With the Cambridge Analytica scandal rumbling on, the issue of whether fake news swayed key recent elections, including the American presidential election, has reached the top of the public consciousness.  A recent study from Princeton University set out to discover just how many Americans might have forwarded fake news on Facebook during the campaign.

The study finds that relatively few people shared fake news during the campaign, but among those that did, the over 65s were a disproportionate number.

The researchers gathered data from a panel survey conducted by YouGov, which revealed that just 8.5% of people actually shared links from supposedly fake news sites on social networking sites, such as Facebook.  What is perhaps most interesting however is who was most likely to do the sharing.

For instance, just 3% of those aged between 18-29 were found to have shared fake news, but this figure rose to 11% of those over 65.  What’s more, this difference seemed to cross ideological lines, with both conservatives and liberals guilty.

“If seniors are more likely to share fake news than younger people, then there are important implications for how we might design interventions to reduce the spread of fake news,” the authors explain.

Spotting fake news

The researchers believe that these differences could be explained by the fundamental differences in digital skills between the age groups that make it harder for older people to spot fake news.  They believe that the findings underline the importance of teaching digital literacy both in schools but also across society so that citizens are better able to discern fact from fiction.

The work is interesting because it found that education, income and gender were not strong determinants of someone’s likelihood of spreading fake news.  There did appear to be more likelihood of Republicans sharing fake news than Democrats however, with 18% of the former doing so versus just 4% of the latter.

The researchers are at pains to point out that it would be unwise to suggest there are ideological factors behind this pattern however, as it might instead simply be that most of the fake news generated during the campaign was pro Trump and/or anti Clinton.

“This is consistent with the pro-Trump slant of most fake news articles produced during the 2016 campaign,” they say, “and of the tendency of respondents to share articles they agree with, and thus might not represent a greater tendency of conservatives to share fake news than liberals conditional on being exposed to it.”