“The so-called fake news are one of the evils that the liberalization of the public space for opinion and content creation has brought about thanks to social networks”
Nadia M. Brashier and Daniel L. Schacter, two Harvard University psychology professors, published a very interesting article this past May on the age of the people who shared the most fake news. They are the so-called fake news, one of the endemic evils brought about by the liberalization of the public space for opinion and content creation thanks to social networks. The article begins by trying to find explanations for the reason why false news is spread: a lesser habit in the use of social networks, the social changes that we experience when we get older and less attention to precision in communications stand out. on other reasons.
In addition to these general aspects, they offer generational data that I find interesting. Adults over 50 are responsible for 80% of the fake news spread on Twitter. Those over 65 read seven times more fake news than younger users. Another study also shows how the ability to distinguish fake photos decreases with age. These three very eloquent data are what have led me to title this article as “Age and fake news.”
We might think that sharing a news item does not imply that that person believes in it. Possibly many of those posts have comments to refute what they are reading. But the problem is that this dynamic in social networks only feeds the algorithms that are obsessed with understanding what is relevant to show it to other people. Hence, he always defends the urgent need to explain to society how algorithms work in social networks. Because many times one or one behaves thinking that we are in the town square, where it is good to communicate to the neighbors until the cancellation of false content. The problem is that social media metrics don’t understand those concepts very well.
Leaving aside any sociological explanation, this data is relevant in the year of the pandemic. The Avaaz team, a group in defense of human rights, published a report on the impact of disinformation in April 2020, at the height of when societies began to understand the magnitude of the problem. The content of ten Facebook pages that were spreading false news about covid-19 (you can imagine what it is, which I refuse to reproduce despite the fact that there is no algorithm here), had up to four times more visits than the ten most reliable sources on the matter (among others, the page of the World Health Organization). As of May, these fake pages had 3,800,000,000 views on Facebook. It is difficult to fight against such a tremendous number. This is even sadder when we know that up to 800 people died in the first three months of the pandemic after the interference of products that apparently cured them (a remedy, of course, that they had read in these spaces).
And what can be done to stop all this? A quick and intuitive answer goes through the ban. Let Facebook censor them. As always, this is not so easy and it confronts us with the eternal dilemma between the right to information and freedom of opinion. Another alternative, which Facebook has already introduced in fact, is to give this disinformation a lower priority than content generated by trusted sites (whatever the algorithm or its verifiers consider). Facebook has recently reported that up to a total of 98 million content was labeled as possibly “false” between the months of April to June of this 2020. Twitter is on the same path: the recent North American elections showed us how even messages from Trump were labeled as of doubtful credibility. Another solution, often cited as well, is through education. But that is difficult to achieve in the short term. And misinformation, it begins to be another pandemic.
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