9 ms·

It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful, so perhaps don't have the same "this may not be true" skepticism that you

by Liquix 8y ago

It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful, so perhaps don't have the same "this may not be true" skepticism that younger generations have.

taeric 8y ago
Sorta. Propaganda is not a new thing.
- api 8y ago
  No, but I think the parent is correct. I grew up with the Internet. I was reading wacky conspiracy theories in my teens. It made me more skeptical of virtually anything I see in print since I learned how easy it is to create a BS narrative and fit details into it. I also learned what propaganda is, how it works, and how prevalent it is. Older generations grew up with a one-way opaque screen preaching to them. Obviously not everything on that screen was true, but when it was called "news" it was held to some standard and so was probably more likely to be true than not. They also had no way of delving deeper, no way of querying or seeking out an alternative opinion or discussing it with other members of the audience. That generation grew up trusting things on screens.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    On the other other hand, I’ve seen a lot of people thinking they can determine the truth by weighing various commentators against each other and deciding which seems more likely, which I’ve just found Isaac Asimov used in Foundation (1951!) to characterise attitudes of decline. Not sure I’ve noticed a pattern, age or otherwise, with such attitudes.
  - taeric 8y ago
    I think I agree, but you are probably over stating how many of them grew up with television. Now, the same points generally hold with radio, as well. I was just saying that propaganda is not new. Of course, I don't know that this research is claiming these folks are the most misinformed. So, I could be taking it in a pointless direction, as well.
  - burfog 8y ago
    Older generations didn't trust things on screens. They cursed at things on screens. They could and did seek alternative opinions, though often it cost more. Subscribing to newsletters has long been an option. For example, the John Birch Society's TheNewAmerican was created in 1985 as the merger of two older newsletters that date to 1956 and 1965. It's now available at https://www.thenewamerican.com/ https://www.thenewamerican.com/ but you can still get the print version delivered to your house twice a month.
    - taeric 8y ago
      This is in stark contrast to the evidence of the article. That some folks from older generations did this, I can accept. But you will need more data than this to counter the facts presented in the article, no?
      - burfog 8y ago
        The facts misconstrued in the article: older people are more likely to spread news found on a set of 21 conservative web sites identified by BuzzFeed. A better way to interpret those facts: older people lean conservative. The research showed that political outlook was a far better way to predict sharing these web sites than age or even party affiliation.
        taeric 8y ago
        Is this just a slant saying that conservatives share more false news? That feels dangerous.
        burfog 8y ago
        It's something like that. The study picked conservative news sites, then showed that various groups were more or less likely to spread that news. The most obvious finding in the study is that conservatives were more likely to spread this news, but it was also found that old people were more likely to spread it. The article focused on the old people.
stevenwoo 8y ago
The audience for the Fox News channel skew older heavily and Rupert Murdoch made no secret Fox News was created solely for the purpose of airing a right wing narrative, all facts aside. The article says a bland both sides do it objectivity worthy of NPR then states a 4:1 ratio in GOP/Democratic favouring stories, signficantly almost all of them were to the benefit of Donald Trump in the runup/immediately after the 2016 election.
psychometry 8y ago
Also, the older an American is, the less education they're likely to have received [1]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/785618/educational-attainment-by-age-group-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/785618/educational-attai...
- cafard 8y ago
  Well, the fewer years of schooling they are likely to have received. (Full disclosure: 63 years old, two degrees.)
- arayh 8y ago
  Although the study mentions that older people share more fake news regardless of education.
agumonkey 8y ago
Also age causes fatigue and need for emotional response first, which leads to sharing whatever to discuss worrying or angering matter.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful, No, they grew up in a time when media distortion was less likely to be revealed because the major media was narrower and it's ideological biases more consistent, and voices outside the major media had major barriers to reaching any substantial audience.
- arayh 8y ago
  I agree. Younger people are more likely to have experienced more fake news being revealed as falsified information in many forms, including fake social media accounts, photoshopped images and modified videos. I feel that this induces greater skepticism and awareness of fake news.
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  It's both. There was spin, but there also weren't dedicated propaganda outlets (e.g., Fox News). You are right, though -- it took a lot of work to get content to a large audience. That reduced the number of malicious agents who could and the speed with which they could successfully gain broad influence.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Murdoch propaganda press is not a new thing by a long way. Remember Hillsborough.
  - zrobotics 8y ago
    >>There was spin, but there also weren't dedicated propaganda outlets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst While I agree that journalism is in crisis, this isn't the first time. While Hearst was famous for yellow journalism, his papers weren't the only ones, and often the emotional sensationalism was intended to support a particular candidate (or denounce their opponent).
    - stochastic_monk 8y ago
gdulli 8y ago
Also, politics aside, the younger generation has some sophistication about domain names (which are essentially their news sources) in general. They know a domain that's been around vs. one like justice-freedom-eagle.usa that looks like a default wordpress template with stock clip art. They may get their news from aggregators and live in their respective bubbles, but they're more likely to see through a shady looking site with headlines like "Pope endorses Trump" or "Hillary leads Trump away in handcuffs." As much as the respective sides want to believe those things.
- seattle_spring 8y ago
  > the younger generation has some sophistication about domain names (which are essentially their news sources) in general. Is that really true though? A lot of the younger folks on my Facebook share stuff from things like "natural-truth-health.net" or "gmo-truth-toxic.tk" or "naturalnews.com".
  - magduf 8y ago
    Yeah, the "natural health" thing is an actual religion these days, and lots of younger people buy into it.
    - davidkellis 8y ago
      Politics is religion nowadays as well.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        It always has been. Quite often very literally.
  - gdulli 8y ago
    It makes sense that fewer people who grew up with the internet would be fooled. But there will still be people of every age who lack the sophistication.
ardy42 8y ago
> It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful Many of the elderly become more gullible as they reach advanced age, which is the same reason con-men target them with scams.
asabjorn 8y ago
Do you have a link to the source used to classify some news as fake and other news as real in this paper? How do we know liberal cohorts sources are any more reliable? Eg vox and cnn has a similar type of tilt as breutbart and fox. Without validating that the definition does not preclude the conclusion I don’t see how we can trust it’s conclusikn.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  Not linked to in the verge article for whatever reason, but you can find the study here: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586.full http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586.full >Posts containing links to external websites are cross-referenced against lists of fake news publishers built by journalists and academics. Here, we mainly use measures constructed by reference to the list by Silverman (7), but in the Supplementary Materials, we show that the main results hold when alternate lists are used, such as that used by peer-reviewed studies (2). It's domain level, not article. You can follow the links in the paper to see how those groups come up with these lists.
  - asabjorn 8y ago
    soundwave106 replied in another message with the sources. Buzzfeed seems to be the primary source of the classifications, a far-left organization, so the conclusion is with all likelihood predetermined by politically motivated definitions of fake news. These are the classification sources according to soundwave106: A) The primary source was a list of fake news sites compiled by Buzzfeed Media [1] B) The study was cross-checked with a list of sites from a peer reviewed paper (H. Allcott, M. Gentzkow, Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. J. Econ. Perspect. 31, 211–236 (2017)) and according to the paper was similar to buzzfeed suggesting an ideological tilt. There is some additional methodology in the study link. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fa...
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      Do you have any specific examples of bias?
trumped 8y ago
no mainstream media is really reliable/truthful... you have to watch news from both sides to give you a clue of what the truth is... of course it depends on the subject... they won't lie/distort the truth about 1+1=2 for example.

by Liquix 8y ago

It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful, so perhaps don't have the same "this may not be true" skepticism that younger generations have.

taeric 8y ago

Sorta. Propaganda is not a new thing.

api 8y ago
No, but I think the parent is correct. I grew up with the Internet. I was reading wacky conspiracy theories in my teens. It made me more skeptical of virtually anything I see in print since I learned how easy it is to create a BS narrative and fit details into it. I also learned what propaganda is, how it works, and how prevalent it is. Older generations grew up with a one-way opaque screen preaching to them. Obviously not everything on that screen was true, but when it was called "news" it was held to some standard and so was probably more likely to be true than not. They also had no way of delving deeper, no way of querying or seeking out an alternative opinion or discussing it with other members of the audience. That generation grew up trusting things on screens.
- ben_w 8y ago
  On the other other hand, I’ve seen a lot of people thinking they can determine the truth by weighing various commentators against each other and deciding which seems more likely, which I’ve just found Isaac Asimov used in Foundation (1951!) to characterise attitudes of decline. Not sure I’ve noticed a pattern, age or otherwise, with such attitudes.
- taeric 8y ago
  I think I agree, but you are probably over stating how many of them grew up with television. Now, the same points generally hold with radio, as well. I was just saying that propaganda is not new. Of course, I don't know that this research is claiming these folks are the most misinformed. So, I could be taking it in a pointless direction, as well.
- burfog 8y ago
  Older generations didn't trust things on screens. They cursed at things on screens. They could and did seek alternative opinions, though often it cost more. Subscribing to newsletters has long been an option. For example, the John Birch Society's TheNewAmerican was created in 1985 as the merger of two older newsletters that date to 1956 and 1965. It's now available at https://www.thenewamerican.com/ https://www.thenewamerican.com/ but you can still get the print version delivered to your house twice a month.
  - taeric 8y ago
    This is in stark contrast to the evidence of the article. That some folks from older generations did this, I can accept. But you will need more data than this to counter the facts presented in the article, no?
    - burfog 8y ago
      The facts misconstrued in the article: older people are more likely to spread news found on a set of 21 conservative web sites identified by BuzzFeed. A better way to interpret those facts: older people lean conservative. The research showed that political outlook was a far better way to predict sharing these web sites than age or even party affiliation.
      - taeric 8y ago
        Is this just a slant saying that conservatives share more false news? That feels dangerous.
        burfog 8y ago
        It's something like that. The study picked conservative news sites, then showed that various groups were more or less likely to spread that news. The most obvious finding in the study is that conservatives were more likely to spread this news, but it was also found that old people were more likely to spread it. The article focused on the old people.

stevenwoo 8y ago

The audience for the Fox News channel skew older heavily and Rupert Murdoch made no secret Fox News was created solely for the purpose of airing a right wing narrative, all facts aside. The article says a bland both sides do it objectivity worthy of NPR then states a 4:1 ratio in GOP/Democratic favouring stories, signficantly almost all of them were to the benefit of Donald Trump in the runup/immediately after the 2016 election.

psychometry 8y ago

Also, the older an American is, the less education they're likely to have received [1]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/785618/educational-attainment-by-age-group-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/785618/educational-attai...

cafard 8y ago
Well, the fewer years of schooling they are likely to have received. (Full disclosure: 63 years old, two degrees.)
arayh 8y ago
Although the study mentions that older people share more fake news regardless of education.

agumonkey 8y ago

Also age causes fatigue and need for emotional response first, which leads to sharing whatever to discuss worrying or angering matter.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful, No, they grew up in a time when media distortion was less likely to be revealed because the major media was narrower and it's ideological biases more consistent, and voices outside the major media had major barriers to reaching any substantial audience.

arayh 8y ago
I agree. Younger people are more likely to have experienced more fake news being revealed as falsified information in many forms, including fake social media accounts, photoshopped images and modified videos. I feel that this induces greater skepticism and awareness of fake news.
stochastic_monk 8y ago
It's both. There was spin, but there also weren't dedicated propaganda outlets (e.g., Fox News). You are right, though -- it took a lot of work to get content to a large audience. That reduced the number of malicious agents who could and the speed with which they could successfully gain broad influence.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Murdoch propaganda press is not a new thing by a long way. Remember Hillsborough.
- zrobotics 8y ago
  >>There was spin, but there also weren't dedicated propaganda outlets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst While I agree that journalism is in crisis, this isn't the first time. While Hearst was famous for yellow journalism, his papers weren't the only ones, and often the emotional sensationalism was intended to support a particular candidate (or denounce their opponent).
  - stochastic_monk 8y ago

gdulli 8y ago

Also, politics aside, the younger generation has some sophistication about domain names (which are essentially their news sources) in general. They know a domain that's been around vs. one like justice-freedom-eagle.usa that looks like a default wordpress template with stock clip art. They may get their news from aggregators and live in their respective bubbles, but they're more likely to see through a shady looking site with headlines like "Pope endorses Trump" or "Hillary leads Trump away in handcuffs." As much as the respective sides want to believe those things.

seattle_spring 8y ago
> the younger generation has some sophistication about domain names (which are essentially their news sources) in general. Is that really true though? A lot of the younger folks on my Facebook share stuff from things like "natural-truth-health.net" or "gmo-truth-toxic.tk" or "naturalnews.com".
- magduf 8y ago
  Yeah, the "natural health" thing is an actual religion these days, and lots of younger people buy into it.
  - davidkellis 8y ago
    Politics is religion nowadays as well.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      It always has been. Quite often very literally.
- gdulli 8y ago
  It makes sense that fewer people who grew up with the internet would be fooled. But there will still be people of every age who lack the sophistication.

ardy42 8y ago

> It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful Many of the elderly become more gullible as they reach advanced age, which is the same reason con-men target them with scams.

asabjorn 8y ago

Do you have a link to the source used to classify some news as fake and other news as real in this paper? How do we know liberal cohorts sources are any more reliable? Eg vox and cnn has a similar type of tilt as breutbart and fox. Without validating that the definition does not preclude the conclusion I don’t see how we can trust it’s conclusikn.

EpicEng 8y ago
Not linked to in the verge article for whatever reason, but you can find the study here: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586.full http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586.full >Posts containing links to external websites are cross-referenced against lists of fake news publishers built by journalists and academics. Here, we mainly use measures constructed by reference to the list by Silverman (7), but in the Supplementary Materials, we show that the main results hold when alternate lists are used, such as that used by peer-reviewed studies (2). It's domain level, not article. You can follow the links in the paper to see how those groups come up with these lists.
- asabjorn 8y ago
  soundwave106 replied in another message with the sources. Buzzfeed seems to be the primary source of the classifications, a far-left organization, so the conclusion is with all likelihood predetermined by politically motivated definitions of fake news. These are the classification sources according to soundwave106: A) The primary source was a list of fake news sites compiled by Buzzfeed Media [1] B) The study was cross-checked with a list of sites from a peer reviewed paper (H. Allcott, M. Gentzkow, Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. J. Econ. Perspect. 31, 211–236 (2017)) and according to the paper was similar to buzzfeed suggesting an ideological tilt. There is some additional methodology in the study link. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fa...
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    Do you have any specific examples of bias?

trumped 8y ago

no mainstream media is really reliable/truthful... you have to watch news from both sides to give you a clue of what the truth is... of course it depends on the subject... they won't lie/distort the truth about 1+1=2 for example.