It’s not digital illiteracy: Here’s why older adults are drawn to dubious news

A recent study published in Public Opinion Quarterly challenges the prevailing belief that digital illiteracy is the primary factor behind older adults interaction with unreliable online sources. The new findings provide evidence that while older adults are more likely than younger cohorts to engage with unreliable new sources, their susceptibility does not stem from an inability to identify false content. Instead, heightened partisan bias and entrenched political identities appear to drive their engagement.

The internet’s role in spreading misinformation has sparked global concerns, particularly regarding older adults’ engagement with unreliable content. Past research identified older Americans as disproportionately responsible for sharing dubious news, raising alarms about their vulnerability to online misinformation. Previous explanations often pointed to digital illiteracy, cognitive decline, or social isolation among older adults as key factors.

However, evidence has remained inconsistent. While older adults consume and share more dubious news, they often outperform younger individuals in discerning false headlines in controlled experiments. To reconcile these conflicting findings, researchers designed a study that integrates survey data and real-world digital behavior to better understand the drivers of older adults’ engagement with unreliable news.

“Others have documented that exposure to and engagement with untrustworthy news sources increase with age, and I think it is important to understand the information environments of older adults, an increasingly powerful and important segment of society,” said study author Ben Lyons, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Utah.

The research utilized three nationally representative panel surveys of nearly 10,000 Americans, conducted around the 2018 midterm elections. These surveys were paired with digital trace data, which captured participants’ actual online behavior, including visits to websites categorized as reliable, false, or hyperpartisan. This method allowed the researchers to assess both participants’ ability to discern false information in controlled settings and their real-world engagement with low-quality news sources.

Survey tasks asked participants to evaluate the accuracy of various news headlines, which included false, mainstream, and hyperpartisan stories. False headlines were those that had been thoroughly fact-checked and found to be untrue. Hyperpartisan headlines, while based on factual events, were presented in a highly slanted and misleading manner.

The study also included a digital literacy intervention: participants were shown brief tips on how to identify false news, and their discernment skills were evaluated before and after this training. In addition to examining digital literacy, the researchers analyzed political variables, such as participants’ partisan identities, levels of political interest, and degree of affective polarization (a strong emotional preference for one’s political party and aversion to the opposition).

The findings revealed a clear age-related difference in engagement with dubious news. Older adults were more likely to visit dubious websites and engage with hyperpartisan content. However, their engagement was not linked to an inability to identify false news. In fact, survey results showed that older adults were often better than younger participants at discerning the accuracy of both false and mainstream news headlines. This challenges the common assumption that digital illiteracy among older Americans is the primary reason for their higher interaction with unreliable news. Furthermore, the digital literacy intervention had similar effects across all age groups, suggesting that older adults are not uniquely deficient in this area.

Instead, the researchers identified partisan bias as a key factor driving older adults’ engagement with dubious news. Older participants displayed stronger partisan leanings and were more likely to view headlines aligned with their political beliefs as accurate. The researchers argued that this heightened partisan bias stems from entrenched political identities, which tend to become more calcified with age.

“Older adults do share more misinformation online, but this is not because they lack digital literacy or other skills,” Lyons told PsyPost. “Instead, older adults have stronger partisan attachments, which lead them to share more dubious news that denigrates their political opponents. Interventions aimed at tackling misinformation among this age group need to take that into account.”

A particularly important discovery was the role of hyperpartisan news in this dynamic. While most previous research on misinformation focused on entirely false headlines, this study highlighted how hyperpartisan content—stories that are technically true but presented in a highly biased way—drives much of the engagement among older adults. By distinguishing between false and hyperpartisan news, the researchers were able to reconcile the apparent discrepancy between survey results (which show strong discernment skills among older adults) and digital trace data (which show high engagement with dubious news).

“Initially, I discovered a disconnect between engagement with misinformation, which older adults do at higher rates, and apparent belief in it, which does not seem to increase with age,” Lyons explained. “I wanted to understand the reason for this disjuncture.”

“I then realized that we were studying these two questions in fairly different ways. In surveys, researchers typically expose respondents to false news that is balanced in its partisan slant, with an equal number of items congenial to Republicans and Democrats, for instance. However, when we measure exposure or engagement in the wild, we measure behavior that is based on the actual supply of untrustworthy news outlets, which tends to be skewed far to the right.”

“Further, when we assess susceptibility to false news in surveys, we tend to use stories verified to be false,” Lyons continued. “In the wild, we tend to measure exposure or engagement based on lists of sources that tend to be unreliable but surely publish many stories that are not completely fabricated. I found in this data that accounting for these disparities can help explain the disjuncture in outcomes. It appears that older consumers’ engagement with dubious news is sincere, stemming from news judgments made through a strong partisan perceptual screen.”

Despite its robust methodology, the study has limitations. It focuses exclusively on political news, leaving unanswered questions about engagement with misinformation on non-political topics. Additionally, the findings are limited to the United States, though similar patterns may exist in other countries with polarized political climates.

Lyons is expanding this line of research into a book project that will explore these dynamics further, with the goal of informing public policy on misinformation interventions tailored to older audiences.

“I’m currently working on a book project on the topic,” he explained. “In this work, I plan to comprehensively unravel this puzzle through replications and extensions of the current findings. My goal for this project is to not only make a meaningful contribution to theoretical discussions surrounding misinformation and older adults but to shape public policy on this issue as well, using this project’s findings as an opportunity to discuss approaches to age-specific misinformation interventions.”

The study, “Partisanship and older Americans’ engagement with dubious political news,” was authored by Benjamin Lyons, Jacob M. Montgomery, and Jason Reifler.