Informed by existing literature, in addition to lessons learned from ongoing research work pertaining to online information seeking, in this contribution, we discuss our view of how information pollution afects a critical yet understudied user group: children. We first highlight the need to take into account the unique characteristics of children's search context, which can be defined in terms of various factors, from children's age, abilities, skills, and cognitive development to the fuzzy line separating learning and fun. We then describe the importance of good design in assisting children in the diferent roles they play as searchers so that they can recognize and distinguish harmful and helpful content. Lastly, we discuss guidelines for efectively engaging teachers, parents, and children in the design, introduction, and use of search tools to support young users not only in accessing the information available online but also taking advantage of and learning safely from it. The focus on children not only helps us move forward to help a target group but, more importantly, it is a great starting point for further investigating a broad range of information pollution issues.
The internet has become an essential part of modern life, providing users of all ages with
various digital resources [
In this article, we spotlight a latent issue: children’s right to information access [
Although the research community has shown increasing interest in misinformation and
disinformation2 [11, 12, 13, 14], which can harm information access in web search and social
media platforms, the impact on children remains relatively unexplored. Misinformation and
disinformation fall under the definition of information pollution by Meel and Vishwakarma
[15]: “how the contents on the web are being contaminated intentionally or sometimes
unintentionally". Specifically, the authors stress that false information negatively afects society at
large, and may take the form of fake reviews, fake news, satire, or hoaxes [15]. In our work, we
argue that there are other factors that can negatively afect children [ 16] and therefore can and
should actively be regarded as pollution [17], such as resources that are not easy to comprehend
[
There is no denying that the use of search engines can be a valuable aid for children [21]. It is fundamental, however, for children to become self-suficient to independently tackle information pollution in its many forms. For this, they need to have adequate guidance to allow them to explore resources retrieved by the search engines they favour [22], rather than dedicated apps or specialised sites. Teachers and caregivers should be made aware of the potential perils of resources readily accessible via search engines and how to support children in reaching readable 2As defined in [ 10], misinformation encompasses false or misleading information with no adverse intention, whereas disinformation is “false information, spread deliberately" with the intention to mislead and/or deceive. (a) Children searching for the mor- (b) Children curious about how (c) Children seeking information phology of a country (Italy) long to wait before they can about the solar system enare faced with misleading out- go to the sea after a meal first counter ads as their top result. comes among the top-2 SERP see imprecise information, in a In this case, rather than imresults. They are both not use- bigger, i.e., more eye-catching, ages about the topic of their ful, the first because it misses font than the rest of SERP re- search, children are inadverthe original intent of the query sults. Among the remaining re- tently steered towards adverand it is hard to read; the sec- sults, they find a broad range tisements. ond is directed to researchers of responses as digestion deor expert readers. pends on many variables (e.g., the quantity of food ingested, the temperature of the water), which children might not take into account. and useful answers when they search within the universe of digital content [23]. In other words, the adults in their lives have to help children develop the competences they need to “actively learn and participate in the digitally rich society” [24].
Informed by Information Retrieval, Information Systems, and Human-Computer Interaction literature, as well as lessons learned emerging from our ongoing research work on children’s information access, in the rest of this article we examine information pollution and its impact on children’s web search from multiple perspectives. We acknowledge that as children develop, they might be afected by and respond to diferent perspectives of information pollution in a variety of manners. Consequently, we share the underpinnings of information pollution and its connection to children regularly using search engines, and leave an in-depth discussion centred on children at specific stages of development for future work.
In the end, ensuring a safe and positive online experience for children needs expert guidance. It is crucial for researchers and industry practitioners in the realm of information retrieval systems and other systems and platforms children use, like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, to consider the potential harms information pollution can inflict on children and take steps to protect them when developing and deploying these systems. By considering the well-being of children we can help ensure that the internet is a positive and enriching resource for all [25].
Children become part of the digital environment from an early age [
The findings from [ 29] reveal how children deem the protection of their privacy as an important feature when designing a search companion, someone to keep them safe when searching and protecting them from harmful material. Safety online seems to be a choice shared by children and adults and should therefore be accounted for when devising interventions to support children in their online search experience [23, 30]. Searching as learning and learning to search are essential digital competencies children need to acquire in order to fully develop into active citizens and members of society in the future. Naturally, adults and society at large tend to assume a protective behaviour, aiming at preserving children from being exposed to diferent forms of harmful information pollution. This is an understandable reaction, yet it could result in children growing into young adults who are completely unprepared to face the complexities and dangers caused by information pollution. A much more efective strategy would be to introduce children to the reality of searching online and showing them how to recognise helpful reputable sources as opposed to harmful or useless ones. Training children by ofering them the right support at the right time when they explore retrieved information is something the authors of [31, 32] advocate as well.
We turn to the Child Computer Interaction (CCI) community and their efort towards designing for user experience with and for children. In line with the “child as protagonist" principle [33], we find a growing literature reporting the active roles children can play in the diferent stages of collaborative design from informant to evaluator as well as an active member of inter-generational research teams [34].
We see emerging from literature in this area [35, 36, 37] that the core idea is that children are the experts when describing how and why their peers search for education and leisure and as such should be listened to and acknowledged in their contribution to the design efort. Good design is grounded on deep usage research to provide a deep understanding of users’ needs, habits, and expectations, in addition to enabling designers to extract user requirements to guide them all the way toward prototyping and evaluation. Children can greatly contribute by sharing their perceptions of how existing search technology works and so enabling researchers to make sense of their mental models in terms of expectations, barriers, and misconceptions to be dealt with by the new tools to be. The adults in the loop, including caregivers, teachers, and researchers, play a vital role in ensuring healthy and active children’s participation. Not only they will act as facilitators and motivators in keeping children engaged with the collaborative design activities they have devised, but with their guidance and example, they provide natural scafolding to enable children to safely explore the search space and avoid pollution while learning how to do so in the future independently.
When discussing information pollution in the context of web search we need to be precise about some concepts: relevant/irrelevant resources and genuine/polluted information. Traditionally, search systems tend to optimise retrieval and ranking strategies in terms of relevance, leaving it up to the adults seeking information to check the reliability of the retrieved resources, regardless of their position in the SERPs. Children, on the other hand, are known to trust (search) technology and are already challenged in discerning relevant vs. irrelevant resources [38, 39, 31]. This makes it even more dificult for them to recognise that they might encounter intended or unintended harmful information in the SERPs they browse, more so given their lack of experience in judging and consulting online material.
The guidance and support of the “more knowledgeable other” [40], whether that be a caregiver or a peer more well-versed on how to deal with information pollution, is crucial (§ 5). Still, we want children of all ages to become self-suficient; that is empowered to detect, deal with, and/or bypass information pollution regardless of the purpose of the search (i.e., leisure vs. learning). Looking into children’s natural sense of relevance we see that situational relevance and the motivational/afective “inherent characteristics of relevance behaviour” (in [ 41]) are those that better capture the way children assess the quality of retrieved results when performing a search task assigned by their teacher, who is providing extrinsic motivation for it. The motivational/afective dimension keeps the child intrinsically engaged with the search and involved with the selection of relevant results. In [42, 43], the authors explore how primary school children perceive relevance by having them engage with a drawing exercise to reveal the qualities they associate with good and bad search results. Children embraced the angel and evil dichotomy as a strong binary representation of good and bad information, with the angel hinting at trustworthy and safe information versus the evil standing for harmful material that should be avoided at all costs. Material featuring implicit or explicit bullying or violence could fall under this second category because it is not only inappropriate and unhelpful for young searchers, but it may also be harmful because it may encourage violent and antisocial behaviour. Equally fitting is the “Switched on and of bulb - Light or darkness” pair where one child made an explicit reference to “reliable and non-reliable” material, either shedding light or bringing confusion, a clear reference to information pollution and its confusing negative efects on children’s search experience. Dealing with information with the right reading level and age-appropriate is the suggestion made by another child who portrayed a single icon, "Arrow up", to be used to discriminate between results suitable for children, and those for adults, and thus keep them visually separated.
The presence of emotions also seems to afect the way children search. Landoni et al. [ 27] report how emotions in titles and snippets triggered a satisfying search experience and so enabled children to discover more relevant material. Due to the possible correlation between emotional intelligence and fake news detection as “individuals who are better able to disregard the emotionally charged content of such items, better equipped to assess the veracity of the information” [44], it becomes imperative for search engines to account for an efective dimension of relevance as an attempt to mitigate information pollution.
It emerges from a recent study that trust plays an important role in children’s decision
of using an available recommendation for relevant resources retrieved in response to their
online inquiries [45], hinting about their concerns to discern reputable sources and who is
suggesting them. Walsh-Moorman and Hovick add that to identify credible resources, fourth
graders in the US leverage the concept of expertise, encompassing “education (e.g., advanced
degrees, experience, and knowledge” [46]. At the same time, the authors conclude that, in
practice, source authority of online resources is not something that young searchers deal with,
as it is impacted by their vocabulary skills, background knowledge, and life experiences. This
completes a picture of how relevance needs to be revisited to account for the avoidance of
information pollution together with the priority given to readable and reputable sources with
an emotional flavour [
Children turn to search engines for a wide range of online resources; they do so both for
leisure-related reasons, as well as for learning. In the classroom, children are often restricted to
access curated educational resources [9], which protects them–to a degree–from the harms of
information pollution. As Pilgrim [9] mentions, children should be equipped to access online
resources “in the wild”. Unfortunately, research studies conducted over the last few years evince
that it is hardly the case. For example, Loos et al. [47] report that when exposed to a particular
website about “The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus", only 7% of study participants (from the
Netherlands, aged 13), were able to identify this site as a hoax; this percentage is even lower
from the 11% of US study participants in the same age group. Similar findings resulted from
the study conducted by Pilgrim et al. [48] who showed that less than 20% of the more than 300
ifrst-to-fifth grades involved in a study were able to identify credible websites correctly, i.e.,
those not addressing fake news; most participants were “unable to verbalise ways to examine
credibility” [48]. The issue of source reliability analysis is the focus of the findings reported
in [46]. The authors noted fourth graders depend upon their reading skills to establish text
authority and resource credibility. This is a concern, given that online resources are rarely at a
level that young children can read and understand [
The aforementioned findings suggest that children require better guidance, as they develop and acquire more digital skills so that they can be better equipped to deal with information pollution. Researchers across various disciplines, not just computer science, agree that there is a need to design better digital and media literacy curricula across all school grades so that children can be prepared to best deal with information pollution and in turn mitigate related harms [49, 50, 51, 52, 53].
At the same time, Howard et al. [17] fittingly claim that “digital, media, and information literacy skills alone do not provide a foolproof solution” to counterpart information pollution. The authors suggest that the burden cannot be on children alone. Instead, it is key to turn to caregivers and teachers, who can maintain an open dialogue and “promote critical thinking among children” [17]. In [54], the authors propose the EMILIA guidelines for adopting search tools in the classroom that can be extended to all children’s caregivers. Mentoring and monitoring are two of the tasks indicated as fundamental to help children to conduct the search task and avoid information pollution. The mentoring, in particular, needs to be continuous: at the beginning, providing instructions about the search process, and as time goes on, teaching children how to address errors or interpret retrieved resources (and the risk of those that are not genuine) by reasoning together.
We cannot overlook, however, that caregivers and teachers also struggle with how to effectively utilise search engines [23, 55]. Furthermore, they have dificulty with dealing with information pollution–in general, adults are hardly better than young children and teenagers when it comes to either identifying fake news, estimating the credibility of information presented on SERP snippets, or dealing with information pollution [56, 57, 58, 59]. This is a concern; as teachers and caregivers are the ones meant to help children navigate today’s complex digital ecosystem.
Information pollution in web search and its mitigation is a non-trivial problem. With this work, we have aimed to add to the discussion about the various facets of information pollution; in particular, the impact of information pollution on children and web search–a task children undertake daily. We brought attention to the need of involving children as co-designers of technologies and curricula that can ultimately help them confront information pollution. Along the way, we invited the research community to revisit the concept of relevance to account for children’s view of this concept and how it contrasts with information pollution. We have also discussed the importance of guidance on this matter, particularly by the adults in children’s lives, who might themselves struggle with recognising and dealing with information pollution and therefore exacerbating this concern.
Children are a unique user group, one that could be considered ‘unbiased’ in how they judge and interact with search engines and more so, with how they see the world. Empowering them so that they can seek, critically examine, and in the end find information from the resources search engines retrieve, i.e., deal with information pollution and discern helpful vs. harmful resources to ease their path towards relevant information, which is a crucial skill for them to develop in order to thrive as digital citizens [60, 61]. Studying the problem of this user group unbiased by external factors, and meaningfully reacting to it, would enable researchers and practitioners to then extend solutions to aid other user groups. This will also contribute towards advancing research about harms associated with Web search [62].
We must recognise, however, that issues caused by information pollution are not restricted to search engines. There are plenty of other points of access to online information–from recommender systems to social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok– that are impacted by information pollution and that have a direct reach into children, particularly teenagers [63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68]. In a recent study focused on credible information access via TikTok on adult users, Cajas [69] reiterated the importance of advancing research work focused on younger children and teenagers on this topic as “it is unclear how they may have evaluated the information they were presented with. They may not know many facts about the world yet, they may not have developed their personalities and views, or simply may look at TikTok in a diferent light.” This evinces a need to continue to advance research and discourse in this area. Immediate next steps include algorithms to detect the broad ranges of information pollution and studies to capture how children, and other vulnerable user groups, perceive and react to (diferent aspects of) information pollution, interfaces tailored for young users that implicitly and explicitly can serve as conduits for interventions to help children improve how they engage with information pollution in the long term, in addition to curriculum bringing awareness to the perils and opportunities for children of all ages when engaging with information access systems [70, 71, 17, 49, 72, 73]. [9] J. Pilgrim, Are we preparing students for the web in the wild? An analysis of features of websites for children, The Journal of Literacy and Technology 20 (2019) 97–124. [10] K. Shu, A. Bhattacharjee, F. Alatawi, T. H. Nazer, K. Ding, M. Karami, H. Liu, Combating disinformation in a social media age, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 10 (2020) e1385. [11] C. Stöcker, How facebook and google accidentally created a perfect ecosystem for targeted disinformation, in: Disinformation in Open Online Media: First Multidisciplinary International Symposium, MISDOOM 2019, Hamburg, Germany, February 27–March 1, 2019, Revised Selected Papers 1, Springer, 2020, pp. 129–149. [12] H. Keshavarz, How credible is information on the web: Reflections on misinformation and disinformation, Infopreneurship Journal 1 (2014) 1–17. [13] E. Mustafaraj, P. T. Metaxas, The fake news spreading plague: was it preventable?, in:
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