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It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful, so perhaps don't have the same "this may not be true" skepticism that younger generations have.
And they are more likely to vote than young people. We really have to work to make elderly people more digitally literate and young people more involved in politics, I reckon it will require the removal of multiple barriers (like, oh I don't know, not having the election on a weekday that makes no difference for retired people but all the difference in the world to minimum wage employees living pay check to pay check…
Young people have always been less interested in politics. Just because you/we don't like how the elderly are voting, we don't have to make this a bigger issue than it is.
1968 would like a word.
I think people older than age 65 are more interested in "news" period. Older people also vote so they are worth targeting, particularly by right-wing organizations that would like to mobilize them.
And they are more likely to vote than young people. We really have to work to make elderly people more digitally literate and young people more involved in politics, I reckon it will require the removal of multiple barriers (like, oh I don't know, not having the election on a weekday that makes no difference for retired people but all the difference in the world to minimum wage employees living pay check to pay check…
Is digital literacy the problem? Believing that a prominent politician ran a prostitution ring is a basic reasoning problem. I think we'll have to wait until they die off.
I remember there was a trump meme going around where he supposedly said "if I ever ran for president it would be as a republican, they are all a bunch of morons". The first time I saw that it looked sketchy as hell, but both of my folks (intelligent people, mind you) bought it hook, line, and sinker. In general, it's younger people that I saw citing it as a fake while older people shared it. Totally anecdotal, I'll grant you, but I hardly think my experience is unique
Then again, people older than 65 share the most stuff period, if my relatives are any indication.
Age was apparently a better predictor than total number of links shared, according to the article.
Edit: it's here http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586
Edit': as I thought, their dataset includes all kinds of links, but they do the same analysis for sharing hard news and don't find significant age effects. It's table S14 in the supplementary material http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2019/01/07/5.1....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is digital literacy the problem? Believing that a prominent politician ran a prostitution ring is a basic reasoning problem. I think we'll have to wait until they die off.
They are taking Dominique Strauss-Kahn down for exactly that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Strauss-Kahn
It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful, so perhaps don't have the same "this may not be true" skepticism that younger generations have.
No, they grew up in a time when media distortion was less likely to be revealed because the major media was narrower and it's ideological biases more consistent, and voices outside the major media had major barriers to reaching any substantial audience.
It makes sense that people who discovered the Internet through Facebook and Twitter at a later age would be more susceptible to memes. I have been wondering if this will get better or worse. Once all Internet users have been using it since a very early age, will they be more skeptical and responsible? Or will they be more easily influenced? I have been wondering what an elementary school course in memetics and evolut…
The first time my dad used the Internet to look at used car ads on Craigslist, I found him trying to fight off a cascading series of popups (this was in the mid-2000s) that launched when he clicked the "You are our 1 millionth customer" ads.
Older people who are new to the Internet may simply think it's regulated like TV and Radio commercials are. Couple that with how easy it is to target these demographics using an FB/Twitter advertiser account, and how they make up big chunks of the voting bloc, and you have a recipe for disaster.
[source] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4971060/