Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do
www.vox.com
The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.

Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do. The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.::undefined

  • CashewNut 🏴󠁢󠁥󠁧󠁿@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    I have no evidence of who’s falling for my ‘trolling’ online but it’s very similar to what you describe. I’ll make some absurd, nonsense claim or insult them using flowery nonsense language that can’t possibly be taken seriously - but they do!

    I suggested that Java devs (programmers) are the reason we’ll never have FTL engines. They took me seriously!

    Yet there’s other times you’ll get obviously younger people screaming in comments under videos “FAKE!” because they can’t conceive that the video’d thing could happen.

    In that instance I can understand it to a degree because they don’t have the lived years experience to compare what they’re seeing on screen. You’ll get them claiming “that would never happen” or “people don’t do that and if you think it’s real go touch grass” and I’m thinking - “hang on that’s happened to me at least 3 times”.

    I understand it’s probably just the arrogance of youth but it’s quite shocking at times just how confident they can be of their own ignorance.

    • rwhitisissle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      I know people who teach high school and they say that Gen Z has both an extreme degree of personal esteem and that they won’t take shit from anyone who disparages who they fundamentally are as people (like people giving shit for them being from immigrant families, being POCs, being LGBT, etc.), which is fantastic - no one should ever put up with shit like that. But they also seem to have a very hard time organizing their thoughts and making logical conclusions from structured evidence. Like they can’t write a paper making an argument for something and providing evidence for why something is a certain way. It’s all stream of consciousness. I think that as a generational cohort they might be more inclined towards “unstructured thought” or perhaps “stream of consciousness” than other generations. As old as I might sound because of this opinion, I do think that the fact that they interact with information almost entirely through mobile devices is a potential component of that. The mechanisms and mediums by which you consume information arguably shape how you process information.