WHO’S ‘LIKING’ FAKE NEWS?
Study: Boomers trump millennials in posting bogus stories
If you think the political conversations around the holiday dinner table with your Trump-loving older relatives are bad, following them on Facebook is even worse. A new study has found what many younger Facebook users already know: Baby boomers are much more likely than millennials to post fake news stories. The boomer generation doesn’t have as much experience with online news as younger people do, said Jonathan Nagler, a politics professor and co-director of the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab at New York University, which did the study. “People who are 18 to 29 years old have grown up with the internet and are more aware of what a free-for-all it is. They have a basic understanding that anybody can post things online and that breeds a certain amount of skepticism,” Nagler told me yesterday. “If you’re over 65, or over 45, and you see something that looks like a newspaper, it might not occur to you that, ‘Oh, that’s not really a newspaper. That’s something else. That’s someone pretending to be a newspaper,’ ” Nagler said. Researchers examined the habits of 1,300 Facebook users — who agreed to be part of the study — during the 2016 U.S. election campaign. The researchers compared the links the users shared on Facebook with internet domains that post fake news. The results? The group most likely to share fake news stories were people over age 65. Researchers found that more than 1 in 10 baby boomers, about 11 percent, shared bogus stories compared to 3 percent of Facebook users between the ages of 18 and 29. And more Republicans than Democrats shared fake news stories, 18 percent to 3.5 percent, the study found. “It’s been really well documented elsewhere that the vast majority of fake news during this election was proTrump,” Nagler said. For its part, Facebook, Naglar said, is constantly changing the way its platform works, and recent studies suggest there’s less fakenews sharing on Facebook. AARP, the American Association of Retired Persons, declined comment on the study yesterday but posted an article on its website over a year ago warning people of fake news and how to spot it. That’s a start but having a chat about fake news sites with grandma and grandpa or mom and dad is a good idea. Nagler pointed out that boomers have been educated through past public education campaigns to convince them to stop littering and smoking. A stop-posting-fake-newsstories campaign should be next.