The Truth And Lies In Social Feeds
No doubt you have seen misinformation in your social media feeds. The question is, what is the truth and what is not? Are truth and lies distinguishable amongst the massive volume of content we scroll through in our feeds.
A few weeks ago, I watched the new ABC documentary series The Matter of Facts, presented by journalist Hamish Macdonald. The program makes a point that vulnerabilities to misinformation do not belong to less educated or less careful people. They apply to everyone. Researchers who study these effects are themselves subject to them. Susceptibility to misinformation is not a personal failing. It is how every human brain is wired.
The series investigates what happens when people can no longer determine or agree on what is true. It is compelling, at times unsettling, and I would encourage any parent who wonders what their daughter is navigating online to watch it.
 A national survey of young Australians aged 8 to 16 by researchers at Western Sydney University and Queensland University of Technology found that more than six in ten Australian teenagers get their news from social media, overtaking live television for the first time. Most are not seeking news intentionally. They are encountering it while scrolling for other purposes, with no reliable way to evaluate what they are reading.
Why Our Brains Were Built For This Trap
One of the most memorable moments in the series is when Macdonald uses visual illusions to open a conversation about how easily our brains can be misled. The classic examples: two identical lines that appear different lengths; a grey square that looks darker or lighter depending on what surrounds it. These are not failures of a foolish brain. They are features of a brain that has learned to take shortcuts and fill in gaps from experience. The illusion reveals something important: the brain does not observe the world neutrally. It interprets.
The same thing happens when we process information online. The brain reaches for familiar patterns, emotional cues, and the views of people it already trusts rather than stopping to analyse each new claim. Two shortcuts matter most. Confirmation bias is our tendency to accept information that confirms what we already believe and dismiss what challenges it. The illusory truth effect means that repeated exposure to a claim makes it feel more credible, regardless of whether it is true. Social media is designed to do exactly that.
The Machine Is Designed To Keep Her Scrolling.
Here is what troubles me most about all of this. The platforms your daughter uses every day have been engineered to exploit these exact vulnerabilities. Every major social media platform operates on an engagement-based algorithm. The system learns what your daughter clicks on, what provokes a reaction, and selects more of the same. The algorithm cannot assess whether what it is showing her is true. It only measures whether it holds her attention. Attention is the product being sold.
The Matter of Facts draws on a landmark MIT study published in the journal Science to make the point that on the internet, lies travel faster than the truth. The study analysed 126,000 news stories shared across 11 years, involving 3 million people. False news reached audiences six times faster and was 70% more likely to be shared. When researchers removed all automated bots from the dataset, the gap remained. Human beings, making individual choices, were the primary drivers.
Why does false content travel faster? Because it tends to be more novel, more surprising, more outrageous. Researchers have found that outrage is what the algorithm rewards most. The anger your daughter feels when she reads something upsetting is not a side effect of the platform. It is the intended outcome.
The program shows how deliberately this is exploited. Fabricated articles, designed to look like credible news, have been used to drive division, from local conservation debates here in Australia to international political crises. The goal is not to convince people of a specific lie. It is to find the existing cracks in a community and push. AI has amplified this further, making it possible to fabricate the face and voice of a real, trusted person saying things they never said. The number of such deepfake videos reported globally rose from half a million in 2023 to nearly eight million in 2025.
What This Is Doing To Our Daughters
Human beings were never born to read. We were born to speak, to see, to think. Reading is something our species developed, and the brain had to adapt to accommodate it. It does this through neuroplasticity, its capacity to create new circuits by connecting existing regions in new ways. Researchers are now seeing evidence that prolonged digital consumption is producing measurable shifts in how young brains process information.
The average Australian teenager spends many hours a day consuming digital content. The program kept returning to a single word: attention. Attention is what allows us to think carefully about whether something is true or false. Without it, we skim. We word-spot. We register the emotional charge of a headline without pausing to question it.
Cognitive neuroscientist Professor Maryanne Wolf has spent decades studying how the brain reads. Her work is central to what the program presents. In her book Reader, Come Home, she writes that when we skim, we simply do not give our brains enough time to analyse, question, and reflect. Deep reading, the kind that requires sustained effort and asks us to sit with a perspective beyond our own, actively builds the circuits responsible for critical thinking. When skimming replaces deep reading, those circuits do not get the exercise they need.
Wolf makes a specific point that when we read within our own silo, consuming content that confirms what we already believe, we are not exercising critical thinking at all. We are having our existing views reflected back at us. Reading things that challenge us is what builds the capacity to question whether something is true. That is what algorithms and the loss of deep reading habits are taking away.
The program reports measurable decreases in deep reading skills, with the sharpest declines in empathy and critical thinking. Determining whether something is true or false requires concentration, patience, and a willingness to sit with uncertainty. It cannot be done at scroll speed.
What You Can Do
Start here: if your daughter is under 16 and currently on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, X, or Reddit, she is on a platform she is no longer legally permitted to access. Australia’s world-first social media ban came into effect in December 2025, prohibiting children under 16 from holding accounts on all of these platforms. The law is clear, and it exists for a reason. Having this conversation with your daughter is not being unreasonable. It is being a parent.
For parents of students in Years 11 and 12, the ban does not apply. A 17-year-old navigating this information environment without the skills to question what she reads is not protected by legislation. She is protected by the habits we help her build.
The most consistent finding in Australian research on young people and news is that family conversation is the single most important protective factor. Young Australians aged 8 to 16 name family members as the most frequent and trusted source of news in their lives. When parents ask questions, name their sources, and model healthy scepticism, it makes a measurable difference.
When something alarming or outrageous appears in your daughter’s feed, treat it as a conversation rather than a crisis.
Ask the following questions. Where did that come from? Who published it? Can you find the same story on the ABC or in a newspaper? What is this post designed to make you feel, and is that feeling doing your thinking for you?
Researchers found that students who learned to open new tabs to check a source’s reputation, rather than staying on the page, were twice as likely to identify unreliable information. It took six short lessons to build the habit. The dinner table is as good a classroom as any.
Protect reading time at home. Not as a chore. As a genuine investment in your daughter’s capacity to think clearly. A book, a long-form article, a quality podcast engaged with fully rather than skimmed: each of these is building something that scrolling simply does not.
At Santa Maria, we work with students across all year levels on source evaluation and understanding how algorithms shape what they see. Students develop the skills to engage with digital environments critically.
At the end of The Matter of Facts, Hamish Macdonald observes that allowing technology to define our future will not safeguard truth. That responsibility belongs to communities, to schools, and to families.
Catherine McAuley, our foundress, built her Mercy tradition on a commitment to truth, justice, and the dignity of every person. Our role as parents and educators is to encourage young people to slow down, read deeply and think critically about what they see and read in their social feeds because what may appear as the truth is often not.
- Critical Thinking, digital literacy, Featured, Mercy Education, online safety, parent resources, Santa Maria College, social media algorithms, social media misinformation, teenage girls online
Author: Santa Maria College
Santa Maria College is a vibrant girls school with a growing local presence and reputation. Our Mission is to educate young Mercy women who act with courage and compassion to enrich our world. Santa Maria College is located in Attadale in Western Australia, 16 km from the Perth CBD. We offer a Catholic education for girls in Years 5 – 12 and have 1300 students, including 152 boarders.
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