NYU and Princeton study of 3,500 US adults: 11% of those over 65 have shared a hoax article on Facebook, while just 3% of those 18 to 29 have done so
And the finding holds true across party lines — Older Americans are disproportionately more likely to share fake news on Facebook …
Context & Ripple Effects
The NYU and Princeton finding lands in the middle of an accumulating evidence base about who actually spreads misinformation online. A study of registered 2016 voters had already shown fake news consumption on Twitter was extraordinarily concentrated — 0.1% of users accounted for nearly 80% of shares — and later work traced much of that sharing to a small cohort of mostly older users.
What this study adds is the age gradient itself: 11% of over-65s versus 3% of under-30s sharing hoaxes on Facebook, holding across party lines. That matters because seniors are also the fastest-growing group getting news on social platforms — Pew found 55% of Americans 50+ doing so back in 2017 — while reporting has shown they are largely left out of digital literacy efforts aimed at younger users.
First-order effects
- Facebook's integrity teams now have a clear demographic target: interventions like friction prompts before sharing can be weighted toward older users rather than applied uniformly across the feed.
- The finding sharpens the stakes for the growing population of seniors who rely on Facebook as a news source — the same platform where a later survey linked Facebook-reliant COVID news consumption to lower vaccination rates.
Second-order effects
- Digital literacy programs face pressure to redirect budgets toward senior audiences — community centers, libraries, and public-health outreach — since the BuzzFeed reporting shows current efforts skew young while the sharers skew old.
- Advertisers and election officials get a sharper risk model: because sharing is concentrated in a small older cohort, targeted friction and prebunking campaigns aimed at that group promise more impact per dollar than platform-wide content moderation.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — small, demographically identifiable groups driving most misinformation spread, as both the Twitter studies and this age gradient suggest — the industry's center of gravity shifts from policing content to shaping the behavior of specific high-risk user segments.
- Regulators weighing platform accountability gain an empirical hook: rules built around aggregate content volumes may give way to obligations keyed to vulnerable-user protections, treating older adults online the way consumer law treats other at-risk populations.
The trend: As older Americans become social platforms' fastest-growing news audience without matching literacy support, misinformation policy is shifting from blanket content moderation toward interventions targeted at identifiable high-risk user cohorts.