Understanding the impact of misinformation on adolescents

There is an urgent need for targeted, evidence-based interventions to build resilience to misinformation among social media’s most avid users: adolescents. Research on misinformation susceptibility is mostly focused on adults. However, adolescents encounter different types of (mis)information and undergo rapid social, emotional and cognitive changes. These changes can increase vulnerability to misinformation through social influence, emotional manipulation and cognitive biases, while also offering unique opportunities for resilience. Taking a developmental perspective, we outline how adolescents’ susceptibility to misinformation differs from that of adults, propose a research agenda to systematically study these processes and introduce a Bayesian framework of belief updating tailored to social media contexts. Finally, we highlight how these insights inform age-appropriate interventions to promote resilience. This Perspective underscores the vital role that social sciences have in understanding and combating the harmful influence of misinformation on youth’s beliefs and behaviours, while leveraging their strengths.