Baby Boomers Turn Out Sharing Fake News Online Much More Than Gen Y

Fake news seems to be an indispensable element on the social network like Facebook or WhatsApp. Even in your family group, you must see it many times. What is the reason behind it?

The answer is, in fact, because a lot of older people are spreading misinformation at a faster speed than the young.

In recent days, researchers at the two famous universities including New York University and Princeton University published a study showing that those who were born in the period of 1950 – 1969, also known as baby boomers, often share fake news on the social network. It comes as a surprise that the number of their shares is much higher than that of millennials or Generation Y (the term indicates those who were born from 1980 to the early 2000s).

According to the study, younger users tend to deliver fewer fake news than those who are beyond 65 and have conservative ideologies. The number of shares of users beyond 65 is seven times as high as that of users from 30 to 44, and two times as high as that of users from 45 to 65.

According to the authors,

They collected data after observing 3500 Facebook non-users and users. The authors analyzed these participants’ followed pages and shared articles of news, which were related to the Presidential election in 2016.

While only 3% of users from 18 to 29 shared articles as fake news, up to 11% of users beyond 65 did that. One of the authors Andrew Guess said,

However, the reasons why older people are sharing so many fake news haven’t been detected. Maybe they don’t know how to differentiate the fake news from the real news.