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Fears for UK boomer radicalisation on Facebook after Meta drops factcheckers
For middle-aged users, it will be ‘even harder to discern the truth’ among extremist content, expert says
However, after Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that Meta would replace factcheckers with a crowdsourced system and recommend more political content, there is now new concern about the potential radicalisation risks on Facebook, the social media platform of choice for many older people. “It’s clearly a retrograde step that comes with all sorts of risks,” said Dr Sara Wilford of De Montfort University, a lead researcher on a pioneering Europe-wide project called Smidge (Social Media Narratives: Addressing Extremism in Middle Age). Wilford said her research suggested some older Facebook users were often particularly vulnerable, for reasons including a reluctance to factcheck and a tendency to trust online content at face value when it came packaged like conventional news output.
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