By some estimates, the social media multiverse has now enveloped more than 5 billion people with its eclectic mix of cute cat videos, envy-inducing vacation photos, blistering vitriol, and a seemingly endless torrent of misinformation. And while social scientists seem to mostly worry about its toxic effects on the mental health of young people, I’ve recently been struck by research focusing more closely on older adults and their ability to parse the tsunami of suspect info inundating their laptops and phones each day.
Citing a report from the World Economic Forum that called political misinformation one of the greatest global risks in the coming two years, Mubashir Sultan, PhD, and his team from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development set out to identify the various factors that influence an individual’s susceptibility to deepfakes, hoaxes, and scams. What they learned about seniors was both slightly reassuring and curiously paradoxical.
Reviewing 31 studies involving more than 11,500 U.S. participants of all ages, the researchers concluded that two factors — age and analytical thinking skills — were most influential in an individual’s ability to discern online facts from fiction. Education levels, political identity, and gender, among other factors, were much less instrumental. And the ability of seniors to sniff out misinformation was particularly noteworthy.
“While older adults are often considered to be more digitally naive, our findings show that this does not thwart their ability, possibly built up and fostered in the offline world, to accurately discern between true and false news,” Sultan writes in the journal PNAS. “Older adults were also more likely to classify news headlines as false, which can be interpreted as a cautious approach.” More research will be needed to explain whether their ability to identify misinformation is a product of accumulated knowledge, news consumption patterns, or more subtle factors, researchers note.
Further studies might also help clarify a peculiar paradox: Why does such a discerning cohort tend to share online hoaxes more frequently than younger participants? “Despite their higher discrimination ability,” Sultan asks, “what distracts adults — particularly older adults — from news veracity enough for them to end up sharing (the most) false news?”
While we await more clues to that particular behavior, there remains plenty of evidence to suggest that even the most careful seniors still fall prey to online scam artists. “It’s a multimillion-dollar business, defrauding Americans,” Darren Linvill, PhD, a Clemson University professor who studies misinformation and its effect on older adults, tells The Washington Post. “And a lot of it is health.”
Reporter Joanne Kenen highlights the case of Lynn Garside, a retired art teacher in Gentry, Ark. Garside says she often fact-checks online claims when her instincts warn her of fraud, but she still found herself unable to resist a recent pitch for a “Kelly Clarkson” weight-loss product.
“I knew they were too good to be true,” she admits. “But I wanted it to be true. I wanted the pounds to just melt off.”
It turned out that Clarkson’s “endorsement” of the keto gummies was simply an AI-produced deepfake of one of her music videos. And the $39 monthlong supply was followed by a steady stream of other supplements from the same company that Garside never ordered. To stop payments, she had to ask her bank to cancel her credit card.
“At least I didn’t use my debit card,” she says.
The ubiquitous presence of such online scams and misinformation targeting seniors has begun to attract the attention of federal agencies and private organizations. The Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission have developed tools to track and expose these hoaxes. Meanwhile, the Poynter Institute offers an online media literacy program to help older adults better separate fact from fiction, and a Washington University initiative conducts regular surveys to stay abreast of public health information circulating online.
“Older adults in our community panels consistently have higher exposure to misinformation claims and repeated exposure to the same information claims over time,” Washington University professor Matthew Kreuter, PhD, founder of the iHeard program, tells The Post. Those constantly repeated hoaxes, he adds, tend to stick — and spread.
Kreuter and his staff compile the comments from these surveys and then distribute facts to reveal the scams. “When we prepare and distribute accurate information to counter the false claims,” he says, “we can then caution against certain sources that have been unreliable.”
For many seniors, though, a personal approach can offer even more effective protection. Some advocates, such as Kit Bredimus, MD, chief nursing officer at Midland Health in Midland, Texas, are suggesting that nurses — the most trusted caregivers in our healthcare system — play a more prominent role in helping their patients parse suspect health information.
And, in some cases, help may come from unexpected sources. At a senior center in Culpeper, Va., for instance, neighbors look to Gladys Williams for help untangling the fraud from the facts. The longtime senior administrator manages all the services the facility provides, and these days she finds it more necessary than ever to connect her guests to reliable information.
They come to her about emails warning of the dangers of COVID vaccines, surveys masquerading as a front for CBD products, and overtures from financial fraudsters. “If I don’t have the answers,” she says, “I know where to get them.”
And that’s some information worth sharing.
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