Helping seniors get wise to fake news seen online
Lindsay Dinawasn’t fooled by a photo on Facebook that supposedly showedmasses of dolphins frolicking in the canals of Venice.
Dina, 75, ventured onto the social media platform roughly a decade ago, and has developed some savvy. She mostly shares information fromestablished news organizations. She knows howto use Snopes.com, the fact-checking site.
Still, she said, “I’ve seen things and thought, ‘ Well, that’s not true.’ ” But Iwasn’t sure how to verify that it wasn’t.”
To Dina, a retiree in Easton, Connecticut, the internet can still feel like a hazardous place. Twice, online scammers have relieved her of small sums of money.
Atrue-blueDemocrat, she has passed along political stories from CNN and NBC but also posts fromImpeach Trump, whose sponsoring organizationhasearnedpoor truthfulness ratings from PolitiFact.
So Dina was delighted to learn that MediaWise for Seniors, aprojectofthePoynter Institute, has offered free online courses to help older Americans detect and combat online misinformation. She enrolled and begins her training in a couple ofweeks.
TheMediaWise digital literacyprogram, which began in 2018 with funding from Google, initially focused on teenagers and college students. Recently, said Katy Byron, the program manager, “we chose to make a big demographic jump.”
“There was a desperate need to educate this older age group, not only because of the election but because of the coronavirus,” she said.
The online behavior of older Americans during the last presidential campaign alarmed scientistswho study communications, politics and technology.
Considerwhat happened in 2016 on Facebook, the platform that adults over 65 are most likely to use. Researchers from Princeton and New York University determined that sharing articles from“fake news” sources— outlets that propagate false or misleading content masquerading as legitimate news — was rare.
But thosewho did engage with such outlets were far more likely to be older than 65
study of Twitter during the final month of the 2016 campaign similarly found that fake news purveyors amounted to a small share of all the political sources in an individual’s feed — about 1%. But older users were much more likely to engage with fake sources, and those over 50 were overrepresented among the “supersharers” responsible for disseminating 80% of fake content.
Such findings stirred particularconcernbecauseolder adults are far more likely to register and vote than
younger cohorts.
“They have an outsized effect on our democracy,” Nadia Brashier, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Harvard University said of older adults.
Brashier rejects the notion that older people’s participation in misinformation stems from age-related cognitive losses. “Outside the social media environment, we often see that older adults are more discerning than younger ones,” she said, pointing to studies.
Moreover, Brashier said, “older adults have a lotmore knowledge, facts about the world, especially political facts.” Thathelps themresist false claims that contradict what they know, she said.
But on social media platforms, it’s a different story. Although many older adults use those platforms quite adeptly, Brashier said, “there seems to be something specific about scrolling through Facebook or Twitter” that makes them more vulnerable to misinformation.
Jeff Hancock, a psychologist at Stanford University, said, “Online, they have a lot less experience and are less likely to know what’s dangerous,” he said.