#shocked
People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds
101–110 of 437 posts
Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds
#102Like 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…
Agree with you completely.
I'll also throw in to the mix - creating news 'back then' required someone to gather it, someone to write it up, a printing press or studio, distribution, whatever - people and effort and time and money.
I don't think a lot of the older people I've spoken to realise quite how easy it is to put something on the Internet. Therefore anything that appears, and has the feel of something 'official' must have come from a credible place with the same time and effort involved. If that makes sense?
Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds
#103Who shares the most real news?
Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Where is the primary source of this, where can I go to see popular memes?
I read HN, Reddit and sometimes /., and I guess due to my settings I miss a lot of stuff. I'm not on FB, IG or snap, is that why I'm missing these memes?
Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful, 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.
Hmmm. Time magazine, the morning newspapers and CBS/ABC/NBC evening news was much more middle of the road than today's Drudge/Huffpost, CNN/Fox and google/reddit (and HN) type ideological bubbles. More straight news. Back farther in the past, the many competing newspapers were very partisan. Perhaps we're just back to that situation.
IDK, support for the Vietnam war was sky-high for over a decade, despite the lies coming out of multiple administrations.
Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds
#106There’s probably more money scaring old people about dying and buying pills.
When you compare to Fox health and sciences section, their political news looks reasonable. The scaring old people industry must be regulated.
Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s unwise to rely on the incompetence of fake news websites. Compare two UK newspapers, The Guardian and The Daily Mail. They are both well-known and have popular domains which have been around for ages. Considering only their contradictions on the topic of Brexit, one of them must be about as dangerously out of touch with reality as it is possible to be. Which one? I know which one I believe, but I am not…
If you can't tell the difference between The Daily Mail and The Guardian based on stylistic cues, I don't know what to tell you. It is true that stylistic cues won't tell you everything. The rest, unfortunately, is a lot harder to teach. Avoiding the obviously-shoddy sites is sufficient as a start; the rest is really going to be dependent on particular knowledge in areas like science, history, etc. EDIT: Kinda surpri…
> If you can't tell the difference between The Daily Mail and The Guardian based on stylistic cues, I don't know what to tell you.
Then you missed my point. Of course I can tell the difference, but which one is true — the one founded in 1821 or the one founded in 1896?
Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds
#108And 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.
Many states do but the time they're required to provide is pretty short and not long enough in some areas (2-4 hours mostly 2-3) and even where there are provisions like that employers can refuse to provide the time.
> Though many states allow employees to have up to three hours off during the time the polls are open (the number of hours varies by state), nearly all of the states allow employers to refuse time off to vote.
https://aflcio.org/2016/11/5/know-your-rights-state-laws-emp...
Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds
#109Like 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.
My emails from grandma predate Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Gmail, FWIW.
Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds
#110Anecdotal evidence: I remember how my 65 years old dad changed from a large-minded, world-traveling retired professor to an avid consumer of fake news in the span of fewer than two years.
Yes, it was a shock, but most of all I am mortified that this could happen to me as well when I get to his age.