Canadian Publishing Industry News
20 December 2017,     TORONTO
Real vs Sponsored Content - 80% of middle school students can’t tell the difference

Digital perceptions of online content by students of what is real, sponsored and fake were surveyed by Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Students (7,800) were asked to complete an online survey of Slate magazine’s website and to evaluate three different sections - a traditional advertisement, a news story, and native advertisement. The study also looked at social media postings to see if students could determine it was authentic or fake.

 

 SLATE MAGZINE STUDENT SURVEY  PAGE

 

The results showed that 75% students were able to identify traditional news stories and traditional advertisements and 80% believe that the native advertisement, identified by the words sponsored content was a real news story. See the full results of the survey at this link. The Stanford researchers who evaluated students' ability to assess information sources described the results as "dismaying," "bleak" and "a threat to democracy."

 
Story Tools
Most Recent News Comment
Jaded says:
Wow, Torstar really seems to be on a mission to bankrupt one magazine after another....
Most Recent Blog Comment
Lorene Shyba says:
Full of terrific information, Thanks!...
Special Reports
Masthead Web Edition Archives
More Archives