Here's a radical idea: Give young people the news they want to read and not what we think they should read. Not only might this stop the handwringing over a generation that is media aware but not media savvy – it might also strengthen democracy.
As countries across Europe face into general elections, the destabilising effect of fake news (or "very fake news", to borrow a phrase oft-misused by US president Donald Trump) may cause aftershocks when the votes are counted.
There is little comfort to be found in Stanford University study on young people and news, which concluded that the social media generation cannot distinguish between what is true and untrue online. Tell a story often enough, apparently, and younger readers will believe it, even if initially sceptical.
Younger people are also more likely to be dependent on the way search engines order information, so the first answer that Google unearths may sometimes be their last. They are website agnostic, picking and choosing stories at will.
The Reuters Digital News Report (Ireland) highlights that younger people trust media even less than their adult counterparts, a pattern repeated in other surveys worldwide.
Youth market
News outlets, under threat and battling for survival, have ceded the youth market more by default than design. The truism that young people are both uninterested in news and unwilling to pay for it has taken root.
The reality is they are interested in news and debate, but not as we know it. Shane Smith, chief executive of media company Vice, caused a storm when he said: "Young people are angry, disenfranchised; they don't trust mainstream media outlets".
Smith’s detractors argued that younger audiences would eventually “graduate” to trusted news and broadcast sources. But statistics prove them wrong. For media in general, the fake news label threatens a plague-on-all-their-houses style reaction.
Initiatives aimed at dealing with it, such as Facebook's recent partnering with French media outlets, may stem the tide. But the die has already been cast. Samuel Laurent of Le Monde's fact-checking unit has described it as being like "emptying the sea with a glass of water".
Sensational headlines move up the rankings in a snowball effect, and the young pass them on because that is how they engage as digital natives. Initially they were drawn to satirical news sites precisely because they were anarchic. They mimicked the media’s portentousness while writing obviously fake headlines that were instantly shareable.
Comedy shows such as The Daily Show when hosted by Jon Stewart were considered in surveys as a "trusted news source" by younger audiences. Possibly this is because Stewart and his team skewered the foibles of both politicians and media alike, highlighting the hysteria of Fox News and cable news' dependence on conflict, tribalism and sensationalism.
Grabs attention
Conversely, the reason hyper-partisan or fake news websites are seductive is because they use the language of the internet generation – videos, memes, gifs – in a way that grabs attention even as it misleads.
Below-the-line debate on alternative sites appears robust and compelling. The wild west nature of it all appeals to a demographic looking for information that taps into their existing use of social media. Sites such as Vice, Mic and Al Jazeera’s AJ+ are attempting to target “millennials” where they are at. This means mobile-friendly content that combines news with context pieces and individual stories.
In some cases, these sites have deliberately hired diverse staff to reflect the interests of their target age group. Vice caught the global concerns of its audience earlier than most as its more subjective reporting tapped into Generation Y’s desire for more opinionated news.
Still, there is something else at play here. The endless circularity of certain themes in politics, the cynicism of the players involved, and the media’s insider status does not resonate on an emotional level. As one US study on how teenagers source news found: “It’s not that young people disregard the basic ideals of professional journalism but, rather, that they desire more authentic renderings of them.”.
Agents of change
The way to deal with the influence of fake news on a young audience may be twofold. First, there should be investment in younger media workers as agents of change: get them to report on the issues that matter to them, and allow for debunking, subversion and humour. Newsrooms should be opened up to a wider diversity in staff hires.
Young people should also be trained from an early age in media literacy so they can become their own fact-checkers. Digital literacy and informed citizenship go hand-in-hand. Prior knowledge is one of the main defences against lies and disinformation.
The age groups raised by the internet and the wolves of Silicon Valley need the critical skills to source and sieve through vast streams of information. As fake news becomes even more sophisticated, those most exposed to it need an antidote, sooner rather than later.
Kate Shanahan is head of journalism and communications at the Dublin Institute of Technology.