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Do you think that the statement """More than 8 in 10 teens misjudge strength of U.S. press freedoms, compared with the 2024 Reporters Without Borders ranking""

Do you think that the statement """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. What position would you have guessed yourself?

llamaimperative 2y ago
This is a fair critique! I think that's a badly designed question. The questions most people are talking about in this thread, however, are not.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  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. Only 12% marked it as news.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    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.
    - mewpmewp2 2y ago
      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.

llamaimperative 2y ago

This is a fair critique! I think that's a badly designed question. The questions most people are talking about in this thread, however, are not.

mewpmewp2 2y ago
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. Only 12% marked it as news.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  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.
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    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.