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I do wonder how much the internet is to blame with a lot of the older folks not understanding how algorithms work and not understanding just how easy it is to fall into a complete echo chamber online and just not notice" There is a ton of information regarding this. Attributed primarily to the Digital Literacy Gap.
One thing is that we can see almost every "like" "share" copy/paste etc. of almost every action on the internet so it gets easier to tell who is accepting the most information.
Averaging out the last 5 years of data regarding shares, likes etc. and things like copy/paste to forums like this the average age for accepting and sharing blatantly false information is 62. By blatantly false I mean information that is admitted and shown to be false by the people that fabricated it.
The latest whistleblower content proved 12 people are responsible for 73% of all anti-vaccine content on Facebook. Again, 73% of vaccine content will be posted by these people using AI spambot tech to fabricate "information". Logistic and count components of negative binomial logit hurdle predicting counter-media content sharing on Facebook indicates millions and millions of data-points showing this. Of course most false content news-based were shared by Title of the content and not by clicking the actual link.
Talking to my younger cousins, and looking at meta-data it is pretty clear most people, 30 or younger tend to not believe most everything online, or at least more skeptical of the things they see. In my cousins case they, just for fun, make up posts, create websites and fill them with completely untrue garbage to get people riled up. It's their version of egging a house. Most people 30 and up just outgrow this.
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older users skewed the findings: 11 percent of users older than 65 shared a hoax, while just 3 percent of users 18 to 29 did. Facebook users ages 65 and older shared more than twice as many fake news articles than the next-oldest age group of 45 to 65, and nearly seven times as many fake news articles as the youngest age group (18 to 29).
https://www.statista.com/topics/3251/fake-news/#dossierKeyfigureshttps://www.theverge.com/2019/1/9/18174631/old-people-fake-news-facebook-shar... There are of course outliers, such as SARS information where the demographic is reversed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/technology/young-people-more-likely-to-bel...