American Aged 65 and Older Spread Fake News on Facebook
It is mainly American conservatives aged 65 and older who spread fake news on Facebook. The elderly spread seven times as many links to fake news as people aged 30 to 44 years.
This is evident from a study published in the leading scientific journal Science Advances. Striking conclusion: we generally share pretty few fake news. More than 90 percent of the Facebook users engaging in the representative sample did not appear to share fake news. 6.5 percent did, but then one or two stories.
Conservative voters also distributed more fake news than progressives during the 2016 presidential election. There was more fake news about Trump than around Clinton.
The researchers looked at 1191 Facebook profiles, looking for fake news that was massively read and shared. For example, the news that Pope Francis embraced the then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as the future president of the US (not true), the report that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS (undoubtedly not true) and the news that Hillary is no longer allowed to hold office a loophole (absolutely not true). Two of the above three news items come from the same site.
In the end, of the 1191 respondents, only 101 people appeared to have shared fake news. It could not be shown whether the dealers held the news true.
The conclusion that fake news is mainly distributed by people aged over 65 is correct, according to the researchers, but there is a speculative aspect to it. The why-question remains unanswered. For example, it would be possible that the over-65s are not experienced enough on the internet to determine the reliability of some news sources. Another cause could be the weaker memory, according to the researchers.