And in 2018, a Pew Research study found that only 26% of Americans could reliably distinguish fact from opinion in written text. Among 15-year-olds globally, that number drops to just 14%.

How is this even possible?

gestures broadly at the last decade

The U.S. paints a similarly bleak picture. Roughly 45 million Americans read below a fifth-grade level.

I assume that they actually mean adult Americans, as a considerable number of Americans haven't gotten to fifth grade yet.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2026/

About 40 million.

I would guess that immigration is gonna be the major variable in US literacy levels, since you're going to have a significant chunk of people learning English as a second language.

searches

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

U.S.-born adults make up two-thirds of adults with low levels of English literacy skills in the United States. However, the non-U.S. born are over-represented among such low-skilled adults. Non-U.S.-born adults comprise 34 percent of the population with low literacy skills, compared to 15 percent of the total population (figure 2).

White and Hispanic adults make up the largest percentage of U.S. adults with low levels of English literacy, 35 percent and 34 percent respectively (figure 3).

Yeah.