Gen Z Is Pioneering a New Understanding of Truth
Gen Z Is Pioneering a New Understanding of Truth
Z世代正在开创对“真相”的新理解
The polar bear video has millions of views. Set to a haunting piano score that’s become ubiquitous on TikTok, it shows a lone bear swimming between increasingly distant ice floes. The comments section overflows with teenage grief, rage, and helplessness. 那段北极熊的视频拥有数百万的播放量。视频配上了在 TikTok 上随处可见的凄美钢琴曲，画面中一只孤独的北极熊在渐行渐远的浮冰间游动。评论区里充斥着青少年们的悲伤、愤怒和无助。
Beside my laptop screen lies the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Same subject, different universe. The measured language of climate science stands in stark contrast to the raw emotions evoked by that TikTok. Both contain some truth, but also fundamentally different frequencies of human understanding. 我的笔记本电脑旁放着最新的政府间气候变化专门委员会（IPCC）报告。同样的主题，却是不同的世界。气候科学严谨的语言与那段 TikTok 视频所激发的原始情感形成了鲜明对比。两者都包含某种真相，但它们处于人类认知中截然不同的频率。
Gen Z, the first generation to spend their earliest years in the smartphone era, has developed a fundamentally different relationship with truth. Z 世代是第一代在智能手机时代度过童年的人，他们与“真相”之间建立了一种本质上不同的关系。
Starting in 2010, researchers across multiple countries began documenting a sharp rise in adolescent anxiety, depression, loneliness, self-harm, and social withdrawal. Large-scale survey data from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Europe showed similar trend lines emerging between 2012 and 2014. The timing aligned almost exactly with the moment smartphones, front-facing cameras, and algorithmically driven content platforms became the dominant hubs of adolescent social life. 从 2010 年开始，多国研究人员开始记录到青少年焦虑、抑郁、孤独、自残和社会退缩现象的急剧增加。来自美国、英国、加拿大、澳大利亚和欧洲的大规模调查数据显示，2012 年至 2014 年间出现了相似的趋势线。这一时间点几乎与智能手机、前置摄像头以及算法驱动的内容平台成为青少年社交生活核心枢纽的时刻完全吻合。
Studies using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s long-running Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future study, and parallel international mental health datasets found steep increases among teenage girls in depressive symptoms, sleep disruption, and feelings of persistent sadness and hopelessness. Researchers also documented declines in face-to-face social interaction alongside dramatic increases in time spent interacting online. 利用美国疾病控制与预防中心（CDC）长期开展的“青少年风险行为调查”、密歇根大学的“监测未来”研究以及国际心理健康数据集的研究发现，少女群体中抑郁症状、睡眠障碍以及持续的悲伤和绝望感显著增加。研究人员还记录到，面对面的社交互动在减少，而在线互动的时间却大幅增加。
But the deeper transformation was not simply psychological. It was cultural and cognitive. As social life migrated onto platforms optimized for engagement, visibility, and emotional reaction, questions of truth increasingly became filtered through identity, emotion, and social validation rather than through slower institutional systems of evidence, authority, and debate. Beyond changing what young people consumed, social media also altered how they processed reality. That shift, from shared public truth toward personalized and algorithmically reinforced truth, sits at the center of truth’s future. 但更深层的转变不仅仅是心理上的，更是文化和认知上的。随着社交生活迁移到针对参与度、曝光率和情绪反应进行优化的平台上，关于“真相”的问题越来越多地通过身份认同、情感和社交认可来过滤，而不是通过更缓慢的证据、权威和辩论等制度化体系。社交媒体不仅改变了年轻人的消费内容，还改变了他们处理现实的方式。这种从共享的公共真相向个性化且由算法强化的真相的转变，正处于“真相”未来的核心。
“Our realities,” says Emma Lembke, “are being shaped by a profit-driven attention economy that prioritizes engagement over well-being.” Lembke is the director of Gen Z Advocacy at the Sustainable Media Center, a nonprofit I direct that brings together an intergenerational board to protect kids from the harms of social media. She has spent years organizing young people around these issues, tracking platform behavior, and building coalitions between researchers, attorneys, and youth advocates. For her, this isn’t an abstract threat. It’s her generation’s everyday life. “我们的现实，”艾玛·伦布克（Emma Lembke）说，“正被一种以利润为导向的注意力经济所塑造，这种经济将参与度置于福祉之上。”伦布克是可持续媒体中心（Sustainable Media Center）的 Z 世代倡导主任，该中心由我负责，旨在汇集跨代董事会以保护儿童免受社交媒体的伤害。多年来，她一直致力于围绕这些议题组织年轻人，追踪平台行为，并在研究人员、律师和青年倡导者之间建立联盟。对她而言，这并非抽象的威胁，而是她这一代人的日常生活。
The danger is no longer just misinformation. Thanks to AI, it’s now possible to manufacture fake realities at scale. Deepfake videos, cloned voices, and bogus news stories are dissolving the line between what’s real and what’s not faster than society can adapt. 危险已不再仅仅是虚假信息。得益于人工智能，现在可以大规模制造虚假的现实。深度伪造视频、克隆语音和虚假新闻报道正在以社会无法适应的速度，消解着真实与虚假之间的界限。
Fully AI-generated personas, with faces, voices, backstories, and millions of followers are already operating across Instagram and TikTok, indistinguishable from human influencers. Gen Z didn’t create this problem. They inherited it. And they’re navigating it without a map, inside feeds that have no obligation to tell them what’s real. For Gen Z, whose understanding of the world is already filtered through algorithmic feeds, reality itself often arrives pre-curated, emotionally optimized, and computationally amplified. 完全由人工智能生成的虚拟人物——拥有面孔、声音、背景故事和数百万粉丝——已经活跃在 Instagram 和 TikTok 上，与人类网红无异。Z 世代并没有制造这个问题，他们只是继承了它。他们像是在没有地图的情况下航行，身处那些没有义务告诉他们什么是真实的推送流中。对于 Z 世代而言，他们对世界的理解本就经过了算法推送的过滤，现实本身往往以预先策划、情感优化和计算放大的形式呈现。
New York University professor and media critic Scott Galloway has been blunt about the way AI and algorithmic platforms are reshaping truth for Gen Z. He argues that AI-powered platforms like Facebook and TikTok aren’t just social networks. They have become influence engines capable of shaping what millions of young people see, believe, fear, and ultimately accept as real. 纽约大学教授兼媒体评论家斯科特·加洛韦（Scott Galloway）直言不讳地指出了人工智能和算法平台重塑 Z 世代“真相”的方式。他认为，像 Facebook 和 TikTok 这样的人工智能驱动平台不仅仅是社交网络，它们已经成为影响力引擎，能够塑造数百万年轻人所见、所信、所惧以及最终所接受的“现实”。
Central to Galloway’s critique is the idea that engagement has replaced human judgment as the organizing principle of information online. Platforms are optimized not for accuracy, empathy, or discussion but for attention and emotional reaction. “They aren’t crawling the real world; they aren’t crawling what’s best about us,” he said during a panel with Lembke at the Sustainable Media Center. “They’re crawling the comments section.” 加洛韦批评的核心在于：参与度已经取代了人类的判断力，成为在线信息的组织原则。平台的优化目标不是准确性、同理心或讨论，而是注意力和情绪反应。“它们抓取的不是真实世界，也不是我们身上最美好的一面，”他在可持续媒体中心与伦布克共同参加的小组讨论中说道，“它们抓取的是评论区。”
That tension between emotional experience and factual truth is particularly visible around climate change. Climate activist Xiye Bastida, one of the most visible Gen Z voices in the global climate movement, has argued that social media allows younger users to experience climate change through human stories and firsthand accounts, creating an emotional understanding of the crisis that feels very different from reading scientific reports alone. 这种情感体验与事实真相之间的张力在气候变化议题上尤为明显。气候活动家希耶·巴斯蒂达（Xiye Bastida）是全球气候运动中最具影响力的 Z 世代声音之一，她认为社交媒体让年轻用户能够通过人类故事和第一手叙述来体验气候变化，从而对这场危机产生了一种情感上的理解，这与单纯阅读科学报告的感觉截然不同。
In 2023, researchers at Google published a study examining how Gen Z navigates online information. Participants, they found, tend to encounter information passively through social media feeds rather than actively seeking it out, and their engagement is deeply social, shaped by collaborative interpretation and discussion within peer groups. The study called this practice “information sensibility,” a socially informed awareness of how to judge the value and credibility of what they see online. 2023 年，谷歌的研究人员发表了一项研究，探讨 Z 世代如何浏览在线信息。他们发现，参与者倾向于通过社交媒体推送被动地获取信息，而不是主动搜索，他们的参与过程具有深刻的社交属性，由同伴群体内的协作解读和讨论所塑造。该研究将这种做法称为“信息敏感度”（information sensibility），即一种基于社交经验的意识，用以判断在线所见内容的价值和可信度。
Participants described reacting emotionally first, discussing stories with peers second, and verifying details later, if at all. What looks like credulity from the outside is something more sophisticated from the inside. Gen Z has developed a distributed verification system, not institutional, not algorithmic, but social. Peer networks function as real-time editorial boards, stress-testing information against lived experience before it gets accepted or rejected. This has real implications for how we think about media literacy. 参与者描述说，他们通常先产生情绪反应，接着与同伴讨论故事，最后才去核实细节（如果会去核实的话）。从外部看这似乎是轻信，但从内部看，这其实是一种更复杂的机制。Z 世代已经发展出一种分布式验证系统——它不是制度化的，也不是算法化的，而是社交化的。同伴网络充当了实时编辑部的角色，在接受或拒绝信息之前，会根据生活经验对信息进行压力测试。这对我们如何思考媒体素养具有深远的现实意义。