Study finds Black and Latino teens outpace white peers at spotting online disinformation

Avriel Epps at UC Riverside led the research with Brendesha Tynes of the University of Southern California. The team worked from daily diary reports filed by more than 100 Black adolescents, plus similar numbers of Latino and white peers aged 11 to 19. Minoritized youth were quicker to flag false claims and racist propaganda. They also checked posts against credible sources more often, and answered with corrective, fact-based content.

Epps said the skills were not taught in classrooms.

"They have developed these critical skills in many cases from their lived experiences navigating online racism, not necessarily from school-based instruction," she said, according to UC Riverside's write-up of the study.

The paper, titled "Racial-Ethnic Differences in Adolescents' Daily Enactment of Critical Race Digital Literacy Skills: A Daily Diary Study," was published in New Media & Society. Its co-authors are Matthew Coopilton of Cal State Northridge and Devin English of Rutgers University. The work forms part of the National Survey of Critical Digital Literacy, a longitudinal project led by Tynes and funded by a Lyle Spencer Award to Transform Education from the Spencer Foundation.

What the researchers measured

The study defines Critical Race Digital Literacy, or CRDL, as the ability to recognize, critique and evaluate digital media through a lens focused on race and how it manifests racism. Participants reported daily on how often they analyzed, responded to or ignored race-related digital content. Epps used that data for an analysis revealing racial differences in the skills measured.

Many Black and Latino participants were more likely to challenge racist content by writing their own posts calling out false information, or by sharing articles from reputable sources to counter divisive narratives, the authors found.

"These teens are often doing this work for their communities," Epps said. "It's very possible they're posting accurate information about social justice movements or correcting harmful stereotypes because they feel a sense of responsibility."

The researchers argue the results point to lived experience rather than instruction. Epps told UC Riverside that Black and Latino youth "keep their eyes open and are hyper vigilant" and have absorbed skill sets from navigating a world where a racial microaggression could happen at any time. White youths, by contrast, were less likely to question misleading posts about race.

"This isn't because they are less intelligent, but because they haven't had to be as vigilant," Epps said. "They aren't the targets of digital racism in the way that youth of color are."

At odds with earlier research

The findings run counter to a 2021 study by the Stanford History Education Group, now called the Digital Inquiry Group. In that study, Black students scored significantly lower than other racial-ethnic groups when asked to analyze real-life digital media. The Stanford work did not examine reactions related to race or racism, according to the UC Riverside account.

Epps said the study was prompted by a mismatch she saw between academic assumptions and the visible role of Black and Latino youth in shaping culture on social platforms.

"How is it that they are the ones who are producing the culture on these online spaces, and yet the literature and research are saying that they have less digital literacy than their white counterparts?" she asked.

The publication lands as disinformation campaigns grow more targeted and harder to spot, and as schools wrestle with how, or whether, to teach about race. The authors say high schools do address digital literacy, but mostly without touching the racial dimensions of much of the false content circulating online. They add that political backlash over teaching about systemic racism, including critical race theory, has had a chilling effect on classroom discussion of race.

The researchers do not call for the burden to shift onto students. "Our goal is not to shift the burden but to recognize and honor the critical skills these young people already possess," Epps said. "We can either ignore that reality, or we can build on it to make education more relevant and just."

For teachers, Epps framed the takeaway in broader terms: culturally relevant lessons matter whatever the subject. "Culturally responsive pedagogy matters in math. It matters in English and language arts. It matters for digital literacy and digital citizenship," she said.

The study arrives alongside separate research into how disinformation networks operate. Exposing the Invisible, a guide published by Tactical Tech, describes a four-step method for discovering, mapping and tracking such networks, and notes that campaigns range from state-linked influence operations to content farms chasing advertising revenue. It cites a network of 125 unreliable AI-generated news sites identified by NewsGuard, and sites run from a small town in southern Italy that it says were uncovered through similar network analysis.