ISLAMABAD – People older than 65 are more likely to share fake news on social media, a new report has revealed.
The report has been prepared by researchers at New York and Princeton Universities and revealed that older users tend to share more fake news articles than younger ones irrespective of education, race, income, and the number of links they have shared.
In the study, the age proved to be a better characteristic to predict their behavior when compared to any other including party affiliation.
This revelation negates the previous finding that conservative voters tended to believe more fake news and ultimately sharing them.
The recent study’s findings state that 11 percent of users aged above 65 shared a hoax while only three percent of the users aged between 18 and 29 did it.
Facebook users aging 65 and more shared more than twice fake news articles than the oldest age group of 45 to 65 years.
They shared nearly seven times more fake news than the youngest age group 18-29.
“When we bring up age finding, a lot of people say, ‘oh yeah, that’s obvious’,” said co-author and a political scientist at Princeton University.
Nevertheless, the study did not deduce anything as to why older users tend to share hoaxes. The researchers did share two possible theories though.
The first one is that older people lack digital literacy skills as they came on the Internet later.
The second theory is that people undergo cognitive decline as they grow old, which makes them susceptible to believe the hoaxes.
