Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

Busses on the Moon was the preserve of the Sunday Sport.

The Daily Heil or Sun reliably gave anti-trans, anti-EU - always anti-something, and hard right sympathy of the "we hate the NF/BNP, but immigrants should stop..." variety, occasionally far more blatant.

Most knew what they were avoiding, as well as what they were choosing from their daily.

Now thanks to facebook illegal political advertising and fringe groups like Britain First - who Facebook took years to ban - have gained a voice that reaches a very wide audience, where everyone appears as credible as everyone else if they can play the social media game.

Until it was eventually generally known what they were, Britain First stuff was shared by all sorts of people whose main failing was believing a story or meme someone shared - because it came from someone they knew.

We either expect everyone to be deeply untrusting and cynical of their friends and family all the time - which they're not and cannot be. Or we require some standards of Facebook, finally.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586

"Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains, which in 2016 were largely pro-Trump in orientation, than liberals or moderates"

We can speculate as to why. In my opinion, anti-intellectualism is far more virulent on the right than left. Nearly every single left-leaning politician is pro-science and accepts the scientific consensus on a broad range of issues. Conversely, most conservative politicians are anti-science, reject scientific consensus on a broad array of subjects, and consistently parrot mythology in its place. In fact it has become extremely common for conservatives to dislike and distrust higher education, academia, and research all together. It is a common trope in conservative media to attack scientific research as "pointless" and "expensive" and to use religious leaders to discuss intellectual or scientific topics.

Any ideology which preaches anti-intellectualism and mythology over science, evidence, etc, is necessarily more vulnerable to being co-opted in other evidenceless subjects.

I have two additional theories for why the boomers are more prone to spreading fake news.

Maturity

Every person, demographic adopting a new media has to go through the whole maturity cycle anew. We've all been there. (For me it was CompuServe, BIX, FidoNet.) We've always had trolls, memes, jokes etc. So netiquette and its predecessors emerge. It takes a while for the novelty to wear off, cooler heads to prevail.

Entertainment Becomes Reality

Boomers are bored. One article I read quoted a few boomer trolls who regarded fake news as funny, a way to pass the time. No different than the supermarket tabloids.

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Alas.

Like when the AOL noob tsunami flooded the web, obliterating the indigenous culture, there's a huge cohort of boomers adopting Facebook. Fed and supported by boomerbots, of course, they're having an outsized impact.

More sadly, I fear most boomers are no longer teachable, more so as they age. So they're not likely to adapt or develop their own netiquette. I've all but stopped talking politics with my older relatives. Because they have no memory of prior discussions. Just like Groundhog Day.

Lastly, how we talk changes how we think. Propaganda works. This is more than confirmation bias feedback loops (mentioned elsewhere). This is something like brainwashing. My mom's boyfriend got her watching Fox News and cable news. She's transmuted from educated, progressive, liberated powerful woman (earned a masters degree, marched in DC to support abortion rights) to almost complete dittohead. This "captured by a cult" story is sadly common.

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The only remedy I can think of is turn off their TVs, log them off facebook. Keep them distracted with knitting, puppies, and church.

My elders are now basically shut ins. Plugged into the TV. They'll happily watch happy shows, like Antique Roadshow, nature shows, cooking.

But when the nontoxic programming ends, they go back to the default channels of Fox News, CNN, and manufactured outrage.

I tried to figure out how to reprogram their TVs, cable boxes to exclude the toxic stuff.

But what's needed is an eldercare streaming TV apps. Like parental controls, but for our parents instead of our kids.