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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 believe that many older people find critical thinking to be taboo, and prefer to take things at face value because they confuse passivity with wisdom. Why question something when someone will come along any minute to make you feel comfortable anyway?
They tend to be wrong when they think independently because they were never any good at critical thinking to begin with, so they just parrot what they were told makes sense. What's going to keep their lives "the same."
This article does a better job than I ever could explaining my reasoning... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616721243921...
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I disagree. One just has to look at Reddit to see that the younger generation is as caught up in all this as any. I think some people are just wired to think that way and, as we get older, some people switch to thinking that way. As I get older, I get more concerned that whether or not I mentally decline in one way or the other is just random chance and genetics.
> One just has to look at Reddit to see that the younger generation is as caught up in all this as any. The study refutes that statement. I'm not saying we're invincible, I'm just saying we're less susceptible. Anyways, afa mental decline with age goes, some of it is random, some of it is genetics, some of it is lifestyle that is 100% in your control.
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Gather all information from primary sources? Sarcasm aside, I do agree that journals and other longer period periodicals are more reliable.
In the age of the internet, that doesn't have to be as sarcastic as you think it might.
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 hope this is not the case for your dad and I'm sorry if I scared you, but you could consider having him checked.
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> 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…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI
It's also pretty prevalent on the radio, and has a fair few historical precedents from before journalism saw credibility as an important thing to keep in mind (yellow journalism et all).
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Fox news doesn't correct their lies when exposed, they double down. Unlike any other journalistic entity that isn't state run.
Which is to say that their peers don't correct their lies when not exposed. Which is to say that the number of corrections is proportional to the number of exposures. So Fox is just a pig among pigs in lipstick. I'll buy that, but it doesn't really change my point.
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I'vs seen this proclivity in a lot of older military guys. Korea and Vietnam vets. They just split their sides laughing at this stuff. Also, at least in the case of my father and uncle, the fact that people believe a lot of this stuff is what makes it all funny. I honestly don't believe they would be at all interested if no one believed it. I wonder if your dad is ex-military? Of course, all of that's older enlisted…
I'm not ex military but I find Alex Jones legitimately hilarious and I'm astonished people take him seriously. Before I left fb I had an ex-Marine old friend from elementary school on my list and he shared conspiracy memes relentlessly, very much mirroring the stuff Russia used in the 2016 election meddling. He actually believed it. I gave up trying to debunk it and played along.
Only 38% opted in, which was only ~1100 people. Moreover, the group of "older" people spread at a rate of only 11%, which was lower than other cohorts (I won't mention which). Finally, only 8.5 percent actually spread fake news, so this whole study is about about 95 people and how they spread news. Other commenters mention that the domain list is also suspicious. Clickbait science