Previous generations have seen every generation as gullible, but a recent Politico piece by Catherine Kim makes the case that Gen Z is the most gullible in history.

As part of her case, she spoke about a video that Gen Z kids believed showed voter fraud in the United States but which, a Google search would have shown, was actually from Russia.

“When researchers from Stanford studying young people’s media literacy — the ability to accurately evaluate information in the wilds of mass media — showed the video to 3,446 high school students, only three succeeded in identifying the Russian connection,” she said in the piece.

“There is this myth of the digital native, that because some people have grown up with digital devices, they are well equipped to make sense of the information that those devices provide,” the man who led the 2021 survey, Joel Breakstone, said. “The results were sobering.”

She noted that several studies confirm that the current generation is the worst at discerning fact from fiction.

“That becomes an issue when the internet — and specifically, social media — has become the main source of news for the younger generation. About three in five Gen Zers, from between the ages of 13 and 26, say they get their news from social media at least once a week. TikTok is a particularly popular platform: 45 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 29 said they were regular news consumers on the app,” the author said.

Concerning when there is not much quality control or attention to getting the facts correct on those platforms and the way Gen Z tends to fact check, her report said, is by checking the “comments section.”

“They tend to feel comfortable relying on aggregate trust, so they’ll rely on Yelp reviews or Amazon reviews,” pollster Daniel Cox said. “This sounds like a very similar thing, right? They’re seeing what other people are saying about an article or a product and basing their decisions on that.”

But often, that is unreliable because the algorithm draws people to a particular video who have a preconceived idea about the subject matter.

“[The algorithm] helps segregate people in ways that are profoundly concerning to me,” Cox said.

“We’re not sharing the same experiences online — we’re having very discrete, different experiences by our gender or sexual orientation or politics. … Everything that you’re experiencing, you can find some kind of validation online for it,” he said.