‘‘ JAG VET INTE RIKTIGT VAD JAG SKA TRO! ’’. En kvalitativ studie i ungdomars förhållningssätt till desinformation på sociala medier

Sammanfattning: Disinformation, i.e. intentionally false content disseminated with the aim of reaching a particular group to influence their views on a topic or issue, has become increasingly common with the rise of digital media and a clear threat to democratic values, according to research. This thus raises questions about how to prevent disinformation from the impact it has on different groups and in different contexts. Much research exists on the subject in the form of studies that measure people’s ability or lack of ability to identify disinformation on social media. These studies, of both qualitative and quantitative types, often set a focus on respondents’ confidence in detecting disinformation. However, few studies exist on the topic of young people and disinformation. In Sweden, there is some research on this topic, but these studies often focus on the more quantitative aspects of a problem and no studies has so far highlighted how young people in Sweden relate to disinformation on social media with a starting point of finding out how they reason about false content on social media and why they think the way they do; i.e. to understand their lifeworld in relation to this. Thus, this work has come to be about investigating this with a qualitative method. The following study has been conducted with eleven in-depth interviews with high school students from year 1 and year 3. The questions that have been asked have aimed to answer which social media platforms young people use the most and why, how they reason about disinformation circulating on these platforms and their confidence in different types of channels and content. An important aspect has been to present examples from the internet/social media that border on or by definition can be said to be disinformational content and discuss this with the students. This has been done to review in what way their confidence, or lack of such, to identify disinformation resonates with the correspondents actual ability and competence to understand what is reliable or not. Finally, a comparison has been made by analyzing if there is a difference in how older students relate to disinformation on social media compared to the younger students. The results show that young people generally find it difficult to distinguish between what is true and what is false on social media unless the source is considered reliable (well-known newspapers were often cited as an example). Overall, it can be said that there was always some uncertainty as to whether something could be considered as truthful. When asked how the respondents find out or determine what is true or false, the answers were somewhat scattered; gut feeling, cross-checking or prior knowledge became common answers as to how to make such an assessment. In terms of media literacy, an important distinction was discovered in that those who had high confidence in their own competence was often able to explain why and how they make judgements about the reliability of different content, but when presented with the three examples from the internet/social media containing curiously misleading information, in some cases these individuals had more difficulty in making a clearly delineated assessment. However, it must be said that in some cases this was due to a certain difficulty in understanding some of the concepts used in these contents. In terms of the comparison made on whether there was a difference in how respondents’ attitudes towards disinformation on social media depending on their age, two main distinctions were made. The first, in line with the above, was that the younger students had a greater difficulty with certain concepts, which affected either their view of a certain content or their ability to determine the truthfulness of said content. The second was that the older students found it easier to reason aloud about why they determined a piece of content to be either true or false, i.e., the older students could more easily articulate why something seemed more or less credible to them. Here, the younger ones explained this more in terms of a feeling about whether or not something seemed true, but had more difficulty in pinpointing the characteristics of that feeling. In summary, it should be said that this study is very much an in-depth study, which means that the focus has been on the respondents’ feelings, impressions and experiences. It is therefore difficult to make a major generalization of the results as the information extracted is so personal on many levels. Having said that, the study has resulted in an up-close analysis of how young people might reason and thus suggests different aspects and perspectives that can be useful for future research.