Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 437 posts

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

#71

Post by pjc50 »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #53
akiselev wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did his pizza shoppe actually have a basement, though?

Allison Mack, some other prominent actors, and several members of the Bronfman family are going down for running a sex ring. Some of the circumstances are crazy. It would seem like fake news at first glance surely. It's downright bizarre. I certainly would have written it off as 'National Enquirer' were it not out of super credible institutions. Sometimes it's hard to tell what is 'truth' and the major 'credible' new…

> were it not out of super credible institutions.

Indeed. And there's a huge war over creditability. It's expensive to maintain and it suits some people to destroy it entirely.

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

#72

Post by magduf »

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.

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

#73

Post by pjc50 »

stochastic_monk wrote: post #48
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.

It's both. There was spin, but there also weren't dedicated propaganda outlets (e.g., Fox News). You are right, though -- it took a lot of work to get content to a large audience. That reduced the number of malicious agents who could and the speed with which they could successfully gain broad influence.

Murdoch propaganda press is not a new thing by a long way. Remember Hillsborough.

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

#74

Post by undecisive »

Their conclusions don't excite me, and theorising about the reasons doesn't help. I'd like to see a few comparison studies showing the bell curves by:

- age

- IQ

- reading speed

- concentration

- bias

- activism

- non-social-media surfing time

For example, the people I would expect to see rank highly for fake news sharing:

- a person with low reading speed and either a significant bias towards the conclusion or low concentration

- a low-iq non-activist (less likely to have read up on the subject)

- a person who only surfs social media

Of course, between these categories the data will have its own correlations (age + low eyesight, iq + surfing patterns, etc) and so I'd want to see the data both with and without correcting for those correlations too.

I don't know how surprising this data would be - once all the correlations are corrected for, I imagine the graph would look pretty flat.

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

#75

Post by mcculley »

maldusiecle wrote: post #28
mcculley wrote: post #9

It makes sense that people who discovered the Internet through Facebook and Twitter at a later age would be more susceptible to memes. I have been wondering if this will get better or worse. Once all Internet users have been using it since a very early age, will they be more skeptical and responsible? Or will they be more easily influenced? I have been wondering what an elementary school course in memetics and evolut…

You don't need knowledge of evo-psych or "memetics" (whatever that means) to distinguish most sketchy sites from reputable ones. It may be tricky to distinguish more carefully-assembled fake news sites, but most of these bogus websites/Facebook groups are easy to pick out via stylistic cues alone.

I find evolutionary and psychology and memetics to be powerful models for understanding my own cognitive biases and limiting their influence. Stylistic cues are not sufficient to determine if something is intended to manipulate me.

Your mileage may vary, of course. I am intrigued that you would discredit such a model without knowing what it means.

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

#76

Post by dazc »

beat wrote: post #70
dazc wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what you're saying is, people who have 40 years more experience of life than you have, people who've paid taxes for most of those years, people who sacrificed a better lifestyle so they could change your nappies, etc shouldn't vote because their political opinions don't chime with yours? You don't know it yet but a lot of what you think you know stems from fake news too.

Do they have 40 years of experience, or one year of experience 40 times?

Not sure what your point is?

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

#77

Post by zedpm »

saemil wrote: post #49
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.

Wow. Should we also say that people younger than 30 should not vote because they do not have the life experiences necessary to make rational decisions?

Don't worry, they're already opting out on their own[0]

[0] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/voti...

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

#78

Post by TremendousJudge »

simulate wrote: post #37

The elderly are generally more susceptible to internet fraud. Last summer the New Yorker had this story about how an 85 year old was scammed out of her life savings: My Mother and Her Scammer https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-mother...

Nigerian prince scams and the like are much older than the internet though.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam

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

#79

Post by beat »

bbeonx wrote: post #24
dplgk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is digital literacy the problem? Believing that a prominent politician ran a prostitution ring is a basic reasoning problem. I think we'll have to wait until they die off.

Pizza gate is an extreme. But also, yes, news has changed dramatucally over the last couple of decades and older generations maybe don't consume as defensively as younger generations. Over time this can make ridiculous things sound plausible. I remember there was a trump meme going around where he supposedly said "if I ever ran for president it would be as a republican, they are all a bunch of morons". The first time…

I don't think it's that ridiculous things can sound plausible. No, they sound ridiculous. I think it's when the fake news looks like something someone is inclined to believe anyway. In my little bubble, I'm always chiding young, progressive friends for uncritically sharing memes with fake quotes etc that happen to reinforce their political biases.

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

#80

Post by magduf »

dplgk wrote: post #7
pimmen wrote: post #3

And they are more likely to vote than young people. We really have to work to make elderly people more digitally literate and young people more involved in politics, I reckon it will require the removal of multiple barriers (like, oh I don't know, not having the election on a weekday that makes no difference for retired people but all the difference in the world to minimum wage employees living pay check to pay check…

Is digital literacy the problem? Believing that a prominent politician ran a prostitution ring is a basic reasoning problem. I think we'll have to wait until they die off.

Until they all die off? Go read about the pizzagate incident. The guy who fired a rifle inside that restaurant was 28 years old. Alex Jones, the lying asshole who runs infowars, is in his mid-40s. The alt-right is full of men in their 20s-40s.

The problem in this particular case isn't old people. If you want to point at one broad demographic, it's men, largely under the age of 50.

Post reply on HN