It is not lack of digital literacy that make older citizen share fake news
"Why should I fact-check the news? It's not true anyway."
Older adults read, share, or believe misinformation at higher rates than younger audiences. The explanation for this behaviour has often been attributed to cognitive issues or digital literacy. But new research by Imani Munyaka, PhD, Eszter Hargittai, and Elissa Redmiles, published in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, aims to better understand older adults' engagement with misinformation by interviewing adults aged 59+ from the US, the Netherlands, Bosnia, and Turkey.
They find that people with decades of potential exposure or experience with both online and traditional news media have reached a state of media cynicism, in which they distrust most, or even all, of the news they receive. Yet, despite this media cynicism, older adults continue to read and share news extensively, and they rarely fact-check the news they consume.
If they decide to fact-check content, older adults do that by checking other sources (so-called triangulation) in the same way as younger adults. But it seems like the media cynicism makes them less motivated to fact-check the content in the first place.
This paradoxical reaction to media cynicism is quite different from prior explanations, such as cognitive issues and digital literacy, for why older adults share misinformation to a greater degree. And this finding suggests we might need efforts to reduce older adults' engagement with misinformation that are not purely educational, since reading and sharing misinformation can cause irreversible harm and negatively impact news consumers' ability to discern false information.
Read the full article here.
