Slashdot Mirror
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.
Young people are not on fakebook.
The study is skewed. Also thanks for the ageism you fucking shitheads.
Enjoy your socialism. You deserve it
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.
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.
-
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
"there'll come a time when I can't tell a crook from an honest man because my critical thinking facilities are toast."
You voted for Clinton, didn't you? My brother I have some bad news for you...
Exactly. This story really should be "people older than 65 more adept at seeing through media bullshit".
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.
CNN makes mistakes. Fox is just trying to bullshit you.
Actually these days Fox seems to be trying to beam messages directly into the President's head.
How much time do you spend watching/reading Fox News?
Personally, I've been trying to read them regularly, specifically because I want to understand that side of the coverage, though I still use the NY Times as my primary news source. What I see is that it's not nearly as bad as I had been led to believe. Outside of a handful of opinion commentators who tend to go off the rails on occasion, the factual level of their coverage is pretty good. They often cover things that I'd have thought they would prefer to ignore, and do it fairly. Their headlines tend to have an obvious slant to them -- though not be actually incorrect -- but the articles tend to be accurate.
I mention this only because I think there are lots of left-leaning and moderate people around who have a very inaccurate perception of Fox News, which derives from their own online echo chambers. I think that's just as unhealthy as if Fox really were what so many believe them to be.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
CNN makes mistakes. Fox is just trying to bullshit you.
Actually these days Fox seems to be trying to beam messages directly into the President's head.
CNN does a bit more than make mistakes, sarin is an odorless, colorless, tasteless chemical used in chemical warfare and yet this CNN reporter huffs a suspected sample. The kind of person who lacks critical thinking and impulse control and tries to huff death spray usually dosent make it to be a reporter so I'm assuming they knew it was fake all along. Even a non lethal minor exposure to your lungs can easily cause permenant neurological damage.
Fox is notorious for ignoring important news stories for political reasons. It's well documented.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
https://www.vox.com/2018/5/30/...
First result from a google of "fox news ignoring stories".
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC