Gen Z’s most trusted source for news: online comment sections

Gen Z has come of age swimming in a gloppy stew of digital content. Every day they navigate memes, photos, social media, chats with their friends, flashes of video, who seek it out, not sprayed algorithmically into the eyeballs of credulous, internet-surfing teens. “Casual consumption of silly TikToks is very unlikely to lead someone into a dark corner of hate or misinformation,” says David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research who studies online behavior. “It is highly likely that if they get there, they chose to get there.”

All of us are consuming less formal news content these days, like TV or newspapers. And like Gen Z, we’re all relying more and more on our social networks to tell us what’s going on. A recent study from the Pew Research Center found that most users on Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok encounter news frequently. On X, it most often comes from the media outlets and journalists who actually produced the news. On Facebook and Instagram, it comes via family and friends whose viewpoints, for better or worse, you already know. But on TikTok — with its disproportionately younger user base — the source is usually influencers. They aggregate, meta-analyze, and pre-digest what other sources are saying. Maybe that’s why users on TikTok, compared with other platforms, say they’re unlikely to be “worn out” by the news they see. Someone else already did the hard work; they’re getting the executive summary.

As clickbait-avoidant Gen Zers might suspect, Jigsaw’s interest in their online behavior isn’t purely academic. The Google subsidiary makes software called Perspective that lots of news outlets — including The New York Times — use to moderate their comment sections. The new iteration of Perspective incorporates Jigsaw’s latest findings, elevating comments that contain warm and fuzzy “bridging” sentiments, like curiosity and reasonableness, to the top of the section. The aim is to reach Gen Z readers where they live — scrolling through the comments — and turn them into subscribers. By studying Gen Z in the wild, Jigsaw can lay better traps for them in their native habitat.

As a Gen Xer, I’m inherently skeptical of broad pronouncements about the up-and-coming generation. You should have heard some of the stuff boomers said about us. (Not that we cared. Like, whatever.) But I’ll confess that I worried about the idea that Gen Z checks the comments to decide what to believe. So, after a therapeutic clutch at my pearls, I figured I’d better check it out. To evaluate Jigsaw’s research, I performed a scientific gut check: I looked at Google Scholar to see how many other researchers had cited the study. That’s a standard metric for how much a field values any given journal article.

And then I realized: I was basically checking the comments. We all do it — we look for lots of links, for 5-star reviews, for what the replies say. These are all valid ways to surf the modern social-informational ecosystem. The kids are all right, and all right.

Still, I wondered what Gen Zers themselves might make of Jigsaw’s research. Conveniently, two of them live in my house and call me Dad. So I texted them the findings, along with a question-mark emoji.

“Yeah, seems right,” the younger one replied. “But you know not all of us do that.”

I counted myself lucky — that was more of a response than Goldberg got. “We always share the final results with respondents,” she says. But when Goldberg asked her subjects what they thought of her research, true to her findings, all she heard back was the gravid silence of teenagers looking at their phones. “I’m not sure how many of our Gen Zers read our papers,” she concluded ruefully. No comment section, no comment.

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.