How Can My Students Trust What They Find on the Internet?


By Jeff Walsh
CEO and Founder of Sooth.FYI

 

A growing trend on Instagram is Gen Z’ers asking “is this story real?” in response to content surfacing in their feeds. They’re smart to be asking. An unprecedented number of new forces are reshaping our information ecosystem. If the internet created the infrastructure that supercharged information flow, these new forces are heavily influencing the kind of information that’s flowing.

Generative AI products like ChatGPT (or Gemini, CoPilot, etc.) top the list of these new forces. They’re great at assisting with discrete, time-consuming tasks or answering basic questions. But don’t confuse their confidence with competence when it comes to complex or nuanced queries. Even if a response is free of errors or fabrications, it should be considered much like Wikipedia – an ok starting point, not an end point.

The more important consideration, however, is their widespread accessibility. Generating reams of misinformation can now be accomplished with the click of a button (according to NewsGuard, there are already close to 1,000 AI-generated unreliable news sites, many of which are self-sustaining via ads.) Mass proliferation of AI generated content will inevitably circle back on itself, resurfacing either as answers to user queries (this is already happening) or as new training data for future language models. Finally, ingestion and regurgitation of copyrighted work – in particular, news stories – is putting publishers at risk of losing much-needed site traffic and subscription revenue.

That’s bad timing because Americans’ trust in “mass media” is already at an all-time low according to Gallup; it’s not the ideal time to be kicking out the other leg from under the media stool. But are Americans truly untrusting of the news, or are they just seeking alternative views that emphasize facts they think are most relevant? Do we understand the difference between truth and bias? This is where it can get complicated; catering to audiences and advertisers can lead to relegation of journalistic standards.

One way to ensure media survival might be through subscriptions. According to the Reuters Institute, only 22% of Americans paid for any news last year. The same 2024 report also states that most Americans are unwilling to pay for more news. It already feels like there are too many paywalls, doesn’t it? That probably explains why 67% of Americans rely on social media as their main source of online news. Here, it’s worth quoting from the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.”

This is all bad news for students and educators. Not only do these powerful, new forces heighten the urgency for teaching information literacy, but they simultaneously render it more difficult to do so. We are at risk of moving toward a future where accessing diverse, trustworthy, original insights and facts becomes a herculean task. Is it responsible to burden our educators and students with such an unedifying challenge?

This is exactly why we are building Sooth.fyi, the only internet search platform specifically designed for students. What started as a project to solve a problem for knowledge workers reoriented 18 months ago to focus on education because that’s the area of greatest need and potential impact. A beautifully designed and intuitive interface that delivers you diverse insights into today’s pressing issues. All content retrieved comes exclusively from thousands of the internet’s most reliable and diverse original sources of news, research, data, and insights. No ads, chatbots, dubious or commercial content get in your way. You can immediately verify the source reliability (using NewsGuard’s Reliability Ratings) and bias (using AllSides Media Bias RatingsTM), access all the content – including that which is typically behind paywalls, build research collections, take notes, generate bibliographies, and collaborate with colleagues and classmates. Seamlessly translate content for your English Language Learners or auto rewrite it into lower reading levels. Monitor your information diet to ensure you’re consuming from a wide variety of source types and perspectives. When confronted with potentially dubious information, verify it using our one-of-a-kind Misinformation Toolkit. And when you need a break, scroll the latest headlines across a range of topics on our news feed instead of “doomscrolling” on social media. This is Sooth.fyi and we’re just getting started.

Jeff’s presentation at the MSA Summer Symposium was titled “Bias, Misinformation, and Polarization: How Can My Students Find Anything on the Internet?”


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