Why Do Older People Tend to Shar

With social media, fake news is spreading faster and faster. Who on earth is spreading false news and what do these people have in common? A study published in January ，2019 in the Journal Science Advances announces an age-specific feature that older people over 65 are the main players in transmitting false news. The Wechat Public Number "Global Science" translated the content of the research.

Around the 2016 U.S. election, researchers at New York University and Princeton University installed an application for more than 1,300 people to track their shared data, their posts and pages of interest. It was found that about 8.5% of them shared links to false news.

Through further analysis, the researchers believe that age may be the best indicator （指标）of the people who share false news. Among them, 11% of users over 65 share false news links, while only 3% of users between 18 and 29 share false news links. In terms of the number of false news sharing, people over 65 are nearly seven times as likely as those from 18 to 29 years old. Researchers also studied differences in gender, race and income, but found no significant difference in sharing false news.

Why is it easy for older people to share false news? Researchers think there may be two reasons.

First, a series of previous studies have shown that people aged 60 lack the digital media literacy （数字媒体素养）necessary to judge the authenticity of online news. "Older people may not be able to easily distinguish facts and lies on social networks as other people do."

Secondly, from the perspective of cognitive and social psychology, aging has a negative impact on cognition and memory. According to this theory, memory deteriorates with age, which makes it difficult for older people to resist the "illusory truth effect". That is to say, they are willing to believe that information is correct when they are repeatedly exposed to certain types of information. When assessing the truth, they are more willing to judge by their familiarity than to conduct rational analysis. Therefore, the more complex the information environment, the more popular the error information, the more serious the effect.

That's why it's so easy for older people to share false news. I hope it's enlightening for you.