Can We Trust Online News?

I just don’t know who or what to believe anymore! Have you ever found yourself thinking or saying this out loud regarding what you encounter or social media. With advances in AI generated content and the ways in which we as individual users can create content on social media, those of us who are concerned about the accuracy of what we see oftentimes leaves us scratching our heads while muttering, “Is that true?” The reality is that we are living in a world where the prevalence of falsehood is on the rise, as well as the chances for each of us to be scammed or duped. A new report from the Pew Research Center tells us that a fifth of U.S. adults now regularly get their news on TikTok, a figure which is up sharply since 2020. In fact, forty-three percent of adults under the age of thirty say they regularly get their news from TikTok, which is up from nine percent in 2020. While we can’t tell you where to go to find trusted truth online, we can tell you to beware, and to warn your kids to do the same.