On April 24, the 12th webinar of the Coordination Center for ccTLD .RU/.РФ took place from the cycle Safe information environment of childhood. The Smart Internet Foundation is the traditional information partner of the event. On this platform, ccTLD .RU/.РФ specialists and the organization’s partners discuss social and educational initiatives in the field of digital literacy and culture, issues and problems that these projects are trying to solve.

The guest of the next webinar was Ekaterina Starostina, Director of Corporate Communications at M1Cloud and Industrial Head of the IBIS Department at IThub college with the topic “Critical Thinking: how can we protect the younger generation from AI manipulation?”

At the beginning of the meeting, Ekaterina shared some alarming statistics: 73% of Russian youth face fakes on social media every day, and every 2nd schoolchild believes in the “news” from public publications with fake quotes from officials. And then she offered a short instruction on fact-checking for the “gullible generation of zoomers”:

• analyze the source of the publication (for example, the date of creation of the community in which the news was published, the number of subscribers); if the news is published on the site, then you can check its domain name using the WHOIS service, also pay attention to the date of creation of the domain and its administrator (for example, the owner of a domain disguised as Public Services may be a private person; that hints to us about the unreliability of the resource);
• to try out a method of cross-checking, for example, you can search for the news you are interested in on the websites of news agencies, and check the scientific fact using the CyberLeninka catalog;
• pay attention to emotional triggers: phrases like “Urgently!”, “Only today!”, “It’s being hidden!”, “Shock content!” are obvious markers of manipulation.

Ekaterina also suggested practical methods for developing critical thinking that are suitable for users of any age:

“Training working memory and cognitive flexibility helps a lot. The latter helps to develop the study of foreign languages or games that require strategic planning, such as chess or go.

The recordings of all the webinars of the Coordination Center for ccTLD .RU/.РФ from the “Safe Childhood Information Environment” cycle are available in the official VK community of the dot .ДЕТИ.