Taylor Schlitz: When lines blur between influencers, deepfakes and actual news

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If you want to understand my generation, do not start with our news habits. Start with our playlists and closets.

Gen Z is teeming with nostalgia. The '90s and early 2000s are everywhere again in low-rise jeans, grainy “camcorder” filters and edits that look like they were ripped from an old DVD. My generation often feels nostalgia without memory — at least not our own memories. We treat the past like an archive we can remix.

Back then, you knew when you were watching a commercial, or a news broadcast, or a movie trailer. Each had its lane. Today, the lines have blurred. Everything arrives in the same scroll. An ad, a meme, a breaking news story, a deepfake like those circulating after the killing of Renee Good — or a viral Nick Shirley video that looked like an investigation, spread like news and yet still needed actual reporters to check whether any of it was true.

To me, nostalgia is a clue about what my generation is missing. Part of what we are reaching for, even if we do not say it out loud, is a clearer sense of what is actually real and what is a mirage. When we gravitate to older aesthetics, we are not just chasing a look. We are reaching for a feeling where we think the terms are clearer. A retro commercial does not pretend to be anything but an ad. A grainy home video from 2001 is not pretending to be breaking news.

By contrast, our daily information diet is a mashup of everything. The same platforms that sell us nostalgia also flatten everything else into one feed. When you cannot tell what is reporting, what is opinion, what is propaganda, what is a joke and what is AI, distrust becomes a kind of self-defense.

In other words, many teenagers today picture journalism as a rigged game. The rules are corruption and spin. Honesty is the exception.

That feeling is not abstract. It was reinforced with the Shirley video. The video traveled like news before any newsroom had the opportunity to verify a single claim. For a generation already convinced that information is just performance, watching the video go viral felt less like news and accountability and more like confirmation that everything is for sale or clout.

When I spoke with Benjamin Toff, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota who studies trust in news and also directs its Minnesota Journalism Center, he described this reflexive distrust as understandable but dangerous. He acknowledged that it’s much harder to tell the difference today between professional journalists and others who are posting videos on social media.

“They may not really necessarily consider themselves journalists, but I think there’s so much lumping together of all these categories in a way that makes it really hard to discern what’s true and what’s not,” he told me.

So skepticism has its place, he said. Expecting proof and being able to explain why you trust one source more than another is healthy. He worries when young people decide that everybody is equally untrustworthy, because trust is also a way of not feeling like you have to report every story yourself.

The deeper danger is not that teens dislike the news. It is that many have stopped believing anyone more than anyone else. If you think everyone is lying equally, then it is easier to fall for a lie. Conspiracy channels and bad-faith influencers do not have to prove they are right. They only have to convince you that no one else is.

As a Black woman I know how dangerous that is, because our communities have always been targets for rumors and deliberate misinformation, from false claims about elections to distorted stories about crime and protest. A press that is genuinely independent and accountable is one of the few tools we have to challenge that. If teens decide there is no real difference between a newsroom that can be sued for defamation and a stranger with a ring light, the people who benefit most are the ones who already hold power.

Teens are not asking to stay confused. In another survey from the News Literacy Project, an overwhelming majority of teens said schools should be required to teach media literacy, yet many reported getting no such instruction in the past year. When I asked Toff what real help might look like, he did not start with a new app. He talked about conversations. We need to talk more about how we decide what to trust and why we believe one source over another.

That responsibility is shared. If you are going to tear down “the media” in front of young people, you have a moral obligation to also explain what ethical journalism looks like so they can recognize it. If you work in news, you cannot assume Gen Z sees you as different from any other account in the feed. You have to make the reporting process visible and show how you gathered facts.

And if you are part of Gen Z, we cannot live inside retro aesthetics and call it rebellion, then shrug about the information that will decide our rights and our future. If we have time to scroll, we have time, at least sometimes, to ask, “Who made this? What do they want from me? Where else can I check this?”