| ---------------------------------------- |
| /.: People Older Than 65 Share the Most Fake News |
| January 09th, 2019
----------------------------------------
|
| Saw this on Facebook, makes me think of a few of my uncles: |
|
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge:
|
| > Older Americans are disproportionately more likely to share |
| > 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.
---------------------------------------- |
| Back to phlog index |
| gopher.zcrayfish.soy gopher root |
| This phlog entry has been read 2266 times.
Future direct comment submission has been disabled for this phlog entry.
Comments are still accepted by email, please send to:
zacharygopher@gopher.zcrayfish.soy
Be sure to include the post title in the subject line! Thanks!
Comments have been left on this post:
> buzzfeed. hehe. Yeah, everything right of stalin is fake news I guess.
Posted Fri May 15 10:03:14 UTC 2020 by 85.211.103.186
------------------------------------------------------------------------ |