  Older adults habitually encounter misinformation on social media, but there
is little knowledge about their experiences with it. In this study, we combined
a qualitative survey (n=119) with in-depth interviews (n=21) to investigate how
older adults in America conceptualize, discern, and contextualize social media
misinformation. As misinformation on social media in the past was driven
towards influencing voting outcomes, we were particularly interested to
approach our study from a voting intention perspective. We found that 62% of
the participants intending to vote Democrat saw a manipulative political
purpose behind the spread of misinformation while only 5% of those intending to
vote Republican believed misinformation has a political dissent purpose.
Regardless of the voting intentions, most participants relied on source
heuristics combined with fact-checking to discern truth from misinformation on
social media. The biggest concern about the misinformation, among all the
participants, was that it increasingly leads to biased reasoning influenced by
personal values and feelings instead of reasoning based on objective evidence.
The participants intending to vote Democrat were in 74% of the cases concerned
that misinformation will cause escalation of extremism in the future, while
those intending to vote Republican, were undecided, or planned to abstain were
concerned that misinformation will further erode the trust in democratic
institutions, specifically in the context of public health and free and fair
elections. During our interviews, we found that 63% of the participants who
intended to vote Republican, were fully aware and acknowledged that Republican
or conservative voices often time speak misinformation, even though they are
closely aligned to their political ideology.
