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Mom's 'book report' approach is a brilliant way to deal with baffling Gen Alpha slang

"It's not that deep" is not an acceptable answer.

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Many feel this generation's litany of nonsense words is something different.

I know it’s our lot in life as we get older to not jive with whatever slang the cool kids come up with, but the Gen Alpha lingo has simply crossed a line, hasn’t? Literally saying “6 7” to signify…nothing? Absurdism has its place, but are we, the ones charged with guiding our future leaders of tomorrow into adulthood, seriously gonna stand idly by and let that kind of brainrot slide? Nay, I say nay!

Thankfully, one mom has come up with a brilliant way to respond to what nonsense parents might hear coming out of their kids' mouths.

“What I've been doing with my two sons is I’ve been ‘book reporting’ them,” said content creator @Dewwwdropzz in a TikTok.

@dewwwdropzzz ♬ original sound - Dewwwdropzz

Essentially, what she means is that any time her kids come home and say something ludicrous like “6 7,” she has them do research on where the term actually came from. “We go on a journey together, and we decide to research what that means, where it comes from, why it happened, and where it stemmed from.”

So far, her kids haven’t rebutted with another Gen Alpha phrase, “It’s not that deep,” primarily because they are already being taught that everything is, in fact, interconnected in some way. However, if she ever does hear those words, you can bet that there will be a book report on it.

@juventus 6 7 🗣️‼️‼️‼️ #meme #67 #UCL #juventus #bvb (meme assets: @🦬🏹Первобытный🏹🦬 ♬ original sound - Sanity

This is a pretty cool idea, as it addresses questionable behavior without resorting to punishment, while also helping kids develop critical thinking, research skills, curiosity, and, perhaps most importantly, the wherewithal to not mindlessly parrot what they hear from others. All attributes that feel rather…vital, in this day and age, wouldn't you agree?

Other folks seemed to be on board with the concept and were eager to try it out themselves.

“This is probably the best thing you can do for your kid. I’m going to start this with mine.”

“I’m putting this in the back pocket for sure.”

Others, including parents and teachers, shared similar strategies they've already incorporated.

@mrcoachwhitehead and that’s what that means! #fyp #foryou #teachersoftiktok #education #highschoolteacher ♬ original sound - eazye_editz

"My rule is that they can't use words if they don't know the meaning," a commenter wrote. "This started after my oldest (8 at the time) came home saying ‘uwu.’ He heard it at school and thought it was a funny sound. Which is fine, but words have meaning. I don't want him hearing offensive words and causing someone harm just because they ‘sound cool.”

“If one of my students keeps interrupting saying these things I ask them to please stand up and explain what they are saying to the class, what it means, and why it is so vitally important that we needed to hear it right now," a teacher wrote. "If one actually knows we applaud because they not only knew but had the bravery to give an impromptu lesson. That has happened twice in 3 years. Usually they apologize and choose to stop.’”

Others were begging that the meaning “6 7” be explained. Again, people, it’s intentionally meaningless. Hilarious, right? Let’s just pray it goes the way of “cheugy.”

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Thom Yorke publishes letter on Gaza conflict and it's more thoughtful than any politician

He was being harassed by fans from both sides of the debate.

Wikpedia, Instagram, Canva

Thom Yorke posts a statement.

In October of 2024, Radiohead front man Thom Yorke was crooning his electric songs in dreamy blue and pink light on-stage in Melbourne, Australia, when a man from the crowd began screaming about war. "Do you condemn the Israeli genocide of Gaza? Already 200,000, half of them children," he yelled.

Thom pauses, then responds, "Come up here and say that. Don't stand there like a coward; come here and say it."

Many in the crowd scream for Thom to ignore the heckler, though some pile on. He continues, "You want to piss on everybody’s night? OK, you do it, see you later," and then leaves the stage. He returns soon after the crowd chants his name and sings Radiohead's "Karma Police," met with exhilaration.

-Thom Yorke on stagewww.youtube.com, CNN

In a piece about the incident for NBC News, Patrick Smith notes, "Radiohead has faced criticism in the past for playing gigs in Israel and not joining a boycott of the country by some artists." Smith also shares a statement Yorke made in 2017 at a concert in Tel Aviv: "We don’t endorse Netanyahu any more than Trump, but we still play in America. Music, art and academia is about crossing borders, not building them."

Unfortunately, those border walls have only gotten higher in the divide between human beings, as of late. The art of nuance, historical context, and listening to one another has somehow been lost among the memes and soundbites.

Yorke has now made a lengthy, thoughtful statement which he released on Instagram in order to, as he writes, "fill in the blanks" and to address the constant online (and in-person) bullying.

He begins his note, referencing what happened at the show: "Some guy shouting at me from the dark last year when I was picking up a guitar to sing the final song alone in front of 9000 people in Melbourne didn’t really seem like the best moment to discuss the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”

He shares that his silence following the incident has allowed people to put words in his mouth. "My attempt to show respect for all those who are suffering, and those who have died, and to not trivialize it in a few words has allowed other opportunistic groups to use intimidation and defamation to fill in the blanks."

Yorke is now ready to make sure there are no gaps in his beliefs. He writes, "I think Netanyahu and his crew of extremists are totally out of control and need to be stopped, and that the international community should put all the pressure it can on them to cease."

But he notes this is not a one-sided conflict. "At the same time, the unquestioning Free Palestine refrain that surrounds us does not answer the simple question of why the hostages have still not all been returned? For what possible reason? Why did Hamas choose the truly horrific acts of October 7th? The answer seems obvious, and I believe Hamas chooses too to hide behind the suffering of its people, in an equally cynical fashion for their own purposes.”

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

He then addresses the polarization happening due to the easy spread of misinformation on social media. "Social media witch-hunts (nothing new) on either side, pressurizing artists and whoever they feel like that week to make statements, etc., do very little except heighten tension, fear, and over-simplification of what are complex problems that merit proper face-to-face debate by people who genuinely wish the killing to stop and an understanding to be found.

This kind of deliberate polarization does not serve our fellow human beings and perpetuates a constant ‘us and them’ mentality. It destroys hope and maintains a sense of isolation, the very things that extremists use to maintain their position. We facilitate their hiding in plain sight if we assume that the extremists and the people they claim to represent are one and the same, indivisible."

Yorke makes it clear that he understands the helplessness that many feel when watching the news coverage of today's world. "I sympathize completely with the desire to ‘do something’ when we are witnessing such horrific suffering on our devices every day. It completely makes sense. But I now think it is a dangerous illusion to believe reposting, or one or two line messages are meaningful, especially if it is to condemn your fellow human beings. There are unintended consequences."

But he warns that keyboard justice warriors dehumanize one another. "It is shouting from the darkness. It is not looking people in the eye when you speak. It is making dangerous assumptions. It is not debate and it is not critical thinking."

He later ends with an acknowledgement that he won't be able to please everyone. "I am sure that, to this point, what I have written here will in no way satisfy those who choose to target myself or those I work with, they will spend time picking holes and looking for reasons to continue, we are an opportunity not to be missed, no doubt, and by either side.

I have written this in the simple hope that I can join with the many millions of others praying for this suffering, isolation and death to stop, praying that we can collectively regain our humanity and dignity and our ability to reach understanding… that one day soon this darkness will have passed."

On the subreddit r/Radiohead, there are already thousands of comments. One person asks, "This parasocial obsession with making celebrities take sides on political issues is so weird. Why aren't they allowed to have privacy for their own beliefs?"

Another answers, "Because some people want the celebrities to tell them what to think. Not having a definitive answer is a discomfort too hard to bear for them. They feel entitled to have the answer now because their identity is entwined with the celebrities. They don't want to feel the disappointment that these celebrities are just humans who don't think exactly like they do."

This Redditor discusses how complicated the history of the world is, and questions why Thom Yorke (and other celebrities) seem forced into commenting about events of which they are not experts: "The reality is this is a hundred-year-long conflict with a deep and complicated history.

There's no simple black-and-white answer of "Palestine good, Israel bad." Obviously Israel should not indiscriminately kill civilians, but they also cannot allow Hamas to terrorize their population.

I still have no clue what people hoped to accomplish by making Thom say something about it. He's neither an expert nor an especially influential person in this sphere. Other than making you feel good that your favorite musician agrees with your political stance... what does this accomplish?"

In a more hopeful message, this commenter says: "His music says a lot but the direct words in this message are also beautiful, thoughtful, and reinforcing. Thank you Thom. Much respect."



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Debunking doesn't stop misinformation online. But researchers found 'pre-bunking' can.

This approach is more effective than fact-checking.

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Some helpful information to fight misinformation.

The rise of misinformation on social media has been a monumental stress test for the world’s critical thinking skills. Misinformation has had a huge influence on elections, public health and the treatment of immigrants and refugees across the world. Social media platforms have tried to combat false claims over the years by employing fact-checkers, but they haven’t been terribly effective because those who are most susceptible to misinformation don’t trust fact-checkers.

“The word fact-checking itself has become politicized,” Cambridge University professor Jon Roozenbeek said, according to the Associated Press. Further, studies show that when people have incorrect beliefs challenged by facts, it makes them cling to their false assumptions even harder. These platforms have also attempted to remove posts containing misinformation that violates their terms of service, but this form of content moderation is often seen as insufficient and is often applied inconsistently.

misinformation, conspiracy theories, tin foil hat, fake news, debunking false informationConspiracy theorists are associated with tin foil hats.via Mattias Berg/Flickr

How do we combat dangerous misinformation online if removing false claims or debunking them hasn’t been effective enough? A 2022 study published in the journal Science Advances by a team of university researchers and Jigsaw, a division of Google, found a relatively simple solution to the problem they call “pre-bunking.”

Pre-bunking is an easy way of inoculating people against misinformation by teaching them some basic critical thinking skills. The strategy is based on inoculation theory, a communication theory that suggests one can build resistance to persuasion by exposing people to arguments against their beliefs beforehand.

The researchers learned that pre-bunking was effective after conducting a study on nearly 30,000 participants on YouTube.

“Across seven high-powered preregistered studies including a field experiment on YouTube, with a total of nearly 30,000 participants, we find that watching short inoculation videos improves people’s ability to identify manipulation techniques commonly used in online misinformation, both in a laboratory setting and in a real-world environment where exposure to misinformation is common,” the recently published findings note.

The researchers uploaded videos into YouTube ad slots that discussed different types of manipulative communication used to spread false information such as ad hominem attacks, false dichotomies, scapegoating and incoherence.

Here’s an example of a video about false dichotomies.

- YouTubeyoutu.be

Researchers found that after people watched the short videos, they were significantly better at distinguishing false information than they were before. The study was so successful that Jigsaw is looking to create a video about scapegoating and running it in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. These countries are all combating a significant amount of false information about Ukrainian refugees.

Many people talk about "critical thinking," but a lot of people don't really understand what the term means. Learning about the tropes and techniques used to spread misinformation is a vital part of developing critical thinking skills. It's not just about thinking for yourself and determining what's true based on what your brain tells you; it's about recognizing when messaging is being used to manipulate your brain to tell you certain things. It's learning about logical fallacies and how they work. It's acknowledging that we all have biases that can be preyed upon and learning how propaganda techniques are designed to do just that.

There’s an old saying, “If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach that man to fish and he’ll eat forever.” Pre-bunking does something very similar. We can either play a game of whack-a-mole where social media platforms have to suss out misinformation on a minute-by-minute basis or we can improve the general public’s ability to distinguish misinformation and avoid it themselves.

Further, teaching people to make their own correct decisions about misinformation will be a lot more effective than pulling down content and employing fact-checks. These tactics only drive vulnerable, incredulous people toward misinformation.

This article originally appeared three years ago.

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A former QAnon believer answers all your questions about how the cult really works

How they lure people in and how he got himself out.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

Several years ago, you wouldn't have known what QAnon was unless you spent a lot of time reading through comments on Twitter or frequented internet chat rooms. Now, with prominent Q adherents making headlines for storming the U.S. Capitol and elements of the QAnon worldview spilling into mainstream politics, the conspiracy theory/doomsday cult has become a household topic of conversation.

Many of us have watched helplessly as friends and family members fall down the rabbit hole, spewing strange ideas about Democrats and celebrities being pedophiles who torture children while Donald Trump leads a behind-the-scenes roundup of these evil Deep State actors. Perfectly intelligent people can be susceptible to conspiracy theories, no matter how insane, which makes it all the more frustrating.

A person who was a true believer in QAnon mythology (which you can read more about here) recently participated in an "Ask Me Anything" thread on Reddit, and what they shared about their experiences was eye-opening. The writer's Reddit handle is "diceblue," but for simplicity's sake we'll call them "DB."

A group of people belonging to a Qanon splinter group stand in a lineQanon splinter group | Marc Nozell | Flickr www.flickr.com

DB explained that they weren't new to conspiracy theories when QAnon came on the scene. "I had been DEEP into conspiracy for about 8 years," they wrote. "Had very recently been down the ufo paranormal rabbit hole so when Q really took off midterm for trump I 'did my research' and fell right into it."

DB says they were a true believer until a couple of years ago when they had an experience that snapped them out of it:

"It was a couple of posts made by Q on the chans that seemed highly suspicious because of how ignorant they were of technology. Q posts often had weird syntax as a kind of code

    • Kind Of [writing like this] as if there was [a secret] in using brackets To Tell The Truth.

One morning Q claimed to have shut down 7 FBI super computers (named after the seven dwarves no less) via satellite hacking and all the rabid fans ate it up, claiming that "their internet was running a little bit faster)

FBI Super Computer ::SLEEPY::[[OFFLINE]]

alarm bells went off in my head because, come on, that's not how any of this works. Using elementary school syntax form To SpeLl a [[Secret Code ]] felt fishy, and claiming your email in rural Montana loaded faster because seven super computers got shut down by remote hacking was a bridge too far for me. I realized that most of the Q believers I had seen were Boomers with no idea how technology works or people my age with no idea how computers operate. That day, I Googled Q Anon Debunked and got out."


Episode 1 Mind Blown GIF by The OfficeGiphy

If simply Googling "QAnon Debunked" were enough to get QAnoners to deprogram themselves, why don't more of them do it? That's the tricky part. DB explains several elements to Q belief that keeps people in it. A big part of what primed DB to accept conspiracy thinking was a fundamentalist Christian upbringing.

"Theories about evil evolution, science denial and The End of The world rapture return of Christ stuff is all pretty crazy too," wrote DB, who moved to a more progressive version of Christianity after leaving QAnon behind. "There's a strong link between the two."

There's also some "perverse comfort" in conspiracy theories like QAnon, DB wrote, "because of the false sense of order and purpose it brings to the world. Either the world is a boardgame chess match between Good and Evil forces working behind the scenes, and you might be a pawn but at least you are on The Right Side or you admit that the world is a mess, nobody is in charge, there is no grand battle of good and evil behind the scenes and your life has less purpose and order than you hoped."

They also said overconfidence and arrogance play a big role in people staying in the QAnon world, as well as the belief that you are the one engaging in critical thinking while everyone else is a mindless sheep.

"At this point the problem isn't Q, it's gullible people who lack critical thinking skills and gain a massive ego boost in thinking they have secret in that the sheeple don't know," DB wrote.

"Worth noting, conspiracy thinking hooks the brain because it feels like critical thinking. Even though it isn't."

That piece right there really is key.

Turn The Page GIF by U.S. National ArchivesGiphy

As another user explained, the "do your own research" concept works to reinforce conspiracy theories while making people think they're coming to conclusions on their own, thanks to the way search engines and social media algorithms work:

"The idea behind the 'research' is that you are more likely to believe a source if YOU stumble upon it yourself vs if I tell you -go watch this video.

So if I tell you Hillary is a lizard person, watch this video ... It's easy to watch and dismiss me as a crazy that saw a dumb video. BUT ... if I tell you Hillary is a lizard person, but don't take my word for it - google it yourself.... and you come across hundreds of videos and articles about Hillary being a lizard person - that makes it all the more believable. Especially since there's so many articles saying Hillary is NOT a lizard person. If it wasn't true, why would people be making videos and articles 'debunking' it?

And the debunk articles are appearing higher in searches than the articles saying she is. Why is that? Is big tech in on it to ....and you see where this is going.

So their 'research' is just a way of manipulating people."

DB shared that it was hard to admit that they'd been played by a baseless conspiracy theory. "It's NOT easy realizing you've been conned, been a rube, been taken in," they wrote. "It was massively humbling to realize I'd been a sucker."

However, they are also surprised to see how much "crazier" QAnon has gotten, as when they left a couple of years ago they were "certain it would all be over soon." They weren't a "storm the Capitol" kind of believer, but rather a "snicker quietly to myself in my bedroom because those sheeple don't know the truth" type.

DB explained that they keep themselves away from the edge of the rabbit hole now by embracing doubt and different ideas and have added "some fucking worldview humility" to their life.

"The problem with fundamentalist religions, cults, and conspiracy theories is they all demonize doubt and are all so absolutely certain that they have the total truth of reality figured out. I hold my beliefs much more humbly now, I acknowledge that I could be wrong," they wrote.

"I read more widely and expose myself to the ideas of others, so that I don't end up in an echo chamber."

As for how to help others get out? DB said that arguing with a QAnon adherent, especially online, is a waste of time—and their simple explanation for why makes perfect sense:

"I don't think they can be reasoned out of beliefs they were not reasoned into."

There's no way to rationalize with irrational beliefs, unfortunately. DB suggests if you have loved ones who've fallen down the rabbit hole that you maybe try asking them questions using Street Epistemology techniques (which you can read about here), avoid confronting and trying to reason with them (because it's simply not effective), and continue loving them (while setting boundaries about what you're willing to listen to) so they have a stable place to land if and when they are able to extricate themselves.

You can read the entire Reddit thread of Q and A here.

As frustrating as it is to see people we know fall for kooky conspiracy theories, seeing that it's possible for someone to get out offers a ray of hope that they aren't necessarily gone for good.


This article originally appeared four years ago.

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