When I was a teenager, social media was still in a state of blissful infancy, before it evolved beyond providing a filter that made you look like a dog. For young people today things are a bit more complicated and being able to identify fake news and misinformation is an essential part of online safety, not least because, according to BBC Bitesize, 47 per cent of young people trust social media as a news source.
BBC Bitesize and Survation recently collaborated on a survey of 2,019 children aged 11-16 in the UK as part of a renewed focus on online safety. They found that young people rely on social media for the news, even if they don’t entirely trust it. TikTok is the top-ranking social media platform for news (30 per cent compared to Twitter’s six per cent), yet only 31 per cent of respondents trust the content.
