“I almost threw it away because this is what it looks like,” she says indignantly into her camera, holding up a copy of a Trump leaflet. “This looks like an ad for Donald Trump. This does not look like an absentee ballot request form.”

“What the fuck is this?”

The post has a galvanizing visual power because of its self-made quality, her youthfulness and the genuine outrage behind her complaint. All are markers of authenticity and credibility to Generation Z, the first Americans who grew up in a social media-dominated ecosystem. The tirade was quickly viewed more than 2 million times on Twitter and 10,000 times on TikTok. The leftist meme page thatsnotrightpolitics shared it with its more than 80,000 followers, where it got over 800,000 views on Instagram alone.

“This is about as un-American as it gets. There’s no exaggeration anymore. Trump wants to be a dictator,” read the thatsnotrightpolitics caption on the video. “Fair and free elections are out the window.”

That is, if it were true. It’s not. Her ballot didn’t come from the government.

Political parties and campaigns often mail out voter registration forms to encourage people to vote. It’s a legal practice that has been reported in a handful of Southern states. There have been no reports of official election notices coming wrapped in partisan advertisements. The mailer probably arrived by coincidence, and a formal application, complete with the Official Election Mail logo, would have been on its way.

The woman in the video, 22-year-old Kendall Olivia Matthews, a Georgia-based actor, told POLITICO she knew it wasn’t from official election organizers and tried to stop its spread when she saw that was how people were interpreting it. The viral video was taken from a series of posts in which she detailed her discomfort in receiving ballot request forms with campaign material, she said.

The viral video wasn’t deliberate disinformation, brewed up by a cabal of Russians or other anti-democratic forces. Rather, the video’s journey from one young woman’s complaint to viral sensation is emblematic of the unprecedented misinformation challenges Gen Z voters face, despite their social media savvy. With an inundation of information, a penchant for picture-based platforms that can obfuscate nuance and an emotional media landscape rife with conflicting and dubious accounts, Gen Zers can and do fall into pitfalls with serious implications on their political outlook.

“Trust in institutions is down across the board, but teens experience even more cynicism about institutions just as a function of their time of life,” said Peter Adams, senior vice president of education at the News Literacy Project, a group that teaches youth about media literacy.

“That can easily lend itself into falling into conspiratorial thinking traps,” he added.

a new media landscape

Gen Z social media habits often drift toward Instagram and TikTok, photo and video platforms where the origins of information can easily be obfuscated. YouTube and Instagram were ranked as the daily new source of choice among a plurality of Gen Zers when compared with text-based media such as Reddit or newspapers, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.

Add to that the emotional atmosphere surrounding this presidential election, an incumbent with a fractured relationship with the truth, a national reckoning on race and the global pandemic of a barely understood disease, and the instincts to fact-check often go by the wayside.

“Mis- and disinformation on TikTok wasn’t as big of a problem early on, and there was a lot written about how it was an apolitical zone for jokes and recipes and dancing,” Adams continued. “But now I think we’re seeing more and more political content there and with that comes people exploiting that.”

To be sure, Gen Z does not need lessons on how to use the internet. This generation of digital natives has been “online since the day their parents start taking pictures of them in the delivery room,” said Cindy Otis, a former CIA analyst whose book “True or False” helps young adults spot disinformation.

They aren’t falling for the same fake news stories that may have duped their parents in 2016. Angela Lee, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate who studies the psychology of young people’s interactions with technology, said Gen Zers are generally very apt at being able to trace the origins of stories or discern the authenticity of a viral story line.

But Gen Zers are inundated with information in ways earlier generations have never been. Even when they try to unplug from the news by looking on more entertainment-focused platforms, influencers and TikTok stars routinely allude to the news du jour in their posts. That opens its own avenues for trouble: instances in which a Gen Zer may have the ability to discern misinformation, but not necessarily the time or desire to do so.

Consider the amount of information a 19-year-old might see on a single 15-minute scroll through their Instagram feed: all the memes, videos and captions, each telling its own narrative.

Now imagine how many 19-year-olds would verify every fact they encounter in those 15 minutes.

“Their generation is sort of infograzing much of the time,” Adams said. “And they’re seeing way more headlines, posts, comments, memes than any other generation in history so they’re having to make really snap decisions and also to be really conscious and deliberate about what sticks.”

“We are hardwired to notice patterns, and if we see a false claim repeated over and over again, it starts to feel true even if it’s not,” Adams said.

That can particularly be the case amid the coronavirus pandemic, Otis said, as an evolving understanding of the disease by the scientific community and general fears over the economy and people’s health lead to a slew of distorted rumors or false information. The U.N. has dubbed the crisis of misinformation on the disease an “infodemic,” and Gen Zers have not been immune.

It doesn’t help that Trump has downplayed the disease and gone against the recommendations of his own health experts. Pro-Trump Instagram accounts often repeat the president’s inaccurate statements, like that children are practically immune or that the virus has a practically negligible fatality rate, feeding the misinformation machine. (Over 200,000 Americans have died from the disease, and many who survive sustain lasting impairments; meanwhile, children with Covid-19 may be susceptible to a potentially dangerous Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome.)

Similarly, amid the anti-racism protests that erupted in cities across the country this summer, social media allowed Gen Zers to see what was happening on the ground directly from the protesters. But the graphic depictions of protesters and police clashing often circulated on social media without context of what protesters were calling for or what led up to the escalations.

“When you pair very vivid imagery and put it with text, either on the image itself or sort of a post, it can have a very particular effect where it pushes all those emotional buttons that then in return shuts down critical thinking skills or questions that a viewer might have,” Otis said.

Cross-posting of content among platforms in particular can place barriers to verifying information. Instagram meme pages frequently include screenshots of tweets or reposts of TikToks, discouraging users from clicking into the usernames or otherwise checking the source.

And TikTok’s very structure of reacting to and sharing other videos — in the form of duets — can obfuscate where a video originated. That’s only exacerbated if the video is taken off platform.

Several platforms have made efforts to combat misinformation, and TikTok itselfadmits that it “isn’t the go-to app for news.” TikTok, as well as Facebook and Google, have partnered with independent fact checkers and try to remove posts that are misleading or inaccurate.

But that hasn’t stopped some particularly egregious examples of misinformation from ballooning into cultural phenomena.

conspiracy overload

A particularly gruesome example was the viral conspiracy theory that the furniture retailer Wayfair was secretly trafficking children. The baseless narrative spread across TikTok, with users matching names of furniture lines with missing children to construct a theory that the furniture company was selling missing kids.

It was a political reincarnation of the viral “pizzagate” conspiracy theory that led to a shooting at a Washington pizzeria in 2017. And it wasn’t before long that it grew ties to the world of QAnon — the equally baseless right-wing mythology that Trump is secretly fighting against a cabal of deep-state pedophiles. (The FBI has dubbed QAnon a domestic terrorist threat.)

These theories may seem too absurd to believe, but when repeated constantly in the peripheral vision, remnants of the theories can trickle into impressionable observers.

“False narratives pushed by conspiratorial extremists can get laundered across different platforms, and those talking points can be repeated even by folks who have no idea where they came from,” Adams said.

After federal marshals located 39 missing children — some believed to be victims of abuse — over a two-week blitz in Georgia, a number of posts began circling claiming that the children were in fact victims of child sex trafficking associated with various QAnon-generated conspiracies. Links were drawn to Wayfair, and some conspiracy theorists began implicating major news organizations for not thoroughly covering the mission.

Even people completely unaffiliated with the world of Wayfair and QAnon began criticizing news organizations for not covering the rescue of child trafficking victims — an example, Adams said, of the trickling down of conspiratorial talking points.

(PolitiFact debunked many of the claims circulating about the operation and pointed out that many news organizations had in fact reported on the missing children.)

Political actors with more deliberate agendas have also seized on some of the vulnerabilities to gain a foothold in youth social media. A number of right-wing accounts sowing disinformation on issues ranging from mail-in voting to the coronavirus have found platforms on TikTok and Instagram.

A pro-Trump group even recruited teens to spread right-wing messages and misinformation from their own accounts, The Washington Post reported. Turning Point Action, an affiliate of conservative youth mobilization group Turning Point USA, spread coordinated messaging and misinformation about mail-in voting. Facebook and Twitter suspended a number of accounts after the Post inquired about the effort.

Meanwhile, Russia is hardly finished trying to sway American public opinion through social media, Otis said. Its social media mechanisms have become only more sophisticated and harder to track since 2016, with more organic forms of content creation — at times using third parties outside the country.

Saudi Arabia, China and Iran are increasingly exploring options for expanding their propaganda operations outside their borders. U.S. intelligence officials determined that Iran was seeking to sow discord in the United States and that Russia was pushing damaging narratives against Biden.

It could be a tall order to expect a cohort of 18- to 22-year-olds to outsmart international propaganda operations. But there is reason for hope.

The mere fact that Gen Zers display skepticism of social media posts and place a value on authenticity makes them responsive to fact-checking, said Jeff Hancock, a Stanford communications professor who has studied the psychology of social media users.

The sharing of fake news stories still tends to be the domain of older generations, Hancock said. Hancock, who serves as Lee’s faculty adviser, is the founding director of Stanford’s Social Media Lab and has studied the psychology of social media users.

Lee also pointed out that younger social media users are often quick to call out in the comments of problematic posts when something is misleading or flat-out false.

In one viral example, a firefighter pointed out the inaccuracies in a video posted by a young skeptic of the wildfires plaguing the Western United States. The original video posited questions that seemed to invite conspiracies, such as asking why the wildfires ended at the Canadian border (the map didn’t cover Canada), and why there was a radiation warning in a particular photo (the photo was from Chernobyl). Thedebunking video has been viewed more than 7 million times on TikTok and Twitter.

After Matthews, the woman in the viral absentee ballot request form video, reached out to TikTokers who had shared her video, the overwhelming majority of them quickly agreed to take it down, she said. Today, few remnants of the video are still visible on the platform.

Hancock said members of Gen Z are acutely concerned with authenticity when browsing social media, particularly when engaging with influencers. They are savvy with metrics and can often tell when a brand or other external actor is behind an influencer’s posts.

There have also been efforts to advance information literacy education in middle- and high-school curricula. The News Literacy Project’s Checkology program, which teaches teens how to spot fake news and other critical reading skills, is used in classrooms in every state and more than 100 countries worldwide.

But despite the generation’s preparation, it still faces a new media landscape rife with pitfalls. And Gen Zers are dealing with many of these issues at an unprecedentedly young age.

“We’ve built this massive online architecture on this new generation and sort of said, figure it out. Find out what’s true or what’s false yourself,” Otis said. “We’ve left them with a royal mess.”