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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.

3 of 403 comments (clear)

  1. Re: "Fox News idiot accuses everyone of communism" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    You're linking a website literally owned by the Clintons, managed by Chelsea...

    Do you really trust this is unbiased, or even factually accurate? If so, you're a fucking moron... And likely 65+ years old.

  2. Re:"Republican easy-liar blathers, news at 11" by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 1, Troll

    You should read the Constitution. Then you'd realize that the Senate has had gerrymandering baked into its definition since day one. The Republicans hold 53 seats after receiving 35 million votes, while the Democrats hold only 45 seats even though they got 53 million votes.

  3. Re: "Fox News idiot accuses everyone of communism" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    So did you find a single fault you can point to in any of it, or are you just going to pretend you did like a coward? How 'bout this one?
      https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/01/09/donald-trump-team-contact-russian-officials/2530829002/

    Collusion is essentially proven, says the official report. 100+ contacts, he said he had zero. Is that just Hillary also, lol moron? The MSM got you crying again? Aww.

    Go on, hide ya bitch. Run back to Moscow before we hang you.