Google to study Gen Z's online behavior: shocking findings

Many people want to know this. Social networks want young users. Media want subscribers. Politicians want guests. Professors want to know why students don't read books. Everyone seems interested in understanding “today's youth.”

For the past few years, researchers at Jigsaw, a Google subsidiary that focuses on internet politics and polarization, have been exploring how Gen Z digests and metabolizes what they see online. The researchers hoped that their study would provide one of the first in-depth ethnographic studies of Gen Z's “information literacy,” but as soon as they began their research, their most basic assumptions about the nature of digital information were shattered.

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Jigsaw CEO Yasmin Green says she just threw out the term “information literacy” in a week-long real-world study. It found that Gen Z “doesn't take a linear journey to assess the truth of something.” Instead, they engage in what scientists call “information sensitivity,” a “socially conscious” practice that relies on “folk credibility heuristics.” In other words, Gen Z knows the difference between solid news and a meme generated by artificial intelligence. They just don't care.

Jigsaw's findings provide clear insights into Gen Z's digital mindset. While older generations make an effort to verify information and cite sources, Gen Z doesn't even bother. They read the headline and immediately scroll down to the comments to see what others are saying. They leave the decision on the veracity and importance of the information to trusted influencers who share similar views. If the article is too long, they skip it. They don't want to see something that makes them think too hard or upset them emotionally. Jigsaw realized that if they had a goal, it was to learn what they needed to know to stay calm and converse in their chosen social circles.

The old guard will say, “Yeah, but at the end of the day, you have to care about the truth,” Green says. Gen Z will say: “Tell me your truth and what you think is important,” he adds. It's not some fixed notion of authority that determines the legitimacy of what's being said; it's the social signals we receive from our peers.

The Jigsaw study is not statistically significant. They did not survey a large group of Gen Z users about their digital habits. Instead, they relied on intensive interviews with a few 13- to 24-year-olds from a representative range of demographics, class, and gender. They did what anthropologists do in the field, seeking qualitative depth rather than quantitative data.

Also see “Trapped 30-Year-Olds” and “Every Career Choice is a Trap.”

They were surprised by what they heard. Young people generally say there is no difference between using the internet for news and for social interaction. Zeds engage in most of their digital experiences in what researchers call a “timepass” mode, simply because they don’t want to be bored. If they want to answer a question or learn something new, they can use a search engine, but they get new information primarily through social channels, which are algorithmically trimmed to reflect what they care about and who they trust. In other words, they created their own filters to process the deluge of digitized information. Only what’s important shows up, and if it’s there, it must be important.

Don't read long articles. And don't trust ads, paywalls, or popups that ask for donations or subscriptions. If you create clickbait, you don't trust your content at all, one respondent said. And news sources, even CNN and the New York Times, create clickbait. I reject these articles immediately, he added.

For Gen Z, the online world resembles the hierarchical, factional mess of 1980s teen movies, and rather than listening to pompous old teachers like CNN or the Times, they take their cues from online influencers who sit at the top of the social hierarchy. Influencers' personal experiences make them authentic and speak the language of Gen Z.

Gen Z typically has a favorite influencer or group of influencers that they trust and are very loyal to everything they say, said Beth Goldberg, head of research at Jigsaw Inc. “Because I get all my information from them, it would be very costly for me to break away from that group of influencers,” she added.

This doesn't mean that Gen Z is less intelligent or hardworking than other generations. They know how to dig deeper into an issue. They just don't usually want to do it. I barely use these important skills when I use the Internet, according to Goldberg. Whether I'm preparing for an upcoming fight or having to make a big life decision about school or investments, I'm ready to tackle the tedious fact-finding. But they spend the majority of their time in mindless, kill-time mode. Not only was the truth not the most important thing to them, it wasn't important at all, he added.

When one of the subjects shared a false image of Donald Trump fleeing from New York police, the researchers challenged him. It was kind of a shrug, Goldberg says. From the respondents' perspective, they tapped into their critical thinking skills and media savvy. After all, Trump was due to face a criminal trial in New York at the time. That may be true.

And when it comes to things like diet and health, Gen Z will try them on their own bodies to see if they work. They see this as a safe way to do their research, mainly because it's not harming anyone else. If this new diet or exercise regimen “works” for their body, that's more reliable than data showing its effects on the population as a whole.

If some supposedly factual content creeps into Gen Z's feed about what healthy eating is, what Trump would do as president, or whether Ukraine or Russia is to blame for the war, they'll likely jump straight in the comments. This is partly because they know that the nation's digital tribune will quickly expose any fake news, but also because they fear that the news or a particular response to it could spark online ostracism.

As they grow up, they are taught how to play the cancel culture and how not to play it to avoid it, Goldberg said. They receive reliable information from followers in closed group chats and private channels that show they are part of a group and allow them to perform certain social signals. For Gen Z, checking what others are saying in the comments isn't just a superficial thing. It's a matter of social life and death.

If this sounds like a generation that believes all the nonsense they see and doesn't subscribe to newspapers, that's what Jigsaw's scientists are worried about. But the good news is that Gen Z isn't as subject to deliberate deception as you might think. Research shows that most misinformation is created and consumed by the very few users who want it, rather than being pumped by algorithms into the eyes of gullible teenagers surfing the internet.

David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research who studies online behavior, says casual consumption of mindless TikToks is unlikely to lead someone into a dark corner of hate and misinformation. If they end up there, they're very likely to choose to get there on their own.

These days, we all consume less formal news content, like TV and newspapers. Like Gen Z, we all rely more and more on social networks to find out what's going on. A recent Pew Research Center study found that most users of Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok encounter news frequently. On X, it mostly comes from media outlets and journalists who actually create the news. On Facebook and Instagram, news comes to you through family and friends whose opinions, for better or worse, you already know. But on TikTok, where the user base is disproportionately younger, influencers tend to be the source. They aggregate, meta-analyze, and pre-analyze what other sources say. This may be why TikTok users say they're “not bored” of news compared to other platforms. Someone else will have already done the hard work for them. They get a summary.

As clickbait-averse Gen Zers might suspect, Jigsaw's interest in their online behavior isn't purely academic. A Google subsidiary makes software called Perspective that many news organizations, including The New York Times, use to manage their comments sections. The new version of Perspective takes Jigsaw's latest findings into account, elevating comments containing warm and fuzzy “bridge” emotions like curiosity and reason to the top of the section. The goal: to reach Gen Z readers who live scrolling through the comments and convert them into subscribers.

By studying Gen Z, Jigsaw can better trap them in their home environments. As a member of Gen X, I am naturally skeptical of sweeping statements about emerging generations. I’m sure you’ve heard some of the things baby boomers have said about us (not that we care, mind you). I’ll admit that it worries me that Gen Z is checking the comments to determine what they believe. But I came to the conclusion that I might as well look into it. To evaluate Jigsaw’s study, I ran a scientific test: I looked at its Google Scholar page to see how many other researchers had cited the study, a standard measure of how well a particular field values ​​a particular journal article.

And I found myself basically checking the comments, because we all do it: looking for tons of links, five-star reviews, answers. These are all valid ways of surfing the modern social and information ecosystem. The kids are right, and all is well.

Still, I wondered what Gen Z themselves would make of Jigsaw's research — two of them live in my house and call me Dad — so I sent them my test results, along with a question mark emoji.

Yes, the young one seems to have answered that way, but you know that not all of us do that.

I felt lucky, it was a better answer than the one Goldberg received. We always share the final results with the respondents, they say. But when Goldberg asked the subjects what they thought of her study, her findings showed that all she heard was the heavy silence of teens looking at their phones. “We don't know how many Gen Zers read our article,” she concluded sadly. “No comments section means no comments.”

The above article is a translation from Business Insider US.

Music: Mateusz Albin

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