Why This Matters

OLDER ADULTS STRUGGLE WITH DIGITAL MEDIA LITERACY

In 2019, Guess, Nagler, and Tucker released findings that indicated Baby Boomers (those born from 1946 to 1964) and people older than 65 (The Silent Generation) were among the most likely to share fake news online.

With Boomers and older generations sharing more fake news than other voting-age generations, sites like AARP and Facebook attempted to combat fake news by creating lists to help readers identify fake news (AARP, 2017; “Tips to Spot False News”, 2019). However, these sites do not completely address the issue of "fake news": Facebook doesn't actually define “false news” (avoiding the term “fake news” altogether), making the term abstract and open to interpretation. AARP’s article on identifying fake news, while informative, was met with comments that suggested its article was too “left-leaning” and fake news itself.

There are plenty of other websites and resources that attempt to define, summarize, and even educate readers about fake news, but what I discovered was that there was not much of a difference between how the information was delivered to different age groups and generations.

Consuming news online, especially for politically engaged individuals, has an effect on politics. The aim of this research is not to sway you in a particular political direction, but to help you become more aware of the ways in which consuming information online shapes the way you see the world around you.

Towner and Munoz (2016), note that “much of the political marketing research looks exclusively at the Millennial age cohort, ignoring other age groups, particularly Baby Boomers” (p.1). However, U.S. Census data (File, 2017) indicates that it is Baby Boomers and older age groups that are most politically engaged. This, along Guess et al.’s finding that older generations are more likely to share fake news offers a startling exigency: whereas Guess et al.’s findings are mainly quantitative, there is not necessarily rich qualitative data on how Baby Boomers and older generations view and determine the legitimacy of the news they encounter online. Moreover, Lee (2018) argues that a lack of digital media literacy makes older generations especially “vulnerable” to “online risks” which include (but are not limited to) the spread of fake news and misinformation (p. 460).

Politically-motivated individuals are more likely to believe what a politically-motivated blog/website says than a more neutral or biased source (Towner and Munoz, 2017, p.5)

However, politically-motivated Facebook pages may be run by individuals who are interested purely in profits or even be facilitated by users in other countries. In 2018, for example, Facebook claimed to have removed several politically-motivated accounts that used “tools and techniques” that were “similar to those used by the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-linked group that was at the center of an indictment this year [2018] alleging interference in the 2016 presidential election” (Fandos & Roose, 2018). Political blogs that people can share and see on Facebook might be run by single individuals who do not run through the same fact-checking process or have the same journalistic standards as traditional mainstream media. In consequence, political accounts and sites that are not necessarily truthful can easily be viewed as legitimate by politically engaged readers.

This becomes a problem for Baby Boomers and older generations specifically, who are both the most politically engaged age groups but also the age groups likeliest to share fake news online.

Unfortunately, it is often difficult to identify what misinformation or “fake news” is. Not only can various media pages define “fake news” differently from one another, but individuals also define it differently, and their definitions can often simply reinforce viewpoints they already have.

AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) claims that fake news is not a “political phenomenon” but “produced simply to make money” (AARP, 2017). They also offer readers a list of tips for determining the credibility of a source and advise that readers use websites like Snopes and Factcheck.org to check the reliability of a news story. President Trump used the term “fake news” thirty-five times in the month of August, 2019, sometimes using the term to simply refer to the mainstream media and other times calling out specific stories or news organizations like CNN, NBC, and The Washington Post (Trump Twitter Archive). This sentiment of equating mainstream media with “fake news” is repeated in the comments section of an AARP article on determining fake news, with several commenters noting the AARP’s “left-leaning” tendencies or that the article itself is “fake news” (AARP, 2017).

When “fake news” lacks a stable definition, it becomes easier for individuals who want to target social media users to create divisive posts that further destabilize what fake news is, and in consequence, can destabilize legitimate news as well. Gunther, Beck, and Nisbet (2018) argue that in the 2016 Presidential election, “fake news most likely did have a substantial impact on the voting decisions of a strategically important set of voters—those who voted for Barack Obama in 2012” (1). These studies suggest a correlation between news consumption and voting and demonstrates that not only legitimate but also fake news can change the voting decisions of individuals.

These findings ultimately illustrate a need for to determine what can be done in order to help older adults become more capable of talking about and determining the legitimacy of news they encounter on social media, particularly news of a political nature. Many of the findings regarding fake news and Boomers’ sharing of news leaves out information like why Baby Boomers and older generations are more likely to share fake news, how they define fake news, and how they determine the legitimacy of news they encounter online.

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