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Partisanship and older Americans’ engagement with dubious political news

Partisanship and older Americans’ engagement with dubious political news
Partisanship and older Americans’ engagement with dubious political news
Studies based on digital trace data show that older Americans visit and share dubious news sources far more often than younger cohorts, tendencies often attributed to lower levels of digital literacy. At the same time, survey experiments show that older Americans are no worse, if not better, at discerning between false and accurate news. If older Americans can identify misleading news content equally well, why are they still more likely to engage with it in observational settings? In this article, we combine survey measures and digital trace data for three nationally representative samples (N = 9,944) to argue that the existing literature overemphasizes the importance of factors like digital literacy relative to standard political variables such as political interest and partisanship, factors known to increase across the lifespan. Calcified partisanship in particular makes older Americans vulnerable to hyperpartisan news—which is highly slanted but not verified as explicitly false. High rates of engagement with this category of content, which has been examined in survey studies of older citizens less regularly in the literature, may partially explain the high rates of engagement with dubious news domains in behavioral trace data. In all, our findings have important implications for how we understand—and might intervene to reduce—high engagement among this cohort with dubious news.
0033-362X
962–990
Lyons, Benjamin
562d35bb-6be0-4e08-8663-0cc28bfa0063
Montgomery, Jacob M.
decde9ad-0077-43e6-b515-56af32000ae5
Reifler, Jason
426301a1-f90b-470d-a076-04a9d716c491
Lyons, Benjamin
562d35bb-6be0-4e08-8663-0cc28bfa0063
Montgomery, Jacob M.
decde9ad-0077-43e6-b515-56af32000ae5
Reifler, Jason
426301a1-f90b-470d-a076-04a9d716c491

Lyons, Benjamin, Montgomery, Jacob M. and Reifler, Jason (2024) Partisanship and older Americans’ engagement with dubious political news. Public Opinion Quarterly, 88 (3), 962–990. (doi:10.31219/osf.io/etb89).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Studies based on digital trace data show that older Americans visit and share dubious news sources far more often than younger cohorts, tendencies often attributed to lower levels of digital literacy. At the same time, survey experiments show that older Americans are no worse, if not better, at discerning between false and accurate news. If older Americans can identify misleading news content equally well, why are they still more likely to engage with it in observational settings? In this article, we combine survey measures and digital trace data for three nationally representative samples (N = 9,944) to argue that the existing literature overemphasizes the importance of factors like digital literacy relative to standard political variables such as political interest and partisanship, factors known to increase across the lifespan. Calcified partisanship in particular makes older Americans vulnerable to hyperpartisan news—which is highly slanted but not verified as explicitly false. High rates of engagement with this category of content, which has been examined in survey studies of older citizens less regularly in the literature, may partially explain the high rates of engagement with dubious news domains in behavioral trace data. In all, our findings have important implications for how we understand—and might intervene to reduce—high engagement among this cohort with dubious news.

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Lyons et al POQ accepted Jan 2024.pdf - Author's Original
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Submitted date: 5 June 2023
e-pub ahead of print date: 23 October 2024

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 498244
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/498244
ISSN: 0033-362X
PURE UUID: e25ba3ce-d345-49f2-a987-fe1a2444c168
ORCID for Jason Reifler: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-1116-7346

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Date deposited: 12 Feb 2025 17:57
Last modified: 22 Aug 2025 02:43

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Contributors

Author: Benjamin Lyons
Author: Jacob M. Montgomery
Author: Jason Reifler ORCID iD

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