Regardless of political affiliation, over-65s are most likely to share "fake news" (and there's not much fake news, and it's largely right-wing)

I’m not convinced that sharing .8 fake news stories is itself much of a story.

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In my observation, by far the older people I have to link to Snopes articles.

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Used to be if it wasn’t true, you couldn’t print it without facing slander or libel laws. Then along came the Enquirer which was “printed for the sole entertainment of our audience”. Same with Faux “news”.
After reading some non sense in the Enquirer, my mother in law was convinced that using lemon juice in her iced tea would counteract her diabetes…

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I wonder how they deal with people who knowingly share stories from The Onion and sites like it because they are hilarious, knowing that they are false? I’m going to acknowledge, when most of the people on the internet had a fairly good grasp of reality, I used to share Onion articles. I don’t anymore because 2016 showed us that the average American wouldn’t know reality if it bit them on the arse; but I’m sure some people still do. (And those people would probably find it hilarious when someone goes off on the Onion article as if it were real.)

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I don’t think there’s even an implication in any of these studies that the reason older folks are more taken in by online bullshit is that they’re less “mentally acute”.

Barring early onset dementia (which can get you in your 40’s) 65 would be pretty early to enter mental decline. And there’s been a number of these studies showing a pretty clear gradient based on age. With under 35 groups being much, much better at guaging the veracity on material online than older groups. With the 65 demographic being the most credulous, but those in their 40’s and 50’s also being notably bad at identifying BS in the media.

More over that’s not how dimentia or mental decline works. It doesn’t make you stupid or credulous. The bulk of the progression is memory falures. And the late stages bring loss of base cognitive function. A person in the early stages aren’t neccisarily more likely to believe what they read. They’re less likely to remember the details of what they read, or contextual facts relating to it. And with more severe dementia they’re unlikely to remember to watch or read anything, or retain much of what they read or watch at all.

My grandmother is 85, and was just diagnosed with the earliest stages of dimentia. According to her doctors this is a bit earlier than typical. She has trouble remembering which movie that was with David Niven she was watching the other day. Forgets how her Roku works. And will tell the same story twice in a row. But she can still identify bullshit, and will analyze said bullshit in the context of the news as well as ever. 94 year old grandfather has no touch of mental decline or dementia and is sharp as ever when it comes to this sort of thing. Because that sort of decline is neither the default, nor a guarantee.

And importantly neither one of them uses a computer or much knows what Facebook is. Just like the bulk of their age group. This is an issue of base media and internet literacy. It’s about experience in dealing with low quality news and false claims online and on social media. And the studies I mentioned before the age groups match up pretty nicely to age groups that were young when the internet took over, and then when social media started out. With those who grew up with niether being the most credulous, and those who grew up with both being the least.

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I looked for the list of “domains” they used, and I think I found a list of 21 sites they used in their main analysis. The supplementary material includes other analyses using alternate, larger, sets of fake news sites. Their analysis is unfortunately somewhat opaque on the actual lists of domains they used. They have a list which I think they used, but I’m not 100% sure it’s the whole list.

The list of 21 sites in the paper do not include The Onion or other satirical news sites I know about. It does include TMZ Hip Hop dot com (name written out so as to not turn into a link). The list looks strongly right-leaning, with many sites including “conservative” in the name or otherwise looking libertarian or tea-partyish. None of the names screamed “liberal” or “left” to me.

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The best part is, Fox news will produce charts showing the opposite.

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The overall finding about who and what age groups are most prone to this are pretty much inline with what I’ve seen elsewhere.

But their conclusions about the scale and how this spreads seem at odds with a lot of the other analyses we’ve seen. And if they really did limit what they were looking at that’s probably the reason why. Along with only looking at Facebook.

Even before 2016 there were a lot of people researching this. Mostly in terms of conspiracy theory, alt med claims, crash diet marketing, and viral hoaxes. But the election created this big test bed for looking at politicized misinformation.

By now theres a really well established path way. Claims start in isolated social media cliques, often loaded with bots and these highly partisan “news” and activist publications with low readership. They proliferate initially through social media in some of those same social media cliques. Often on places like reddit, Twitter, and 4chan. That brings them to larger partisan media like Brietbart, who serve as a bridge to more legitimate or high visibility media, and then onto the media as a whole. Once a claim hits one of those larger partisan sites, that’s when it starts to proliferate on things like Facebook and more broadly on other social media. And get to politicians and nationally visible media personalities.

The right and left both have a similar system of not very accurate partisan, small news sites. And uncritical, highly partisan online communities. But the left is much smaller. And more legitimate left wing sites are less credulous and less central to the discussion than those on the right. The left lacks something on the scale of Brietbart or even the Daily Caller to take this trash and force it into the broader discussion. The origin points on the left are smaller, and less popular. And the legitimate left wing media is less accepting of false claims, and so less likely to elevate them.

These researchers seem to have limited themselves enough that they caught the early stages of it, and not in the venue that’s most important for it.

Based on their definition of “fake news” I’d almost go as far as to say they are looking at a different phenomena. If, as you say, fake news flows from isolated social media cliques and highly partisan “news” and low readership activist sites, through 4chan/reddit/Twitter, through Brietbart, and onto (presumably low-quality) media as a whole before being widely shared on FB, then that whole chain is essentially excluded from their analysis. At best, they are looking at flows from from step 1 (the highly partisan “news” and activist sites) to FB, and are specifically excluding Brietbart and “more legitimate” media.

Despite our high response rate, half of our respondents with Facebook accounts opted not to share their profile data with us. Any inferences are therefore limited insofar as the likelihood of sharing data is correlated with other characteristics of interest.

In other words, people who declined to share their FB data are not included in the study. Meaning the data are already skewed.

I have a dear, dear friend - really a 2nd Mom to me and a bunch of my friends from high school that we keep in touch with on FB. She’s in her 70’s now but still very outspoken. She’s a Southerner so is already predisposed to the Christian Conservative mindset, but she’s developed a habit of passing on right wing memes taken straight from the pages of Fox or Brietbart.

We used to try and correct her on the outright falsehoods she passed along but that has proven futile. In order to maintain a relationship with her I’ve taken to just deleting the most offensive and outrageous posts from my feed. It serves no purpose to argue with and alienate her. I just shake my head and hope that one day she’ll come around to reality.

Had to send this to my mom:

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Yeah think they just caught part of step one. But the origin point is both those small but VERY active social media groups, certain personalities and the sketchy partisan news sites on the small end. So it looks like they only looked at one of those origin points.

Brietbart is something of an aberration because their size means they bridge step 2. Where you’ve got those same small fringe publications, your more visible partisan media and personalities like Alex John’s and Mike Cernovich. And your step 3 where you’ve got much more visible “legitimate” but partisan/political operations (think Daily Kos for a not insane example), op Ed pages, and politicians or mainstream media personalities. And Fox News is like wise strange in that it’s run like a step 3 operation, but it’s so big and influential as a part of the “real” media that it also functions as the other endpoint. Hit fox and it’s now part of the media and the discussion as a whole. And in Trump’s mouth.

The same rough pathway has been identified for a whole host of things. Even if it his slightly different, or non political vectors. It’s how a lot of marketing works, and roughly how that press release based bad science reporting happens. It’s how “bigfoots real and he’s got an angel penis” proliferates. And it always starts with a small subset several steps removed, and isolated from the braoder culture. That’ what makes it so manipulatable.

The right wing aparatus for this seems to be unique in a couple of ways. There are more vectors in each stage. More insular online groups, more bullshit “news” sites, more partisan commentary operations, and so forth. And the scale of them are all is larger. The personalities have more followers, the subreddits are more active, the publications have more readers.

But there’s also the way lack of standards and a handful of publications like Fox and Brietbart are directly plugged into the base. That makes right wing political media highly optimized to elevate bullshit. It’s a faster, more efficient, more monetized system.

I’m not sure how much that hold up. If it was we should expect to see a trough of disbelief in some middle range, people old enough to have run into scams for a long time, but young enough to have not been primarily shaped by a more scarce news environment. That 30-44 demographic has been soaking in cheap internet garbage since the mid 90s.

I’m leaning towards a more social explanation. Our life experiences teach us that we can trust long time friends and will sometimes repeat things they say without close analysis. This thought isn’t fully fleshed out, but neither the biological or experience narratives seem to fit the data in studies like this.

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Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: FWD: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: OMG! Amazing news that will shock absolutely no one!!!

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I think the data is also skewed by looking at only Facebook. Generally speaking older people are more likely to be only on Facebook, or primarily use Facebook. And iirc Facebook’s userbase has been skewing older over time. As younger people leave, or never adopt it in the first place.

I think it’s under 30 the top social media sites are Snapchat and Instagram.

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This could almost be a companion piece to

Senescence explaining the likeliness to share fake news? Oh, well; mortality would be the cure.

:wink: :smiling_imp:

I agree with this. Only 41% of people 65 and over are on Facebook, compared to >80% for 18-29-year olds, 78% for 20-49-year-olds, 65% for 50-64-year-olds. What we don’t know is how Facebook-using relates to sloppy-thinking for the older demographic. Perhaps all the thoughtful 65-year-olds have decided there are better uses of their time than FB.

(ETA: Data from Pew)

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To reassure you somewhat, I’m a daily visitor to Boing Boing, I’m 70, and I’ve never shared fake news and never will - as long as the Alzheimer’s doesn’t kick in.

…and I don’t use Facebook because I find it trivial…