GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a political outsider who has taken many by surprise with his ability to generate viral moments, likes to cite a particular statistic about Gen Z in his speeches.

“Sixty percent of Gen Z say they’d rather lose their right to vote than give up TikTok,” he says.

But is it really true that that many young people would give up the right to vote … to keep the right to post?

How we fact-checked it

To fact-check Ramaswamy’s claim, I did a keyword search for the exact words he used in a speech he gave to the Faith & Freedom Coalition. He posted an excerpt on X in June. This might tell us where he got this information.

Specifically, I searched “Vivek Ramaswamy,” and the exact phrase, “Gen Z says they would sooner give up their right to vote than their access to Tiktok.”

Here’s a search-like-a-pro tip: By putting quotation marks around a phrase, you are telling the search engine to only bring back results with those words in that particular order.

I found this article from Fox News from May 2023. It says Ramaswamy cites this statistic to support his plan to raise the voting age from 18 to 25 for most young adults.

The news story links directly to a study by the Reboot Foundation, which describes itself as a Paris-based nonprofit seeking to “elevate critical thinking.”

But how do we know this research group is a reliable source? Let’s ask the first important question when fact-checking the internet: Who’s behind the information?

I searched “The Reboot Foundation” and it brought up a lot of results — mostly about skin care — so I used a few more tips to narrow my search.

I added the keyword “research” but found a lot of sources directly from the organization. Remember, one of the keys to lateral reading is getting away from the site you’re checking out.

So, I did some advanced keyword searching. I added a minus sign and “site:reboot-foundation.org” to throw out any links that come directly from their website. The minus sign removes any results from the search term that immediately follows it, and the site-colon specifies the domain you want to limit.

Finally, for good measure, I clicked on the “news filter” so that I would only see news articles.

I found several articles from credible news organizations that used Reboot as a source, including one from The New York Times and one from The Guardian. The Tampa Bay Times even ran a column from Reboot’s founder. The fact that multiple reliable sources have quoted Reboot lends it credibility.

Reboot also says it did the study in partnership with YouGov, a research group in the United Kingdom that “has a strong history of accurately predicting actual outcomes,” according to this Reuters Institute article.

Now that we’ve established Reboot’s credibility, let’s get back to the claim from Ramaswamy that 60% of Gen Z said they’d give up the right to vote rather than lose TikTok.

Here’s another tip to search like a pro: If you’re looking for a document, like a study or paper, add filetype:pdf to your search. That will find any PDF with the keywords you use, and PDFs are the format of most primary research. That tip works for any type of file, including Powerpoint, Excel and Word documents.

I found the exact Reboot study, and according to it, 61% of TikTok users ages 13-24 did say they would give up their right to vote for one year rather than lose access to TikTok for one year.

However, that is not exactly what Ramaswamy said. He said Gen Z would rather give up their right to vote — but not all of Gen Z uses TikTok and this study only focused on TikTok users. It’s always good to remember that statistics can be misleading if they lack the right context.

Rating

We rate Ramaswamy’s comments as Needs Context. His comments were based on a study from a recognizable organization, but his quote distorts the results.

To recap: We used five search-like-a-pro tips to come to this conclusion. But there are plenty more ways to make your search terms work harder for you:

• Using AND in all capital letters means both terms must be present in the results — so you might search “Ramaswamy AND voting age” to get results about any time that the candidate talked about voting age.
• Using OR in all capital letters tells the search engine that one or the other term needs to be present. This one is pretty much the opposite of the AND trick. For example, if you searched “Ramaswamy OR voting age” you would get results about Vivek Ramaswamy or results about voting age, but not necessarily both.
• And you know that squiggly symbol, called a tilde? You can put it before a word in a search engine, and it will look not only for that word but synonyms of that word. So you might search “Election ~false information” and this would search for synonyms of the word false, like untrue or incorrect.