As a result, they assembled a limited list of sites that reliably published fake content, based on various sources, including reporting from BuzzFeed News. They found that Republicans and those who identified as “very conservative” tended to share the most news from questionable sources. For one, seniors, having come of age well before computers were ubiquitous, may lack the digital media literacy required to reliably suss out fake sources. The authors did not have access to users’ news feeds, so they could not investigate whether those who shared fake news more were also exposed to it more by friends and family. And while age seemed to predict the level of misinformation a user shared, the authors found no such correlation by sex, race, education or income.

Source: New York Times January 10, 2019 21:29 UTC