Young People Know Their Feeds Are Broken. Here's What They're Asking for Instead.

Knowing how the game works doesn't make the young people we talk to everyday immune to it. The same teens who demonstrated sophisticated algorithmic awareness also told us they don't know how to determine what is true anymore. When we asked one student how he decides if something he sees is accurate, he replied: "It's very hard to come across what information is actually true, because I don't think anyone really knows."

Young people are digitally sophisticated AND they are tired and oversaturated by a constant flood of information. In that exhaustion, many have adopted a fallback strategy we call majority rules — if they see the same claim repeated across multiple posts, they take it as more likely to be true. It's an earnest attempt to apply a basic evidentiary principle. It's also exactly how algorithmic amplification of misinformation works.

The broken information systems are acutely visible in how young people have encountered the Middle East conflict after October 7, 2023. This was most teens’ first “social media war,” with graphic and contested content arriving unfiltered in the two minutes they scrolled between class periods. Jewish students described an algorithm that knew they were Jewish — pushing Middle East content onto their feeds relentlessly, turning their phones into spaces where their identity, safety, and sense of belonging were suddenly on trial.

Students with no direct connection to the conflict found themselves caught between two sets of certainties that admitted no middle ground. As Milo, an 11th grader with no ties to the region, put it: "It's just too extreme; I can't even form an opinion because all I see is Israel deserves to invade [Gaza] because Hamas invaded first and that Israel can't do this because people are suffering. What's really even happening?"

What Milo is describing is a knowledge crisis: young people are learning about the world in their out-of-school time on a parallel track to what they learn in school. They get taught digital citizenship in class, and watch the most uncivil behavior play out online. The content they learn in class, and rules about evidence and verification, seldom translate into their time in their feeds.

We think it is time to make those learning tracks intersect intentionally and meaningfully. Wouldn’t it be better for young people to know that they can bring their questions about what they are seeing in their feeds to adults who are prepared to help them make sense of it?

For many students we interviewed, classrooms are the only place left where it feels possible to ask real questions and where changing your mind is still permitted. Classrooms are where the accountability of face-to-face conversation — as one student put it, where "you can't just shut your brain off and walk away from me," — replaces the anonymity that digital spaces reward.

Young people’s digital lives are not a problem to be solved; they bring many assets to how they are building identity, encountering the world, and making sense of things that matter deeply to them in those spaces. The challenge is to help them do that work more wisely — to turn what they are already doing, imperfectly, into genuine civic learning about the most pressing issues for our country and our world, together.

At Or Initiative, we are hard at work on curriculum resources that will be the connective tissue between their online experiences and their classrooms, to make it easier for teachers to support students in developing digital discernment, with regular classroom practice that creates enduring habits and uses up-to-date social media content. We’re not interested in teaching students what to think about current events and contentious topics—but we are invested in teaching them how to think, and how to collaborate with their peers to understand all the perspectives on issues that deserve them. We’re helping educators to meet students where they already are — curious, sophisticated, and hungry for spaces where complexity is welcomed.

We're building for that; want to learn more? Join us at orinitiative.org.