• knittedmushroom@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Hm, like most opinion pieces, there aren’t any hard numbers from studies really shown besides the initial percentages. And I immediately picked up on the second paragraph’s

    Compared to older generations, younger generations have reported higher rates of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying.

    Yeah no shit those metrics will skew towards Gen Z being more victimized if you’re lumping cyberbullying into the mix! They’re one of the first generations that have had to deal with their peers harassing the everloving shit out of them all hours of the day online. As a millennial, I didn’t have to even think about putting up with that until at least high school. I’d really want to see what questionnaire wording they were using for the survey data. If the question was legitimately “Have you ever been a victim of phishing, identity theft, romance scams, or cyberbullying?” then I think almost everyone with a social media account for their whole life would need to check “yes.”

      • Pigeon@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I also wonder if they controlled for the fact younger people are online more often in the first place.

    • Reil@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Yeah no shit those metrics will skew towards Gen Z being more victimized if you’re lumping cyberbullying into the mix!

      They’re high in each of those categories individually, not (just) if you add the categories together and compare the totals. Millennials are slightly higher in Romance scams and identify theft though.

      BUT these numbers are also self-disclosed. I’m not sure how you’d correct for this in a survey, but I could easily believe that these two generations are simply more likely to realize they’ve been victimized, and have a higher exposure to the internet (and thus to scams).

      I’d be more interested in something like a sit-down test, to be honest. It’d be easier to account for time spent online and self-awareness of victimization, and more likely to isolate “internet street smarts”, as far as I can tell.