Misinformation and the Aging American: The Paradox of Engagement and Truth Discernment

Why do older adults engage more with misinformation online, even when they often identify falsehoods correctly in surveys? Benjamin Lyons investigates this paradox using a host of survey experiments and behavioral trace data. Analyses across multiple nationally representative samples show that older Americans disproportionately consume and share low-credibility political and health contentDLbut not due to simple cognitive decline or inability to detect false claims. Rather, this gap emerges from contextual and motivational factors. Older adults possess relatively high news literacy and cognitive reflectiveness, yet these traits do not reliably predict real-world sharing behavior. Instead, high political interest and strong partisan identity contribute to a heightened tendency to trust and share politically congruent misinformation, and smaller, more like-minded social networks incentivize sharing it. Importantly, the media ecosystem older adults inhabit is asymmetrically skewed: most dubious online content leans right, intensifying engagement especially among older conservatives. This asymmetry helps explain why discernment ability appears high in controlled experiments with balanced content but breaks down in naturalistic settings. Lyons extends these findings to health misinformation and video-based platforms to show that engagement patterns generalize across domains and modalities, suggesting an underlying preference for clickbait among these consumers. Ultimately, Misinformation and the Aging American argues that the age-misinformation relationship is less about cognitive vulnerability than about complex interactions between identity, social context, and the media environment. Mitigation efforts, therefore, must address not only skills but also supply structures, audience demand, and social media dynamics that shape behavior in later life.

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About the Author :
Benjamin Lyons is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Utah, studying the intersection of media, politics, and public understanding of science. His research centers on misinformation and misperceptionsDLtheir origins, effects, and how to address themDLusing surveys, experiments, digital trace data, and spatial data. His work has been published in journals such as Science, PNAS, Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Communication, Risk Analysis, and Vaccine, and featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN, and Der Spiegel. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Exeter and the University of Pennsylvania.