Stefan Mileschin

The older you get, the more likely you are to fall for it

Boffins at New York and Princeton Universities have been adding up some numbers and discovered that older Americans are disproportionately more likely to share fake news on Facebook.

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 behaviour better than any other characteristic -- including party affiliation.

The study, published in Science Advances, examined user behaviour 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 16 November, 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.

https://fudzilla.com/news/47913-olde...hare-fake-news