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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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!!
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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.
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That's not true. You better look at those numbers again. Democrats have had 5-8 point larger share since at least 2004. That's why in every national election since that time the Democratic candidates have gotten a majority of the votes. If it hadn't been for gerrymandering, both houses of Congress would have been in Democratic control for the past 15 years.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not just gerrymandering. For senate, each state gets 2 senators regardless of population. But I don't mind if the house and senate are from different parties, since that requires them to actually learn to cooperate and compromise to get stuff done.
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.
...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
Look, you asked how the Senate could have a Republican majority without sub-state level gerrymandering. When I showed you the math, you flipped into the standard "There's only States! No US population!" mode. Well, why did you ask your goddamned question if you already knew the answer?
However you try to spin it, you cannot deny the simple fact that the party in control of the Senate represents the will of a not-even-close minority of US voters. That outcome is indistinguishable from gerrymandering, intentional or not.
It isn't just the same effect as gerrymandering -- it absolutely is gerrymandering. It is gerrymandering in favour of rural populations and against urban populations, rather than geographical gerrymandering, but it is nonetheless a deliberate gaming of the vote.
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 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"