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Comment by iamben

3 hours ago

I think that's a default for a lot of the older (and some of the younger!) generation, same goes for news and media. They grew up in a time where there was a practical barrier to publishing and (largely) laws behind you doing it.

So they trust literally everything they read. I still don't think my folks can fathom you can spin up a very real looking newspaper website with fake articles in about 10 minutes.

I find younger people are more likely to trust whatever they read - social media rumors, LLM output, Reddit threads - and older people looking for credible sources.

  • When my kid was young I set up a basic web server and taught him how to make a VERY basic web page. I let him write whatever nonsense he wanted to and then we made it live.

    It was both a gateway into learning how the web works but also that literally anyone can post anything to the internet and it doesn't make it true. I like to think he's more savvy than many of his peers but we all have our blind spots.