The kids are alright. Grandpa’s the problem.

NYU and Princeton professors just released an important study that took a set of fake news domains identified by BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman and others and asked who shares them on Facebook. They found that:

• Sharing so-called fake news appears to be rare. “The vast majority of Facebook users in our data” —more than 90 %— “did not share any articles from fake news domains in 2016 at all.”
• Most of the sharing is done by old people, not young people. People over 65 shared fake news at a rate seven times higher than young people 18–29. This factor held across controls for education, party affiliation and ideology, sex, race, or income.
• It is also true that conservatives — and, interestingly, those calling themselves independent — shared most of the fake news (18.1% of Republicans vs. 3.5% of Democrats), though the researchers caution that the sample of fake news was predominantly pro-Trump.
• Interestingly, people who share more on Facebook are less likely to share fake news than others, “consistent with the hypothesis that people who share many links are more familiar with what they are seeing and are able to distinguish fake news from real news.”

Compare this with accepted wisdom: That fake news is everywhere and that everyone on Facebook is sharing it. That Facebook…