Teens learn a new conspiracy theory every week on social media

Yeah, the thing is that there used to be far less outlets back in the day which you'd come into contact with - you had your local newspaper, radio and TV station and the NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, Fox or whatever on the national stage. That's it. Anything not on that list at least had some serious money backing it and was thus credible by assumption.

These days, the local news have all gone down the drain and got replaced by an army of bloggers, some with actual blogs, some with Medium/Substack and some just doing shit on Twitter/Instagram. National news got increasingly partisan. And on top of that comes an even larger army of influencers of all kinds - game streamers, sometimes porn models pivoting their career, corporate shills, enemy propagandists...

It's easy for us old guard to at least roughly size the credibility of an outlet. But the young ones? They grew up in a world where the "household names" factually didn't matter.

Granted, there are also conspiracy theory websites likely to be less reliable than Coca Cola about Coca Cola, and activist websites whose reliability on the subject of Coca Cola varies from considerably more to considerably less reliable than Coca Coca's own press team, but I don't see any particular reason why teens would assume Reuters was one of those, even if they didn't know what Reuters was. Particularly not if they were showed the article. Sure, there are other ways you can make it make sense like if you substituted "reliable source of Coca Cola's opinion" into the text. But the more obvious explanation is that a large minority of teenagers believe that the most trustworthy authority on anything about Coca Cola is The Coca Cola Company. Just like similarly large proportions believe that Google's sponsored ads are the most popular or relevant results or that something labelled "Commentary" isn't an opinion...

> They did better at recognizing Google’s “sponsored” results as ads, but about 40% of teens said they thought it meant those results were popular or of high quality.

Emphasis mine

1. Some news will publish anything with the goal of getting clicks. Misleading headlines.

2. News sites will try to hide whether something is sponsored content, because then sponsors are willing to pay more money.

3. News sites are influenced by their leadership views, views in the company and also by the sources that donate money to these news sites.

4 ... believing there are bunch of other incentives that can go against the exact truth or truthful bias.

Do I think Coca Cola is bad for your health and the environment? Absolutely. Do I think their screenshot here is more credible than Reuters one here? Yes.

If anything, Coca Cola would be more conspiratorial than Reuters, since Reuters is more random combination for incentives, while it's more clear about Coca Cola - they are making money from making people unhealthy, ruining the environment and they are trying to make it look good.

This is entirely bullshit about Reuters. There is plenty of free media, e.g. Forbes, who do this. But you're echoing the sort of conspiracy mindedness the study warns about.

Reuter's comment about "In 2020, 16% of the company's packaging was reusable. That year, 90% of its refillable glass and plastic containers were collected, it said." is lifted straight from the press release.

First article is claiming that Coca Cola is going to have a target of 25%.

Second article is claiming also that (in a sense verifying that) and making an additional claim that Coca Cola is criticized.

So if the first statement was false, then both articles were false.

If first statement is correct, then left is correct, but right has a chance to be wrong because it is making other statements in addition.

Logically left one given the information is always more credible.

Not to mention left is the literal source, while right is claiming that the source stated something.

In any case left should be considered more reliable.

If it was a statement on some achievements and not setting goals it would be different.

Cost of proving a rumor is false : $$$

Cost of disseminating that proof to say 90% of people fooled: $$

Cost of persuading those 90% that your proof is more reliable than the rumor: $$$$$

Neither does censorship, of course - if anything, it fuels the conspiracy.

What works is education, in general. The better the quality and versatility of education, the higher are the chances an alarm would ring in person's head when he reads some controversial statement. But quality education is an extremely hard and costly problem.

A spreadsheet of "cross every variable with every other variable" also does nothing but produce ample fodder for people with zero stats training to conclude that a medicine prescribed for X, causes X.

Most people do not have 20 years education in anything. For an average human, you need several stats classes before you can reliably make good conclusions from data, and reliably understand how and why bad data is flawed. There is not enough time in an average human life for everyone to be meaningfully good at stats.

Not letting experts be experts just literally does not scale.