Getting Wise to Fake News

Consider what happened in 2016 on Facebook, the platform that adults over 65 are most likely to use. Researchers from Princeton and New York University determined that sharing articles from “fake news” sources — outlets that propagate false or misleading content masquerading as legitimate news — was rare.

But those who did engage with such outlets were far more likely to be older than 65. That cohort shared twice as many articles from phony sites as 45- to 65-year-olds and nearly seven times as many articles as the youngest group.

A study of Twitter during the final month of the 2016 campaign similarly found that fake news purveyors amounted to a small share of all the political sources in an individual’s feed — about 1 percent. But older users were much more likely to engage with fake sources, and those over 50 were overrepresented among the “supersharers” responsible for disseminating 80 percent of fake content.

Such findings stirred particular concern because older adults are far more likely to register and vote than younger cohorts. In the 2016 election, more than 70 percent of people over 65 cast ballots, compared with about 46 percent of those 18 to 29.

“They have an outsized effect on our democracy,” Nadia Brashier, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Harvard University said of older adults.

And that group is at highest risk for illness from the coronavirus, a subject also generating lots of online distortion and conspiracy theories.

Dr. Brashier rejects the notion that older people’s participation in misinformation stems from age-related cognitive losses. “Outside the social media environment, we often see that older adults are more discerning than younger ones,” she said, pointing to studies showing that older people could more accurately distinguish false headlines and articles from true ones.