We should all probably spend less time staring at screens. At least, that’s what the professionals tell us. And yet the average person needs to be online. They use the internet for work, to pay bills, to access government resources, and to follow political leaders. Many have turned social media into their livelihoods.
And if you skip one day on the internet, you are sure to miss a year’s worth of memes, references, and even historical events. In fact, social media is where more than half of Americans get their news, if not from a chatbot assistant.
It’s online where you’ll be lulled into doomscrolling, engage in unhealthy digital interactions, or witness violence. A good portion of what you see may not even be real. It may be trying to intentionally deceive you. For those staying online, there is at least one way to protect yourself from false information: Stop and ask why.
Why am I still scrolling? Why did this account post this particular opinion? Why is this ad targeting me? Why would this platform allow this?
Pausing is a stopgap for misinformation, media literacy experts say. A few minutes is often all it takes.
Learning to slow down in an internet built for speed
In this age of AI and misinformation, not many people are being taught the basics of consuming modern media.
“Most states don’t require districts to offer news and media literacy instruction,” said Chuck Salter, president and CEO of the News Literacy Project. The News Literacy Project promotes K-12 media literacy curriculum to address growing gaps among the next generation of news consumers.
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General called for intentional media literacy instruction. A 2024 survey of educators by The National Association for Media Literacy Education found that only 12 percent of schools offered media literacy as part of their core curriculum. Yet news and media literacy is an essential life skill, experts argue.
Credit: Pew Research Center
How are adults faring? Around 25 percent of U.S. adults read at the lowest literacy level. When it comes to digital literacy skills, one third of U.S. workers lack basic knowledge. Around half say they find it difficult to spot fake news when scrolling online, according to a 2025 Pew Research survey.
Lots of slop
Even the savviest social media users — who are increasingly turning to these platforms for both news and entertainment coverage — are navigating an overwhelming amount of posts aimed to deceive them.
“Social media is littered with false and misleading content,” said Sofia Rubinson, Senior Editor at misinformation watchdog NewsGuard. In addition to an abundance of intentionally stimulating content, “it is inevitable to come across AI fakes, twisted political claims, and foreign disinformation when scrolling.”
More than one-third of new web content is now AI-generated, according to recent data from Pew Research. Other reports allege more than half of the internet is made up of “AI slop.” And estimates of the number of bot social media accounts range from 10 percent of platforms to nearly 50 percent.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince claims agentic bot usage constitutes 57.4 percent of total internet traffic, while human traffic has dropped to 42.6 percent.
False and manipulative content performs best for Big Tech
Despite claims of free speech and open town squares by its leaders, social media isn’t a neutral conveyor of information, Marijus Briedis, Chief Technology Officer of online security company NordVPN, told Mashable. “Feeds are built to move you quickly and reward things that provoke a reaction. That is a design choice, and it happens to be the exact environment where synthetic content performs best.”
Many of these design choices are currently under the spotlight of federal and state regulators, including features like endless scrolls, personalized recommendation algorithms, and autoplay.
Other, less noticeable, platform choices make it worse, like the sporadic ability to embed or link to external sources on sites where users most often get their news, including TikTok and X. Without these built-in fact-checking opportunities, we’re forced to rely on our own intuition.
“We scroll fast, react on instinct, and read likes and shares as ‘lots of people believe this,'” explained Roei Sherman, senior director of research at cloud security firm Mitiga.
Limited moderation helps fake news spread
Our scrolling habits, combined with the algorithm’s rules of engagement, are further enabled by Big Tech’s ongoing moderation problem.
“You have a much more free flow of information, which has always been the case in the United States, but there’s an even further lack of moderation occurring now,” explained Zohaib Ahmed, CEO of deepfake detector Resemble.AI.
Large platforms like Meta and X have decimated human moderation teams in recent years, while simultaneously weathering allegations of censorship by their AI-powered moderation tools. YouTube, a hot spot for AI slop, has also loosened its moderation guidelines.
Ahmed explains that advanced AI models have pushed us further toward the “Indistinguishability Threshold,” or the point at which the human senses fail to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate content without the help of technology itself.
He adds that indistinguishability stirs confusion and conflict in online content moderation, too, especially on platforms that have slashed professional teams in favor of community fact-checking.
“That creates more commentary that can be split down the middle, that can be very opinionated and isn’t very precise when it comes to labeling misinformation or disinformation,” Ahmed said. “The average user will simply gloss over that, and they won’t think to dig in any further than what the human moderators have already done.”
AI agents might be setting us up to believe anything
The popularization of friendly chatbots and helpful AI agents have made many more susceptible to scams and manipulation, experts told Mashable.
“We tend to be far too loose with the AI agents we interact with daily,” said Eyal Elazar, head of market intelligence for e-commerce security business Riskified. When it comes to scams, bad actors weaponize this psychology and count on users to let their guard down around “cutesy” personable agents, he explained.
Credit: Cole Kan/Mashable/Getty
Meanwhile, AI continues to promise the user an unburdened life. AI agents, AI-powered search engines, and chatbots encourage users to consolidate access to information into a single helpful tool. According to Elazar, the human desire for frictionless experiences, where everything is at our fingertips with a single click or one chatbot prompt, may end up being our biggest vulnerability.
“AI makes it really easy to avoid thinking for yourself,” Salter said. “We have to exercise our agency.”
Learning new internet habits
A lot has changed in just a few years. It’s easy to fake a crowd. It’s cheap to run a scam. And fake media no longer looks fake, Sherman said. Now, “the instincts we built up have stopped working, and we haven’t built new ones yet,” Sherman said.
Protecting yourself doesn’t take a technical background.
How do we build those new habits? We fight back by slowing down, said Andrew Jones, co-founder of AI security firm Adaptive Security.
“Social media rewards speed. Every autoplay, every infinite scroll, every push notification trains us to react in a second and move to the next post,” he said. “Protecting yourself doesn’t take a technical background.”
Jones said it’s more important than ever to build a pause into your everyday routine, even if it take some effort. But just a few minutes sets yourself up to fight back, no matter your skills.
Skepticism, not cynicism
We need to exercise caution, experts say, but not let ourselves fall into conspiracy. Skepticism is healthy. Cynicism is dangerous, warns Salter. “It can lead us to believe what we want to or reject information that challenges us, regardless of whether it’s true,” he said.
If you choose to stay online, stay tethered to the real world. Fact check information with real people you know. Discuss viral posts with your friends.
“Once people understand that anything can be faked, they start doubting the real things too,” said Briedis. “You do not get that back easily.”
Source: https://mashable.com/tech/why-it-feels-impossible-to-fact-check-social-media
