Much of the research on dissemination and spread lacks individual-level
data, limiting the kinds of conclusions that can be made about the types of
people who are more likely to share online misinformation. One recent
exception is Guess, Nagler, and Tucker (2019), who examine the individual-
level determinants of fake news sharing behavior on Facebook. By combining
anonymized proﬁle data with a representative survey of Americans, they ﬁnd
that the most consistent predictor of sharing a fake news article to one’s friends
is age: Those in the oldest age groups were much more likely to post links to fake
news. As the authors discuss, this observational study is not able to disentangle
the mechanisms behind the age effect, but one possibility is that age is a proxy

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108890960 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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Andrew M. Guess & Benjamin A. Lyons
Social_Media_and_Democracy