| Hey, it's Josh. One of the great mysteries of adult life is what teenagers are doing online. Twice in the last two months, a group of students at Portola High School in Irvine, California, have generously looked up from their devices and attempted to explain to me what things have been like during a presidential election and a warped school year taking place in the middle of a pandemic. The most recent conversation came last week, following the first presidential debate and Donald Trump's hospitalization for Covid-19. The kids I spoke to, who ranged in age from 15 to 17, had various levels of interest in politics, and nearly all of them said political discussion had taken over the timelines of their favorite social media networks. (In roughly descending order, the group's preferred apps were Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Twitter. More on Facebook in a second.) People who get their political news primarily through social media are less informed than those who get their news in any other way, except those who rely primarily on local television, according to the Pew Research Center. Pew's study didn't look at people under the age of 18, but the teenagers were well aware of the low quality of the information they were getting in their social feeds. "The Pizzagate thing, my whole TikTok was that for a good two weeks," said Ariana, 17, referring to a precursor to the QAnon conspiracy theory. "Then everyone totally forgot about it." Chris, 15, said the app's algorithm regularly served him videos claiming that 9/11 or the moon landing had been faked. None of the students copped to believing any of these conspiracy theories. They see social media as politically biased and unreliable and said they tended to rely on Google news searches or the websites of actual news organizations when they wanted real information. (Pew found this pattern of news consumption produced the best-informed adults, with radio listeners coming in a close second.) The purpose of social media, said the students, was more about rallying emotion around political or social issues than informing oneself about them. "It's all people fighting, or it's all people being swept up in their own echo chamber," Ariana said. But the internet also offered them the chance to peek into the political discussions of opposing groups, something they rarely had a chance to do at school where they said political consensus reigns. The teenagers did highlight one group whose views diverged maddeningly from their own: their parents. All of the kids who expressed partisan leaning said they supported Democrats, but several said their parents were Republicans whose social media diet mostly consisted of Facebook. The kids viewed the service, which basically none of them claimed to use themselves, as a place for conservative adults to get excited about President Trump. But the students also said their parents were less active online and, therefore, less besieged by the polarization kids are immersed in each day. They guessed that adults were having substantive political debates in the workplace. They couldn't imagine that their parents were having political discussions as pointless as their own, which consisted of mockery of the facial expressions candidates made on the debate stage or ironic arguments over whether Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden had hotter grandchildren. A 16-year old named Ryan expressed a common feeling within the group when he said he was looking forward to a day when the internet didn't dominate his thoughts in the way it does today. "There's no limit to the independent thought you're going to be engaging in when you're older and away from social media," he said. If he only knew. —Joshua Brustein | 
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