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Older Adults' Experiences with Misinformation on Social Media by Sharevski, Filipo; Loop, Jennifer Vander is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Older Adults' Experiences with Misinformation on Social Media about?

Older adults habitually encounter misinformation on social media, but there is little knowledge about their experiences with it. In this study, we combined a qualitative survey (n=119) with in-depth interviews (n=21) to investigate how older adults in America conceptualize, discern, and contextualize social media misinformation. As misinformation on social media in the past was driven towards influencing voting outcomes, we were particularly interested to approach our study from a voting intention perspective. We found that 62% of the participants intending to vote Democrat saw a manipulative political purpose behind the spread of misinformation while only 5% of those intending to vote Republican believed misinformation has a political dissent purpose. Regardless of the voting intentions, most participants relied on source heuristics combined with fact-checking to discern truth from misinformation on social media. The biggest concern about the misinformation, among all the participants, was that it increasingly leads to biased reasoning influenced by personal values and feelings instead of reasoning based on objective evidence. The participants intending to vote Democrat were in 74

Author

Sharevski, Filipo; Loop, Jennifer Vander

Published

2023

Language

EN