As the TikTok generation registers to vote, schools take on misinformation

Democracy & Doubt
Pittsburgh navigates trust and choice in the 2024 election season

Baldwin High School teacher Adam Foote pulled up an online article claiming an FBI agent implicated in the Hillary Clinton email leaks was found dead in an apparent murder-suicide. What did his students think of the article, he asked, encouraging them to dissect it and check for false information.

“If you saw this article when it came out, would you think twice before believing it?” Foote asked, instructing the students to look up the publication — Denver Guardian — on another tab, revealing that it was a fake news website.

“This concept of lateral reading — like you’re reading across something. You’re reading across the tabs up here,” Foote explained. “If I’m truly trying to verify how correct something is, this is what you want to do —  multiple sources, multiple tabs.”

The students were participating in a newly formed course titled Media Literacy, an initiative helmed at Baldwin by Foote. He sees the class as a way to bridge instructional gaps around how students access and interact with information at their fingertips.

His goal is to incorporate media literacy and government into his teaching and provide practical solutions to combat misinformation to seniors who are on the cusp of voting.

With the 2024 general election less than a month away, high school teachers in the region are navigating approaches to teaching civics and combating misinformation. Against persistent social media exposure, some educators recognize the importance of equipping students with the critical thinking skills necessary to navigate the complex landscape of political information.

How a bias chart counters social media spin

Kaylee Wilson, a 14-year-old student at Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12, gets almost all of her information from social media.

“You can literally scroll and just see somebody talking about Trump, Kamala,” she said. “Everything that there is to talk about the 2024 election, it’s all on TikTok, which I think is crazy.”

Research says the share of TikTok users who regularly get news from the platform has more than doubled since 2020, and nearly 40% of adults under 40 get news from TikTok.

Even though she seeks out information from platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, Wilson acknowledges that they can breed misinformation.

“Especially on TikTok, because there’s a lot of misinformation going from both sides, the left and right, I think you just have to go to the direct source that they’re saying this from,” she said.

To fact-check and understand her sources, Wilson refers to the AllSides Media Bias Chart , a tool designed to identify political leanings of different news outlets. She learned about the tool in her civics class, where teacher Jenna O’Neill talks about concepts like the separation of governing powers and works to keep students informed on political candidates and their positions.

One of O’Neill’s goals is to create awareness about media biases among her students and help them to develop a habit of checking statements they see on the internet.

A 2022 NewsGuard investigation found that for a sampling of searches on prominent news topics, almost 20% of the videos TikTok presented as search results contained misinformation.

Lara Putnam, a research professor at the Pitt Disinformation Lab, said young people are less likely to be persuaded by disinformation and pass along untrustworthy information because they are more familiar with manipulation on social media and more inclined to take claims that they see on social media as something closer to entertainment.

Like Wilson, her classmates Raymi Aguilar Carroll and Meyvn Robertson also use social media platforms as their primary sources of information but recognize the widespread misinformation on those platforms.

“It’s just there’s so much to check. You don’t know if your information is correct,” Robertson said.

“It’s scary that we have to check because it’s to the point where we can’t trust who we should be putting our trust in,” added Aguilar Carroll.

Students said O’Neill’s classes, and the Media Bias Chart, have helped them to check their news sources.

“There’s so much that they can have access to right now that I really hope that they can maybe be a little bit more discerning whenever they hear things,” O’Neill said.

Navigating divisiveness by fostering listening skills

At Baldwin, Kathleen Temme teaches an Advanced Placement [AP] government class to high school seniors. One of the gaps in civics education, she found, was a lack of mandatory government or civics classes for all seniors. Some districts, including Baldwin, do not have a separate government course in high school.

“They’re going to college, or they’re going out into the workforce. They’re going to have to start paying taxes if they already haven’t,” she said. “They’re doing all of the things that government is related to and I don’t think we do a great job [preparing them for that].”

She said she believes school districts should make civics classes mandatory for all seniors instead of offering it only in AP courses.

According to state law , school districts are required to develop and administer, at least once, a locally developed test of U.S. history, government and civics. Districts can administer this test at any time in grades seven to 12. There are no state-administered Keystone exams for civics or government required by school districts.

Another challenge, according to teachers like Temme and O’Neill, is navigating teaching in classrooms where students have divided political views.

At CAPA, O’Neill said, most of her students have a “liberal” political mindset. Unlike most teachers, O’Neill chooses to tell her students where she stands on the political spectrum so they know about her biases.

“I told them, not because I want you to have my political viewpoint, but so if I am saying something biased, you might be able to recognize that because I think it’s hard for us to separate our biases from and be completely neutral all the time, as much as we might try.”

At Baldwin, Temme tries to foster listening skills by asking students to respect each other even if they disagree. She chooses not to share her political views with students and sees her role as someone who is there to listen and correct misinformation in the classroom.

Many of her students are on the opposite ends of the political spectrum and come with a lot of opinions formed within their homes, she said. She teaches students in her AP class to expand their horizons by listening to opposing viewpoints.

“That’s kind of the tone that I’m trying to set in that class where you might not agree politically, but just because you don’t agree politically, doesn’t mean that you have to hate each other,” Temme said.

Her students have taken those lessons as they prepare for their senior class project around civic engagement. Temme has assigned students to participate in at least one civic activity. This year, she is urging students to organize a voter registration drive in the school in advance of the Oct. 21 deadline.

“Our school is very divided on opinions,” said Alisha Katel, a senior at Baldwin. “I think just staying aware and staying respectful, thinking about what you say before you say, is really important, because it’s OK to have a different opinion, but it’s not OK to disrespect someone based off of that.”

Lajja Mistry is the K-12 education reporter at PublicSource. She can be reached at lajja@publicsource.org .

This story was fact-checked by Emily Briselli .

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