This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
What a stupid headline.
"So who are these people? They're a bit more likely to be female. While both the comparison groups were roughly evenly split between male and female, the superspreaders were 60 percent female. They're also older, on average 58 years old, nearly 20 years older than the sample as a whole."
So it's not older women but older people, a bit more often women than men
And perhaps statistically insignificant when proportionally adjusted (men die younger or fewer use social media).
So the term "old wives' tale" is still holds up?
I can clearly see this around me.
Not only women, but also elder men, who are really educated but lose their lucidity in front of fake news on the web. I guess it’s also because they come from a time where you were not swimming in fake news.
And sometimes, even if they think it might be fake news, they just send it to you to get your opinion on it.
My mother, an otherwise brilliant woman, was convinced that Prilosec causes Alzheimer's
My mom is convinced the covid vaccine is going to kill me.
It is. I heard it making sinister plans with some sketchy characters out back o the Wendy's
Where do I sign up?
Well, it is. At the same rate as air even.
Luckily I've basepilled my mom enough that she doesn't fall for this sort of crap.
My father watches Fox News every morning and then I hear about him pissing himself he’s so excited about it. Literally. I hear it from his nurse when we text every night
Out of 650,000
just 2,107 accounts that are responsible for 80 percent of the tweets linking to sources of misinformation.
What the fuck?
Some people have way too much time and way too disturbing world views to be allowed on the Internet.
Like everyone on Lemmy
Up voted for the well played irony!
.social is mastodon.
Midwest.social is Lemmy. I'm even using Jerboa.
I think. Quite honestly, I don't pay much attention, if it works it works.
Oh. You're right. Usually accounts ending with .social are hosted on mastodon, guess not in this particular case.
What's your point?
You've been frequenting lemmygrad?
That is why my parents are not allowed to be on social media. I mean, they choose not to be, but also I'd like to forbid them from ever making an account. That way they get their news from the TV, which is alright. It's not even remotely close to American Television.
There's this expression, it refers to a piece of information that is often spread as wisdom but has no basis in fact or truth, that expression is "old wives tale."
Old wives be trippin'.
AND the wives of supreme court justices!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Academic researchers have responded by trying to understand the scope of the problem, identifying the most misinformation-filled social media networks, organized government efforts to spread false information, and even prominent individuals who are the sources of misinformation.
While you might expect these to be young, Internet-savvy individuals who automate their sharing, it turns out this population tends to be older, female, and very, very prone to clicking the "retweet" button.
The work, done by Sahar Baribi-Bartov, Briony Swire-Thompson, and Nir Grinberg, relies on a panel of over 650,000 Twitter accounts that have been associated with voting registrations in the US, using full names and location information.
The researchers first identified tweets made by these users, which contain political content, using a machine-learning classifier that had previously been validated by having its calls checked by humans.
From this population, Baribi-Bartov, Swire-Thompson, and Grinberg identify just 2,107 accounts that are responsible for 80 percent of the tweets linking to sources of misinformation.
For the analyses they perform, the superspreaders are compared to a random sample of the total population and the heaviest sharers of links to reliable news sources.
The original article contains 472 words, the summary contains 187 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I believe this, but it’s also LOTS of men too
Yes. But that 60% F to 40% M ratio is quite telling, and the fact that the majority of them were 20y older than the rest of the sample...
Basically it means older people on Twitter spread misinformation and that of those older people they're major women.
However, it only applies to Twitter, I want to see the numbers for Facebook; it is basically the gathering place of older people so it'd be more interesting.
