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

#231

Post by theseatoms » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 6:26 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #148

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.

My dad was similar, but he thought it was all a joke. He thought sites like rense and infowars were today's equivalent of the counterculture political satire from when he was young. He knew there were people on those sites who weren't in on the joke, and people with mental illness, but I think he thought it was maybe 5% or 10%, and it just added to the fun for him. He got reverse-pwned by Poe's Law. Yet still he foun…

This is so relatable. Virtually all "news" is entertainment these days. And entertainment is, at its core, a matter of subjective preference.

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

#232

Post by sailfast » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 6:27 PM UTC

"Article with headline "makes sense" to my worldview and fits with my stereotyped understanding of elderly people so everyone piles on to comment"

Congratulations. We just did the same thing this article purports most people over 65 do most of the time.

This study was comprised of people sharing their Facebook profile data with a research company. I wonder what their disclaimers said when they clicked "Yes"?

> “When we bring up the age finding, a lot of people say, ‘oh yeah, that’s obvious,’” co-author Andrew Guess, a political scientist at Princeton University, told The Verge. “For me, what is pretty striking is that the relationship holds even when you control for party affiliation or ideology. The fact that it’s independent of these other traits is pretty surprising to me. It’s not just being driven by older people being more conservative.”

Was his going-in hypothesis that older people are more conservative? Or that hoaxes only target conservatives?

I am not saying the entire study is BS, merely that everyone saying "haha yeah it must be that 65+ don't have good BS detectors because they watched Ed Murrow on TV" may not have employed their own detector 100% when reading this article.

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

#233

Post by fzeroracer » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 6:29 PM UTC

tropo wrote: post #225

thecatspaw wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware that buzzfeed actually has a pretty good news section too? It doesnt pay well enough, so they also have the clickbait stuff

BuzzFeed is the site that spread the "piss dossier" nonsense. You can't get much more fake than that without invoking aliens and Elvis.

You mean the same dossier that has increasingly had various points of data within it proven true?

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

#234

Post by Nasrudith » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 6:30 PM UTC

babyslothzoo wrote: post #229

I find it interesting that many people, especially boomers, can go to the grocery store and recognize checkout tabloids as obvious hoaxes, yet they stumble into something much more ridiculous online and determine it to be true. They seem particularly susceptible to confirmation bias in propaganda memes and literal fake news.

I think part of it is learning "everyone knows" that Tabloids are all "batboy was impregnated by bigfoot". It doesn't require any critical thinking.

Yet they fall for it because it wasn't socially embedded as "obviously fake" to them. Not to mention that sadly most people are very vulnerable to flattery of their beliefs (see the infamous Sokal Hoax).

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

#235

Post by bwanab » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 6:31 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.

If it helps, I'm over 65 and while I've seen it to an extent in other people my age, it hasn't happened to most of my friends and most importantly, as far as I can tell it hasn't happened to me.

Your father notwithstanding, I think education and awareness have a lot to do with who gets sucked into the fake news vortex and who doesn't. On the other hand, I've seen some of my friends whom I thought would know better post some real dingers at times.

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

#236

Post by mrlala » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 6:34 PM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #123

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.

I remember when CNN launched. News all day was a novelty; no other TV network was like it. I was a kid, but it did seem to me to be much more conservative (in the sense of not overtly sensational) and "straight" news at the time. I guess today's CNN and their much more pronounced left-wing orientation is just a response to the right-leaning stuff from Fox? Or it just seems more left-wing now in comparison.

[dead]

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

#237

Post by tnolet » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 6:35 PM UTC

theseatoms wrote: post #231

dkarl wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad was similar, but he thought it was all a joke. He thought sites like rense and infowars were today's equivalent of the counterculture political satire from when he was young. He knew there were people on those sites who weren't in on the joke, and people with mental illness, but I think he thought it was maybe 5% or 10%, and it just added to the fun for him. He got reverse-pwned by Poe's Law. Yet still he foun…

This is so relatable. Virtually all "news" is entertainment these days. And entertainment is, at its core, a matter of subjective preference.

Well, maybe in the US. Come to Germany and I'll show you the snorefest of the news media here.

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

#238

Post by fzeroracer » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 6:35 PM UTC

asabjorn wrote: post #207

soundwave106 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the above news article, there is a direct link to the magazine with the study. The direct link to the study is here: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586 The study appeared to correlate two sources to determine the nature of fake news: A) The primary source was a list of fake news sites compiled by Buzzfeed Media: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fa... B) The study was cross…

Thanks! Buzfeed believes in far-left progressive views and is not known for objective reporting, so using this as a primary source for classifications of fake news would predetermine this outcome. With this in mind I think we can't trust the studys conclusion.

Why don't you address the actual study instead of disregarding it on a partisan basis?

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

#239

Post by ThomPete » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 6:37 PM UTC

jmcqk6 wrote: post #139

ThomPete wrote: post #92

This article is a perfect example of the incredibly sloppy and biased thinking that happens in media and which is part of the very problem it talks about. Fake news first and formost is a clickbait scam to get advertising dollars, NOT a political propaganda approach and this tendency to keep using it as if it's an actual political issue is really absurd and itself an example of what is probably more an example of slo…

>Fake news first and formost is a clickbait scam to get advertising dollars, NOT a political propaganda approach and this tendency to keep using it as if it's an actual political issue is really absurd and itself an example of what is probably more an example of sloppy news. That's a pretty bold assertion. Let me make sure I'm getting this right. According to you, there is not a problem of people creating and spreadi…

By all means. Please show me this new problem that didn't exist before and please show how this is actually convincing people to change their minds about a subject matter.

There is nothing what so ever that makes "fake news" worse than your or mine self-delusional idea of what is true ESPECIALLY in politics which has nothing to do with truth but perspective.

The actual problems with social media platforms like FB and Instagram etc are depression not one group of people living in an echo chamber more than others.

Yes "fake news" can spread faster but so can rebuttals and "real news".

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

#240

Post by QuotedForTruth » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 6:38 PM UTC

Cakez0r wrote: post #226

SkyMarshal wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it’s at least partly that the elderly didn’t grow up with Internet, never really understood its culture, didn’t hang out on 4chan, Reddit, etc, and never developed a highly attuned BS/scam detector like more of the younger generations did. Many of these folks don’t even really understand how the Windows UI motif works, they’ve just memorized enough procedures to get stuff done on it. I also suspect that man…

> I also suspect that many of those artfully worded and subtly manipulative email forwards of the late 90s and 2000s May have been Russian psyops experimenting with viral information. They were always just a little too clever and effective while trying to look colloquial and organic, and I always suspected it was some PR outfit somewhere cranking them out, but could never divine a reason for the non-political ones. B…

What part of that sounds like BS?

We know they have industrial scale operations to post propaganda now. [1] Obviously this had to start somewhere. I'm pretty sure many intelligence agencies have been researching how information spread on the internet ever since it was created.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/world/europe/russia-troll...