What is the Internet doing to baby boomers’ brains? Social media platforms are sucking a generation into a misinformation rabbit hole.

I think a part of it is that younger people are inoculated against a lot of these patterns of disinformation. I grew up when the internet was just getting big (in school from '95-2008), and we learned how to use search engines around 2000. Being a late college student, I got to see how they teach us research, and they trotted out the example of martinlutherking.org (Daily Beast article about this, don't worry) being run by the racist website Stormfront, which was used to tell us to always check the source of information, and site sponsors (which you'll need for your citation anyway). But even before that, we were taught research methods to try to determine bias and just reliability of a source all the way to high school. It's radically different than being told "here's the curated library, all the information can be trusted." I think a part of that, and what turns people's critical thinking off as alluded to in the article, is social media being print or video, which to many people sends a flag that it is automatically valid. Because YouTube/Facebook/Twitter contains a lot of valid information, people think it only contains valid information.