Generation Z is pioneering a new understanding of truth

Polar bear The video has millions of views. Set to the haunting piano tune that has become so ubiquitous Tik TokIt shows a lone bear swimming among increasingly distant ice floes. The comments section overflows with teenage sadness, anger, and helplessness.

Next to my laptop screen is the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Same topic, different world. The measured language of climate science stands in stark contrast to the raw emotions evoked by TikTok. Both contain some truth, but also fundamentally different frequencies of human understanding.

Generation Z, the first generation to spend its early years in the smartphone era, has developed a fundamentally different relationship with truth.

Beginning in 2010, researchers in several countries began documenting a sharp rise in adolescent anxiety, depression, loneliness, self-harm, and social withdrawal. Large-scale survey data from the US, UK, Canada, Australia and Europe showed similar trend lines emerging between 2012 and 2014. The timing aligned almost exactly with the moment when smartphones, front-facing cameras, and algorithm-driven content platforms became the dominant hubs of teens’ social lives.

Studies using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Long-Term Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the University of Michigan Monitoring the Future Study, and parallel international mental health data sets have found sharp increases among teenage girls in depressive symptoms, sleep disturbance, and feelings of persistent sadness and hopelessness. Researchers also documented declines in face-to-face social interaction along with significant increases in time spent interacting online.

But the deeper transformation was not just a psychological transformation. It was cultural and cognitive. As social life moves to improved platforms for engagement, visibility, and emotional reaction, questions of truth are increasingly filtered through identity, emotion, and social validation rather than slower institutional systems of evidence, authority, and debate. Besides changing what young people consume, social media has also changed how they engage with reality. This shift, from public, shared truth to personal, algorithm-enhanced truth, lies at the heart of the future of truth.

“Our reality is shaped by a profit-driven attention economy that prioritizes engagement over well-being,” says Emma Lembke. Lembke is the director of Gen Z Advocacy at the Center for Sustainable Media, a nonprofit I direct that brings together an intergenerational council to protect children from the harms of social media. She has spent years organizing youth around these issues, tracking platform behavior, and building coalitions among researchers, lawyers, and youth advocates. For her, this is not an abstract threat. It is the daily life of her generation.

The danger is no longer just misinformation. Thanks to artificial intelligence, it is now possible to manufacture fake facts on a large scale. Fake videos, cloned voices, and fake news stories are blurring the line between what’s real and what’s not faster than society can adapt.

Completely AI-generated characters, with faces, voices, backstories, and millions of followers already run across Instagram and TikTok, and are indistinguishable from human influencers. Generation Z did not create this problem. They inherited it. They navigate without a map, within briefs that are not obligated to tell them what is real. For Generation Z, whose understanding of the world is already filtered through algorithmic feeds, reality itself often reaches a pre-curated, emotionally enhanced, and algorithmically inflated level.

NYU professor and media critic Scott Galloway has been frank about how AI and algorithmic platforms are reshaping reality for Generation Z. He says AI-powered platforms like Facebook and TikTok aren’t just social networks. They have become engines of influence capable of shaping what millions of young people see, believe, fear, and ultimately accept as true.

Central to Galloway’s critique is the idea that participation has replaced human judgment as the organizing principle of online information. Platforms are not optimized for accuracy, empathy, or discussion but for attention and emotional reaction. “They’re not creeping into the real world, and they’re not creeping into what’s best in us,” he said during a panel discussion with Lembke at the Center for Sustainable Media. “They crawl the comments section.”

This tension between emotional experience and factual reality is particularly evident in relation to climate change. Climate activist Chey Bastida, one of the most prominent voices of Generation Z in the global climate movement, has claimed that social media allows younger users to experience climate change through human stories and first-hand accounts, creating an emotional understanding of the crisis that is very different from reading scientific reports alone.