On April 24, the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ held the 12th installment of its webinar series Safe Information Environment for Children. This platform brings together experts from the Coordination Center and its partner organizations to discuss social and educational initiatives focused on digital literacy and culture, as well as the key challenges these efforts aim to address.
The featured guest of the latest webinar was Yekaterina Starostina, Director of Corporate Communications at M1Cloud and Head of the IBIS Department at IThub College. She presented on the topic: Critical Thinking: How to Protect the Younger Generation from AI Manipulation?
At the start of the meeting, Yekaterina Starostina presented some concerning statistics: 73% of Russian youth encounter fake content on social media daily, and every second school student is likely to believe news shared in public groups featuring fabricated quotes from officials. To address this issue, she offered a brief fact-checking guide tailored for the so-called “gullible Zoomer generation”:
- Assess the source: look into the origin of the post – check when the social media group was created and how many followers it has. If the news appears on a website, examine the domain name through the WHOIS service. Pay attention to the registration date and domain owner. For instance, if a domain pretending to be a government portal is registered to a private individual, it likely indicates the site is unreliable.
- Use cross-verification: search for the same news on reputable news agency websites. To verify scientific claims, refer to trusted academic databases such as CyberLeninka.
- Be wary of emotional triggers: headlines or messages containing phrases like “Urgent!”, “Just for today!”, “What they don’t want you to know!”, or “Shocking content!” are clear signs of manipulative intent.
Yekaterina also shared practical strategies for developing critical thinking, suitable for users of all ages. “Training working memory and cognitive flexibility is especially effective. Cognitive flexibility, for instance, can be improved by learning foreign languages or playing strategic games like chess or Go. It’s also important to maintain a healthy lifestyle: lack of sleep impairs synaptic plasticity, while a deficiency in Omega-3 fatty acids negatively affects cognitive function,” she noted.
For more insights and helpful tips, watch the full webinar here.
Recordings of all webinars from the Safe Information Environment for Children series by the Coordination Center are available in the center’s official VK community. The project’s information partner is the .ДЕТИ domain.
