Anecdotal evidence: I remember how my 65 years old dad changed from a large-minded, world-traveling retired professor to an avid consumer of fake news in the span of fewer than two years.<p>Yes, it was a shock, but most of all I am mortified that this could happen to me as well when I get to his age.
Like other commenters, this study jives with my experience with older relatives. I mean 'forwards from grandma' has been a thing forever, right?<p>'Bill Gates will give a nickel every time this is read' (remember email chains?), 'naked women get shared, but this heroic child won't get a single like', 'Like and Share if you stand with politician X', etc etc.<p>Combine this with the targeted scamming of elderly from various Nigerian princes and jailed grandchildren, and there does seem to be a much greater degree of credulity with our current elderly generation. I think a more interesting study would be to figure out whether it's generational, a function of changing brain physiology as we age, or what.
Study says that damage to the prefrontal cortex in older adults can increase susceptibility to fraud and scams, which may be related to why older people share more fake news.<p>[source] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4971060/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4971060/</a>
It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful, so perhaps don't have the same "this may not be true" skepticism that younger generations have.
Here's the study since the article didn't link directly to it: <a href="http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586" rel="nofollow">http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586</a>
The elderly are generally more susceptible to internet fraud. Last summer the New Yorker had this story about how an 85 year old was scammed out of her life savings:<p>My Mother and Her Scammer
<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-mother-and-her-scammer" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-mother...</a>
This article is a perfect example of the incredibly sloppy and biased thinking that happens in media and which is part of the very problem it talks about.<p>Fake news first and formost is a clickbait scam to get advertising dollars, NOT a political propaganda approach and this tendency to keep using it as if it's an actual political issue is really absurd and itself an example of what is probably more an example of sloppy news.<p>Furthermore the insinuation that the older generation somehow is more naive than the young generation in political views only adds to the superficial and naval gazing claims.
My hypothesis is that they grew with a notion that "if it is on a newspaper, magazine or a book, it must be true", which was indeed the case when compared to digital content in today's world.<p>It took me a long discussion to convince my Indian uncle that image of certificate (signed by director general of UNESCO) that he forwarded on WhatsApp, declaring Indian national anthem as the best national anthem in the world, can be created in 10 minutes by anyone these days.
Overheard during the 2012 campaign in florida, between some octagenerians:
I’m voting for that Mitt Romney because he’s a nice Protestant boy, not like the others. (Not that it matters, but Obama was the only Protestant in that race, Biden and Ryan are catholic, Romney is like the most famous Mormon).
A almost guarantee that 100% of the people who believe clickbait fake news articles from bogus and untrustworthy sources also have never heard of the scientific method.<p>I believe that many older people find critical thinking to be taboo, and prefer to take things at face value because they confuse passivity with wisdom. Why question something when someone will come along any minute to make you feel comfortable anyway?<p>They tend to be wrong when they think independently because they were never any good at critical thinking to begin with, so they just parrot what they were told makes sense. What's going to keep their lives "the same."<p>This article does a better job than I ever could explaining my reasoning... <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167212439213" rel="nofollow">https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616721243921...</a>
A day after an article about fake-news research being retracted and here are people commenting enthusiasticly and gullibly about another piece of fake-news research being promulgated. It's like no one has heard of the social sciences reproducibility crisis. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
It makes sense that people who discovered the Internet through Facebook and Twitter at a later age would be more susceptible to memes.<p>I have been wondering if this will get better or worse. Once all Internet users have been using it since a very early age, will they be more skeptical and responsible? Or will they be more easily influenced?<p>I have been wondering what an elementary school course in memetics and evolutionary psychology should look like. Kids need memetic inoculation, not just to protect from fake news, but all kinds of automated marketing.
I find it interesting that many people, especially boomers, can go to the grocery store and recognize checkout tabloids as obvious hoaxes, yet they stumble into something much more ridiculous online and determine it to be true.<p>They seem particularly susceptible to confirmation bias in propaganda memes and literal fake news.
Their conclusions don't excite me, and theorising about the reasons doesn't help. I'd like to see a few comparison studies showing the bell curves by:<p>- age<p>- IQ<p>- reading speed<p>- concentration<p>- bias<p>- activism<p>- non-social-media surfing time<p>For example, the people I would expect to see rank highly for fake news sharing:<p>- a person with low reading speed and either a significant bias towards the conclusion or low concentration<p>- a low-iq non-activist (less likely to have read up on the subject)<p>- a person who only surfs social media<p>Of course, between these categories the data will have its own correlations (age + low eyesight, iq + surfing patterns, etc) and so I'd want to see the data both with and without correcting for those correlations too.<p>I don't know how surprising this data would be - once all the correlations are corrected for, I imagine the graph would look pretty flat.
It's not <i>digital</i> literacy, it's literacy.<p>Older people grew up believing in religion, in fact they could be beaten mercilessly if they expressed doubt.<p>They also grew up during one of the most intense ideological struggles in political history.<p>And on top of that they were the first generation exposed to mass media, in an era where there were still relatively few alternative information sources.<p>Basically they were ill prepared to think critically, and still are.<p>Sorry. I love my dad but he came out a Putin fan a while back. He also thought he'd won the lottery which he'd never entered.
Not at all a surprise.<p>The first time my dad used the Internet to look at used car ads on Craigslist, I found him trying to fight off a cascading series of popups (this was in the mid-2000s) that launched when he clicked the "You are our 1 millionth customer" ads.<p>Older people who are new to the Internet may simply think it's regulated like TV and Radio commercials are. Couple that with how easy it is to target these demographics using an FB/Twitter advertiser account, and how they make up big chunks of the voting bloc, and you have a recipe for disaster.
There’s probably more money scaring old people about dying and buying pills.<p>When you compare to Fox health and sciences section, their political news looks reasonable. The scaring old people industry must be regulated.
"Article with headline "makes sense" to my worldview and fits with my stereotyped understanding of elderly people so everyone piles on to comment"<p>Congratulations. We just did the same thing this article purports most people over 65 do most of the time.<p>This study was comprised of people sharing their Facebook profile data with a research company. I wonder what their disclaimers said when they clicked "Yes"?<p>> “When we bring up the age finding, a lot of people say, ‘oh yeah, that’s obvious,’” co-author Andrew Guess, a political scientist at Princeton University, told The Verge. “For me, what is pretty striking is that the relationship holds even when you control for party affiliation or ideology. The fact that it’s independent of these other traits is pretty surprising to me. It’s not just being driven by older people being more conservative.”<p>Was his going-in hypothesis that older people are more conservative? Or that hoaxes only target conservatives?<p>I am not saying the entire study is BS, merely that everyone saying "haha yeah it must be that 65+ don't have good BS detectors because they watched Ed Murrow on TV" may not have employed their own detector 100% when reading this article.
It has really upset me to see my father, an accomplished businessman, constantly share with me videos/news and ask questions based on information that is obviously false. I never would have believed it if you had described it to me, but for some reason the social component adds an element that gives these stories a lot more legs than they'd otherwise have
Only 38% opted in, which was only ~1100 people. Moreover, the group of "older" people spread at a rate of only 11%, which was lower than other cohorts (I won't mention which).<p>Finally, only 8.5 percent actually spread fake news, so this whole study is about about 95 people and how they spread news.<p>Other commenters mention that the domain list is also suspicious.<p>Clickbait science
For a lot of those 65+ they remember when an article that claimed:
'If you <i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i>* then share this with 10 of your friends' would have cost them 10 quarters and taken several days of effort to comply.<p>They know the free postage won't last forever, so they'll use it while it lasts.
While this is complete conjecture, I don't think the ability to ascertain truth from falsehood is uniquely age related; I believe it comes down to the age of media you were raised in. That's not to say it age doesn't play a factor at all, as cognitive function does decline as you get older. Unfortunately we don't have the data to control for generational changes, so 'older people' and 'the current older generation' are used synonymously. In my opinion, younger generations have become better accustomed to the bombardment of lies, in the form of new age marketing, that older generations didn't have growing up (at least, weren't as acutely aware of). That is compounded with the fact that people become more trusting of their chosen form of media over time [1]. If you've grown up with a small amount of media to choose from, and develop a loyalty to a certain one, it's a hard cycle to break out of.<p>Anecdotally, it seems to me that the older people I know only consume information from 1-3 sources, whereas younger people tend to flip-flop between many different ones. So if any of that small pool of media sources becomes untrustworthy it 'poisons the water', so to speak, much quicker.<p>To add to this, modern forms of media often have instant feedback mechanics (article comments, suggested counter-articles, up-vote/down-vote functions etc.) that can control fake news to a small extent. If someone shares fake news on HN for example, I can read the discussion and be made aware of any falsehood in the article. Traditional paper and television media does not have this control mechanism. Take note, I'd argue that this argument shouldn't apply to Facebook (which happens to be the most used website for over 50's). Their algorithm favours popularity over anything else so even if people react negatively to it (angry react), it only serves to spread fake news further.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/generations-trust/" rel="nofollow">https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/...</a>
Discerning whether a story is fake or not is a cognitive task. Many people over the age of 65 are in some stage of cognitive decline. It should not be surprising to anyone that they would score more poorly than young adults.
One would think from this title that I share more fake news than younger people. I'm 72. I don't share news at all.<p>What is "more fake news"? Is it that some individuals share more fake news than others or more individuals share at least some fake news?<p>I'm sure a better title could be composed.<p>One would think from these comments that younger people don't share fake news. There is a reason the words 'naive" and "youth" are often associated with each other. Youth trying to evaluate/judge older people is, in a word, naive itself.
Given the increased hostility between religion due to inflammatory social media posts -- I wonder if things are harsher now, or whether these sentiments were always there and facebook just made it easier for people to say things! Maybe, in a way, it's ok that people have shown what they truly believed in, and so our understanding of people's true belief's has been expedited.
I've been thinking of building a 'fake news' app to embarrass people like this who share fake news.<p>The idea is to have a legitimate looking site.<p>The link would be something like 'thebostonreporter.com' where it looks like a real news URL and the content ALSO looks like a legitimate news site.<p>The site would create news stories that confirm the bias of people who tend to share fake news.<p>For example, "Hillary Clinton Convicted of Money Laundering in Boston Court" or something like that...<p>Then we push it on social media.<p>Once the links has gone out and has been distributed across social media we flip the content of the link and say, basically:<p>"You've been the victim of fake news!"<p>and explain what they did wrong and how to be more critical of links they share.<p>PART of this is going to have to be to shame them.<p>Another part is to make it clear that the next link they share MIGHT be another "fake news time bomb" that could revert and embarrass them again - hopefully making them reconsider sharing fake links in the future.
Also from the article:<p>"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."
Seems like this could be solved by issuing large fines for publishing fake articles. There obviously needs to be more regulation on news agencies or companies that put out all this disinformation.
Elderly people are frequently the target of scams.<p>I'm curious what the age statistics for people who clicked on Nigerian Prince scams and viagra spam were like before social media.
This is not news! There's a certain brand of conservative baby boomers in the US who are obsessed with upsetting news, and they are extremely vulnerable to fake news. Long before this whole "fake news" thing on social media came to the popular consciousness, I was already getting e-mails about the Clintons being part of an assassination plot or a certain breed of poisonous spiders living in the toilet waiting to bite your butt and kill you. I called these "old person emails" because only baby boomers would send them. It's the reason we have snopes.com. Unfortunately I sent one of the snopes articles back in a response to one of these "old person emails", and the response I got was, "snopes is a liberal site!". In the US, the people from this generation grew up fearing death by nuclear attack by communists at any moment. Even though the world has changed pretty extremely since they were young, I think the psychological effect of it never wore off for some people. Unfortunately, I find Donald Trump to be the worst possible example of this type of personality: he's always angry, he refuses to believe news that doesn't fit his angry world view, and he says everything out loud that every angry baby boomer has always dreamt they could say out loud (thus many people see him as bold, not rude).
My Dad (mid 70s in age) shares the fake news articles because he thinks they are funny. He still cannot believe that people take so much of this crap seriously. Of course, when you have an elected representative that thinks an island will tip over if you put too many people on it, its not hard to understand where critical thinking has failed.
The researchers found that Republicans shared more fake news than Democrats, but they suggest that is only because recent fake news has been largely directed to support Trump (i.e. that age-susceptibility to fake news is otherwise ideologically neutral). If it turned out that conservatives as such are more susceptible to fake news, though, that might help explain why the elderly are more susceptible insofar as old people tend to be conservative.
It depends on how you define fake news. I see most of what I'd consider fake news being shared by people under the age of 40. I'd classify most of The Verge articles as "fake news" for instance. They're politically charged clickbait/outragebait often with undisclosed relationships between the authors and subjects.
Having spent Christmas back home, I've come to the conclusion that people over 65 should not have the right to vote.<p>You've had almost forty years of voting, you don't really have any future left, and your minds aren't what they used to be. Please stay out of it.
I think people older than age 65 are more interested in "news" period.<p>Older people also vote so they are worth targeting, particularly by right-wing organizations that would like to mobilize them.
And they are more likely to vote than young people. We really have to work to make elderly people more digitally literate and young people more involved in politics, I reckon it will require the removal of multiple barriers (like, oh I don't know, not having the election on a weekday that makes no difference for retired people but all the difference in the world to minimum wage employees living pay check to pay check? And make it harder for ISPs to screw over rural people?).
Does anyone have a link to the source used to classify some news as fake and other news as real in this paper? Whomever control that definition can shift any conclusion, similarly to how hate speech definitions is used to silence speech on platforms such as Patreon [3].<p>I think we should treat any conclusion made by YouGov with caution because on at least on one occasion YouGov associated themselves with people believing in and adovocating for social justice [1], so maybe they are part of the ongoing effort [2] to re-gain progressive information gateway control in a world where much information dissemination is shifted from traditional media to social networks and streaming.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/core/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/YouGov_CSJ_Polling-Results_2018.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/core/wp-content/up...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.changetheterms.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.changetheterms.org/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/patreon-crowdfunding-platform-defends-itself-amid-boycott-2018-12" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/patreon-crowdfunding-platfor...</a>