Finding 4
Some young people with SEND may be more vulnerable to conspiracy theories – but more research is needed.
Summary:
Our preliminary research indicated that young people with SEND (specifically those with autism) may be particularly vulnerable to conspiracy belief, misinformation and disinformation.
In many cases, staff working in special schools are already expected to have a more active role across many areas of a young person’s life, and additional intervention to tackle conspiracy belief, misinformation and disinformation may therefore be easier to embed.
More research is required into the specific vulnerabilities to conspiracies of young people with SEND.
The Commission acknowledges the need to understand how this issue impacts vulnerable young people, including those with SEND. While this was not the focus of the Commission, some preliminary qualitative findings suggest that SEND pupils are possibly more vulnerable to conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation; but more work needs to be done in this space.
The school staff we engaged with who worked with young people with SEND (predominantly autism and ADHD) were concerned about how conspiracy beliefs, misinformation and disinformation may influence these vulnerable groups, as well as children with other additional needs. There were also clear worries about how to strike the balance between educating young people with SEND without scaring them. This seemed to manifest in many reactive responses to particular incidents, but less clarity around engaging proactively with these issues.
It’s hard to explain the risk to them…I thought ‘I don’t want to terrify them, but I have to tell them about some of the risks!’
Teacher, SEND School Focus Group
Staff raised numerous examples of conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation that they had encountered from pupils in school. They were concerned at the lack of criticality pupils displayed towards this information.
“During the election last year, they were just saying things they’d seen online, and some of my pupils are of voting age, and I thought ‘they could go and vote based on this misinformation!’“
“The race riots… there was very strong opinions. And we had to address that, both sides, and we asked them where they got their information from – social media.”
Staff suggested that their pupils were particularly vulnerable because of the ways their additional needs manifest. For some pupils, staff told us about their concerns regarding young people’s ability to discern reality from fiction, and that rendered young people vulnerable to having conversations online with people impersonating fictional characters.
‘‘They can’t differentiate between real and not real, and they’re having conversations with people who are pretending to be fictional characters.”
“It’s so hard for them to distinguish between real and not real.”
In particular, the ‘special interests’ held by some young people with autism were raised by multiple participants as presenting a very real issue in the context of online misinformation, given the internet’s relatively endless supply of information on any given topic. Apparently harmless interests such as ‘flags’ could quickly lead down ‘rabbit holes’ online:
The special interests they have can lead them down rabbit holes online. Some who are really into flags can then get into the wars of that country, and spend hours and hours on that.
Teacher, SEND School Focus Group
Staff thought the fact that many of their pupils were relatively restricted and lacked independence in their physical day-to-day lives made them more vulnerable online. The two drivers of this were a lack of understanding of how to navigate the online world safely, and viewing the online world as an escape:
“It’s about exposure to the real world. They don’t have any lived experience, their lives are school and home. They’re not savvy. They haven’t had the experiences that neurotypical students would learn from. They’re in a bubble.”
“The internet is a perfect place to live out that fantasy… [of] the freedoms that neurotypical children have.”
There was an acknowledgement that staff in SEND schools are generally expected to be more involved across a range of areas in young people’s lives. As such, there was a real openness and desire for intervention at the school level, but a sense that this needed backing up with additional training for staff, and more support both from and for parents.
“If I’m teaching it, and it’s not bookended at home, or vice versa…it needs to be coming from all sides.”
“For special schools, the boundary of what is education and what is not is blurred. We’re expected to do a lot more. Parents rely on us an awful lot to do an awful lot more.”
“It’s training. Really. We’re good with our curriculum, but there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know, and they’re [young people] always one step ahead of you. There was a platform we hadn’t even heard of… Discord!”
This is undoubtedly an area where further research is needed. This additional research should include a greater breadth of young people with different SEND needs and those in different settings, including both mainstream and specialist SEND settings.