Partisanship and older Americans’ engagement with dubious political news

Abstract

Studies based on digital trace data show that older Americans visit and share dubious news sources far more often than younger cohorts, tendencies often attributed to lower levels of digital literacy. At the same time, survey experiments show that older Americans are no worse, if not better, at discerning between false and accurate news. If older Americans can identify misleading news content equally well, why are they still more likely to engage with it in observational settings? In this article, we combine survey measures and digital trace data for three nationally representative samples (N=9,944) to argue that the existing literature over-emphasizes the importance of factors like digital literacy relative to standard political variables such as political interest and partisanship, factors known to increase across the lifespan. Calcified partisanship in particular makes older Americans vulnerable to hyperpartisan news --- which is highly slanted but not verified as explicitly false. High rates of engagement with this category of content, which has been examined in survey studies of older citizens less regularly in the literature, may partially explain the high rates of engagement with dubious news domains in behavioral trace data. In all, our findings have important implications for how we understand --- and might intervene to reduce --- high engagement among this cohort with dubious news.

Older Americans are more vulnerable to prior exposure effects in news evaluation

“…Finally, it is worth examining the role of headline congeniality, which is controlled for in the analyses above. In further supplemental analyses available in the OSF repository, I first document a positive effect of headline congeniality on perceived accuracy, which notably increases with age (see also Lyons et al, 2023). The effects of prior exposure are also stronger for congenial headlines.…”

“…Why might older adults identify false news in surveys but fall for it "in the wild?" There are likely multiple factors at play, ranging from social changes across the lifespan (Brashier & Schacter, 2020) to changing orientations to politics (Lyons et al, 2023) to cognitive declines (e.g., in memory) (Brashier & Schacter, 2020). In this paper, I focus on one potential contributor.…”

“…In other words, current wisdom suggests I can best help older news users by focusing on skills for identifying misinformation online. However, because older users are well equipped to spot misinformation in the first place (Brashier & Schacter, 2020) and literacy training is not more effective among these users (which suggests they are not at a comparative deficit in such skills) (Lyons et al, 2023), explicitly communicating the effects of repetition might be one way to supplement training modules. In sum, interventions aimed at older news consumers could be modified to include information about the effects of repeated exposure, which might boost metacognitive awareness and lead to debiasing (for potential limitations of this approach, see Kristal & Stanos, 2021).…”