The Effect of Social Media Information Cascades Different Generations
https://reboot-foundation.org/is-there-a-fake-news-generation/
On social media, one of the biggest problems that we come across is the spread of misinformation – fake news seems to spread rapidly and in many cases, people believe because they can’t distinguish between fake news and the truth. As someone who uses social media very often, I find it easier, in many cases, to be able to tell the difference between what is fake news and what isn’t – I can tell when an image has been photoshopped and make it a point to fact check information that doesn’t come from reliable sources. For my grandmother though, this is more of a challenge – posts that I find to be obviously fake, she believes without any doubts. She isn’t able to distinguish between misinformation and truth. This made me curious about how information cascades might affect various generations differently, based on cultural aspects associated with the generation as well as their experience with detecting misinformation on social media.
Information cascades refer to the situation where people conform to what others are doing without using judgement beforehand. In other words, information cascades describe when we “follow the crowd.” In the case of misinformation, information cascades apply in the sense that people will believe a post to be true just because it has gone viral or because a friend has shared it with them, without really taking the time to question or fact check the information.
According to a story run by CNN, people older than 65 are equally as vulnerable to misinformation as younger generations. For example, a study was recently conducted that looked at whether older adults above 65 are better able to distinguish between true headlines than younger adults ages 18-30 and whether or not they found clickbait headlines to be catchier. The study found that older adults were more likely to click on clickbait than younger adults but across the board, both older and younger adults were unable to distinguish between fake and real news. In fact, the more time that someone spent on social media (10+ hours), the worse they got at being able to distinguish between truth and misinformation.
This is particularly interesting because younger adults and my generation tends to feel confident that we can easily distinguish between what is fake news and what isn’t. This study suggests, however, that internet literacy might be something important for all generations in order to prevent information cascades related to misinformation on social media that cause very real consequences as we have seen with the COVID-19 vaccine and the last presidential election.