That is according to a survey conducted by YouGov with support from Google that surveyed 8,585 people in the U.S., Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany, Nigeria, India and Japan.
The report found that younger people are more confident when it comes to parsing fact from fiction online and are far more concerned about older family members believing or sharing misinformation in cyberspace than they are.
Almost a third of Gen Z respondents said they felt moderately confident detecting online misinformation, compared to 29% of Millennials and 26% of Gen Xers. Those numbers fell to 23% and 19% respectively for Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation.
Despite that, people from the Gen Z and Millennial generations were twice as likely as Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation, born just after World War II, to say they unwittingly amplify false or misleading information online because they feel pressure to share an event quickly.
In the era of "alternative facts" and with former President Donald Trump still disputing his election loss, almost three quarters of people who responded to the survey said they still felt the most important factor in determining if something was true or not was whether a conclusion was supported by sources and facts.
Only 55% of people surveyed across the respondent countries said information coming from a government source was the most important factor they weighed when deciding if it was true or not.
That lines up with scholarly research showing that author credibility is a key factor in detecting fake news. But that's something of a double-edged sword, since it is increasingly easy to find sources online that twist facts to fit long-held beliefs and reinforce deeply held confirmation biases.
Google has taken notice of the finding and announced a series of changes to its "featured snippets," boxes at the top of a search result that highlight information in an article that the search engine thinks might be an answer to a query.
Google said its algorithm can already understand consensus by looking at high-quality sources across the web that agree on a certain fact and then presenting it in a search as the correct answer in a snippet.
But snippets aren't always the best answer to a question, especially when the best information isn't out there yet, or the whizzing zeroes and ones of the computerized brain don't quite understand what they're being asked.
In a blog post, Google said, "a recent search for 'when did snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln' provided a snippet highlighting an accurate date and information about Lincoln's assassination, but this clearly isn't the most helpful way to display this result."
To get around this, the company said it has pulled back on snippets popping up with those kinds of false premise search queries in the latest update to its search engine, reducing featured snippets in those situations by 40%.
Google said it is also expanding advisories that show up when the search engine can't find high-quality sources on an emerging topic and figure out a consensus on facts. Instead a notification might pop up before the search results telling the user that there aren't too many good sources for that search.
The company is also expanding the number of languages and depth of content available in its "About this result" feature, three dots next to the result that give users more of an idea of where a piece of information comes from.
Of course, those features will only help if people use Google's search engine to find or verify information, which not everyone does.
The survey found members of Gen Z are twice as likely as those from the Silent Generation to use a search engine to find out more about where a particular post came from, and twice as likely as Baby Boomers to use reverse image searches, or pull up multiple searches and tabs to double-check a piece of information.
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