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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.
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.
That seems to correlate with the age of the Fox News audience.
when they see it online and recall the truth.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
Perhaps "fake news" is any news article that's likely to displease inbred twits from the boss class?
Yup, older adults were appalled that the younger kids were so opposed to the Vietnam War, despite there really being no valid reason to be there in the first place. It took a long time before the anti-Vietnam feeling became mainstream. Granted, we still had the draft so there was a vested interest in young people to not head off to war. Whereas in WWII people were enlisting to join the fight because the reasons for the war were more apparent.
...oh wait.
This is your daily reminder that a "page 10" correction to the previous day's "Front page bombshell" is one of the many issues of the "Fake news" paradigm.
When the initial story gets widespread dissemination and the correction is all but ignored because it's no longer "News of the day", then the initial story is what people remember, and often quote later even after a correction has been issued.
Fake news is not just deliberate lies. It's many things. You'll be quite surprised to know that Fake news can also be rooted 100% in truth, if you simply omit key facts or context that are unfavorable to the narrative you're attempting to spin.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
And here we see part of the problem. No, bad reporting is not part of fake news. Is the corrections being downplayed a problem? Yes, absolutely. Are they part of the fake news problem? No. There is a world of difference between someone making a mistake and someone intentionally writing false information in an article. Sure, mistakes are a problem. Yes, biased reporting is a problem. But they are not a part of fake news or even on par with it. Part of the issue is that posts like this cause people to distrust the public media, so they see no difference between someone's blog and the mainstream media because "it's all the same". Bias and mistakes are not the same as fake news.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
I pointed out that a picture of a Tweet forwarded by one of my senior friends was fake, and that you could tell it was fake because it had a watermark on it identifying it as having originated at a fake tweet website, and a quick Google search confirmed it. The response? No retraction, no warning not to share it, no delete, no update... Just a comment that said, "Well, it's something she probably would have said." That's when I started giving up on correcting the seniors in my feed. They literally do not care whether the things they forward are fake or not, as long as they fit their preconceived (FoxNews seeded) worldview.
The other alternative is that they truly do not care about job security.
I think there are many factors, including simply having more time and not as much to spend it on - hanging out with the remaining friends and family on Facebook and sharing fairly indiscriminately as a way of "keeping in touch" might be more prevalent.
And probably growing up at a time when news came from newspapers which had actual journalists that verified the news, and a desk with editors that approved publishing. Post-Murdoch, news just isn't what it was.
The other tidbit, that republicans are far more likely to share fake news than democrats, I don't think is entirely due to fake news being Trump-friendly. i have a feeling that if adjusting for that, republicans would still be ahead. If nothing else because of a correlation between political affinity and accepting outrageous claims and long-living memes like the Jewish carpenter story. I.e. a propensity for believing over questioning.
Chomsky was always fake news, though.
Before we saved Kosova from Serbia, he claimed we were going to build an oil pipeline from Turkey over the mountains(!!!) through former Yugoslavia into western Europe.
Same thing at the start of the war in Afghanistan; he predicted it was all about a pipeline.
He is the "father of linguistic" in the same sense that Freud is the Father of Psychology; he started a field before his theories had to be discarded.
But he was never a reasonable political geographer at all. He only has eyes for oil. He has no sense of perspective, or knowledge of other externalities or sources of corruption. He lies ten times per paragraph.