Scientists show how ‘doing your own research’ leads to believing conspiracies — This effect arises because of the quality of information churned out by Google’s search engine::Researchers found that people searching misinformation online risk falling into “data voids” that increase belief in conspiracies.
I cannot find the study at the moment, but a few years ago a media literacy test was done to a statistically useful amount of Americans as a scientific study.
If you count ‘being able to read multiple news articles from multiple different sources, be able to recognize the history and motivations of the outlet and author, be able to notice differences in vocabulary and phrasing and also be able to notice what is left out of some articles, and what is left out of all articles’ as totally literate…
Then only either 8 or 3 percent of the adult American population is totally literate.
(There were two threshold levels at the top and i cannot remember if the 8 or the 3 percent applied to the description i just gave.)
Further, something approximately /half/ of all adult Americans perform at what is functionally a 7th or 8th grade level of literacy, or worse.