> In another exercise, teens were asked to identify which of two pieces of content about Coca-Cola’s plastic waste was more credible: a press release from Coca-Cola or an article from Reuters. The results were too close for comfort for the report, with only 56% of teens choosing the Reuters article as more trustworthy.
So, at the end of the day, you're concerned over which article they're choosing to uncritically put their faith in? If this is the case then I'm not sure `news literacy` is worth anything.
I think you'd want "information literacy." The ability to find studies and understand them, to ask questions about them, and to do their own follow up work based off of them.
If all you're doing is asking them to choose between two articles then their world view is entirely controlled by publishers, and we've reduced them down to deciding which publisher is more credible, and given them no tools to ask important questions on their own. I can't think of anything less valuable for an education system to involve itself in.
IIUC this is from page 40 [1] with the two articles being coca-cola's [2] and reuters [3].
With the key question being "% of teens who say the image on the ___ is more credible (reliable or trustworthy) than the other".
I'm not actually sure Reuters is more trustworthy here. The claim being made is that Coca-Cola has a goal to use reusable packaging 25% of the time. Why is a third-party more reliable source of a companies's goals than the company? Hell, if we read the articles, Reuters is bunch of glued together quotes; at least coca-cola has coherency.
Like, if we change this to Telsa and ask whether Tesla has a goal of FSD by 2012. I would also think Tesla is more credible in that they had a goal of FSD. Sure, they might not achieve it but the titles are about "pledging" not "achieving".
> the claim being made is that Coca-Cola has a goal to use reusable packaging 25% of the time. Why is a third-party more reliable source of a companies's goals than the company?
Parsed incredibly literally, sure. But at that point we're asking about reading comprehension and obviously dealing with someone working backwards from the answer they like. The context around the goal is whether it's actually being pursued and whether similar goals have been announced in the past and how those went. That's obviously not going to come reliably from the press release.
And doesn't come from the reuter's article either.
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.
If there were any disagreement between the two articles at all then there could at least be some kind of conflict. The whole study rests on the idea that Reuters is a trusted investigative journalist, and if they said something like “coca-cola fails their pledge to do xyz” I would trust them over a company statement.
Instead the options given are a primary source of information and a news article that repeats that information while giving some context and opinions of environmentalists regarding the statement. I don’t see anything special about Reuters being the one to write this article that somehow makes it a more trustworthy news source.
I think the authors think that if the Coca Cola claim was totally bogus, that the Reuters article would take that up? I.e. what is not written also gives information?
This is an easy example because one is a press release. It should be well known to everyone that press releases are advertising. They don't even claim to be factual or trustworthy. It's marketing. They're telling you outright that it's company propaganda. You can trust it if you want to, but you can't claim you were fooled. Further investigation is unnecessary. There's nothing to investigate since they've already told you up front it's a press release. The education system's responsibility is to let kids know what a press release is, and how it's different from journalism.
Not that all journalism is automatically trustworthy, no. With journalism you also have to take into account track record, and reputation, and so on.
If a young person doesn't know what Reuters is, they can use Wikipedia to find out what kind of entity Reuters is, their history, their reputation, etc.. That's how the responsibility of education is involved.
Anyone who believes that there is still a clear delineation between press releases and journalism doesn't know how the sausage is made. Declining revenues and cost-cutting mean that an increasing amount of "reporting" is just an intern paraphrasing press releases. Many news outlets - including Reuters - will happily publish your press release verbatim on their domain, with only a subtle disclaimer to distinguish that paid content from news.
I don't fully endorse the sibling comment arguing that news publishers have "brought this on themselves", but the unfortunate reality is that news is a dying business and many publishers are making increasingly desperate decisions at the cost of their reputation. I'm not particularly concerned about bias, because that's usually fairly easy to recognise; what I am concerned about is a very broad decline in quality. The constant pressure to produce more content at lower cost means that most journalists are grimly resigned to churning out articles which they know are poorly researched and thinly sourced. The product is crap, but nobody can admit that it's crap because there's no obvious alternative.
> Many news outlets - including Reuters - will happily publish your press release verbatim on their domain, with only a subtle disclaimer to distinguish that paid content from news
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.
Fair enough. Reuters is a news wire. They're publishing it as a press release, but I could see how someone might be misled by that. Still incredibly different from Forbes-style sponsored content, or insinuating there is no difference between press releases and journalism. That's the post-truth nonsense that makes the American public incredibly easy to sell stuff to. But it comes with obvious disadvantages, too.
For me the point is to not just consider something more reliable or credible, because there's a certain logo on that screenshot or image.
You should take a look at the content as well, which given those images, would've led you to believe that the content is just a statement of intention, but not anything really factual and therefore there's no credibility issue in the first place with the Coca Cola one.
If Coca Cola was making claims that we "we reduced plastic waste by 75%", then that would be a whole other ordeal, where maybe they are hiding some info, and I would be more inclined to consider Reuters credible, if they have a title "Coca Cola claims to have reduced plastic waste by 75%, but only according to this flawed metric".
The 'reputable' news(collectively) did this to themselves. They figured out at some point you could get more viewers by confirming their biases one way or another. So much so that ask about anyone, and they'll claim the other side's news sources are a joke.
It's not surprising people are all skeptical, and that other sources of varying reputation have entered the fray.
Even aside from bias, so much of the news entertainment produced by legacy media was slop. They didn’t act to raise media literacy because it would cut into their margins. Who could have possibly been surprised when their lingering prestige dried up and people preferred the slop on YouTube better?
One thing that is clear with a press release, that it's biased to highlight good sides of the company. With media, without deep investigation and knowing the background of certain news media, you are in the dark about bias. So in a sense press release is more reliable.
I don't think "uncritical faith" comes into it. Or publishers' inherent credibility. The idea is to consider the motivations and vested interests of the publishers in this specific comparison.
I think there’s a significant difference between using potential motivation to assess the credibility of sources of information and using potential motivation as the basis for creating a narrative about something.
Of course, but the thing about that test ("do you trust Coca Cola or Reuters") doesn't seem make distinction between this. Even if it asked "why", it would still put a considerate reader and a conspiracy believer in the same bin.
If there's a website showing Coca Cola logo with Coca Cola's contact number being displayed there, and then another screenshot of Reuters logo and a contact number, claiming to be a contact number that Coca Cola shared to them at some point.
The education system and the media was traditionally tightly controlled or monopolized by a handful of interests. With few players on the field they could weave together a more-or-less coherent story. But was that actually the truth? We only know that the stuff that was debunked was false.
As for "information literacy", it's an ideal to strive for, but impossible in practice. It's simply not possible for everyone to be literate at everything. For the topics a person is not familiar with, they need to trust a source at some point.
A bit of knowledge is often a hindrance than helpful. With modern tools at hand and sufficient motivation, one with an agenda can fool anyone except the best experts.
TBH I think "objective truth" is going down the drains and it's not coming back. The version of truth you believe in is actually real, other people will vehemently disagree, and there will be no mechanism to objectively decide who is right. It might sound pessimistic, but this kind of "diversity" in subjective beliefs can be very useful for other reasons (which is mostly off-topic).
99% of people are not going to genuinely do their own research. Their “own research” usually consists of the last thing they heard about it from some influencer. In this paradigm it’s important to be able to have trustworthy information providers and for people to be educated on who those are.
Honestly, at least with the Coca-Cola press release, I know what their agenda is, so I can at least decide which parts to believe or be skeptical of. News agencies have much more complex agendas, and purveying objective truth isn't part of them.
That's not conspiratorial thinking. It's understanding the real world. There's no conspiracy, it's just a massive outcome of different incentives aligning in certain ways.
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.
At rock bottom a reader needs to make value judgment between several sources. The Coca Cola v Reuters case is absurd but it is absurd in that it should be blatantly obvious to trust a press release less than an investigative publication.
No one said they had to believe everything in the Reuters article. It asked which is more credible.
It’s awful seeing people think themselves into a corner like this.
It seems like a brand issue for Reuters. The distinction between a press release and investigative journalism is obvious if you know which one is a investigative journalism outlet and which one isn't, but they might just assume Reuters is no different than some other news site that just reprints press releases wholesale in articles (there are legion). They are teens after all, saying something "is from Reuters" might be meaningless to them in the same way "it came over the wire" would be to them.
I wonder if it would be much more stark if you picked Coca Cola vs some well known investigative youtuber. They would probably pick the youtuber much more, I assume.
Assuming the source was an aggregator that at worst would simply be reproducing Coca Cola's greenwashing PR was a less reliable source than Coca Cola's greenwashing PR would seem like a pretty bad heuristic...
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...
> 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.
This would track in the same way with how the very concept of "selling out" doesn't seem like a big thing for young people anymore. Working with any company for money, or parroting what they say, seems to be pretty popular. Influencer roles have made the wholesale commodification of ones life popular, even earnestly desired. That would seem to promote an atmosphere and general sense of going along with whatever a company says in the same way a lifelong employee might feel compelled to "toe the company line".
> The distinction between a press release and investigative journalism is obvious if you know which one is a investigative journalism outlet and which one isn't
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.
But they weren't asking about Reuter or Coca Cola, they were asking about screenshots on a mobile phone, correct?
So they should've made the decision based on the logo in the header?
If they only look at the logo in the header, sure. But if they scanned the whole thing, they would've seen that Coca Cola is claiming to set a goal. Setting a goal is nothing, anyone can do it. There's no point in trying to doubt it.
Reuters on the right is verifying Coca Cola on the left by claiming that Coca Cola indeed set this goal. But they are also making other claims, which make it potentially be false. But Coca Cola here is more credible because:
1. The facts are that Coca Cola is announcing a goal. It's the original source.
2. Reuters is reporting on the original source (potential for error), and then they are making additional claims which may or may not be right. "Coca Cola" being criticized. Who is doing that criticism, yada, yada. Reuters is making much stronger claims that are much more difficult to verify.
Overall Coca Cola's screenshot by any logical measure is more reliable/credible here.
You are way, way overthinking this. The entire study is multiple results all pointing to kids not understanding how incentives distort content.
> 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.
It's both, these results are paid for, but also they are the ones most likely to receive the clicks aka most popular. Ad Rank = Max CPC Bid x Quality Score.
You can pay, but still your ads won't be shown, while if you have good ads they will be clicked most at shown in front most frequently.
They really should word these exercises better.
Here 80% of the kids got it right, because both of those factors influence it. You need both.
The correct rebuttal to that claim is not "they say that all the time!" but "the claim is untrue and here is why."
That is what you attempted to do, so credit there, but you failed in that effort because fucking obviously the surveyed teens are not pointing to secondary or tertiary effects of micro-optimizations in ad auctioning algorithms when they say "Sponsored post means more trustworthy content!"
Sometimes bad things do happen. Sometimes things get worse for people. You can't brush it all of by just saying, "well yeah they said bad things were happening before though and actually they're still pretty good."
It totally is worth applying a bit of discount factor due to the effect you're pointing to, but that should not be even close to a 100% discount. The article isn't "making the claim that x," it's showing data.
1. The questions / answer options are flawed and there's multiple interpretations.
2. The study itself looks to have certain biases on what is right or wrong. Binary biases when life and World is much more complex than that.
3. The study based on the structure seems set out to prove the point they wanted to prove.
4. Many teenagers don't even care about the questions/answers or are edgy and will respond however they want without thought. And that's fine, that's normal for teenagers.
5. Countless of unfounded speculative statements based on those metrics.
Here's one more example of the study that seems ridiculous to me:
The highlighted conclusion:
"""More than 8 in 10 teens misjudge strength of U.S. press freedoms,
compared with the 2024 Reporters Without Borders ranking"""
The scoring method
---
Notes: Results based on the 1,102 teens who responded to this question. Items may not sum exactly to 100% due to
rounding. Rankings of 1-10 were categorized as "much stronger," rankings of 11-44 were categorized as "somewhat
stronger," rankings of 45-65 were categorized as "close to/exactly," rankings of 66-100 were categorized as "somewhat
weaker" and rankings of 101-180 were categorized as "much weaker."
Source: SSRS survey for the News Literacy Project conducted online from May 17 - 28, 2024, with 1,110 teenagers
ages 13-18 nationwide.
---
Basically they had to pick US as the 45th to 65th out of all the countries in the World for press freedoms ranking. And if they didn't pick in that range, it's counted as "misjudging". That's ridiculous. Why did they pick this range specifically?
It's ironic to me that this is a study on media literacy.
"""More than 8 in 10 teens misjudge strength of U.S. press freedoms,
compared with the 2024 Reporters Without Borders ranking"""
Is a logical conclusion to categorize you to misjudge the strength if you don't put US in the 45th to 65th position from all the countries in the World?
E.g. you put it as 40th or similar, it means you are "misjudging strength of US press freedoms"? I imagine they don't even know half the countries in the ranking beating US, and even less so would they know how the press is for each and of those countries.
I get these kind of thoughts about most of the questions there, and starting from the headline picked by fastcompany.
E.g. the first task where they had to ID an ad based on there being certain text such as “WP BrandStudio” and “Content from Safeway.” and then "Only 50%" of teens specified it's an ad. While 30% thought it was opinion, which is a valid and harmless guess to me if you have never heard of those terms. So 80% picked the harmless option in my view.
Next task as well. In my view 86% had the harmless option.
So overall I think depending on the questions you can get very different results, from which you can make very different conclusions.
And based on the overall "vibe" I get from the study it seems like they were set out to prove this and not do a fair study on the topic.
There being a title like "Commentary: Could Taylor Swift be the biggest election influencer of them all?" and the correct answer being an "opinion". It just seems like a "pondering essay" of some sort rather than opinion. I wouldn't call an essay an opinion. I understand that it is labelled as "opinion piece", but I don't see it to be harmful to not be able to label it as such when to me the label intuitively doesn't seem accurate.
The distinction between ad and opinion in that example is very strong and extremely clear. The fact that you think it's a blurry distinction is... exactly what the study is arguing.
> And based on the overall "vibe" I get from the study it seems like they were set out to prove this and not do a fair study on the topic.
I would caution against arbitrarily discounting information because you don't like its "vibe." Even if the vibe is off or unfair, it turns out good information can come from unfriendly sources.
To me ultimately all of these are "labels". It doesn't necessarily matter how you label something. I can tell you with high certainty that when I was a teenager, it wouldn't have made any practical difference whether I thought the piece about "Vegan meat being as good as the real meat" was an ad or it was an opinion. Neither of those would've been "the truth" for me. Even if it it's an ad, it is still an opinion. And if it's an opinion, it could just be opinion from a vegan propagandist.
I may have marked it as opinion just because I have no good way to tell for sure that it's paid for, based on that screenshot, unless I know exactly what the terms above mean and I'm familiar with. I assume I wouldn't have been able to Google during the survey. All of these survey questions are about how you label something, while ignoring common sense completely. And you could orchestrate any sorts of metrics results depending on what content you provide and how you form the question. Whether the above is an ad or an opinion, I wouldn't as teen have believed that vegan meat was as good as the real thing unless I've tried it myself.
The label doesn't matter, what matters is what do you start to take as fact or belief based on the content given. The correct question should've been "To what extent does this article change your belief/opinion about vegan meat being as good as the real thing?".
If you want to test the true thing, ask questions where answers to those questions actually matter in implicating certain beliefs, not just how good people are knowing at exact definition of certain labels. That's anti common sense and literacy.
> I would caution against arbitrarily discounting information because you don't like its "vibe."
I mean I looked at the questions and tried to figure out how I would've approached them as a teen, and what I would've answered. I did it on the basis of a skeptical vibe, because of the initial titles and everything was trying to portray a certain narrative which is not very scientific. So then of course I was biased to play devil's advocate, but none the less, I believe that these results don't carry much meaning and the conclusions that are made, is not something that can really be made from this particular data. It would be harmful to consider an AD an actual factual news report, but this is what very few did. Also considering opinion as a factual news report would've been bad, but again only very few did. If you look at harmful vs harmless labelling then the stats don't look that bad at all. Someone considering the piece about elections and Taylor Swift an entertainment instead of opinion. This is pretty harmless.
I do still remember what I was like as a teen, I remember my thought process, and I can still relate to myself at that point.
Nobody is going to successfully sue Coca-Cola for being fooled into thinking drinking Coke will get them a girlfriend or help them meet Santa. It's advertising. Everyone should be educated in school that marketing and advertising are free speech and cannot be reasonably expected to contain any trustworthy information at all, ever. The purpose of marketing is branding, not information.
You are correct though that news organizations can say anything as well. When deciding what to believe with journalism, one should take into account what claims are being made, the journalistic reputation of who is making the claims, and the weight of evidence being presented. Again, more information that should have been part of your education, but apparently our education system no longer functions.
I'm pretty sure any company with around $11 billion dollars in operating revenue isn't going to care if they get sued for putting out false information.
This stuff is my jam now. It’s insanity all the way down.
1) This article is more about media literacy, and has a longer headline which conveys this.
2) There are countries that successfully teach media literacy. Finland comes to mind.
3) Conspiracy theories are virulent. If they get their grips into someone, or if someone is convinced of it, almost nothing will get them out. Conspiracy theories always have barbs that make removal difficult - at their outset, they discredit the proof and sources that show it’s incorrect.
4) America has a relatively unique situation, which is much worse today than it was even a few years ago.
The best analogy I have no longer mechanistically analyzes the media machine.
Instead you have 2 information markets in America (and the English speaking world in general).
One of them is captured utterly, and sets the media and political agenda.
The consolidation of local news channels, and then much later, the rise of the net, were a problem for both the media hemispheres. But post the launch of Fox News, the market on the right failed in a far more insidious manner than the left.
This has been achieved by using conspiracy techniques. The intentional decimation and degradation of trust in institutions has been a specific goal since before the 90s.
The internet has absolutely succeeded in expanding access to information. The problem is that disinformation is still information and it's spread just as easily, except it's more "exciting".
> While teens don’t believe every conspiracy theory they see, 81% who see such content online said they believe one or more.
Its really hard to make a judgement on this without concretely knowing what they actually believe. "one or more"? Who knows? maybe these kids are just really well read on the Gulf of Tonkin or something.
Tracking down all the civilians targeted during the Lavon Affair to strongly warn them against conspiratorial thinking and the spread of misinformation
Rather than censorship, a better way of combatting this sort of rumor would be a government agency, for example, one that would be put in charge of food and drugs, collecting and publishing k-anonymized incidences of disease annotated by such things as what drugs and risk factors groups of individuals were subject to. This would allow such claims to be evaluated empirically.
At least until such 'food and drug' agency was inevitably overwhelmed by lobbyists, patent royalties, and a revolving door between industry and government. Then it'd be worse than nothing at all.
Most Americans cannot read at a high school level. How many do you think even know what "k-anonymized" means?
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.
You actually wouldn't need any stats classes to do this particular analysis, the sample sizes are quite large. You only need to know four values, the size of the groups of all vaccinated or unvaccinated, and the numerators, the number of incidents of cancer in both groups, to determine if there is a difference in the incidence rate between the two populations.
Such agency will have hard time building trust (especially given it's a government agency - modern governments aren't particularly good at building trust), and it could lose it all over a single honest mistake, or (as we're talking about conspiracies here) some sort of a poison pill dataset.
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.
There exist several US federal bureaus, such as the census and labor statistics ones, that have built and maintained widespread trust in publishing accurate tabulations. It is not an impossible problem.
These are not widely trusted by the American public, at least in my own anecdotal experience. I've been told numerous times that the Bureau of Justice Statistics lies because they're the government. Typically, in relation to modern politics. From what I've seen, distrust for the government is at an all-time high, but trust in randos with podcasts is also at an all-time high.
Uh... There are plenty of people who seem to think census results are rigged in one way or another. E.g. I think I've seen that the infamous Heritage Foundation (I know, I know) has some beef with The Census bureau over some under-counting or something like that.
If anything, I'd love to see more zero-trust approaches to government, where possible (voting, statistics, etc). No idea if that's going to work, but probably worth a try.
> About 80% of teens who use social media say they see content about conspiracy theories in their online feeds
Where conspiracy theory means what, exactly? Did they define this term for the teens (or even just for the survey)? Why is 'disinformation' (itself undefined) conflated with the hilariously ambiguous 'conspiracy theory'?
It's really just a terribly weak article, and the source "study" doesn't look much better. It really looks like it is a study set forth to push a particular agenda with "numbers".
Too many people confuse data with science, and perhaps that is what schools should actually be teaching; probably when they teach statistics, which all students should take. Pseudo-science like "critical thinking" can't really be taught, but actual science can.
Agreed that the author doesn't seem to understand what is and is not a conspiracy theory. The article starts off by calling the ancient alien astronauts "theory" a conspiracy theory. Who are the conspirators? I don't mean Tsoukalos, he just spreads the myth. But if it's a conspiracy theory, there had to be conspirators. And there weren't, because there is no conspiracy. A conspiracy is not the same thing as a myth.
> Pseudo-science like "critical thinking" can't really be taught, but actual science can.
Arguably critical thinking is the express purpose of English and Language-Arts. Media literacy falls into that, too. People often discredit schools, but they already teach a lot of this stuff, it's just that Billy Bob was blowing snot bubbles.
I mean, a huge part of school is just reading pieces of text and trying to formulate an understanding, as well as gauging the Author's intent and the larger social context. That, to me, is just critical thinking.
Most of the garbage you see on TikTok is not data, unless you consider disinformation valuable, I personally do not. It seems on TikTok and twitter when I dare venture there is pure competition to get clicks and have the most outlandish stories to get there. I know legacy media has its issues, but there is no comparison to the drivel that is firehose’d on twitter and TikTok (amongst the worst on the internet) short of right-wing cesspool channels on telegram and discord.
I'd be curious to know if being exposed to more conspiracy theories correlates to believing them. At the extremes, if I'd never seen a conspiracy theory before, it would be hard to identify it. And if everything I heard claimed to be a conspiracy, I imagine I might just block them all out. I imagine there's a goldilocks zone where conspiracy theories are most palatable.
From what I seen myself and what my son is sharing with me, Iit is a culture war, people are filled with hate and they will believe the shit that matches their side of this war, even if the conspiracy is retarded like Earth is flar or "Israel invented the Covid vaccine to make people gay"
Personal one: Cloudflare is a US intelligence gathering operation and the largest wiretap in the world. Their extremely generous free tier combined with their tendency to host sites that no other company would serve (but are of special interest of 3 letter agencies) like 4chan, daily stormer, pirate sites, script kiddie webforums etc makes me think they are not stripping TLS because they are pro free speech or whatever.
Some people deliberately post conspiracy theories, especially political ones. (Think Russian disinformation.) These people are smart, and hard workers. If you create any kind of automated filter, they will find ways of saying it that won't get caught by the filter, or they will create new conspiracy theories.
The only way around that is, rather than blacklisting conspiracy theories, you have to whitelist the truth.
So, at the end of the day, you're concerned over which article they're choosing to uncritically put their faith in? If this is the case then I'm not sure `news literacy` is worth anything.
I think you'd want "information literacy." The ability to find studies and understand them, to ask questions about them, and to do their own follow up work based off of them.
If all you're doing is asking them to choose between two articles then their world view is entirely controlled by publishers, and we've reduced them down to deciding which publisher is more credible, and given them no tools to ask important questions on their own. I can't think of anything less valuable for an education system to involve itself in.