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People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

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Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#81

Post by jessaustin »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #53
akiselev wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did his pizza shoppe actually have a basement, though?

Allison Mack, some other prominent actors, and several members of the Bronfman family are going down for running a sex ring. Some of the circumstances are crazy. It would seem like fake news at first glance surely. It's downright bizarre. I certainly would have written it off as 'National Enquirer' were it not out of super credible institutions. Sometimes it's hard to tell what is 'truth' and the major 'credible' new…

Or consider that horrible Jeffrey Epstein. Not a politician, but he hosted politicians on his island of victimized children. Now we've learned that federal prosecutors colluded with his defense team to fool the courts into letting him off with a few months in a part-time minimum-security resort prison. It was fortunate for him that he had cultivated friendships with those in power! It was unfortunate for the little girls, how he cultivated those friendships...

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#82

Post by pimmen »

RightMillennial wrote: post #13
pimmen wrote: post #3

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…

Aren't employers legally required to give you time off to vote? In roughly half of the states it's paid time off as well.

The states that don't offer time off controls a very large portion of the electoral college votes, unfortunately. The ones that offer paid time off are at a real disadvantage because of the electoral college, too.

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#83

Post by TremendousJudge »

saemil wrote: post #49
btbuildem wrote: post #40

Having spent Christmas back home, I've come to the conclusion that people over 65 should not have the right to vote. You've had almost forty years of voting, you don't really have any future left, and your minds aren't what they used to be. Please stay out of it.

Wow. Should we also say that people younger than 30 should not vote because they do not have the life experiences necessary to make rational decisions?

Or maybe children should vote, since they have all the future ahead of them. If there's a reason why education is ignored so much by governments it's because children don't vote

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#84

Post by hannob »

sillyquiet wrote: post #31

Like other commenters, this study jives with my experience with older relatives. I mean 'forwards from grandma' has been a thing forever, right? 'Bill Gates will give a nickel every time this is read' (remember email chains?), 'naked women get shared, but this heroic child won't get a single like', 'Like and Share if you stand with politician X', etc etc. Combine this with the targeted scamming of elderly from variou…

> I mean 'forwards from grandma' has been a thing forever, right?

Let me tell you that grandma' with email is a relatively new phenomena.

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#85

Post by Eli_P »

arayh wrote: post #30

Study says that damage to the prefrontal cortex in older adults can increase susceptibility to fraud and scams, which may be related to why older people share more fake news. [source] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4971060/

You can search for J. Rogan with Robert Sapolsky podcast where doc said that either prefrontal or orbitofrontal cortex finishes developing at ~25 years old, so brain can learn about environment and extrapolate accumulated experience later throughout life. I think age bias is not appropriate, because youngsters could consume propaganda with memes, feeds and games as well, just through the different medium. What matters here is anxiety level and/or IQ.

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#86

Post by wil421 »

CodeCube wrote: post #57
mu_killnine wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this study includes memes like that or only actual site links external to Facebook. I have similar experiences with older loved ones I'm friend with on Facebook and it's rare they send links. But I think the rampant meme-sharing of misinformation/disinformation is much more prevalent.

I'm really really loathe to say this ... but in today's climate, "memes are news". I have 100% had the contents of memes thrown at me in a political discussion. I happen to be online a lot, so in many cases, I've seen the meme scroll by and it's easy both to realize what it is (fake propaganda), and easy to debunk ... but to those folks, it's as real as if delivered by Walter Cronkite's lips.

The last election really turned me off of social media. The amount of absolutely false memes and screenshots being shared by both sides was way too much. I recently saw some of the ads and memes being churned out by the Russian propaganda machine. I was not so surprised some of the stuff they created was the same crap people I knew were sharing as truth by intelligent yet older people.

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#87

Post by sametmax »

PaulHoule wrote: post #42
sametmax wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And since they are the ones with the least experience with the internet and the smaller capacity to adapt/learn/sort a lot of info, the whole thing make sense.

Some oldsters have been using the internet since before there was a world wide web so they may have more experience than youngsters. Some of them have been sharing memes on AOL since before some HN readers were born. So far as cognitive capacity, I don't know. I've seen young people refuse to learn from other people's mistakes, take deadly risks, etc. When it comes to the epistemology of these people the right way to…

Go to a school and an old folks house. Ask them to create an instagram account, take a picture, crop it, and post it online.

Would you really try to defend the point of view that the kids wouldn't do much better ?

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#88

Post by brlewis »

burtonator wrote: post #66

I've been thinking of building a 'fake news' app to embarrass people like this who share fake news. The idea is to have a legitimate looking site. The link would be something like 'thebostonreporter.com' where it looks like a real news URL and the content ALSO looks like a legitimate news site. The site would create news stories that confirm the bias of people who tend to share fake news. For example, "Hillary Clinto…

From the article: "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."

Relying on people clicking through to see the content might not work.

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#89

Post by kaffeemitsahne »

magduf wrote: post #72
btbuildem wrote: post #40

Having spent Christmas back home, I've come to the conclusion that people over 65 should not have the right to vote. You've had almost forty years of voting, you don't really have any future left, and your minds aren't what they used to be. Please stay out of it.

I'm not sure this is fair to all people over 65. It sounds like maybe your relatives are much like mine, and I agree, my relatives shouldn't be voting either. If we're going to put up a discriminatory barrier to voting, I think it'd be more effective if it was education-based. People with no education make poor voting choices, as we've seen in recent elections.

It's quite frightening to see how popular this education barrier to voting idea is. Another one I've heard is that everyone should make a test before being allowed to vote.

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#90

Post by axaxs »

btbuildem wrote: post #40

Having spent Christmas back home, I've come to the conclusion that people over 65 should not have the right to vote. You've had almost forty years of voting, you don't really have any future left, and your minds aren't what they used to be. Please stay out of it.

I don't necessarily agree or disagree with your line of thought, but removing the right to vote from ANY group is dangerous idea. People always vote in their own best interests, typically for the now/near future. Imagine social security and medicare being ended overnight. Not only would there be a lot of homeless/starving seniors, but, in 20-30 years when the current voters aged out, nobody who was eligible to vote would care enough to help them. This would likely end up as some quasi Logan's Run type scenario.

This is absolutely not a voice in favor of the mentioned programs, just used as an example.

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