Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

401–410 of 437 posts

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

#401
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.

  they double down.
Examples?

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

#402

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.

Also happened to both my parents, especially my dad. My mom can still be reasoned with and I can change or at least open her mind with logical arguments. My dad on the other hand is all in.

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

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "...you have to wonder if the word 'ironic' still has any meaning." This is perhaps the most ironic thing.

Pretty sure most news agencies consider anything remotely conservative fake news now. I rarely ever see corrections or retractions from ANY of the big outlets. It's largely become infotainment, and everyone drinks from the fire hose of their own perspective. It's no wonder there is so little tolerance of any other perspective. This will likely lead to another push for controlling the internet/media a la net neutralit…

This makes no sense, but is a common talking point. How is net neutrality "another push for controlling the internet/media"? If anything, it's the pure opposite, ensuring that all views can be accessed equally.

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

#404
post #102

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…

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 'officia…

Makes complete sense. I don't think folks that pre-date the computer age (with some exceptions) have a intuitive grasp of what the 90s would call cyberspace, and how that differs from meatspace construction.

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

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who draws the line of what these categories are? Let's say for example, you are not racist, nor sexist, but you also do not subscribe to the "positive discrimination" (oxymoron) bullshit, and instead of hiring people to meet diversity quotas, you hire people purely based on their fitness for the role you are hiring for. When you reject certain "unprivileged" individuals because others are more fit for the role, they…

i really can't tell if you are responding in some weird attempt at playing devils advocate (in some sad alt-right personality), but in case you are actually responding in good faith... sadly it's impossible to be both "not racist, nor sexist" _and_ against "positive discrimination". not sure how much more simple i can make it for ya. sorry. no one is angry because one person of color or woman is rejected from a posit…

> impossible to be both "not racist, nor sexist" _and_ against "positive discrimination".

So people are racists and sexists if they disagree to the political view of affirmative action? This is what create polarization in society.

I have often said that I would enjoy to watch what happen if we had a simple law that required all official gender segregated places of employments to impose affirmative action. Here in Sweden there are equally amount of women and men employed, so for every place there is a male dominance there is an other that is female dominated. It actually happen that the extremest gender segregated profession is female dominated, as is the only university level program that is 100% mono-gender. It happens that 87.5% of the population, both women and men, work in a gender segregated profession and thus around 90% of work places would be required to implement affirmative action if we had a common law that equally apply to all citizen, women and men.

Are you against making affirmative action a common law? If so, is it you or I that are sexist?

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

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any specific examples of bias?

[1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/buzzfeed/ [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/10/21/le...

I meant in the list, not for buzzfeed itself.

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

#407
post #215

Here's the study since the article didn't link directly to it: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586

Wow, that's bad. The definition of "fake news" is a list of 21 conservative web sites chosen by BuzzFeed. For some reason, BuzzFeed wasn't in that list. Unsurprisingly, by that definition, fake news is primarily spread by conservatives! Chart C shows that as the strongest result by far. Chart B, going by age, is a weaker result. Well yes, it seems that conservatives live longer (living less dangerously?) or that peop…

>>>

As a robustness check, we constructed alternate measures using a list curated by Allcott and Gentzkow (2), who combined multiple sources across the political spectrum (including some used by Silverman) to generate a list of fake news stories specifically debunked by fact-checking organizations.

>>>

We took this list and removed all domains classified as “hard news” via the supervised learning technique used by Bakshy et al. (23) to focus specifically on fake news domains rather than the more contested category of “hyperpartisan” sites (such as Breitbart).

>>>

> that conservatives live longer (living less dangerously?)

or have more money to spend on healthier living (high quality food, high quality entertainment, high quality housing, plus medicine, etc)

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

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't look at the founding date, that's completely irrelevant. Look at the Daily Mail homepage. Does it look like a news site, or does it look like a tabloid?

>Does it look like a news site, or does it look like a tabloid? I think you've just demonstrated why many people believe fake news. A lot of them are set up to look like regular news sites. Fake news sites have been around for a lot longer than people think. I remember quite a few years ago reading an article about an event where some minority Christians were being mistreated in some non-Christian country. It looked…

> I think you've just demonstrated why many people believe fake news. A lot of them are set up to look like regular news sites.

You're reading my argument backwards. I'm not saying you should trust any website that looks reputable. I'm saying you should _distrust_ any site that looks _disreputable_. That's the first step, and it's a huge improvement over trusting everything (which is what most people who buy these fake news sites do).

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

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White People are not actively discriminated against, period. Your fears are absurd and unfounded, considering white people still compose the majority of tech and that has changed very little.

The majority of applicants for tech roles are white men, period! It's no accident that if you have 80% white people apply for jobs, then 80% of your company is going to be white. This is, assuming you do not discriminate based on skin color. If you have 80% white apply, and only 60% of your company is white, then you are disciminating based on skin color. This is racism! I don't care how you want to spin it, whether…

sorry you can't discriminate against white people, and it's not racism. again i feel like everyone has been very clear with you and i'm sorry you can't understand this.

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

#410
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> both sides Sure.

In my experience (and this is explicitly anecdotal) ... it seems like liberal memes tend to either satirize a politician's actions or repeat opinion-based editorial info, while conservative memes are more often explicitly fake ... yes, satirical/op-ed memes obviously exist there, but I see more obviously false and easily-debunked conservative memes.

For the conservative, those op-ed memes can tend to be interpreted as the oft-quoted "fake news", which is where I'm guessing the "both sides" sentiment comes from.

Again, that's just entirely my anecdotal experience.

Post reply on HN