Average Number of Fake News Stories Shared on Facebook, by Age Group
Source: Guess, Andrew, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua Tucker. Less Than You Think: Prevalence and Predictions of Fake News Dissemination on Facebook (New York: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2019)
Topic: Disinformation
Reference year: 2019
Geographical area: United States
Method: Survey (N=5000)
Link to original document:
advances.sciencemag.org
The chart shows that that the oldest Americans, especially those over 65, were more likely to share fake news to their Facebook friends. This is true even when holding other characteristics—including education, ideology, and partisanship—constant. The coefficient on “Age over 65” implies that being in the oldest age group was associated with sharing nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains on Facebook as those in the youngest age group, or about 2.3 times as many as those in the next-oldest age group, holding the effect of ideology, education, and the total number of web links shared constant.