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A recent study published in Quarterly report of public opinion challenges the prevailing belief that digital illiteracy is the main factor behind older adults’ interactions with unreliable online sources. The new findings provide evidence that while older adults are more likely than younger cohorts to encounter unreliable new sources, their susceptibility does not stem from an inability to identify fake content. Instead, heightened partisan biases and entrenched political identities appear to drive their involvement.
The role of the Internet in spreading misinformation has raised concerns worldwide, especially about the involvement of older people in unreliable content. Previous research has found that older Americans are disproportionately responsible for sharing dubious news, raising alarms about their vulnerability to online misinformation. Previous explanations often pointed to digital illiteracy, cognitive decline or social isolation among older adults as key factors.
However, the evidence has remained inconsistent. While older adults consume and share more dubious news, they often perform better than younger individuals at distinguishing between fake headlines in controlled experiments. To reconcile these conflicting findings, researchers designed a study that integrates survey data and real-world digital behavior to better understand the drivers behind older adults’ engagement with unreliable news.
“Others have documented that exposure to and involvement with unreliable news sources increases with age, and I think it is important to understand the information environment of older adults, an increasingly powerful and important segment of society,” the author said. research. Ben Lyonsan assistant professor of communications at the University of Utah.
The study used three nationally representative panel surveys of nearly 10,000 Americans conducted around the 2018 midterm elections. These surveys were combined with digital tracking data, which captured participants’ actual online behavior, including visits to websites identified as trustworthy, fake or partisan. were categorized. This method allowed the researchers to assess both participants’ ability to distinguish false information in controlled environments and their real-world engagement with low-quality news sources.
Survey tasks asked participants to rate the accuracy of various news headlines, including false, mainstream and highly partisan stories. False headlines were headlines that had been thoroughly fact-checked and found to be untrue. The highly partisan headlines, while based on actual events, were presented in a highly slanted and misleading manner.
The study also included a digital literacy intervention: participants were shown brief tips on how to identify fake news, and their discrimination skills were evaluated before and after this training. In addition to examining digital literacy, the researchers analyzed political variables, such as the participants’ partisan identity, the level of political interest and the degree of affective polarization (a strong emotional preference for the political party and aversion to the opposition).
The findings revealed a clear age-related difference in engagement with questionable news. Older adults were more likely to visit questionable websites and respond to hyper-partisan content. However, their involvement was not related to an inability to identify false news. In fact, the survey results showed that older adults were often better than younger participants at distinguishing the accuracy of both fake and mainstream news headlines. This challenges the common assumption that digital illiteracy among older Americans is the main reason for their greater interaction with unreliable news. Furthermore, the digital literacy intervention had similar effects across all age groups, suggesting that older adults are not exclusively deficient in this area.
Instead, the researchers identified partisan bias as a key factor driving older adults’ involvement in questionable news. Older participants showed stronger partisan leanings and were more likely to view headlines that aligned with their political beliefs as accurate. The researchers argued that these heightened partisan biases stem from deeply held political identities, which tend to become more calcified with age.
“Older adults share more misinformation online, but this is not because they lack digital literacy or other skills,” Lyons told PsyPost. “Instead, older adults have stronger party-political ties, which leads them to share more dubious news that denigrates their political opponents. Interventions aimed at tackling misinformation among this age group must take this into account.”
A particularly important discovery was the role of highly partisan news in this dynamic. While most previous research on disinformation has focused on completely false headlines, this study highlighted how highly partisan content — stories that are technically true but presented in a highly biased way — drives much of the engagement among older adults. By distinguishing between false and highly partisan news, the researchers were able to reconcile the apparent discrepancy between survey results (which show strong discrimination among older adults) and digital tracking data (which show high engagement with dubious news).
“I initially noticed a disconnect between engagement with misinformation, which older adults are more likely to do, and apparent belief in it, which does not seem to increase with age,” Lyons explains. “I wanted to understand the reason for this division.”
“Then I realized that we were studying these two questions in quite different ways. In surveys, researchers typically expose respondents to false news that is balanced in its partisan slant, with an equal number of items that favor Republicans and Democrats, for example. However, when we measure exposure or engagement in the wild, we are measuring behavior based on the actual supply of unreliable news outlets, which tends to skew far to the right.”
“Additionally, when we assess susceptibility to false news in surveys, we tend to use stories that have been verified to be false,” Lyons continued. “In the wild, we tend to measure exposure or engagement based on lists of sources that are generally unreliable, yet publish many stories that are not completely made up. From this data, I have found that accounting for these differences may help explain the discrepancy in the outcomes. It appears that older consumers’ engagement with dubious news is genuine and arises from news judgments made through a highly biased perceptual screen.”
Despite the robust methodology, the study has limitations. It focuses exclusively on political news and leaves unanswered questions about how to deal with disinformation on non-political topics. Furthermore, the findings are limited to the United States, although similar patterns may exist in other countries with polarized political climates.
Lyons is expanding this line of research into a book project that will further explore these dynamics, with the aim of informing public policy on disinformation interventions tailored to older audiences.
“I’m currently working on a book project on this subject,” he explained. “In this work, I plan to fully unravel this puzzle through replications and extensions of the current findings. My goal for this project is to not only make a meaningful contribution to theoretical discussions around disinformation and older adults, but also to shape public policy in this area, using the findings of this project as an opportunity to develop approaches to age-specific to discuss disinformation interventions.”
The study, “Partisanship and older Americans’ involvement in questionable political news”, was written by Benjamin Lyons, Jacob M. Montgomery and Jason Reifler.
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