The debate on misinformation often focuses on young readers, who would be the first victims. " It is necessary to train citizens, and in particular the youngest, to help them recognize false information, to apprehend it, to protect themselves from it ", insisted, for example, Françoise Nyssen, at the time Minister of Culture, during the debate on the law on the fight against false information in summer 2018.
According to a survey conducted by the Décodeurs team of Le Monde newspaper based on data from the Médiamétrie institute, in April 2020, in the middle of a period marked by a strong interest in current affairs and a real need for information, young people do not seem to be privileged targets for the least reliable sites.
The 15-24 year olds, for example, represented in April about 13.7% of all Internet users, 13% of the readers of traditional sites and 16.1% of the readership of sites classified as "red" by the Décodeurs team (Sites that have published a significant number of false information and/or misleading articles are classified by the Décodeurs as " red " and sites whose reliability or approach is questionable are classified as "orange").
25-49 year olds are over-represented in the audience of unreliable sites
According to this survey, "if there is one age group that stands out for its appetite for dubious sources, it would in fact be the 25 to 49 year olds. They like to read traditional sites, but are over-represented among visitors to sites classified as "red" and "orange" in the Decodex. The 35-49 year olds, for example, represent 22.1% of Internet users and 25% of readers of traditional sites, but 32.7% of readers of unreliable sites."Conversely, older people are overrepresented in the readership of mainstream news media, but less likely to visit less conventional sites. This does not mean, however, that they are completely unaffected by online misinformation." People over 65 are the most likely to share erroneous articles on Facebook, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances in 2019.The wealthy categories are not spared
Executives, managers, professionals and teachers (identified by Médiamétrie as belonging to the upper socio-professional categories) are numerous in their reading of traditional sites, but they are especially more numerous than the other categories in the readership of the "red" and "orange" sources. Their profile for consulting news sites is not, in the end, very different from that observed among the less privileged social categories (CSP -).These observations relate to the consultation of the sites and not to the information practices on social networks.
The survey was conducted for the month of April 2020, in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Decoders team sent Médiamétrie the list of 372 websites identified as "unreliable" (classified in red) and 119 identified as "doubtful" (in orange) in the Decodex. Médiamétrie compared the audience composition of these sources (in terms of age and socio-professional categories) with those of the 20 most read news sites in France for the month of April 2020.
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