Getting Wise to Fake News
Older adults are particularly vulnerable to misinformation on social media. But resources have emerged to help them learn to discern true from false.
Lindsay Dina wasn’t fooled by a photo on Facebook that supposedly showed masses of dolphins frolicking in the canals of Venice.
Ms. Dina, 75, ventured onto the social media platform roughly a decade ago, and has developed some savvy. She mostly shares information from established news organizations. She has deleted posts making bizarre claims about Hillary Clinton. She knows how to use Snopes.com, the fact-checking site.
Still, she said, “I’ve seen things and thought, ‘Well, that’s not true.’” But I wasn’t sure how to verify that it wasn’t.”
To Ms. Dina, a retiree in Easton, Conn., the internet can still feel like a hazardous place. Twice, online scammers have relieved her of small sums of money. She sometimes clicks on an apparent news story, she said, “but it turns out they’re selling some Medicare plan.”
A true-blue Democrat, she has passed along political stories from CNN and NBC but also posts from Impeach Trump, whose sponsoring organization has earned poor truthfulness ratings from PolitiFact.
So Ms. Dina was delighted to learn that MediaWise for Seniors, a project of the Poynter Institute, has offered free online courses to help older Americans detect and combat online misinformation. She enrolled and begins her training in a couple of weeks.
The MediaWise digital literacy program, which began in 2018 with funding from Google, initially focused on teenagers and college students. Recently, said Katy Byron, the program manager, “we chose to make a big demographic jump.”
“There was a desperate need to educate this older age group, not only because of the election but because of the coronavirus,” she said.
The online behavior of older Americans during the last presidential campaign alarmed scientists who study communications, politics and technology.
