People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by njarboe » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:28 PM UTC

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 think with the internet age and online banking it is much easier to exploit people who are still in control of their finances but starting to enter dementia/Alzheimer's. These people can loose a lot of money to scammers so the scammers spend a lot of time trying to find them. Especially now that you can do it from a computer overseas and will never be prosecuted. The strange misspellings, bad grammar, and obviousness of these Nigerian scams letters are done on purpose so that people responding are much more likely to be in this confused state.

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

#192

Post by EpicEng » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:28 PM UTC

asabjorn wrote: post #171

Liquix wrote: post #6

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.

Do you have a link to the source used to classify some news as fake and other news as real in this paper? How do we know liberal cohorts sources are any more reliable? Eg vox and cnn has a similar type of tilt as breutbart and fox. Without validating that the definition does not preclude the conclusion I don’t see how we can trust it’s conclusikn.

Not linked to in the verge article for whatever reason, but you can find the study here:

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586.full

>Posts containing links to external websites are cross-referenced against lists of fake news publishers built by journalists and academics. Here, we mainly use measures constructed by reference to the list by Silverman (7), but in the Supplementary Materials, we show that the main results hold when alternate lists are used, such as that used by peer-reviewed studies (2).

It's domain level, not article. You can follow the links in the paper to see how those groups come up with these lists.

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

#193

Post by benj111 » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

dandare wrote: post #110

Anecdotal 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.

I remember a boss not so long ago, similar age. Started having a rant about a woman that was emailing him, flirting with him. I realised it was some kind of phishing thing. He just took it at face value. He wasn't naïve, and had all his faculties, so it really stuck out.

Maybe its like country bumpkins without street smarts, maybe they just havent learned the defenses needed?

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

#194

Post by blablabla123 » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

dandare wrote: post #110

Anecdotal 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.

I know a guy that is half that age and did a similar process. Not from professor though but from someone who does random jobs. So having consumed all this fake stuff - which at the time seemed at best stupid and boring - he is now active in alt right like movements. One prequesite for this was probably also some degree of isolation.

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

#195

Post by apocalypstyx » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

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.

I know people with masters and doctorate level of education in medical and chemistry and other highly technical fields who believe in UFOs, creationism (the 10,000 year old Earth variety), among other things (I even once met a physicist who thought everything about quantum mechanics was bunk and classical mechanics could explain everything). And I'm by no means alone in that. So that may be anecdotal experience, but enough anecdotal experiences among enough people... So I don't think education means what you think it means. That is, it really is about an ideological test, the assumption by certain people being that education, for one reason or another, is selecting specific traits or inculcating certain traits that happen to be the same traits that any given person in such a position, such as yourself, think are somehow common among that group and that should somehow bestow a privilege greater than they do. It all comes down to that better decisions are the decision I agree with, whoever the I in any given instance is.

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

#196

Post by ars » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

nabla9 wrote: post #69

dragonwriter wrote: post #27

Earlier 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.

Media distortion and truthfulness are not the same thing. People and media will always have a viewpoint that distorts their objectivity. That is just fact of live and not necessarily bad thing as long as it's honest belief. Media used to be more reliable and truthful in the past with the normal distortions that people had. Mainstream media is still like this. Their problem is the lack of money and time that lowers th…

> Fox News is the only major mainstream media source that has completely turned news into dishonest influencing operation.

That's is absolutely untrue. The reason you think that is because your pre-existing bias disagrees with them.

CNN, HuffingtonPost, Washington Post, etc, etc, etc do the exact same thing, from the other side.

Here's a helpful list: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/left/

Which sites that you read are on there?

I've made a conscious decision to disbelieve any news unless it came from a site on this list: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/center/

I only news sources not on that list for entertainment.

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

#197

Post by rfinney » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

iheartpotatoes wrote: post #105

rfinney wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please check: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=support+for+vietnam+war+chart++&t=...

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

#198

Post by bilbo0s » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:36 PM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #175

dandare wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean "Don't trust mainstream media, watch this shocking video instead"?

"Don't trust mainstream media" doesn't mean you have to turn to even more untrustworthy sources, nor does it mean you can't ever go to mainstream outlets for information. It just means you have to examine what you're told critically and compare it across sources. I had an epiphany in mid-November 2018. I realized that, despite watching and reading the news on a pretty much daily basis, none of my voting decisions wer…

>none of my voting decisions were changing as a result. I examined voting decisions I'd made going back to 2016 and realized none of them were materially changed by watching the news...

???

Why would a voting decision change based on what you see on the news? Your senator or representative has little to do with the guy who killed his kids and wife last night.

WATCHING news will only get you the extreme stuff. That's how they keep eyeballs. For instance, we know a lot more about Kashoggi than we know about the prime minister that MBS kidnapped. That's because, as horrible as this may sound, the Kashoggi story had more "sizzle" for lack of a better term. This even though the prime minister being kidnapped actually did more to upset the global order.

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

#199

Post by asdff » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:36 PM UTC

mbostleman wrote: post #162

nabla9 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Media distortion and truthfulness are not the same thing. People and media will always have a viewpoint that distorts their objectivity. That is just fact of live and not necessarily bad thing as long as it's honest belief. Media used to be more reliable and truthful in the past with the normal distortions that people had. Mainstream media is still like this. Their problem is the lack of money and time that lowers th…

>>Fox News is the only major mainstream media source that has completely turned news into dishonest influencing operation.>> To me, it's ideas like this that perpetuate the problem. It clings to the idea that journalists and journalism - at least that which is sold via mainstream media channels - are capable of some kind of pristine objectivity. They aren't. It is much healthier in my opinion to understand that news…

Fox news doesn't correct their lies when exposed, they double down. Unlike any other journalistic entity that isn't state run.

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

#200

Post by asabjorn » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:37 PM UTC

octernion wrote: post #170

asabjorn wrote: post #157

Does anyone have a link to the source used to classify some news as fake and other news as real in this paper? Whomever control that definition can shift any conclusion, similarly to how hate speech definitions is used to silence speech on platforms such as Patreon [3]. I think we should treat any conclusion made by YouGov with caution because on at least on one occasion YouGov associated themselves with people belie…

lmao i love anti social justice warriors. bless your tiny, ice-cold hearts and backwards ways.

Most of us are proponents of a secular state clearly separated from religious practices, and social justice believers are religious [1] with the extra flair that they seek institutional power to enforce their beliefs in ways that violate this principle.

Do you believe we should not have a secular state where people can inhabit all sorts of conflicting beliefs in the religious spehere, while resolving their grievances through the law?

[1] https://areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-...