6 Ways to Make the Most of Online Information for Teens

Your challenge: help your teen understand that digital content can be useful or easy-to-locate as well as misleading or unreliable. This may be tricky if your teen has the best technical skills of anyone in your household. Still, you don't need to be a computer genius to help your teen "navigate messiness," as the Center for Children and Technology puts it.

Eventually your teen will see there is no single authority for information; to make sense of a topic, he must sift through many sources. It's not enough to quote a source or to declare, "I read it online so it must be true" or “I saw this same information posted by dozens of people within a social network.” To form independent opinions, he must wrestle with ideas — and where these ideas come from.

http://www.pbs.org/parents/childrenandmedia/computers-teens.html