Teachers and Teens Diverge Sharply on Trusting Social Media, Six-Country Study Finds

A sweeping new study of more than 1,300 teachers and secondary school students across six European countries has revealed a striking generational paradox at the heart of the fight against disinformation: teenagers overwhelmingly get their news from the very social media platforms they know are riddled with fake news, yet they continue to trust those platforms and rarely verify what they encounter. The research, published in the Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, argues that closing this gap requires a fundamental upgrade in teacher training, not just in technical skills but in the critical, pedagogical use of social media inside the classroom.

The study, led by Ana Pérez-Escoda of Universidad Francisco de Vitoria in Madrid, together with Eglée Ortega-Fernández of the Complutense University of Madrid and Laura Martínez-Otón of Universidad Nebrija, forms part of a European Union-funded Erasmus Plus project called WISE-ME. The project’s premise is simple but urgent: disinformation spreads fastest on social networks, and that is precisely where teachers need to be equipped to intervene. Nearly two decades have passed since digital competence was written into European education legislation, yet the researchers argue that the rapid evolution of social media among minors and the explosion of fake news demand a continuous renewal of what teachers know and how they teach it.

To map the landscape, the team surveyed 1,186 students aged 12 to 18 and 166 secondary school teachers in Spain, Austria, Greece, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Denmark. Because the data did not follow a normal distribution, the researchers turned to non-parametric statistics, applying the Mann–Whitney U test to compare the two independent groups at a significance threshold of p < 0.05. The questionnaire itself was a substantial instrument: 35 variables and 150 items organized into four blocks covering sociodemographics, social media use, information management and disinformation management. A panel of experts from all six countries refined the items, and the instrument achieved a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.847, comfortably above the 0.70 threshold conventionally accepted as evidence of high internal reliability.

The theoretical backbone of the work is DigCompEdu, the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators, which has been adopted by every EU member state. The framework organizes teacher digital competence into six domains and 22 sub-competences, and the study concentrated on three of them: supporting teaching and learning, empowering learners, and facilitating learners’ digital competence. It is this last domain that places responsibility on teachers to develop students’ skills in media literacy, communication and digital citizenship, content creation, responsible technology use, and problem solving. In Spain, the framework has been adapted into a national reference model, and recent curriculum reforms under Royal Decree 217/2022 explicitly require students to identify disinformation and assess the reliability of sources.

The statistical comparison exposed deep generational divides. On trustworthiness, the differences were significant for every major platform tested: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, WhatsApp, YouTube, Be Real, Discord, Pinterest and Snapchat all showed p-values below 0.05. Students placed notably more trust in the platforms they used most heavily, particularly Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp, a finding the researchers describe as a departure from earlier studies in which young people tended to be skeptical of the very services they frequented. Both groups, however, reported obtaining most of their information from the internet and social networks, confirming that the news habits of adults and adolescents have converged even as their critical habits have not.

When it came to recognizing fake news, teachers expressed far more confidence: six out of ten said they often or always recognize disinformation, compared with only four out of ten students. Sharing behavior told a more troubling story. While 64.5 percent of teachers said they had never shared fake news, only 52.3 percent of students could say the same. More than 32 percent of students admitted to sharing false content unknowingly, versus 20 percent of teachers, and 15.4 percent of students acknowledged having shared fake news at some point, more than double the teacher figure of 7.2 percent. Perceptions of why fake news is created also split along generational lines: teachers were significantly more likely to attribute it to malicious intent, political interest and economic gain, while students and teachers agreed on boredom and fun as motivations, a divergence the authors link to adolescents’ still-developing ideological awareness.

Perhaps the most revealing results concerned how the two groups judge information. Students were significantly more likely than teachers to assess content based on the number of likes it received or whether an influencer had shared it, while teachers leaned on the credibility of the source. Both groups, however, were influenced by messages received privately from friends, a pattern the researchers interpret through Social Influence Theory and the filter bubble phenomenon, in which social environments shape beliefs and reinforce existing views. Verification habits were weak across the board: only about 18 percent of students said they fact-check information often or always, compared with nearly 38 percent of teachers, and while most students in both groups reported using some strategy or tool to confirm what reaches them, systematic fact-checking remains far from routine.

These findings became the blueprint for a set of training modules designed in the study’s second phase. Module 1 gives students a framework for understanding disinformation and information disorders, identifying the sources and motivations behind them and evaluating credibility. Module 2 addresses information consumption patterns, and Module 3 tackles the psychological dimension, training students to identify the cognitive biases that color their perception of social media content and to recognize common manipulative techniques. Module 4 promotes responsible digital citizenship and respectful, informed online behavior. When teachers reported difficulty fitting the materials into their formal curricula, the team added a sixth, methodological module to help educators adapt the content to their own subjects, including guidance on building a classroom Personal Learning Environment.

The researchers are candid about the study’s limitations. The convenience sample was designed to recruit committed school communities rather than to be nationally representative, the cross-sectional design precludes causal inference, and no factor analysis was performed to confirm the dimensional structure of the 150-item questionnaire. The training modules themselves have not yet been implemented, so their effectiveness remains untested, though an interactive bot to support teachers and students is planned as a next step. Even so, the team argues the work represents a meaningful advance by confronting two challenges that curricula formally acknowledge but classrooms often fail to deliver: the pervasive use of social media by minors and the spread of disinformation.

The broader message is one of structural urgency. The authors contend that the digital divide between teachers and students is not merely a matter of literacy but a generational and methodological gap that demands rethinking initial and ongoing teacher education, revising school curricula, and building training programs that go beyond instrumental technical skills toward security, content creation and critical engagement. As long as young people navigate digital spaces with ease but without pedagogical support, the researchers warn, the online environment remains a risky one, and the paradox of trusting the platforms that spread the lies will persist. Equipping teachers to turn social media from a threat into a teaching tool, they conclude, is a social responsibility that requires sustained and unwavering commitment.

Subject of Research: Teacher digital competence and media literacy for combating disinformation and fake news on social media in secondary education

Article Title: Enhancing teachers’ digital competence for combating disinformation and fake news through the use of social media in classroom

Article References: Pérez-Escoda, A., Ortega-Fernández, E., & Martínez-Otón, L. (2026). Enhancing teachers’ digital competence for combating disinformation and fake news through the use of social media in classroom. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00051-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00051-6

Keywords: digital competence, teachers, disinformation, fake news, social media, media literacy, secondary education, DigCompEdu, fact-checking, teacher training, digital divide, critical thinking