dChan
Anonymous ID: 24e266 Jan. 10, 2019, 5:19 a.m. No.4693238   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3258 >>3259 >>3278 >>3576 >>3770 >>3889

The good news about elderly people sharing so much fake news

 

Who shares fake news? Until today, conventional wisdom held that posting misinformation to Facebook and other platforms was largely a byproduct of ideology. The more conservative you were in 2016, the argument goes, the more likely you were to share hoaxes.

 

But a fascinating new paper published today in the journal Science Advances suggests that something else is afoot. I wrote about it today at The Verge:

 

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).

 

“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.”

 

Why do older users share fake news more often? There are two competing theories, for which we still lack good evidence:

 

The first is that older people, who came to the internet later, lack the digital literacy skills of their younger counterparts. The second is that people experience cognitive decline as they age, making them likelier to fall for hoaxes.

 

Regardless of age, the digital literacy gap has previously been blamed on users’ willingness to share hoaxes. Last year, WhatsApp began developing a program to promote digital literacy in India — where many of its 200 million users are relatively new to the internet — after a series of murders that may have been prompted by viral forwarding in the app. That program is aimed at users of all ages.

 

At the same time, elderly Americans are prone to falling for so many scams that the Federal Bureau of Investigations has a page devoted to them. It seems likely that a multi-pronged approach to reducing the spread of fake news will be more effective than trying to solve for only one variable.

 

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/10/18176162/fake-news-old-people-nyu-study-silver-lining

 

I’ll resist the temptation to quote my entire article, and instead ask you once again to read the full thing here:

Anonymous ID: 24e266 Jan. 10, 2019, 5:21 a.m. No.4693258   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3297 >>3576 >>3770 >>3889

>>4693238

That last line is a quote from the author, not me, the copy paster…

 

Here's the next article they were referring to:

 

People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds…and the finding holds true across party lines

 

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.

 

The role of fake news in influencing voter behavior has been debated continuously since Donald Trump’s surprising victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. At least one study has found that pro-Trump fake news likely persuaded some people to vote for him over Clinton, influencing the election’s outcome. Another study found that relatively few people clicked on fake news links — but that their headlines likely traveled much further via the News Feed, making it difficult to quantify their true reach. The finding that older people are more likely to share fake news could help social media users and platforms design more effective interventions to stop them from being misled.

 

Today’s study, published in Science Advances, examined user behavior in the months before and after the 2016 US 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.

 

Only 8.5 percent of users in the study shared at least one link from a fake news site.

 

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).

 

“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.”

 

The study did not draw a conclusion about why older users are more likely to share hoaxes, though the researchers point to two possible theories. The first is that older people, who came to the internet later, lack the digital literacy skills of their younger counterparts. The second is that people experience cognitive decline as they age, making them likelier to fall for hoaxes.

 

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/9/18174631/old-people-fake-news-facebook-share-nyu-princeton

 

COPY PASTER'S NOTE: They sure are full of shit not taking into consideration that the reason why conservatives are labeled as posting fake news is because sometimes the news isn't fake, just inconvenient to the liberal narrative and liberals hold these studies…

Anonymous ID: 24e266 Jan. 10, 2019, 5:26 a.m. No.4693303   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>4693283

Cernobitch is always talking about his hair and clothes. What a fucking egotistical dumbfuck :-) If I set up a channel, which I'm not too fond of, the last thing I'm going to focus on is hair and clothing. Sounds like he wants to be a Kardashian or something.

Anonymous ID: 24e266 Jan. 10, 2019, 5:41 a.m. No.4693425   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>4693278

Of course CNN and MSNBC will never be on that list of fake news even though they spray more rage and hate than many think the Daily Stormer spreads.

Anonymous ID: 24e266 Jan. 10, 2019, 5:45 a.m. No.4693460   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>4693447

That's not how babies are made, but they're lucky that half of them didn't end up flushed down the toilet.

 

I'm just making fun of them though