What do kids do when their media literacy skills fail them? They use “majority rules”

April 30, 2026

The Or Initiative team interviewed teens in New York City and Southern California last year to learn how young people decide what to trust online about current events and contentious topics, and how they talk (and don’t talk) about those issues with peers.

We’re kicking off our WORks in Progress series with 4 key findings from our interviews with more than 100 middle school, high school, and college students, educators, school leaders, and curriculum developers. See our recent report for more: Coming of Age in Polarized Times: Teaching Civil Discourse in a Digital Era.

By Michael H. Levine and Vikki Katz

Young people are growing up in a world where information is everywhere—and knowledge is harder than ever to attain.

The hours that they spend on social media expose them to content that is difficult, and often impossible, to verify. Posts vanish into the scroll and cannot be easily revisited, compared, or contextualized over time. And it is hard to tell who is claiming to be an expert on a topic and who actually is one.

Digital Inquiry Group sounded the alarm years ago that the media literacy skills still being taught to K-12 students are a poor fit for algorithmically-driven information environments. The days of using .org and .com to distinguish credibility are long gone—and yet, we interviewed students who were still looking for these indicators of what to trust online.

Our interviews reveal what kids do when the media literacy skills they’ve been taught don’t work: they rely on “majority rules.”

With majority rules, teens decide if they can trust something based on whether they see more content with the same information. The young people who use this technique are attempting to apply a foundational media literacy principle: when multiple sources are in agreement, the claim is more likely to be true.

But algorithmic tracking in social media environments makes this strategy unreliable. When teens engage with a video on a topic, the algorithm will deliver more, similar content. That makes majority rules a self-fulfilling prophecy because young people are more likely to accept misinformation as true—and if they are later confronted with the reality that it is not, they become more likely to believe that nothing online is really true.

When nothing feels verifiable, evidence loses power — and civic life breaks down at the root.

Our young people deserve better than the weighted coin flip of majority rules.

At Or Initiative, we’re taking that as our challenge.

We're combining the best existing curriculum with new tools that make it easier for teachers to bring real, up-to-date social media content into the classroom. Our goal is to help young people learn to verify what's trustworthy in collaboration with their classmates and teachers.

Then, on a solid and shared evidence base about a current event or contentious topic, our learning resources will support them through age-appropriate activities that develop their capabilities to (dis)agree constructively with each other.

The Or team will use WORks in Progress to keep you updated on what we’re developing with educators to build young people’s civil and civic muscle in the digital age. You can also join our mailing list and access our learning resources at orinitiative.org.

Vikki Katz, Ph.D., is Executive Director and Founder of Or Initiative