Older people are the main consumers of dubious information, according to much of the scientific evidence. “All the studies in this field that I know of show this,” says Mariken van der Velden, a professor at the Free University of Amsterdam. The most widespread reason until now for this credulity was their lower digital capacity, although the evidence was not definitive. Now a new study assures that the main reason is another: his deep and stagnant ideological conviction.
“Older people do share more misinformation online, but it’s not because they lack digital skills, they actually have stronger partisan ties and care about whether their side comes out well and the other side comes out badly,” says Ben Lyons, a professor of the University of Utah and co-author of the new article, published in Public Opinion Quarterly.
The fragmentation of the media landscape and the creation of dozens of hyper-partisan media outlets and their network speakers have allowed the emergence of a new offer that older people see with more interest, especially if they are right-wing: “In subsequent work, I have discovered that older people They tend to believe explicitly fake news when it is right-wing, but they are prone to detect left-wing fake news. This may imply the ability to reject fake news only if its political inclination is ignored,” says Lyons. The lack of digital skill would, therefore, come after ideology: fake news is only detected if it harms one’s own ideas.
This finding would coincide with the 2023 macro study that found that the majority of Facebook misinformation was consumed by conservatives. The increase in hyperpartisan media would meet a demand that older people especially value: “These websites fill a demand for news that discredits the left, something that the other side does not need because the majority of media are rather center-left. and they already publish quite a lot of news that criticizes conservatives here in the United States,” says Lyons.
All of this does not mean that the difficulty in understanding digital codes is not also a reason for older people to believe more in all this amalgamation of dubious news or news interpreted with a strong partisan bias. There are many readers who might be more digitally savvy, but that alone doesn’t necessarily explain the patterns we tend to find in age differences.
The scientific community that analyzes these details is debating why older people are more likely to fall for dubious news and it seems that stronger political convictions prevail as the central cause. There is plenty of research showing that confirmation bias (only accepting what confirms our prejudices) is a strong predictor of news selection.
But the lack of digital skills can also mean that older people are less aware of information that does not come from journalistic sources. If something looks like news, they are more likely to believe it is. “It is very difficult to separate these two reasons,” says Van der Linden. “But a lack of digital skills is not a weak explanation, as it implies a broader pattern than just believing misinformation. This group is also more likely to believe that ‘the bank asks for their credit card information,’” he adds.
