People are more engaged on Facebook as they get older, especially in politics: evidence from users in 46 countries

Abstract

A growing body of literature has noted an age pattern in the sharing of false news in social media, with older people sharing more often misinformation than younger users. In this article we supplement this literature by documenting two distinct but complementary phenomena: Facebook users share more content as they get older regardless of whether it is political; and that this increment in sharing activity as age increases is more intense with political and partisan URLs. Based on the Facebook Privacy-Protected Full URLs Data Set, a vast Facebook database with demographic information of those who saw and shared links on Facebook in 46 countries, we investigate the impact of age on link-sharing activity. We found that in 43 countries, the average age of people who shared links was considerably higher than the age of those who saw the links. In a more detailed study, with Facebook users in South America, we find that the average age increases consecutively in the sharing of non-political content, in the sharing of political content, in the sharing of partisan sites and in the sharing of right-leaning partisan sites.

Effects of Preemptive Empathy Interventions on Reply Toxicity among Highly Active Social Media Users

“…A14), the age distribution of the sample is skewed towards older participants (M = 66.18, SD = 12.42). This aligns with a recent finding that older people are more active on Facebook, especially when it comes to sharing political content (Moretto et al, 2022). Reported political orientation on a left-to-right scale is not skewed to any side but reported political interest is comparably high (see SI Fig.…”

Partisanship and older Americans’ engagement with dubious political news

“…First, we emphasize that some of the differences in exposure across age groups may be attributable to the sheer volume of news that older Americans' consume. Likely reflecting generally high political interest (Glenn and Grimes 1968;Moretto et al 2022), we find that older cohorts consume more dubious news as well as mainstream news.…”

“…In fact, recent consumption data shows older adults attend to even more online news than younger audiences do (Allen et al 2020). Importantly, most news, and partisan news in particular, that is shared online comes from older adults (Moretto et al 2022). As such, their digital behavior is important to understand.…”

“…To begin, due to increasing interest in news and politics (Moretto et al 2022;Glenn and Grimes 1968), older Americans consume far more news overall. This greater political interest also coincides with increasingly established partisan identities and concurrent increases in affective polarization (Phillips 2022).…”

“…More fundamentally, however, there are many variables that may correlate with both age and engagement with low-quality news content; it is not clear that digital literacy is the most likely culprit from among these factors. For instance, older Americans are also more politically engaged and consume more media overall (Glenn and Grimes 1968;Moretto et al 2022;Sears and Funk 1999;Hobbs 2019). Most importantly, older Americans have more calcified partisan identities and report higher levels of affective polarization (Phillips 2022), factors that may affect what news older Americans engage with.…”