Clearly it will become easier to spread fake news as older

by Tiago Muraro

The latest analysis conducted by researchers at New York University and Princeton University revealed that Americans over the age of 65 are more likely to spread fake news on Facebook than any other age group . Regardless of the number of education, gender, race, income, and shared links, elderly users seem more likely to spread fake news than younger users.

People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds - The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/9/18174631/old-people-fake-news-facebook-share-nyu-princeton

Since the US presidential election in 2016, interest in fake news is increasing globally. Especially during the presidential election, Facebook has become a hotbed of fake news, and it is also clear that Facebook sold 11 million yen of advertisement to the Russian Fake News spreading account . Another survey found that the number of people who clicked on the fake news link during the presidential election was relatively small, but even if you did not click on the content to view the content, It was a fact that headlines were spread all over the world via news feeds, so it was difficult to quantify how much fake news influenced it.

Meanwhile, on the Science Advances of science magazine, a new research result was published that investigated the behavior of Internet users in the months before and after the 2016 US presidential election. This research showed that "Elderly people are more likely to spread fake news", The Verge of foreign media says, "In order to prevent users from misunderstandings, more effective intervention can be done with social media and platforms It will be the knowledge for designing it. "

by Glen Carrie

A survey conducted jointly by researchers at New York University and Princeton University cooperated with the research company YouGov and targeted 3,500 subjects including Facebook users and non-Facebook users. On November 16, after the presidential election, subjects who are Facebook users have Facebook accounts such as "profile" "religious and political views", "posting to their own timeline", "data such as the page you are following" I installed an application that will be able to share information. In addition, users can select whether or not to share individual categories, so researchers can not access information on news feeds and friends.

About 49% of subjects who are Facebook users agreed to share their own profile data. After that, we used the list of web domains that we shared fake news published by BuzzFeed, and it is checked whether the subject diffused fake news.

Analysis revealed that spreading fake news in all ages is a "relatively rare act". In the survey, only 8.5% of the users said that they spread at least one link on the fake news site. In addition, it seems that the user identified as conservative was more likely to spread fake news than the user identified as liberal. Likewise, Democratic supporters spread the fake news less than 4%, while 18% of Republican supporters were spreading fake news. Responding to this result, the researchers wrote, "It is clear that Fake News helped Mr. Trump, who was a Republican presidential candidate, in the 2016 American presidential election."

Looking at the age group, fake news was spread only 3% among young people aged 18-29, whereas 11% of users older than 65 years spread fake news. In addition, the oldest age group of 65 years old or older has diffused fake news more than twice than the second oldest age group (45 to 65 years old), and the youngest age group ( In comparison with the age of 18 to 29), he said he was diffusing seven times as many fake news.

by Gilles Lambert

Researchers can not draw conclusions about why the elderly are likely to spread fake news, but we have two hypotheses. The first one is "The elderly have a lack of digital literacy skills like the younger generation" and the other is "the cognitive function decreases as the age goes up, and the possibility of becoming deceived by the hoax increases It is like that.

Regardless of age, it is clear that the lack of digital literacy skills greatly affects the spread of hoax information. Also, as it is also true that elderly Americans tend to fall into so many frauds, "To reduce the spread of fake news it is not a matter of trying to solve with only one variable but a multifaceted approach It seems to be effective, "The Verge wrote.