Study reveals older people share more fake news on Facebook



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Seniors are the ones who share the most fake news on Facebook. A study from Princeton University found that the older a person is, the more likely they are to share (and believe in) false news – regardless of their political status, gender or level of education. 39; study.

Women over 65 are by far the most common false news of the social network: 11% of older people published false links, while young people aged 18 to 29 shared only 3 % of lies [19659002] Over 65s share more than double false news than adults of average age (45 to 64 years). See the table below:

On the list of political preferences, Republicans shared most of the false news. Among those who published false information 4% declared themselves members of the Democratic Party, while 18% declared themselves Republicans

. most conservative and Republican party supporters (mostly older). The lack of digital literacy among older people and cognitive decline are also reasons for older people to fall further into fraud.

Although we are bombarded with false news, the prospects for the future are not so bad. The study found that 90% of Facebook users had not posted a fake link during the biennial review. " Sharing news with fake news is a much rarer event than sharing links in general", badyzes research done by Princeton University

It should be remembered [19659008] The study badyzed a sample of 3,500 adult residents of the United States and compared the veracity of the shared links from 2016 to 2018 (when Donald Trump rules the United States). The truth of the links has been verified by fact checkers.

At the beginning of the process, researchers asked users to allow an extension to monitor the account and actions of these 3,500 users. This monitoring generated data about religion, political preferences, and pages that each user liked. The data was obtained with the authorization.

Another addendum is to recall that only the open and public part of Facebook has been studied by researchers. We do not know the number of false information disseminated in private couriers such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp itself, which leaked a lot of ink during the Brazilian presidential election. as more and more people are seeking to be informed via WhatsApp. Only in the last two years, the number of newspaper articles consumed on Facebook has decreased by 6%. Among the youngest, the drop has reached 20%. Meanwhile, the number of people consuming information on WhatsApp has increased by 4%.

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