People are more engaged on Facebook as they get older, especially in politics: Evidence from users in 46 countries

Abstract

A growing body of literature has noted an age pattern in the sharing of false news insocial media, with older people sharing more often misinformation than younger users.In this article we supplement this literature by documenting two distinct butcomplementary phenomena: Facebook users share more content as they get olderregardless of whether it is political; and that this increment in sharing activity as ageincreases is more intense with political and partisan URLs. Based on the FacebookPrivacy-Protected Full URLs Data Set, a vast Facebook database with demographicinformation of those who saw and shared links on Facebook in 46 countries, weinvestigate the impact of age on link-sharing activity. We found that in 43 countries, theaverage age of people who shared links was considerably higher than the age of thosewho saw the links. In a more detailed study, with Facebook users in South America, wefind that the average age increases consecutively in the sharing of non-political content,in the sharing of political content, in the sharing of partisan sites and in the sharing ofright-leaning partisan sites.