classroom-based
learning environments. Rather than resolving cognitive glitches and
encouraging critical distance, as boyd argues, we suggest that social support
and belonging may be key solutions to the problems of misinformation and fake
news. Our participants were largely less focused on trying to fill knowledge
gaps (created, as boyd proposes, by literacy education’s drive to produce
critical thinkers) than they were on social gaps, which they sought to fill by
consuming the right, most relevant information. A lack of social belonging
pushed participants to seek new social groups, which they could access through
shared information consumption. For many Gen Zers, in other words, the core
problem is not misinformation (solved via literacy-based competencies) but
rather social belonging, which may be solved via sharing misinformation.

Gen Zers make judgments about how seriously to take online information—and
therefore how to evaluate it— depending on its significance for their lives.
Our work also shows that the evaluation of information, in situ, is not
reducible to questions of facticity or accuracy for Gen Zers, but is tangled
with judgments of relevancy and social significance. Prior work has shown that
relevance, defined as being related to one’s interests, matters for
misinformation behaviors among teenagers on messaging apps (Herrero-Diz et
al., 2020). A wider approach to relevancy, incorporating social pulls, could
help HCI researchers better gauge not only whether Gen Zers are practicing
information literacy, but when and why they choose to do so (or not). The
entangled nature of social and informational work for Gen Zers, as young
people make sense of information together, means that HCI and literacy-based
interventions should look for ways of supporting youth in their social or
relational needs through engagement with online information, rather than
presuming a primary need for help with truth-assessment.

##### Information journeys often do not begin with a truth-seeking search
query.

Although we began this research interested in information-seeking behaviors,
we found that Gen Zers largely encounter online information, rather than
actively search for it. As one 13–17 mainstream participant put it:

> “I use social media to keep up with current events, because it’ll come
> across my feed. I don’t sit down and watch the news every morning. I’ll just
> use TikTok or Instagram to see what’s happening.”

We found that many researchers analyzing information literacy implicitly use
the concept of an “information journey” as a heuristic: a linear process that
begins with a verifiable question entered into a search engine, where the user
finds relevant information or content, performs a credibility check, and
arrives at an answer (a model owing to the concept’s origins in library and
information science (Association et al., 1989)). The user moves from a state
of being less informed to more informed (or incorrectly informed, in the case
of misinformation discovery).

We discovered, however, that our Gen Z participants more often encountered
information “in the wild” (rather than starting with a query and following a
single search pathway), and often toggled dialogically between implicit
information-encountering and explicit information-seeking, starting and
finishing their engagements during conversations with family, in comments
sections, on social media feeds, and elsewhere. We represent this nonlinear
model in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Two representations of information journeys. On the left, a
traditional, linear journey from question to answer. On the right, a more
exploratory and less definitive journey that toggles between information-
seeking and information-encountering.

Prior work has identified this experience of passive exposure to information
brought about by the internet; Qayyum et al. (Qayyum et al., 2010), for
instance, found young people “encountering” the news while surfing web portals
(e.g., MSN, Hotmail), more than actively seeking online information. Our work
with Gen Zers finds that this practice has grown more significant with
increased mobile and social media usage (especially the development of
algorithmically-determined scrolling feeds, both text and short-form video)
and must be incorporated into HCI and literacy-based information models as the
default mode of engagement, not the exception to the rule.

Furthermore, ours is not the first work identifying nonlinear information-
seeking behavior; other studies, in both HCI and information science, have
documented it empirically (e.g., cyclical patterns in health information-
seeking, (Patel et al., 2019)) or sought to model it (Foster, 2004). However,
it remains common among studies of information literacy behaviors, especially
among young people, to evaluate competencies premised on (and designed to
support) more linear models of searching and evaluation (e.g., (Breakstone et
al., 2022; Hargittai and Young, 2012; McGrew et al., 2018)). Ecologically-
valid interventions that seek to channel or enhance nonlinear online
information habits rather than eliminate them (e.g., lateral reading
(Breakstone et al., 2021a; Wineburg et al., 2022)), could be more sustainable
and effective among Gen Zers than approaches designed for linear journeys.

##### Gen Zers use information to orient themselves socially and define their
emerging identities.

We investigated not just how Gen Z seeks and evaluates information, but also
its function. We found that Gen Zers use online information not simply to
verify facts, but for identity-formation and to achieve social belonging. In
other words, information helps them determine who they are, where they fit,
and what they believe.

The use of online information for social orientation and identity-formation
manifested in several ways among our participants. For many, finding and
consuming the “right” information was a way of participating in social groups
or building relationships with family members. Crowdsourcing the comments to
analyze credibility was one key way to seek that social validation. For
others, online information helped them push away from existing relationships
(e.g., with parents) by giving them tools to win arguments. We also found a
widespread sense that engaging with online information relating to politics or
the news was a signal of adulthood and maturity—whether already achieved or an
aspirational future state. Many proudly stated that they were the “kind of
person” who knew to check sources and evaluate credibility.

The literature on social semiotics, self-presentation, and identity-
construction is vast, but we follow Taylor (Taylor, 1989) in linking identity
to practices of belief-formation. In keeping with social semiotic theories, we
found that Gen Zers figure out what they believe not only by seeking and then
internally processing facts about the world, but by dialogically orienting
themselves with and through a much wider field of socially-meaningful,
multimodal information (Bakhtin, 2010). Learning from our participants to
adopt a more capacious definition of information (both textual and audiovisual
content, including facts, opinions, arguments, and social signals) allowed us
to more fully understand this social semiotic process. This suggests the
potential dividends for HCI and literacy-based approaches in adopting a richer
and more inclusive definition of online information.

These findings are also an empirical contribution to the HCI literature on
identity and information. What we found with Gen Zers is a generalized form of
what Tripodi (Tripodi, 2020, 2022) has found specifically for American
evangelical conservatives: that online information practices may be used to
signal political or social identities. Crowdsourcing comments for markers of
social similarity is a key example of this practice. Further HCI studies might
explore this for other cohorts (e.g., older users or progressives) or examine
how platform-specific features and affordances could shape identity signalling
via information-processing.

###  5.2. Susceptibility to misinformation

Here we consider how this information sensibility framework accounts for the
susceptibility of Gen Zers to misinformation (RQ3) and might reorient both HCI
and literacy-based approaches to intervention. We found that all Gen Z
participants, whether alternative or mainstream, used information for social
belonging. Three of the information sensibility practices we identified
(crowdsourcing credibility, everyday experience, and surrogate thinking) were
not strongly linked with either alternative or mainstream information habits
but were effectively neutral; they often reinforced beliefs normative in
participants’ social circles, whether based on facts or misinformation. We
posit that one practice (“good enough” reasoning) seems to offer a protective
effect for both mainstream and alternative Gen Zers, in cases where no
definitive “right” answer was available,.

We began this work assuming that belief in misinformation would be non-
normative for Gen Zers. Yet some Gen Zers exist in spaces (social or physical)
where misinformation is the norm. Here, too, their information practices were
affected by the desire to belong. We observed Gen Zers sharing misinformation
when it was normative within their communities to do so. If most people around
them were skeptical about COVID vaccines, for instance, they were more likely
to share vaccine misinformation, out of a desire to connect with others. This
finding—that Gen Zers’ susceptibility to misinformation is deeply shaped by
family influences or social contexts—extends previous work on the social
appeal of misinformation (Messing and Westwood, 2014; Geeng et al., 2020;
O’Connor and Weatherall, 2019; Duffy et al., 2020) by clarifying the social
influences at play on young people in particular (like (Herrero-Diz et al.,
2020)). It also confirms the need for sociotechnical approaches to
misinformation in which interactional or pedagogical interventions are
combined with attention to social forces, both on- and offline.

In alternative information contexts, the practice of surrogate thinking
frequently led Gen Zers to accept and share misinformation. Those whose
surrogate thinkers were family members, like Bella (18–24, Alternative) and
Cris (18–24, Alternative), quoted in 4.2.3, were urged to share vaccine
misinformation or trust alternative news sources advancing conspiracy
theories. Yet surrogate thinking can also lead to surprising shifts in
orientation—including for Gen Zers themselves. For example, Hannah (13–17,
Alternative) had a religious family that shared misinformation about COVID and
Black Lives Matter (BLM). She was also a big Justin Bieber fan, partly since
he openly spoke about being religious. Because of this fandom, she listened
closely to what Bieber said about other topics, like COVID. Since she “trusts
what he says” about faith, she also trusted his claim that COVID was real,
prompting her to rethink inherited family attitudes. As an information
practice for Gen Zers, surrogate thinking confirms prior work on social
signaling and trust (Tripodi, 2022; van der Does et al., 2022) which has
found, for instance, that how speakers make claims or signal group memberships
(e.g., faith or ideology), matters as much, if not more, for trust than the
substance of a given claim.

Crowdsourcing credibility, used by both alternative and mainstream Gen Zers,
is another practice that involves making sense of social signals beyond the
factualness of information. It is also a case—as other researchers have found
(e.g., (Tripodi, 2020))—of information literacy practices being deployed in
novel ways that can increase susceptibility to misinformation. Participants
often sought to verify facts in the comments (e.g., by following links or even
simply noting that links were provided), but not whether or not a commenter
was who they said they were (or was even a real person). They knew about
“fact-checking” news sources, but generally did not apply the same reasoning
to individual influencers or commenters, rather evaluating signals of social
similarity. Valuing the comments so highly could make Gen Zers of all
political orientations more susceptible to misinformation, as this information
space is deeply shaped by bots, bad actors, and incentives that could drive
misinformation-sharing (e.g., audience monetization, or a welcoming in-group).
The Gen Zers in our study did not demonstrate a robust awareness of these
risks, nor did they have sophisticated heuristics for judging the authenticity
or motivations of accounts posting comments. (Valuing everyday experience, in
this context, can also increase susceptibility to misinformation, if not
paired with critical attention to authenticity.) By widening our definition of
“meaningful” information to include social signals and collective beliefs,
found often by Gen Zers in the comments, our work suggests how literacy-based
interventions could be reworked with information sensibility. For instance,
Gen Zers might benefit from accuracy prompts (found effective by, e.g.,
(Pennycook et al., 2021)) within comments sections, or advice for considering
the authenticity of digital identities.

We found that “good enough” reasoning may offer both alternative and
mainstream Gen Zers a layer of protection against misinformation—especially
when queries are not easily or definitively resolvable. For example, Alia
(18–24, Mainstream) was a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) member who
told us about her process of figuring out whether COVID-19 had been made in a
lab: her “right-wing” parents thought it had been, but her “left-wing” cousins
found this claim to be ridiculous. She spoke to a friend with similar
“moderate” beliefs as her. They searched online together but could not come to
a definitive answer. Weighing all that they had found, they concluded that
COVID-19 was probably not manufactured in a lab. Later that week, Alia
attended an ROTC training exercise that simulated the release of a
manufactured bioweapon. This made her question her initial belief: “Oh man, if
the military thinks this is possible, then maybe COVID was manufactured in a
lab.” Instead of following a misinformation rabbit hole, however, Alia
concluded that she couldn’t ever be sure. Her willingness to declare an
information journey “good enough” meant she did not turn to misinformation for
a definitive answer.

“Good enough” reasoning allows Gen Zers to stop their information-seeking
journeys before they reach a single, definitive answer to their query, when
they decide they have sufficient information or that certainty cannot be won
(e.g., for interpretive, rapidly-changing, or normative topics). This runs
against the grain of literacy-based approaches, which are designed to help
people confidently complete linear information-seeking journeys by locating
accurate, high-quality information. Yet many studies have identified a
relationship between desire for certainty (termed by psychologists as the need
for cognitive closure) and susceptibility to misinformation or conspiracy
thinking (Ecker et al., 2022; Marchlewska et al., 2018; Douglas et al., 2017).
In many cases, misinformation preys on this dynamic by offering the false
promise of total certainty. Our findings suggest the need for interventions
that build comfort with uncertainty or enable “good enough” reasoning, rather
than aiming to reduce it on the basis that a single, discoverable truth always
exists.

Indeed, the Gen Z information sensibility practice of valuing everyday
experience also illuminates the need to help Gen Zers navigate the information
landscape as they find it, not as we might wish it to be. As Doctorow
(Doctorow, 2017) argues, the misinformation crisis is not simply about what is
true, but how we know what is true. Experience, as (boyd, 2018) has written,
is an epistemology recognized by disability activists and some Indigenous
communities as a privileged mode of knowledge construction. Rather than
devaluing this approach by asserting that “facts” always trump experience, it
might be more effective to help Gen Zers identify different epistemologies and
understand how they produce different answers.

In sum, Gen Zers’ information sensibility practices do not make them
universally more susceptible to misinformation. Generally, the effects of
these practices appear determined by local social and family norms. The use of
“good enough” reasoning, perhaps developed in response to information
overload, may help Gen Zers resist the certainty promised by misinformation.
Before overwriting these practices with new competencies, HCI or literacy-
based interventions should first recognize the utility of information
sensibility from the user perspective.

###  5.3. Effects: period, age, cohort

In this subsection, we hypothesize which findings have implications for the
wider population, classifying them into period, age, and cohort effects (Table
2). We make these suggestions based on previous qualitative studies (e.g.,
(Wheeler, 2021; Goldberg, 2021)) and the literature reviewed in Section 2.
These hypotheses provide avenues for future research based upon our findings.
Period, age, and cohort effects are not always neatly categorizable, so we
indicate in each section where gradients occur.

####  5.3.1. Period effect

Period effects are experienced by all age groups living at a particular moment
in time. Some period effects are the result of a specific, discrete event;
others may be caused by longer-term social, economic, or cultural conditions.
We hypothesize that people of all ages seek social belonging. People across
the population as a whole also currently experience information overload at
unprecedented scale and speed (challenge) and use surrogate thinking to cope
with it, relying on go-to sources (practice).

We propose encountering information in the wild rather than searching for it
is a period effect (experienced by all ages) but is more pronounced among Gen
Z. We theorize that this effect has a generational gradient rather than a
sharp difference: younger generations are more likely to encounter most of
their information rather than searching for it. Being pulled by a desire for
social belonging more than a desire to ascertain accurate “truths,” we posit,
is shared across the population but is more pronounced in adolescents
(gradient age effect). Coupled with research into misinformation
susceptibility in adult populations (Wheeler, 2021), we also hypothesize that
discomfort with uncertainty and desire for normativity predicts susceptibility
to misinformation across the population, which we suggest testing in future
research.

####  5.3.2. Age effect

Age effects are effects that people of a certain age experience, regardless of
the time period they live in. Adolescence is a key example. We propose that a
heightened fear of social error and dislike of misrecognition (challenges) are
age effects more acutely experienced by adolescents. Adolescents also
experience a stronger desire to orient themselves based upon their peers, and
to develop a sense of self via information practices.

More specifically, we noted an increased family influence on beliefs for 13–17
year olds, which we propose is an age effect, one that modifies the surrogates
they select. As people age, they move away from family influence toward peer
influence regardless of generation. The specific practices they use to do so,
we propose, are cohort effects (to which we now turn).

####  5.3.3. Cohort effect

Cohort effects are effects experienced by specific generations (e.g., Gen Z,
Baby Boomers). Generational technology use has specific effects on information
practices. For example, Gen Z practices are shaped by the media they use most
as a cohort (e.g., TikTok) at this particular, critical developmental stage.

The specific information validation practices our participants used were
therefore largely unique to Gen Z, due to the media “waters” they grew up
swimming in. The affordances of the social media technologies they interacted
with allowed for the crowdsourcing credibility practices they used.
Generations coming of age before social media lacked these digital social cues
altogether121212We note this as both a cohort and period effect in Table 2 due
to the familiarity that this generation has with social cues, though people of
all ages & cohorts may also use information from the comments as in (Geeng et
al., 2020).

Further, Gen Zers place higher trust in everyday experience (practice) rather
than expertise, we posit, in part due to a widespread collapse of
institutional trust as they were learning to evaluate information. This is a
cohort effect, since it is dependent on the specific historical moment in
which Gen Z came of age. Finally, Gen Zers are more risk-averse than other
generations, in part due to stagnation of wages and a fear of getting publicly
canceled (Katz et al., 2021).

##  6\. Conclusion

In this paper, we argued that Gen Zers practice information sensibility when
encountering and evaluating online information, interpreting it through the
lens of their existing social influences. For Gen Zers—and, we hypothesize,
for others—information processing is fundamentally a social practice. Our
findings suggest that, like Gen Z’s information sensibility practices, the
solutions and strategies to address misinformation should also be socially
embedded.

Information sensibility is complementary to information literacy, not a
replacement for it. The descriptive reorientation provided by our work—and by
the concept of information sensibility we introduce with it—opens up space for
others to develop a new set of prescriptive competencies to foster to reduce
misinformation vulnerability. Those interventions should address how we can
best support Gen Zers in meeting their own needs and building resilience to
misinformation, given what we know about the social nature of information
seeking, evaluating, and sharing.

###### Acknowledgements.

We are grateful to Vanessa Maturo for her early research work on this project.
We extend a very big thank you to Behzad Sarmadi, Rebekah Park, and Todd
Carmody for their many efforts in support of this project. We would also like
to thank Brad Chen, Cass Matthews, Crystal Lee, Francesca Tripodi, Hector
Ouilhet Olmos, Ioana Literat, Jason Lipshin, Mariana Saavedra Espinosa, Meena
Natarajan, Nidhi Hebbar, Paree Zarolia, Rachel A. Edson, Roberta R. Katz, Sam
Wineburg, Serena Chao, Vishnupriya Das, Yasmin Green, Zach Cordier, and
several other experts and colleagues for their support and ideas as we planned
and conducted this research. Finally, we’d like to thank our participants for
sharing their experiences with us.

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