  Assessing the trustworthiness of information online is complicated.
Literacy-based paradigms are both widely used to help and widely critiqued. We
conducted a study with 35 Gen Zers from across the U.S. to understand how they
assess information online. We found that they tended to encounter -- rather
than search for -- information, and that those encounters were shaped more by
social motivations than by truth-seeking queries. For them, information
processing is fundamentally a social practice. Gen Zers interpreted online
information together, as aspirational members of social groups. Our
participants sought information sensibility: a socially-informed awareness of
the value of information encountered online. We outline key challenges they
faced and practices they used to make sense of information. Our findings
suggest that like their information sensibility practices, solutions and
strategies to address misinformation should be embedded in social contexts
online.
