Misinformation as a Security Threat: Recognition of Misinformation in Student Population

This paper presents a study on students’ ability to recognize misinformation disseminated via social media, websites, forums, etc. The research was conducted with students from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Croatian Military Academy (N=100). Participants were shown a total of 48 news stories, with 32 of these being untrue (classified as misinformation) and the remainder true. They were tasked with identifying the stories they believed to be false. To mimic the common conditions under which young people, specifically students, typically consume news today, background music and videos were played for two of the experimental groups as they read through the stories. In contrast, the control group was asked to complete the questionnaires in a quiet setting without such distractions. Only 58.4% of the information was correctly recognized as true or false. There was no statistically significant difference in the recognition of misinformation between the students who read the messages without distraction and those who were distracted while completing the questionnaire. However, our findings suggest that young people may generally be inattentive to the content they are exposed to, making them more susceptible to misinformation, i.e., often encountering misleading and manipulative information.