Practicing Information Sensibility: How Gen Z Engages with Online Information

Assessing the trustworthiness of information online is an increasingly complicated task. Literacy-based paradigms are widely used to help, yet have also been widely critiqued. We conducted a study with 35 Gen Zers from across the U.S. to understand how they assess information online. We found that they tended to encounter--rather than search for--information, and that those encounters were shaped more by social motivations than by truth-seeking queries. For them, information processing is fundamentally a social practice. Gen Zers interpreted online information together, as aspirational members of social groups. Our participants sought information sensibility: a socially-informed awareness of the value of information encountered online. We outline key challenges they faced and practices they used to make sense of information. Our findings suggest that, like Gen Z's information sensibility practices, solutions and strategies to address misinformation should also be embedded in social contexts online