Abstract

Evidence is emerging that old adults share more disinformation online and are more politically polarized. 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 investigated the impact of age on link-sharing activity. We found that in 45 of 46 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 82% of Facebook users residing in South America, we found that the average age increases consecutively in the sharing of non-political content, in the sharing of political content and in the sharing of partisan sites.