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People Older Than 65 Share the Most Fake News, Study Finds (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Older Americans are disproportionately more likely to share fake news on Facebook, according to a new analysis by researchers at New York and Princeton Universities. Older users shared more fake news than younger ones regardless of education, sex, race, income, or how many links they shared. In fact, age predicted their behavior better than any other characteristic -- including party affiliation. Today's study, published in Science Advances, examined user behavior in the months before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In early 2016, the academics started working with research firm YouGov to assemble a panel of 3,500 people, which included both Facebook users and non-users. On November 16th, just after the election, they asked Facebook users on the panel to install an application that allowed them to share data including public profile fields, religious and political views, posts to their own timelines, and the pages that they followed. Users could opt in or out of sharing individual categories of data, and researchers did not have access to the News Feeds or data about their friends.
About 49 percent of study participants who used Facebook agreed to share their profile data. Researchers then checked links posted to their timelines against a list of web domains that have historically shared fake news, as compiled by BuzzFeed reporter Craig Silverman. Later, they checked the links against four other lists of fake news stories and domains to see whether the results would be consistent. Across all age categories, sharing fake news was a relatively rare category. Only 8.5 percent of users in the study shared at least one link from a fake news site. Users who identified as conservative were more likely than users who identified as liberal to share fake news: 18 percent of Republicans shared links to fake news sites, compared to less than 4 percent of Democrats. The researchers attributed this finding largely to studies showing that in 2016, fake news overwhelmingly served to promote Trump's candidacy. But older users skewed the findings: 11 percent of users older than 65 shared a hoax, while just 3 percent of users 18 to 29 did. Facebook users ages 65 and older shared more than twice as many fake news articles than the next-oldest age group of 45 to 65, and nearly seven times as many fake news articles as the youngest age group (18 to 29). As for why, researchers believe older people lack the digital literacy skills of their younger counterparts. They also say that people experience cognitive decline as they age, making them likelier to fall for hoaxes.
About 49 percent of study participants who used Facebook agreed to share their profile data. Researchers then checked links posted to their timelines against a list of web domains that have historically shared fake news, as compiled by BuzzFeed reporter Craig Silverman. Later, they checked the links against four other lists of fake news stories and domains to see whether the results would be consistent. Across all age categories, sharing fake news was a relatively rare category. Only 8.5 percent of users in the study shared at least one link from a fake news site. Users who identified as conservative were more likely than users who identified as liberal to share fake news: 18 percent of Republicans shared links to fake news sites, compared to less than 4 percent of Democrats. The researchers attributed this finding largely to studies showing that in 2016, fake news overwhelmingly served to promote Trump's candidacy. But older users skewed the findings: 11 percent of users older than 65 shared a hoax, while just 3 percent of users 18 to 29 did. Facebook users ages 65 and older shared more than twice as many fake news articles than the next-oldest age group of 45 to 65, and nearly seven times as many fake news articles as the youngest age group (18 to 29). As for why, researchers believe older people lack the digital literacy skills of their younger counterparts. They also say that people experience cognitive decline as they age, making them likelier to fall for hoaxes.
This is an easy one to solve.
Dear Facebook,
Cut down on fake news. Turn off sharing for the elderly.
Your citizen,
Anonymous Coward (Not older than 65)
Print and later TV used to be the gatekeepers of information. What made it into mass media tended to be true. Now there are no gatekeepers, for better and for worse.
I know one old man who's been sharing a lot.
That seems to correlate with the age of the Fox News audience.
All the young people need to start trolling old people on Facebook until they either quit Facebook or have a heart attack. Problem solved! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Are they? Re-reading...
when they see it online and recall the truth.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Do older people just share more news? Do they share a larger percentage of fake news? Also as you get older you see so many real cases of your government killing a half a million here (Syria) or 4.5 million (Vietnam) that you get to the point that you can believe almost anything. Yes Hillary is a progressive excetera.
"What, do you think people would do that, just get on the Internet and tell lies?"
Humpty Trumpty is WELL OVER 65.
Think about it, trumptards! You've been played by putin and sold on a total loser.
The big thing that TFA seems to miss is that I find that older people don't tend to understand that basically anybody can put together a professional looking website with articles that seem to be written by journalists. For most of their lives, they've only had three TV networks, major newspapers and other media outlets that have been invested in the copy and its presentation.
It's hard for them NOT to believe stories like "Hillary and Oprah had an affair in the 1970s" when they can find it on http://abcnews.go.corp/ - which is a an actual article I got forwarded from an elderly family member during the 2016 election and we had to explain to her that the URL wasn't actually ABC News even though it had the actual ABC logo which means the story wasn't true.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Just die already you stupid fucks with your antique headphone jacks.
I can see both the inexperience of youth and the calcification of the opinions of the elderly.
I know very well what the first is like, and sadly can see myself headed straight for the second. There is much wisdom there, but it really does depend on what kind of life you have had. Opinions that took a lifetime to form, very rarely change by themselves. Old people do what they do and so do the young. The troubling thing is that most are addicted to the social network, not that sometimes bad ideas proliferate on it.
-
Die young! Stay pretty!
I think digital skills are a factor, but I think a bigger factor might be cultural alienation.
Realistically western culture is dominated by white males between 25 and 55, diversity is rising... but that demographic still rules.
Nevertheless this group is becoming a lot more progressive than previous generations of white males, the 65+ group of white males, and that previous group is becoming alienated from modern culture and acting accordingly.
And how do you explain being out of step with modern culture and morality? Well you justify it with a different set of facts, ie, fake news! The fake news isn't there to trick people, it's there to give them an excuse to trick themselves!!
I stole this Sig
Or alternatively, perhaps *this* article is the fake news. I'm not going to be a statistic and share it.
Fake news targets voters and retired people with income and time to be conned out of it. Those all tend to be over-65. 45 year olds are too busy and stressed to read any news (fake or not), and 25 year olds are too poor to be worth targeting.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
https://www.vox.com/2018/5/30/17380096/fox-news-alternate-reality-charts
The stories Fox News covers obsessively — and those it ignores — in charts
Compare Fox News’s alternate reality to other cable news coverage.
Go on, don't be a pussy Republican, take a gander at how the sausage (your lazy mind) is made.
The other alternative is that they truly do not care about job security.
"No need for a communist like yourself to be wanting and wishing for state ran media." - are you ironically ignoring the fact that Fox News is essentially Trump's campaign management and advisory board in one?
Literally. https://www.thedailybeast.com/sean-hannity-in-trouble-with-fox-after-participating-in-trump-ad
In other news, water is wet.
Of 3500 initial respondents in wave 1, 1331 (38%) agreed to share Facebook profile data with us
So they surveyed 3500 respondents. Then asked them to share their facebook profile to collect data on links and news they shared. Of which only 38% agreed.
And guess what? Most of the 38% who agreed were OLD PEOPLE because they're more than happy to share at the drop of a request. And that's how your numbers are formed.
This is as scientific as throwing chicken bones to predict the future...
There was the WWII propaganda, but you could excuse that with the war. The lost a bit of control with Vietnam, but look at the coverage of the Iraq war. I'm too out of it to go dig up more/better examples, but go find Norm Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent for a comprehensive look at it.
Our media has served corporate masters for decades, probably centuries.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Age related cognitive decline is a thing and we're all susceptible to it. It worries me that there might come a day when I morph into a Trump supporter out of fear and confusion. e.g. there'll come a time when I can't tell a crook from an honest man because my critical thinking facilities are toast.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Any news article that decries "fake news" is itself fake news.
They are on their way to fake heaven
If you smart-mouth like this in the real world, you might just get yourself an all-expense paid free one way trip to that fake heaven yourself,
you stupid little faggot twerp.
"Researchers then checked links posted to their timelines against a list of web domains that have historically shared fake news, as compiled by BuzzFeed reporter Craig Silverman."
Sooooo, BuzzFeed reporter Craig Silverman is the arbiter of what is fake news and what is not. BuzzFeed. Really! Head slap here....
"..older people lack the digital literacy skills of their younger counterparts. They also say that people experience cognitive decline as they age, making them likelier to fall for hoaxes."
What are digital literacy skills? Being able to tweet? Proper use of OMG? Ability to "like" on Facebook?
Cognitive decline as they age....so at 65 people are stupid? Let's see....Hillary is how old? Pelosi? Schumer? CEO of many of the largest real industry companies.
WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP.
https://gawker.com/5814150/roger-ailes-secret-nixon-era-blueprint-for-fox-news
https://theweek.com/articles/483558/did-fox-news-originate-nixon-white-house
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/02/john-dean-nixon-might-have-survived-if-thered-been-a-fox-news-216207
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-244652/
https://www.vox.com/2017/5/19/15660888/roger-ailes-america-trump-television-fox-news
Oh yeah? You might want to take your dentures out before you throw down, grandpa
They are getting senile and their memories disagree with the true reality as witnessed by google and reddit The solution is to outlaw sources of information that reinforce their own incorrect memories. BAN INFOWARS.COM.
This could be fake news ...
This study is fake news in that the list of "real news"cited is almost entirely opinion pieces from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post.
Story Publication
Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one? Washington Post
Stop Pretending You Don't Know Why People Hate Hillary Clinton Huffington Post
Melania Trump’s girl-on-girl photos from racy shoot revealed New York Post
I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton. New York times
Ford fact checks Trump: We will be here forever CNN
‘Pantsuit Power’ flashmob video for Hillary Clinton: Two women, 170 dancers and no police Washington Post
The Press Buries Hillary Clinton’s Sins Wall Street Journal
More Than 160 Republican Leaders Don’t Support Donald Trump. Here’s When They Reached Their Breaking Point New York Times
New Kasich ad: If Trump becomes president, ‘you better hope there’s someone left to help you’ Washington Post
The real Clinton email scandal is that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign Vox
He fought in World War II. He died in 2014. And he just registered to vote in Va Washington Post
Donald Trump Is Going To Be Elected Huffington Post
Why Donald Trump Should Not Be President New York times
Hillary Clinton for President New York times
Max Lucado: My prediction for November 9 FOX News
Donald and Billy on the Bus New York times
Trump campaign manager: There'd be no rape if women were stronger New Yor Daily News
A Week of Whoppers From Donald Trump New York Times
Donald Trump Voters, Just Hear Me Out New York Times
FBI Completes Review of Newly Revealed Hillary Clinton Emails, Finds No Evidence of Criminality NBC News
Ooo-OOoh, watch out! We got a tough meth dealer Republican leatherfag enforcer here now! You can tell he beats up his mom when she fact checks him on immigration or the Mueller investigation, lol. He'll crack when Trump hangs. :)
His neighbors have their security cams all pointed beeline for his double-wide, waiting for the inevitable tantrum meltdown that ends in police blowing the idiot away. Oh well, that's just Republicanism these days. Porch nutter shit.
"Republican INCEL can't read, fakes way through life praising traitors and avoiding women who scare him, news at 11."
In case anyone want to read the REAL article, it takes a bit of hunting to find:
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586/tab-pdf
Go to the end. Look at the fake news sites. What the hell are these? Many of them do not exist.
While the article has a lot of numbers and graphs, it sits on a flimsy foundation. Definition of fake news, where the data originates, etc. Pretty thin stuff.
What would be more interesting is to determine what characteristics these websites have that causes people of any age to click to them. If you read the actual article you'll find that that while there is a correlation dependent upon age, there are a lot of "young" folks clicking too.
There's another aspect of this that all the idiots here are failing to consider. My 80 year old father loves to share fake news stories with family and friends.
It's always part of a conversation about how low certain factions will stoop in an attempt to get their way. I don't think there's ever been one he thought might actually be true.
For those who think crap like this makes sense, it's worth keeping something in mind. When you look at what someone is doing and don't understand it, it could indeed be because they are stupid. However, it's at least as likely that you are.
Go on, find the fault. This is how fact checking works, find the fault. Gawker, vox and politico publish contributors from outside their ranks all the time. The point is you can't refute any, but you feel compelled to cry instead.
Why cry and mudsling and be a baby? Read and prove them wrong on the merits. You pretend you can, so let's see? Find something substantively wrong about each and I'll stop pointing out what a pussy you're being.
the elderly will also do whatever the post tells them to do.
it's a trust thing. because some older associate of them did the same. if it includes something like "a friend lawyer told me to copy paste this" to make some authority. but it's not a friend lawyer of the guy who copy pasted it, but the other elderly seeing that text will think it is, thus it has to be legit because here's this straight up guy they have known 30 years posting that his lawyer told him to share this.
and they will not google/research/apply critical thinking at all. just get outraged and copypaste the thing.
like a typical elderly share includes a "copy to your wall, do not use share".. so it's not the same original fake story, it's copypasted text of the original so it's not so easy for fb to mark them as fake news either with a link to the claimed source explaining how channel 13 never ran this story and how it's all a hoax.
like the "copy this to your wall or facebook will publish all your private data due to privacy change!" thing has been making rounds _again_ just this week.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
https://theweek.com/articles/483558/did-fox-news-originate-nixon-white-house
https://www.vox.com/2017/5/19/15660888/roger-ailes-america-trump-television-fox-news
https://gawker.com/5814150/roger-ailes-secret-nixon-era-blueprint-for-fox-news
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/02/john-dean-nixon-might-have-survived-if-thered-been-a-fox-news-216207
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-244652/
It's funny, the deliberate sheep-dipped morons at Fox are the MOST credible sources in the Conservative traitorsphere right now, not the least, the MOST credible of them all. Andrew Breitbart, RIP, died of shame.
They never had internet; all they had was mainly MSMs so they were fed a lot of fake news and crap. Even the more educated elderly are pretty ignorant; but I don't blame them since they had no other variable sources of information.
It's not obvious whether they've corrected for the fact that retirees naturally have more free time to waste sharing links on Facebook; and of course, sharing more links makes it more likely that at least one of them will be 'fake news'. As noted, some fake news sites can appear to be extremely convincing, masquerading as well-known publications but with a different URL or a slightly different name, and if you're not attentive it can be easy to be taken in - which can happen to just about anybody. I'm sure that for some seniors, cognitive decline enters into the picture, but I suspect that a lot of it may be just that they do more sharing period.
...oh wait.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/01/09/donald-trump-team-contact-russian-officials/2530829002/
"Trump's team had over 100 contacts with Russian-linked officials, report shows"
Updated 10:48 p.m. ET Jan. 9, 2019
They base fake news as any site buzz feed does not like. Yeah this is a terrible study and proves nothing other than older people donâ(TM)t agree with the views of leftist buzz feed.
At this point they've spent so long glued to the TV that they can't adjust to a medium where literally anybody can grab them by the eyeballs.
My mother was trying to tell me for years that I (coincidentally) NEEDED a TV license and that she was worried I would go to court for watching streaming services without it. I finally linked her to an article that explained otherwise and suddenly she was convinced! I'd been making the same points for literally years, but providing it to her in a visual medium was what convinced her.
They just have no filter for visual information.
I'm pretty sure that everyone already knew this.
The "researchers" simply don't know, since all they did was check for incidence of a list of "wed domains".
That alone isn't enough for conclusions like these:
Because they have zero controls on the study.
So this is fake science about fake news.
I am one of the so called baby boomers, in my case the class of '52 and I do not use faceplant for this very reason. I see others who have issues using it because they have little to no social interaction left in their lives and are being ignored and shut away by their children. If I did use facebook it would not be for any purpose other than personal interest, which in my case is classical music, classical guitar (which I play) and perhaps personal communications with those that I am related to.
So for me the "news" sharing aspect of facelook is of no interest whatsoever. However I do have a 90 plus year old mother in law who does worship THE ORANGE CHIMP and post links to Trump bullshit fake news garbage on her page all the time. She is not beyond calling HC "criminal Hilary" and all the other bullshit news that has polluted some of the aging faceplant crowd since the platform was subverted for political purposes years ago. I have come to the conclusion that facebook news addiction is the first step down the road to full blown dementia for some of us unfortunate seniors who rely upon it for social interaction instead of actually seeing and talking to others. The reason for this is obvious the algorithm of facebook is such that it can easily be used to spread propaganda based upon how and what people view and post. This is the problem the ai of the social platform is the issue, make it dumb so it cannot differentiate between individual preferences and facebook would be great. Then it would be a social platform that cannot be perverted by anyone with an agenda and would most likely have to charge users to exist in the first place. EAT MY SHIT ZUK you ain't gonna eat my brains for free you fucking moron!!! When I become demented I want to just sit there and drool on my keyboard or iPad or whatever.
"As for why, researchers believe older people lack the digital literacy skills of their younger counterparts."
I'm an old fart that age too and I was on the Internet before the worldwide web was invented.
We worked on DOS and with Windows 1.03 and unlike the young whippersnappers, we know that Microsoft Office is not the same thing as Microsoft Windows.
The TRUTH about how Jews have taken over our banking system, print money out of thin air, and then make us all work our asses off to pay back this fake money.
The TRUTH about how Jews run your government - never seen Congress giving Netenyahu endless standing ovations? Who are 'The Jewish Board of Deputies' in the U.K., and why do all the heads of the main three political parties bow down to them, in sickening fashion?
This is laughable - the internet means that anybody can find out how the world actually works, and it's got JEW written all over it. Sandy Hoax, 9/11, the Holohoax, all Jewish lies, designed to control their 'cattle'...
I'LL BE DELETING FACEBOOK! !! Hi I'm Mark Zuckerberg The Director of facebook. Hello everyone, it seems that all the warnings were real, facebook use will cost money If you send this string to 18 different from your list, your icon will be blue and it will be free for you. If you do not believe me tomorrow at 6 pm that facebook will be closed and to open it you will have to pay, this is all by law. This message is to inform all our users, that our servers have recently been very congested, so we are asking for your help to solve this problem. We require that our active users forward this message to each of the people in your contact list in order to confirm our active facebook users if you do not send this message to all your facebook contacts then your account will remain inactive with the consequence of Lose all your cont the transmission of this message. Your SmartPhone will be updated within the next 24 hours, will have a new design and a new color for the chat. Dear Facebook users, we are going to do an update for facebook from 23:00 p.m. until 05:00 a.m. on this day. If you do not send this to all your contacts the update will be canceled and you will not have the possibility to chat with your facebook messages Will go to pay rate unless you are a frequent user. If you have at least 10 contacts Send this sms and the logo will turn red to indicate that you are a user Confirmed ... We finish it for free Tomorrow they start to collect the messages for facebook at 0.37 cents Forward this message to more than 9 people of your contacts and it will be free of life for you to watch and it will turn green the ball of above do it and you will see.to 9 of you
Pause
-2:44
Unmute
Video Of The Internet added a new video: A WORLD WITHOUT FACEBOOK.
Mark Zuckerberg deletes Facebook???
Video Of The Internet
soylentnews.org
Can attest to this as I regularly get posts and emails from the older people on my feed about things like poisonous toilet spiders and the Olympic torch virus.
Nothing to see here, move along please.
Perhaps my circle is different, but most of use old fogies avoid Facebook and Twitter like the plague, precisely because it's unreliable. (Hence my moniker.) Perhaps the sample is biased by including only old duffers who fall for social media in the first place.
Oh wow. Looks like it hit a nerve because you come across as a boomer on a defensive rant. You'd likely be less indignant if you were to read the study and see if you disagree with the list of fake news that they chose. You would be able to identify the stories as obviously fake. They're conservative in labeling stories fake to minimize opinion/bias in exchange for not including other less-obvious fake news.
I'm thankful that most people I'm close to who are in the 65 and over age group don't post to Facebook; but the number and extremity of falsehoods in e-mails some of them forward is astounding. Right-leaning organizations are far better (or less morally inhibited) than left-leaning organizations when it comes to targeting elderly people with fearmongering falsehoods. I've seen some pretty out-there anti-Trump stuff too, but that mostly comes across as overly hopeful instead of being filled with blatant lies designed to inspire fear and distrust of large groups of people.
...and I remember when "fake news" was properly called "misinformation". Information that is false and or misleading. If it's "fake news", it's not news, it's just misinformation. The great dumbing down of society continues...
like the "copy this to your wall or facebook will publish all your private data due to privacy change!" thing has been making rounds _again_ just this week.
If you use Facebook at all, this is a significant risk anyway.
SCNR
C - the footgun of programming languages
In looking at the study, there are really only a handful of "news" sources that are the worst offenders of supplying fake news, making this a rather finite problem. Instead of targeting/making fun of the victims in a study, is there a reason they did not focus efforts on eradicating the fucking problem instead?
The solution for Facebook is rather simple, assuming they actually give a shit about the problem in the first place. Every news source who wishes to advertise on Facebook starts out in good standing with a 100 credibility rating. When fake news is reported and verified to be fake, you reduce the sources credibility score. If it falls below a certain threshold, they are banned from Facebook advertising. You can make that a temporary ban initially with repeat offenders getting a more permanent ban.
This problem is not hard. The real problem is convincing Facebook to step away from the money and focus on quality content.
As for why, researchers believe older people lack the digital literacy skills of their younger counterparts.
When snopes.com has been around since the days of dial-up internet, I find this excuse rather lame. It's not hard to teach someone to use something like Snopes. Perhaps we should start with teaching that young employee hired to validate Facebook articles, preferably before they are made public on the platform. You know, instead of wasting time on No-Shit-Sherlock grade studies that essentially provide the public with a precisely targeted punching bag group of people to make fun of. (and here I thought the anti-bullying mentality was actually popular).
They also say that people experience cognitive decline as they age, making them likelier to fall for hoaxes.
Kids need to remember this fact. This isn't just "stupid old people who can't use a computer". This will be you in your golden years.
I bet you're old.
Why don't you inform us about the darkoverlord instead of bringing us this fucking msm bullshit. Boo
about the dark overlord files instead? This is crap news. Who is running slashdot lately? jeez
you censoring motherfuckers, you suck big time
too bad the study did not include why the fake news was shared. I think the results would surprise the researchers. Just because news was shared does not mean it was believed.
People tend to spread what they themselves believe, no matter if it has any truth to it. A extreme of this is the flat Earth believers, who ignore all the decades of proof the Earth is not flat but still believe it is. We see a lot of this happening in politics as people may perpetuate stories true or not because it supports their own beliefs. Doesn't make the stories any more accurate, but people don't seem to care about reading facts.
A bunch of hardcore left-wing sites attacking a competitor and you want to tell us you don't just blindly believe what's published?
Don't need to do that if ... I shoot you in the back and kick you balls thru your nose.
Let me tell you guys, people my age simply DGAF anymore what you kids want to do to screw up your world. If you guys want to get hyper polarized and kill each other over trivial political disagreements, that's your own damn business.
I share fake news because it's fun to watch a bunch of 20-something political "activists" go into orbit over it. And I LOOOOVE getting 100 replies from people "correcting" the fake news with more "alternative facts" or even "alternative fake news."
It's a fun retirement hobby.
if this is fake news.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
And these are the
Nope. Most people under 30 during the Vietnam war supported it. Most people 50 and over opposed it. (30-49 generally supported it but the margin wasn't as high as it was for under 30s)
Bear in mind that a huge proportion of men over 35 and even some women had fought in WW-II, so this shouldn't surprise anyone. But people under 30 didn't start opposing Vietnam until sometime around 1968-1969.
Very interesting generalizations, do you have any data/references to support this?
It has a meaning. If your assertion is that some people misattribute fake to real news, then I have news for you: it doesn't make all fake news real, numbnuts.
Just like so many things in our society, this is just more blame shifting. We are blaming the 'fake news' and the people that are putting it out there. The real responsibility lies on the reader. In most cases they want to believe what they are reading because it aligns with their thinking and in some cases they are too lazy to verify what they read.
I get forwarded articles from my mother (in her 70's) all the time. I guess she gets them from the cesspool that is FB. Anyway's they are so blatantly false that I don't even see them as 'Fake News', but think to myself 'this must be a hoax'. Scary thing is that this kind of crap is believed as news.
I guess it makes for better headlines to call it 'Fake News' instead of 'Dumb-ass People Believing Everything They Read'
... also make it into the "fake news" list?
https://medium.com/@micheleand...
Just asking because the linked list of "fake news" is not "fake news" in general, but "fake news in support of Trump", while the "Real story"s are mostly pro Hillary opinion pieces. The problem then is, that the "fake" vs. "true" contrast in the selection is also a "Trump" vs. "Hillary" contrast, i.e. you can't distinguish if you select for "fake news believers" or for "trump supporters". In proper research you'd want to distinguish those by multivariate correlation analysis.
As it is their main result seems to be that trump supporters are conservatives and on average older than Hillary supporters.
Hardly surprising.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
If I see something stupid Im more likely to share it.
Should be easy to factually debunk! Get busy Let's see your factual rebuttals.
They've got most of the fake vs real bass ackwards. So in reality this study shows that us old fogeys are less likely to be influenced by the modern progressive nonsense. Sure, some of us may be starting to lose our marbles, or stuck in our ruts, but at least we have the perspective of knowing what life was like 50 years ago. Absolutely no young person has that, and that makes all the difference. Additionally, public education 50 years ago was probably better than today.
When snopes.com has been around since the days of dial-up internet, I find this excuse rather lame. It's not hard to teach someone to use something like Snopes. Perhaps we should start with teaching that young employee hired to validate Facebook articles, preferably before they are made public on the platform. You know, instead of wasting time on No-Shit-Sherlock grade studies that essentially provide the public with a precisely targeted punching bag group of people to make fun of. (and here I thought the anti-bullying mentality was actually popular).
I guess you don't know this, but at least since 2016 (I remember that year because of the US presidential election) American right wingers have been saying that Snopes itself isn't trustworthy and is a liberal front for the Democratic Party whose goal is to knock down conservatives and the Republican Party.
I grew up in a small town where lots of people i went to school with are now very conservative Republicans. I've seen them blast Snopes as being unreliable when someone, usually on the left, usually Snopes to point out that some article they shared on Facebook is false. This seems to be based on one story that was some kind of joke that Snopes fell for and called a hoax when it was actually just a joke and pretty obvious to everybody not at Snopes that it was just a joke. So some devious conservatives realized that the best way to fight Snopes is to accuse them of lying and being Democratic shills because conservatives will believe it. There's a lot more dishonesty in the US right now from the right than the left, so a large part of what Snopes debunks is lies from the right and conservatives just use that as "proof" that Snopes is a front for the Democratic Party and can't be trusted either.
honestly, I think this surprises exactly no one
everyone has known for ages that older people, when sharing stuff online, regardless of whether it ends up being fake or not, they frequently go by click-bait headlines and don't even attempt to read the thing in question and see whether it passes a smell-test
and to be clear, lots of younger people do it too, it's just especially more common the older they get
and this isn't really new, tabloids like The Enquirer, their biggest demographic has always been older people
one of my favorites was a click-bait titled "California to outlaw the Bible" which lead to an article with some talk about a bill in their legislature and some preacher making the ominous declaration about the bible banning where if you looked at the actual bill in question, literally all it had to do with was banning people from charging for gay conversion therapy, the end. It didn't even outlaw the practice itself, just charging for it. Nevertheless, people, especially older white evangelicals shared that far and wide as gospel level proof that California was the tool of the anti-christ.
"Essentially?" Looks like another weasel word commonly used by the propagandists peddling fake news. Go qq about fox some more, perhaps one more tantrum will get you your bottle.
It's the other way around. Millennials don't realize everything that they think is a falshood due to the fact that they were raised to believe that truth is whatever does not dusturb their peace of mind. This entire piece is pathetic. Editors?
I tried reading the Vox article. It was nothing but a stream of opinionated claims and hysterics. Everything from the headline to the abstract, to the chosen photo, to the wording of the article makes it clear that this is not news, it's propaganda.
Cognitive decline does happen, but I think they're not being very objective here.
As adults in our prime, the world marches to our drum beat. We don't necessarily agree with all that happens, but we're pretty involved in it happening and see what is going on, allowing us to gauge the news fairly objectively. The older we get, the more the drumbeat of civilization begins to march to the beat of those younger than us, at some point our children. We don't understand anymore, and we often don't like the change, and we rely more on the news to inform us about what's going on. Not everyone has the best tools to weigh that news, but unlike our adult selves, we have no other sources to help us identify obvious lies.
Combine inaccurate, even blatantly fake news which is carefully tailored to our biases and dislikes... it's not a big surprise that the elderly are confused. Everyone tends to favor the news article that agrees with their opinion, even if it is wrong and ungrounded in fact. If someone blasts you with that from all sources, it reinforces your beliefs. This is exactly what is happening.
There is another time in life that all of us have already experienced where we were clueless and gullible and could be easily misled by carefully targeted news: youth. The difference is in that stage of our life, at best we were viewed as precocious, at worst we were viewed as rebellious. But we were exposed to things we didn't understand, we attempted to hold a point of view and simply got rolled when actual facts were presented by our elders (or sometimes, real life) that conflicted. This doesn't work on the elderly, to them we're just kids, and they've mastered real life to the point where only the grim reaper can change their point of view.
While this is interesting, BuzzFeed is complete journalistic garbage.
I wouldn't trust anything even remotely connected to them.
- Alex
Just say'n
They were raised in a generation where you could trust the news. I don't blame them.
They're still far wiser than the youths.
The youths are too stupid to realize some day they'll be sharing fake news on the quantum internet because they don't understand how it works. So they'll regulate away elderly people's rights today and reap the consequences tomorrow.
Keep telling me how stupid older people are though.
People over 65 have more free time. I know up until I hit around 50 I had zero time to do stuff like /. and get deeply involved in politics. I worked hard probably averaging 50-60 hour work weeks and at the startup I was at 60-80. Add in home chores, play time and you got zero left. As you get older, you tend to work less, and your body is starting to not think going for a 20 mile hike is a good idea. Time starts to be available and you start to worry that nest of egg is going to get scrambled into an omelette.
Those old people just aren't woke. That's the problem! /s
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I think the root of this outcome has more to do with longer-held beliefs that when supported by some headline, are latched-onto more quickly, and then shared.
If I've liked the color blue for a few years, that's one thing. If I've liked it for 50 years and I see an article touting the greatness of blue, I'll be quicker to believe it, and share it.
One very important detail the study leaves out is the reason why fake news stories are shared.
Perhaps the fake news was shared because they know it's fake and are warning their friends about how ridiculous and incorrect the story is and to watch out for similar BS.
Perhaps the sharer actually really did believe it and wanted to 'educate' others (as sharing fake news implies).
Perhaps a fake news story was shared because the person found the fake news so outrageous as to be humorous and they simply shared it with their friends to give them a laugh. Kind of like the old supermarket tabloids that showed ridiculous stuff like a pic of Bill Clinton shaking hands with an alien on the front page with the heading 'Aliens endorse Clinton for president'. You see that, you pick it up, and you show it to your friend/gf/wife and you both get a chuckle out of it.
Alternatively, why is the fake news not shard? Was it believed as true and not shared because they've seen it on six other social media sites earlier. Maybe it wasn't shared because they are afraid that others may think they believe if they share it or are afraid of offending someone. Or did the person never see it because it was blocked by ad-blockers?
The conclusion of the study should not be old people share more fake news than younger people, but rather a very small percentage of people share fake news.
My elderly father also watches CNN and MSNBC exclusively. Iâ(TM)m pretty sure the 65-90 demographic is all they have left.
Did you see those two zombies they put on TV after the presidentâ(TM)s speech the other night? Wheew boy, talk about the walking dead!
Doesn't use social media, doesn't listen to pundits, won't tune in to talk radio and firmly believes that freedom's cost is responsibility for actions. Don't paint us all with the same brush, or brace yourself for an unpleasant reaction.
As for why, researchers believe older people lack the digital literacy skills of their younger counterparts. They also say that people experience cognitive decline as they age, making them likelier to fall for hoaxes.
I call bullshit. Allow me to address people who fall for hoaxes: you young whippersnappers out there who believe in socialism and other liberal propaganda are going to be the death of the U.S.A. You've apparently never been taught civics or much history and, as a result, you don't understand how this country came to be rich, powerful, and free. Worse, you're willing to trade your freedoms for free trinkets and you have no clue what you're giving up.
Karl Marx famously said, "Remove one freedom per generation and soon you will have no freedom and no one would have noticed." With 65 being in my rear-view mirror, I'm old enough to have seen evidence of that quote in my lifetime.
One more thing: "digital literacy skills" don't mean squat. Much more important are critical thinking skills and skills in verbal and written communications. Sadly, I'm not seeing these skills in many Millennials.
BuzzFeed does not have the best reputation for reliable reporting.
Quick example:
Buzzfeed’s Trump report takes ‘fake news’ to a new level
https://nypost.com/2017/01/10/buzzfeeds-trump-report-takes-fake-news-to-a-new-level/
The story about older people spreading fake news more than younger people, could be true. Then again, all of this comes from Trump hating leftist sources.
About a month or so ago SlashDot ran a story saying that young people (under 35) were more likely to fall for scams and on-line hoaxes. Now here we have a story saying that it's old people who can't tell on-line truth from fiction and fall for hoaxes more. You can't have it both ways.
Hurr durr snopes
Hurr durr wikipedia
Most of these guys are actually russians. If they're not then they deserve to be told straight up that they sound like a paid for "NPC" as they like to say.
So if you are over 65 and on Facebook, you are reading and sharing news. A lot of it is fake apparently. Is that just because you are sharing tons of news in general?
If you are less than 65, you are on Facebook to do other things rather than mostly deal with news info... like post photos of yourself or snoop on your friends and family... maybe play Facebook video games that give PC viruses.
The study's stats are kind of weird... only 49% of the people agreed to let their profile be looked at. After that, they say 11% of oldies shared fake stuff, whereas 8% of non-over-65 people shared. Of those 11% of oldies over 65, apparently they shared twice as much fake news as the 45-65 category, and 7 times as much as the younger generation. But ... do people under 30 even care about news? My guess is most do not and share NO "news" articles.
This is interesting... I've been wondering if there are sites that "usually do fake news"... and they say yes. If you look on the article, it links to this
https://docs.google.com/spread...
Which says all the well known names are doing real news:
Washington Post, Huffington Post, New York Post, New York times, CNN,Wall Street Journal,Vox,FOX News,New York times, New Yor Daily News, NBC News
These guys apparently often do fake news:
Ending the Fed
The Political Insider
Denver Guardian
World News Daily Report
Conservative State
Burrard Street Journal
abcnews.com.co
Liberty News
Yes I'm Right
Twitchy
World News Daily Report
World Politic US
USA Newsflash
Breitbart
Donald Trump News
World Politic US
Winning Democrats
DC Clothesline
Departed.co
Every News Here
Biz Standard News
Burrard Street Journal
American News
Biz Standard News
NC Scooper
American News
Conservative Tribune
Heavier Metal
Empire News
National Report
YourNewswire
Heavier Metal
YourNewswire
United Media Publishing
Heavier Metal
Adobo Chronicles
American Military News
Reel News Network
Empire News
LGBTQ Nation
The News Nerd
Celebricity
The Political Insider
Daily Currant
National Report
Superstation95
Celebricity
USA Daily Politics
World News Daily Report
TMZ Hip Hop
USA News Flash
Satira Tribune
NC Scooper
Satira Tribunes
National Report
So only people willing to give up their privacy to facebook, have to worry about this.
When snopes.com has been around since the days of dial-up internet, I find this excuse rather lame. It's not hard to teach someone to use something like Snopes. Perhaps we should start with teaching that young employee hired to validate Facebook articles, preferably before they are made public on the platform. You know, instead of wasting time on No-Shit-Sherlock grade studies that essentially provide the public with a precisely targeted punching bag group of people to make fun of. (and here I thought the anti-bullying mentality was actually popular).
I guess you don't know this, but at least since 2016 (I remember that year because of the US presidential election) American right wingers have been saying that Snopes itself isn't trustworthy and is a liberal front for the Democratic Party whose goal is to knock down conservatives and the Republican Party. I grew up in a small town where lots of people i went to school with are now very conservative Republicans. I've seen them blast Snopes as being unreliable when someone, usually on the left, usually Snopes to point out that some article they shared on Facebook is false. This seems to be based on one story that was some kind of joke that Snopes fell for and called a hoax when it was actually just a joke and pretty obvious to everybody not at Snopes that it was just a joke. So some devious conservatives realized that the best way to fight Snopes is to accuse them of lying and being Democratic shills because conservatives will believe it. There's a lot more dishonesty in the US right now from the right than the left, so a large part of what Snopes debunks is lies from the right and conservatives just use that as "proof" that Snopes is a front for the Democratic Party and can't be trusted either.
I get that this study was centered around an election timeframe, but the fake news problem isn't limited strictly to politics. It's merely fashionable right now to join the left or the right and bash the living shit out of the other side by any means necessary. Professional Victim and SJW are valid professions these days. Lies from the right aren't any easier to deal with than mass ignorance from the left (as Evergreen State can attest). A name-calling shit-show between those two groups in recent times isn't exactly what I would define as justification to discredit sites like Snopes. If either the right or the left were actually interested in preserving truth over all, they would work to support fact-checking services, not destroy them.
against a list of web domains that have historically shared fake news, as compiled by BuzzFeed
You're using Buzzfeed as a referee for what's fake news? Right.
Just another day in Paradise
"Democrats have had 5-8 point larger share since at least 2004."
The trend correlates well with an increase in the illegal immigrant population in the US:
https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/ois_ill_pe_2010.pdf
"Between 2000 and 2010, the unauthorized population grew by 27 percent. Of all unauthorized immigrants living in the United States in 2010, 39 percent entered in 2000 or later, and 62 per-cent were from Mexico."
Let me guess - you think absolutely none of the illegal population referenced in the DHS document voted in any of our elections and the Democrat increase in share was simply organic.
I find that hard to believe.
You mean like anything from Faux, Breitbart, or the Daily Caller?
Sorry, almost no one I know shares that bs (and yes, I'm over 65, as are a good number of friends).
I'll also note that the Malignant Carcinoma *lost* the popular vote by almost 3M votes, and then there was this small election a couple months ago....
WHOA! USA Today said that?! It must be true!
I mean, any news outlet that had to literally fire 4 editors and 3 journalists for fabricating stories has to be right! About everything!
Most senior citizens are addicted to the Fox News Network. Period
and got stuck with Clinton because the ruling class shoved her down my throat.
Say what you will about Clinton but she's a classic "Goldwater Girl" (look it up). As pure conservative as there every was. And I mean a _real_ conservative. She'd have kept everything the same, resisting change every step along the way. Trump's the radical, it just so happens he's a radical for mega corporations instead of working class Americans.
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OK read the article huffpost, cnn and nyt are considered real news and breitbart is considered fake. Read the study folks, this is contrived psuedoscience. Gives real science a bad name
Young people today are not old enough to remember decent, unbiased news. I have no facts to back it up but I would put the change at roughly the early 00's, maybe around 2001, in the early Autumn.
to demonize the inconvenient (this time, the "old") and make their ideas and potential wisdom appear to be less relevant to the target (this time, the "young"). Yet another nail in the coffin of unity of all people regardless of age, color, creed, etc. to keep most disoriented and unable to attach to a tangible dialogue without having to rely on "science" or the next new bullshit study.
This is not fake news, just old news
and the oil companies got their pipeline. After it was built the Military Industrial Complex wouldn't let us leave because, hey, free money.
Oil drives just about all of US foreign policy, especially in the middle east. You don't honestly think we're sanctioning Venezuela for "freedom" do you? But Chromsky doesn't really blame everything on oil. At the end of the day it's the relentless pursuit of profit by oligarchs that he harps on. He'll be happy to talk about the crap we did for Dole Fruit company if you care to ask him.
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I have some older relatives and friends who do, indeed, share "fake news" story links with each other. These are not dumb hicks, some are quite well educated and very mentally sharp. So what are they doing falling for this junk?
Simple: They are laughing and entertaining each other. They pass links back and forth with a chuckle, as in "can you believe anybody falls for THIS one?"
The fact that somebody shares a link to a story tells you NOTHING about WHY they shared the link and also NOTHING about whether they were fooled by it.
Incidentally, I've also seen plenty of examples of younger users being completely bamboozled by "fake news" - so being a younger user actually means nothing about how gullible a person is.
People who yearn for the "golden era" of American news, when there was no cable TV and most Americans got their news from a nightly show starring Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, Eric Sevareid, etc, tend to remember a time when all Americans got the same information and thus consensus on various political issues was easier to arrive at. Sadly, however, this situation was far from ideal. The fact that everybody had the same information does not account for the problem of "fake news" - it just means that it was easier for fake news to influence everybody.
Walter Cronkite is a great example. It's said that when President Johnson saw Walter Cronkite become an opponent of the Vietnam war, he (Johnson) new that the war could not be won and that he could not win reelection (because so many American belived anything and everything Cronkitye said). Cronkite, however, was no neutral reporter of facts; the man was a close friend of John F Kennedy and routinely stayed overnight with the Kenedys at their family compound. Cronkite knew all about Kennedy's personal life, health issues, and such and yet chose not to tell the American people anything about any of this stuff. A Person who watched Cronkite's reporting would have had no clue that the man was a Kennedy pal using his position at CBS to decieve people on a daily basis. Cronkite's viewers were unlikely to know that Kennedy took us into Vietnam, and were likely to be supportive of that war during the first years.
you mean all the stuff they said that did not really matter, among which were sprinkled big lies, like the ones that got us into nearly every war we have ever been in? i think you give the media a bit more credit and credence than they rightly merit.
On the bright side, many are calling out that this is fake news.
I find myself wondering where the people are who normally call out the other bullshit being presented here.
This is a self-selected group of people being "tested". In fact, this group of people are entirely defined by not being worried about privacy. Do you think that might skew the results somewhat? Further, what were the distributions of ages and what maths were used to normalize it all?
To me, this article is an agenda and the study is an excuse to air it and none of you seemed to call it for that this time. Am I wrong or is Slashdot sleeping today?
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen