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community weblog
The Adult Children Cleaning Up Their Parents' Feeds
Americans over 60 now spend more than half their leisure hours in front of screens. But unlike millennials and most Gen-Xers, who have spent years navigating engagement bait, stealth marketing, and AI slop — and have developed a working instinct for what to trust — older adults tend to have little idea of what they're looking at. This susceptibility is creating an entirely new type of responsibility for the adult children of these suddenly very online parents, who flock to Reddit to ask things like, How do I stop my dad from watching fake Bruce Lee AI slop? Is it possible to curate a feed for my anxious, elderly mother? and How can I stop my aging parents from believing fake news?
posted by postcommunism on Oct 22, 2026 at 8:10 AM
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Great to see this after a failed attempt at stopping an elderly relative from watching AI animal videos (there was a maudlin one about a bobcat who repays a favor to a forest ranger by rescuing him from a deadly avalanche.) YouTube could make it so much easier if there was a switch to filter out AI videos.
posted by johngoren at 8:15 AM
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Archive link
posted by johngoren at 8:20 AM
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Shepherd is incredibly grateful that his parents in their dotage (mid-80s) have no interest in being online at all. They share a smartphone (an older iPhone model) and it is used for texting and email checking. They don't even web browse on their laptop!
I have no idea what my mom gets up to on her Android but so far I've observed from being around her when she has it is that it's for phone calls and the occasional text. She also has no online presence (no FB or anything like that). But she does live in the US and keeps the news channels on all the time, so frankly, she's still being inundated with weird shit, I'm sure.
posted by Kitteh at 8:22 AM
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My grandmother was a heavy facebook user in the last decade of her lucid life, thankfully before the AI age, and even though she clicked on all sorts of bullshit and mostly used the friends feed to look at who got fat, I think it was generally positive for her in keeping her engaged with something. But oh my god the bullshit she tapped on.
The funniest was that she'd want to "investigate" all of the dirty stuff that came across her feed, and with her low understanding of facebook's tools that usually meant that she'd amplify it in some way. Hot singles in their lacy pants in your area. Those close up pics of, like, knees and ears that look like breasts and vulvas. Etc. I logged into her account a few times a week to clean it up for her. She sent a strip tease clickbait post to the wife of her church's pastor in a direct message. How. How?!??! I would get on the phone with her and try and explain to her what she was doing and that she needs to tap through her feed more thoughtfully, and she would always say "I was trying to delete it!!" Sure, Jan.
But by far the funniest thing was an acquaintance who messaged me to say something like "I'm sure your grandma is a nice lady but I'm not going to accept her friend request, she keeps trying to friend me and I keep rejecting her..." His profile photo made him appear to be sitting naked in a chair, intentionally blurred, so that it appeared if you got the profile pic larger and out of thumbnail it would be him naked in focus. (It was blurry the whole time, you couldn't see anything.) But gram kept trying desperately to friend him and get that photo bigger, just to see. Jesus Christ, Grandma.
Anyway, it was a multi hour a week labor to save her from herself even back then. I am sure it's so much worse now. Personally I've retired from the supervision game, my parents are on their own recognizance.
The absolute
posted by phunniemee at 8:25 AM
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[idk where that last "the absolute" hanging bit came from. Please pretend that's how I sign off all messages now, just like a facebook elder. Thank you.]
posted by phunniemee at 8:33 AM
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I read years ago that some people were using the parental control settings on their elderly parents' TVs to keep them from watching Fox News, and it was effective because the parents were never able to figure out why they suddenly couldn't view the Fox News channel anymore or how to remedy the matter. Some might say that this was interference with their parents' agency, but I say that if the parents in question aren't capable of reading a user manual or doing the kind of simple online research it would take to diagnose such a minor problem and fix it, they aren't equipped to deal with a 24/7 firehose of disinformation and ragebait and their adult offspring are entirely justified in limiting their parents' access to said firehouse. It's straight up eldercare.
posted by orange swan at 8:43 AM
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Facebook and YouTube are the only two internet sites they flip between. Amazon the only place they shop. I haven't seen any ethnography done of their internet use, but I have my suspicions as to which billionaires specifically benefit from this problem.
posted by antibillionaire at 8:54 AM
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"The absolute phunniemee" is the name of someone's new sock puppet.
And yeah, thankfully while my folks are fairly active with their friends on facebook, they seem to still have decently tuned bullshit detectors, although occasionally they run into new attempts at culture war issues that they don't have a lot of experience with. But they don't watch fox, they don't like and subscribe any goddamn weirdo podcaster / youtubers, their TV is tuned to either classic films or sports.
posted by Kyol at 8:54 AM
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My solution is to have my 15 year old take care of it. Coming from me, my parents and my MIL would never listen to me. But when their grandson tells them in the tone of a put-upon teenager that whatever they referenced was fake and they should know better, they seem to work harder.
That said, I've been taken in by a couple of AI dog videos of rescue dogs choosing their owners and I Am Sad I was taken in but it didn't impact my ability to vote sensibly or manage my finances. (I do know this is how lists are built.)
posted by warriorqueen at 8:56 AM
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Americans over 60 now spend more than half their leisure hours in front of screens.
So sad to read that. ... yet here I am. Mrs C spends a bit too much time, in my opinion, playing some silly online games, but I blame myself there too, for not being better at finding or initiating fun offline activities. There are so many museums, art galleries, parks, etc just a short transit ride away. No excuses.
I'm grateful that my (very) elderly Mom doesn't spend much time online at all. She's got a facebook login, but she mainly just looks at pix of her grandkids and great-grandkids, or stuff from her brother.
She almost got hit for $9k by the "grandchild" scam over the phone ( "Hi Grandmother, sorry I have a cold, that's why I sound different. I'm in jail for running over a pregnant girl. I need $9k in cash for bail and you can't tell anyone about this"). We're all just lucky she's unable to drive herself to the bank.
So she's been scared straight by that, and knows now to never respond to such phonecalls or emails. She does a little online shopping, but so far has not got hooked on any junk collectible or similar.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:58 AM
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(WE'RE STILL DOING CAPSLOCK DAY, RIGHT?).
THE AI VIDEOS OF ANIMALS ON REDDIT HAVE GOTTEN ESPECIALLY PROBLEMATIC. I NOW HAVE TO CLICK THE COMMENTS OF ANY CUTE VIDEO TO SEE IF I'M ALLOWED TO FEEL ANYTHING, WHICH IS PROBABLY NOT A GOOD WAY TO LIVE.
I JUST KNOW MY MOM IS LOOKING AT SOME ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT BECAUSE SHE WAS DOING THAT BEFORE GENERATIVE AI. BUT SHE DOESN'T LISTEN TO ME OR MY ADVICE, SO THAT'S PRIMARILY MY SISTER'S PROBLEM.
- THE ABSOLUTE.
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 8:59 AM
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She almost got hit for $9k by the "grandchild" scam over the phone ( "Hi Grandmother, sorry I have a cold, that's why I sound different. I'm in jail for running over a pregnant girl. I need $9k in cash for bail and you can't tell anyone about this"). We're all just lucky she's unable to drive herself to the bank.
My mom's response to hearing about this sorta thing was - more or less - "a night in jail won't kill you and might do you some good and we'll sort it out in the morning". Which, fair enough?
posted by Kyol at 9:03 AM
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My 89-yo mom is sufficiently cautious that she regards anything remotely hinky as suspicious, and will often ask me what to do about it.
I've gotten to the point with some scams that I'm genuinely curious what the game is and I'll play along for a little while knowing it's a scam, just to see where it goes. "Oh, this is trying to get my gmail password."
An AI e-mailed me just yesterday to ask me questions about the kind of work I do (I can't believe I just wrote that). I wasn't certain it was an AI at first, but after a couple of exchanges, it became clear, so I stopped responding. Now it is bugging me to keep the exchange going. Still not sure exactly what the scam is there.
posted by adamrice at 9:05 AM
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More unsettling to me is that I know someone my age - late Gen X - who basically just watches YouTube and who definitely watches AI garbage, because they tell me about it and on one occasion showed me a video they thought was real. They have started telling me about funny responses they get from chatting with AI. And this isn't a stupid person! But man is it unsettling to have an otherwise intelligent person tell you about some chatbot nonsense or show you a fake video.
But it really shows you the pipeline - they've always been a big, big Facebook user, they got into YouTube and they just...watch a lot of YouTube on their feed.
On one hand, I really think that depression is a factor, especially in this case.
On the other, I really also think that people shouldn't start. I think this is a pipeline problem, and the problem started with facebook. This person got used to slop and bait and 24-7 updates and that normalized all the features of YouTube and AI that repel you when you first encounter them, and now all their internet habits are such that for every non-slop YouTube video they watch, they encounter several pieces of slop/bait content. Luckily due to their interests this hasn't led them to right-wing content, but it still seems like a tremendous waste. No one is going to look back when we're proper old and think "oh I'm glad I spent my middle age on chatbots and YouTube".
But my point here is that it can happen to you. Curate your internet while you're at least somewhat young so you don't end up as one of those people whose kids have to do it for them!
posted by Frowner at 9:09 AM
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Luckily, my 80 year old mom just spends all day watching garbage "reality" TV (she loves those house-flipper shows) and she does not watch Fox News.
- THE SUPER ABSOLUTE MEDUSA
posted by supermedusa at 9:11 AM
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My parents are not that old, but my mom definitely doesn't have a finely-tuned BS detector. But she has at least started to admit that she can't always tell, because she'll start a story like, "I don't know if this is true, but I read on Facebook..."
It's rarely true.
posted by asnider at 9:12 AM
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The struggle is real. I've taught my kids to doubt everything online but the past generation is cooked.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:19 AM
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I've always wanted to create fake youtube, fake instagram, fake amazon, fake temu, etc.
Fake facebook just recycles posts from old facebook, before the cruft kicked in.
Fake youtube mostly has old clips of the Andy Griffith show.
Fake instagram -only family pics approved by the admin.
Fake Amazon allows them browse but when you get to the ordering part, the orders never go through, and a nearby relative grabs a box off their floor and then puts it back outside like they got a new package.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:19 AM
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My dad died a few years ago and I really miss him. My mom has vascular dementia and I really miss her, too. But a small part of me is happy that these tragedies are at least allowing us to dodge these particular challenges.
posted by ElKevbo at 9:26 AM
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The fake ordering sites had their post in August. Dopamine sites.
posted by cobaltnine at 9:28 AM
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Not only are my parents not interested in Facebook, they don't even have a Facebook account because the whole idea of social media in general creeps them out. They also only have one mobile phone they rarely use (and have only just mastered how to TEXT people). They do have a laptop but only use it for email and researching recipes or gardening tips. The most "techie" thing they have is an Alexa unit which they only use for weather reports, a glorified radio, and to settle "who was that actor who was in the movie about the jewel thief who goes to Greece" kinds of arguments. They also CANNOT STAND Fox news and prefer MS Now (Mom likes Rachel Maddow a lot) and CNN (they loved Anthony Bourdain as much as me).
I cannot even begin to describe how grateful I am.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:30 AM
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What makes it even worse is the tech-skill regression that happens around the same time with elderly folks like my parents. I swear half our time together is spent helping answer increasingly basic questions like forwarding a photo someone sent them to someone else. ("Was it on email? Text? No, I'm sure you're doing it EXACTLY the same way you always have and it's the entire system itself that's suddenly and inexplicably broken," etc.) When keeping track of passwords and finding a show on a streaming TV is at the outer limits of their ever-shrinking skill set, recognizing something as AI slop or a scam seems like a hail-mary dream. Thank god they haven't been targeted yet or sucked in by anything worse than [shudder] Bill Maher.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:32 AM
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"Was it on email? Text? No, I'm sure you're doing it EXACTLY the same way you always have and it's the entire system itself that's suddenly and inexplicably broken," etc.
Well, there's this program called Teams...
posted by LionIndex at 9:36 AM
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On the one hand, the one positive thing I can say is that my mom has, by dint of wanting to be supportive of her union-employed oldest son and two other sons who have married immigrants, has tilted left-center and generally takes her pointers from her kids these days.
But on the other hand, we struggle with my mother-in-law, who because of her age and language barrier, depends on Hungarian TV news, which makes her a captive audience for pro-Orbán and Pro-Kremlin propaganda.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:38 AM
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There's one FB ad that my poor mother keeps clicking on, the one that is made to resemble FB itself and has a couple of red "1"s that indicate this is a notification you should click on. When she clicks on it, she gets the OMG your computer has a virus click here now!!! window, and luckily knows to close it. No matter how many times I report that ad and hide it, it keeps coming back, sometimes within minutes. Really criminal what this site and others do for the elderly.
posted by Melismata at 9:54 AM
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My mom gets cute AI-generated mice that look like a mashup of Beatrix Potter and realistic 3D graphics. They make cute little AI generated sounds. I say "that's AI." She makes a face, because she doesn't generally like AI, then "But they are so cute!" because cuteness trumps all, and she's not going to stop.
posted by surlyben at 9:55 AM
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As someone close enough to 60 (THE DANGER ZONE!!!!!!!!!!1111!!!!!) I recently quit facebook. This was really hard, unlike leaving Insta a few years ago. I used and wanted fb for keeping in touch with friends and family, my neighborhood groups, some cat groups. But increasingly my feed was filled with so much garbage. Now I am perfectly capable of recognizing that garbage, doing what fb allows to get rid of it etc., but I found, repeatedly, that when I was tired or low mood and just scrolling I would be vulnerable to clicking on certain clearly fake content (disaster reels omg! floods, landslides, sinkholes oh my). So I just had to leave, because I don't want that stuff in front of me. None of us can be 100% confident we won't go the same way as our elders, the garbage is so finely calibrated to get past our defenses.
And I know this because since I left fb I have had a noticeable uptick in youtube use. Like actually going there to look for something to watch (which I NEVER did before) vs clicking on a link, say here, to a particular thing.
Ugh. I'm going to go live in a cave in a dark forest and eat bugs. Bring on the asteroid!
posted by supermedusa at 10:02 AM
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So glad my dad quit Facebook after the whole Cambridge Analytica conspiracy came to light. If anything he's become anti-AI. Unfortunately that's largely because his wife uses ChatGPT for everything. He was complaining to me about it recently, like, "she'll ask the damn thing how to arrange the curtains, how long to boil potatoes, who knows what else."
One of my boomer aunts blocked me years ago for my posting a meme featuring George Washington and Vladimir Lenin with the caption saying something like "only one of these men owned slaves". Forgot she followed me. Messaged me furious about how great a man Washington was and then got "unable to reply to this conversation". Anyway my sister tells me my aunt is now forever sharing slop edits of herself so I guess I dodged a bullet there.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 10:03 AM
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ungated link
I'm over 65, online So Much, and I think there's some confirmation bias. My kid watches Seth Rogan and other crap and buys into it until his cousins set him straight. Young people use AI on purpose, a lot.
The issue is when people develop cognitive issues, not age itself.
When my friend started repeatedly claiming she was hacked, she was dismissed. I sat down with her and as I listed and asked clarifying questions, her confusion and lack of memory became more clear. A good blocking service would be a help.
Another issue is the growth of bots, Fox News, and similar intentional deceivers who are enabled by technology. It's a whole different world, and I don't feel at all sanguine.
posted by theora55 at 10:13 AM
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My mom has a flip phone she can't hear and a house phone that barely works. She uses her tablet principally to play endless hands of solitaire. She tried her hand at texting a couple of times. Results were mixed.
Actual text exchange from March 2022:
Mom: "COULD YOU GET ME A QT OF MHHHLK AND A LOAF OF RAISEN FENNEL BREAD THANKSO MUCHOOMOM."
Me: "ABSOLUTELY YEYESSYES I WILL!!!!!!"
Mom: "I DONT KNOW HOW TO GT BACK TNO LOWER CARSE!"
Actual text exchange from May of last year:
Me: "hello, i am trying to call. are you at the beach frolicking?"
Mom: "Nn no w3 wer at0the eapm0rtand 3"
Me: "Wow, that sounds exotic! Where is the eapm0rtand 3? Do they have a signature beverage?"
Mom: "That wou55dbe tge faqm0rstand 0k"
She called right after she sent that last one and informed me that the eapm0rtand/faqm0rstand was the farmstand and that she was done with texting for the foreseeable future, which, to my boundless sorrow, has proven true.
She watches the PBS news hour, unless they start to feature video of Trump, and she listens to NPR, unless they start to feature audio of Trump.
posted by Don Pepino at 10:15 AM
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My kid watches Seth Rogan
Is your child getting involved in pottery? Look for these warning signs. (You may mean Joe Rogan.)
posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:17 AM
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idk where that last "the absolute" hanging bit came from.
I liked it, that fragment made it seem like you were trailing off humorously into speechless frustration!
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:26 AM
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My folks are straddling 80 and doing a better job navigating the bullshit info-tainment environment than some of my friends, and many of my friends' kids, for which I'm grateful. My mom's painting group has started using AI to get critique on their paintings - not generative, but like, asking it for advice? I hate it but it sounds like it's given them sound advice so far so I'm not sure what to tell them besides, "I don't like it and won't use it."
She loves newspaper comics, and forwards me a lot that were clearly AI generated. I want so badly to take them in the spirit she intended and not, like, discourage connecting over stuff she finds funny? But also they suck. I donno. It could be a lot worse but it's hard to know what to say when the stakes are so low. Ultimately I believe she should be enjoying her retirement and not having to worry about whether the funny drawings she likes were drawn by actual people or the Torment Nexus, but that's how it becomes the new normal. Still figuring out what tack to take talking to her about all that.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 11:01 AM
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Oh, and for a sort of insight into how the algorithmic feeds just go off into weird corners, Phil Edwards did a video about how little it takes for the algorithm to pigeonhole you and start feeding you to the outrage and scam machines.
Gotta love the algorithm, right?
posted by Kyol at 11:05 AM
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I have tried to educate my folks (in their 70s) about AI slop and how the algorithm deliberately feeds you ragebait to keep you engaged and funneled into the alt-right pipeline. I don't know if it's their pride not wanting to admit they're being duped, or if they're just so far down the Faux News rabbit hole that they think everything else, even their son, is feeding them Fake News. Maybe a little of both.
I'm so tired of trying, and a little ashamed to admit that I've just... stopped.
posted by xedrik at 11:20 AM
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But unlike [. . .] most Gen-Xers, who have spent years navigating engagement bait, stealth marketing, and AI slop — and have developed a working instinct for what to trust
Mmmmmmmm . . . as an actual Gen-Xer boy I got doubts about this.
While most of us have not yet hit the age-related physical and cognitive decline of the parents in the article, I think our ability to clock engagement bait and AI-slop and outright lies is highly variable at best. And then there's also the general human factor where we like things that reinforce our already existing world-views and get enraged by stuff that challenges that world-view and don't actually much care whether it's slop or bait.
And I think a lot of it has to do with education level and how early in life we were introduced to computers & how much our careers have depended on using computers. I know a lot of my age cohorts, especially those without college degrees or those who didn't really need to use computers in their jobs for much besides, like, emails and specialized industry-specific software (CAD or inventory control & the like), think that Facebook and Amazon ARE the Internet, like basically all of it, and otherwise computers are mostly just annoyingly complicated typewriters with minds of their own. And so they never have developed any solid instincts about what to trust and why.
I have a same age co-worker who used to kind of mock his parents who thought that you needed to use different browsers to open different websites, and yet back in the day when "free browser toolbars" were a Thing (remember those?) he used to call me in regularly to figure out why he couldn't see half his screen. Because he'd just clicked on stuff without reading or thinking about it and added 15 toolbars to his browser. Also he has never understood the use of "reply" versus "reply all" in emails and gets mad when I disappear from an email conversation. And now that he does most of his stuff on his phone he can never remember whether he's gotten info via text or FB message or email and spends minutes angrily muttering and scrolling on his phone because he doesn't understand search functions.
IOW, nah, us Gen-X ain't getting off easy, lots of us are just as bad, there's just fewer of us.
the absolute
posted by soundguy99 at 11:47 AM
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Americans over 60 now spend more than half their leisure hours in front of screens. But unlike millennials and most Gen-Xers, who have spent years navigating engagement bait, stealth marketing, and AI slop — and have developed a working instinct for what to trust — older adults tend to have little idea of what they're looking at.
This just doesn't make sense to me. Anyone age 60 or so has easily spent most, if not all, of their adult life online in some capacity...work, home, both. They were the prime demographic for Blackberries, and then iPhones. They were the ones Facebook was originally built for. Hell, I'm 69 and I've been online since before Amazon or Google were even ideas.
Now, once you start getting into people in their very late 70s and 80s, yeah, I can believe it, especially if cognitive decline has set in. That said, I have met a ton of Millennials and GenXers who are also pretty clueless about this stuff.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:50 AM
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Thank you. Yes, late 70s, maybe. Because I'm very online but 'only' 73 and I bristle at this article's age 60 cut-off.
I know a lot of my age cohorts, especially those without college degrees or those who didn't really need to use computers in their jobs for much besides, like, emails and specialized industry-specific software (CAD or inventory control & the like), think that Facebook and Amazon ARE the Internet, like basically all of it, and otherwise computers are mostly just annoyingly complicated typewriters with minds of their own.
So true. What bugs me is so many of my age, especially the boys, migrated completly to their smart-phones and don't even use a laptop anymore. That's no way to internet, so much is denied when you only do it through the tiny screen without a real keyboard.
posted by Rash at 12:23 PM
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I've noticed with my parents, and especially my dad who is completely addicted to facebook, that their late-60s was a marked step change. Before that they were reasonably skeptical of things they read online, now...I had to explain that the video they saw on facebook of Mark Carney pushing an obvious investment scam was both obviously a scam and obviously AI generated. I don't think my dad believed me. Five years ago, I wouldn't have had to have the conversation. It was like a switch got flipped and they are suddenly profoundly gullible in a way that they simply were not.
I think when we discuss age related cognitive decline we imagine it takes the form of obvious symptoms of dementia or something like that, and not simply becoming easily lost in unfamiliar places and or easily talked into "deals" that aren't actually deals.
posted by selenized at 12:37 PM
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When I was on Facebook, I learned never to accept requests from my mother's friends (or their friends, many of whom decided that any friend of Ethel's was a friend of theirs).
On the rare occasions when I'd be asked in person why I hadn't added them back, I learned that saying, "My Facebook is broken," always worked like a charm.
posted by yellowcandy at 12:42 PM
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I wish I could have put parental controls on my parents getting The Telegraph delivered. It made them frightened and angry about things that weren't true. Mum never got on social media, and is past using anything electronic now. Every conversation is the same with her now, as her memory is totally gone. She's healthy and has nothing to scare her. That's good, I guess.
posted by scruss at 1:00 PM
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My mom just sends me Truth Social posts.
posted by sleeping bear at 1:11 PM
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I'm an old. Been on the internet since the beginning so I could see how it was growing and never bought into the scams. I've always known that if a Con was sophisticated enough you could never tell. But there are other ways to spot them, mostly time and (eventually) other sources. That doesn't save you from the "ACT NOW!" ones but I don't have triggers for those.
The worst part was seeing Ragebait develop across the whole internet, and all the people falling for it. Cassandra went insane for reasons.
But seeing Fox News develop over the years prepared me for that as well. My Mother used to be a staunch liberal until she got bored at home and started listed to early AM radio talk shows. "That Rush Limbaugh makes sense sometimes". It progressed from there.
posted by aleph at 1:14 PM
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My father has always been too far left for the democratic party, and he didn't notice when the far-left anonymous message boards he hangs out on were gradually taken over by Russian propaganda.
He got a lot worse after the first round of COVID, which I really think reduced his cognitive abilities (they've recovered a bit since then). We fought a lot about politics early on in Trump's second term because he had so many views that were identical to right-wing talking points (calling Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas, thinking DOGE might be a serious endeavor and not a scheme to enrich Elon Musk and his friends, etc). I think you have to have your wits about you if you are going to reject mainstream, fact-checked reporting to hang out on fringe message boards, because while it's true you can't trust the gatekeepers on everything the alternative is often falling for some grade-A bullshit.
He tells me now that he gets lots of texts meant for me, because I used his laptop once to check my email and I guess that put his phone number on some kind of list? I do worry about him. My mom still has most of her wits about her. Both of them were lawyers who have years of professional bullshit detection skill to fall back on.
posted by subdee at 1:26 PM
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"...have years of professional bullshit detection skill to fall back on."
And since most people don't have that I despair for us all.
posted by aleph at 1:30 PM
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I have taught my mother to trust no emails or phone calls. In fact, we have resurrected the family code word that was supposed to prevent us kids from being abducted in the 80s and if she ever gets a call that one of us is in an accident, in jail, etc, she is to ask for the code word.
The AI videos though? Some of them are terrible and she falls for them. "Have you seen the royal portrait of Princess Lilibet?" But a few of them are amazing and will get me too. Warriorqueen, I also fell hard for a dogs picking their people video.
One of the benefits of being her driver to medical procedures is that while she's under, I go into her phone and unsubscribe her from the spammy emails and fix her feed.
posted by kimberussell at 1:45 PM
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Metafilter: insane for reasons
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:52 PM
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subdee, my parent has also started getting political texts addressed to me. I assumed it was some development from the marketing list that speculates (incorrectly) that I live with my parent.
They are also increasingly gullible about the internet despite a lifetime of being suspicious of absolutely everyone. I have not figured out how to navigate it.
posted by mersen at 1:55 PM
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I am just about 60 and would consider myself pretty cynical, in general, but due to being at an incredibly low point in my life I find myself susceptible to videos on my instagram feed that make me go "that's nice!" Mostly dog and horse rescue vids, most of which are attached to genuine people or orgs, but I realized I'm fairly credulous about them. Anything which comes from a "compiler" account I skip as a result. Mind, I don't have a penny to "donate" or buy items, nor am I likely to change my politics watching a doggy find a home, but it's still disturbing to find a chink in the armor, as it were.
The vague
posted by maxwelton at 2:14 PM
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What bugs me is so many of my age, especially the boys, migrated completly to their smart-phones and don't even use a laptop anymore
It's the Facebook. Once the boys got hooked on that they were already staring at their phones 20 hours a day (and just to wildly over-genderalize, it's often the GenX dudes who are addicted to the Facebook drama and hot goss, women can often seem to take it or leave it and again wildly generalizing I think it may have something to do with women more often being taught the social skills to keep friendships going IRL or via routes other than social media whereas for GenX men it's social media or nothing) and so ANYWAY they were constantly checking Facebook and once it became at least somewhat practical to get emails & shop via app or browser on the smart phones that was it, everything on phone now.
the absolute
posted by soundguy99 at 2:48 PM
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One of my parents passed before the onslaught of AI awfulness, and the other parent in the last few years of life became indifferent to the lure of the interwebs and email noise because they didn't like getting tricked or lied to--I'd have to explain that requests for money were coming from rich/well funded people (politicians were especially energetic with the "please sir may I have some more"). The surviving parent did what I do - watch the same reliable old movies and old TV shows over and over, and take comfort in that familiarity. I'm still on FB but only for the genealogy groups, and members of those people are BS hunting dogs, which keeps the noise to a tolerable level. For now.
The asymmetrical
posted by datawrangler at 2:59 PM
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The boomers in my life are obsessed with Facebook marketplace in the exact same way they used to use Craigslist, which is every day. I think for both the idea that normal people are buying and selling real stuff makes browsing (scrolling?) seem more "real," a conversation starter—"Look what I found on Marketplace this morning...can you believe how much they want for that?"
They can't even stand looking at their actual Facebook feeds because it's just a cascade AI slop memes.
posted by antibillionaire at 3:24 PM
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She watches the PBS news hour, unless they start to feature video of Trump, and she listens to NPR, unless they start to feature audio of Trump.
* snicker * Every time I visit my parents, at some point when we're watching the news (read: Dad is watching from the living room while Mom and I putter in the kitchen because we want cookies or tea and are peering through the doorway), Dad will switch over from CNN or MS Now to Fox during an ad, and when Mom and I protest he says "just for five minutes so we can see what bullshit they're saying."
He says it's "Just for five minutes" but I've never seen him go more than 90 seconds before growling in outrage and switching right back.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:25 PM
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This just doesn't make sense to me. Anyone age 60 or so has easily spent most, if not all, of their adult life online in some capacity...work, home, both. They were the prime demographic for Blackberries, and then iPhones. They were the ones Facebook was originally built for
Facebook was built for Millennial college students.
posted by atoxyl at 4:01 PM
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Because I fled my right-wing stalker family just before the internet, I've always been extremely wary of sharing online. It's still there, to the point that I don't contribute much detail; I'm quite aware that nearly all my actual info is out there. In a way, I guess, I've had my guard up about being found for so long that nowadays when I look at things I'm surprised to find weeds in my digital garden, so to speak. Then again, I shut things down frequently, block people who are sending crap, never clink on links...I remember going to a party in, 1995? and trying to explain what the internet was to somebody. When you had to type in the whole URL. I had loads of internet penpals back then, anyone I met became a chat buddy before the web.
Then I got a job in the early 2000s that required me to have an online presence, and boy did my spidey senses kick in. I realized my (biologic) family could find me easily through links--be my friend of a friend of a friend! Also it was extremely unsettling to have some married-into family member comment on something because it had been shared shared shared, and hearing about grudges and hurts because of a simple post about a dinner. Drama.
My MIL likes to send digital birthday cards--no paper waste!-- but the site she uses has obviously gone to AI generated. She's savvy enough to protest data centers in her area so she could see the problem when we pointed it out. I've seen my in-laws struggles to learn how to use their smartphones (FIL didn't have one until a few years ago) without clicking on the link of a spam advert. Just before our recent family trip, MIL got a spam email in the middle of the night asking for confirmation for a credit card purchase that she'd shared card info with us for reservation bookings. Thankfully she texted us before following through, and was able to figure out it was a phishing scam mirroring her actual account. We're still in a safe place, I think, for now.
Having a family safe word is a good idea, I'm gonna suggest that.
The reclusive
posted by winesong at 6:00 PM
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Woo, I'm 60! I try to limit my time doomscrolling, and most of the places I frequent call out AI stuff. I also try to block off time for media (TV/movies/books), and read/watch something I haven't every day. My parents are in their 90s, and the only thing they watch on youtube are AI gorilla videos. They also watch a lot of sports, and Paul Finebaum. (They've been listening to him since I was in my teens.)
My kid actively pursues offline interests. They hike, bird watch, practice photography, and get together with friends to draw. I'm proud of them.
posted by Spike Glee at 6:13 PM
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My parent is 64 but thankfully is a book reader. She uses her phone primarily for reading, texting and phone calls. I'm not sure that she even has Facebook. Part of this is that she's vision impaired and if she can't get a site up to a very large font it's unusable for her and she hates screen readers. It's surprising how bad the main three facebook, Amazon and YouTube are for vision impairment. The phone is really too small for TV watching for her so that helps. Also mychart is awful at large fonts. We've had some tech issues because of thiis but honestly the slower the better.
Unfortunately she's very into fox news for TV. Sometimes she has perfectly reasonable ideas about stuff but sometimes she's very very conservative but also she's been practicing fundamental Christianity her whole life so it's not exactly all that different than she was 30 years ago
posted by AlexiaSky at 6:42 PM
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Parents? I have two lovely fiftysomething friends...
One of whom is ride or die for Bernie, and he got on the far left -> Kremlin pipeline. Luckily he is starting to dismount that as Trump's vileness made him understand that just because you're on their side, they are not necessarily on your side.
Another is an ethical vegetarian who was served animal cruelty videos on Facebook by chance one day and responded in a way that looked like affirmation to Facebook. And now her feed is loaded up with traumatizing shit that she cannot stop. And this poor woman needs to use Facebook to keep in touch with her near and dears from the old country.
I'm summary, I want to crotchpunt Zuckerberg to the fucking moon.
posted by Sauce Trough at 7:51 PM
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Recently I was complaining about the Slopocalypse and my ~70yo dad told me: "I've never seen an AI-generated video on Youtube." Uh-oh...
posted by scose at 8:00 PM
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I'm doomscrolling right now. Right here on Metafilter. (We're so screwed.)
posted by zenzenobia at 8:04 PM
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1977
"Son, to much tv will rot your brain"
posted by clavdivs at 8:57 PM
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I'm not saying one should borrow an elder relative's phone and unsubscribe their fb profile from especially spammy and "just asking questions" things they've faved and followed, leading to those things dominating their feed, and I'm not saying to increase their privacy settings so it's harder for randos working out of a call center from hitting them up.
But I am typing it.
Also, set up an ad blocker that blocks scam sites.
posted by zippy at 1:20 AM
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clavdivs: "1977
"Son, to much tv will rot your brain""
my mother used to complain I was reading too much!
posted by chavenet at 3:06 AM
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The notion of "GenX" vs "older" strikes me as a remarkably quaint 1990s notion, seeing as how most of GenX qualifies for AARP membership these days.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:02 AM
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1977
"Son, to much tv will rot your brain"
very hard to tell why your brain is rotting even if your brain isn't rotting
posted by flabdablet at 4:20 AM
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I think the trick with 'Gen X versus older" is that most of us do still have living parents, relatives and family friends who are in their late seventies or beyond, and who are of a clearly different generation.
On one hand, this does play a psychological trick where we feel like we're not "old" when actually we are at the very least solidly middle-aged because we still have parental/adult figures who are markedly older.
I think too that Generation X has a different relationship with parents than many younger people do, at least based on what I see. My parents were unusually strict but even so, it was pretty normal to have a really sharp division between adults/parents and teens/kids that I see much less frequently with millennial and Z people. This boosts the sense that the "grown-ups" are the "adults", ie, not us.
But then, of course, young people - it will happen to you!! You will get older, you will get middle aged, in some ways you will feel Very Old the minute you hit forty, in other ways you won't feel any different than you did as a younger adult or even as a student. You will experience (should the planet last long enough, should society retain something of its present form) all those questions about how to act and dress when you feel like you're relatively young but you're actually not, etc. You too will find that you are treated as an old fogey unless you manage to turn into a Magical Old Person, etc. You will think that it will be different because you're not [a Boomer/Silent/Gen X] and in some ways it will be, but in many it won't.
As a firmly middle aged person, I've been talking about all this stuff with my partner. Should we live so long, we definitely want to be checking in with younger family members and give them enough access/powers to step in if one of us becomes convinced that we're really dating a hunky oil-rig worker who just needs a loan of $1000, etc.
I've been very lucky because the family members who have lived to be old have stayed pretty sharp and don't have a lot of YouTube-style interests. But it is genuinely scary out there. I'm constantly horrified by the evolving scams that target vulnerable old people who are lonely, in cognitive decline, etc. It's easy enough to think "oh those are rich people if they can shell out to scammers", but very often they're not rich people - they are people who need to squeak by on social security and a $150,000 401K, and then someone comes along and drains the 401K and things get a lot harder for them.
And while I don't want to burden younger family members, I do want them to be able to step in if I go that way rather than to have to watch in horror as I lose all my money, fall into semi-homelessness, can't afford medications, etc.
ETA: I started off with "on the one hand" upthread and forgot the second hand. It was going to be something about maintaining an age-diverse friend base, not getting grumpy about change, etc.
posted by Frowner at 6:16 AM
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Since I'm on the cusp of 70, I'm going to argue it's familiarity, not age. The 8080 came out when I was finishing HS and I spent decades in Silicon Valley, so I'm pretty attuned. Most other people my age didn't pay attention to computers until their kids got one.
That said, my 16yro granddaughter is better at picking out AI still images than I am, also I suspect, because her generation is attuned.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:19 AM
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my mother used to complain I was reading too much!
Mine too, and would make me go outside to play so I'd get on my bike and go to the library. Ha ha.
The irony is that for 10 years I've been begging her to stop watching TV (or, to be fair, reading) and move her body, she has not, and now her mobility is extremely limited and getting worse. Meanwhile I like many of my Gen-X peers watching particularly our mothers make this mistake are spending hours a week at the gym.
Anyways I really came to say that the scams are really bad. My parents called me in a panic over the "grandchild in jail" scam (not to the point of giving money; they are really tight with a buck) and my MIL has been scammed several times, and has lost over $1k. She also clicks on ads on the internet and buys things from them and keeps getting taken in by the "small local store goes out of business" drop shipping scam despite walking her through it over and over, so she now has a collection of shit from that. And a Temu account.
I cannot for the life of me figure out if it is cognitive entirely. I think so (it is for sure with my dad, although he has a brain injury) and so yeah, my husband and I also need to make plans.
But I also think...and sorry Boomers...that Western white middle class and up Boomers in particular have as a group enjoyed unparalleled privilege and economic growth mixed with 60s idealism, plus demographics, in a way that has always centred not just their wants, but their needs. A lot of scams wisely prey on that.
I'm hopeful that I can hang in there longer, and also adhere to a few rules my spouse (who historically is more susceptible to sales pitches) and I have followed: never give money at the door, never hire a contractor that comes to the door, never give money over the phone, don't give money to Internet friends (I know this is harsh but it works for us), don't shop from ads online, let things sit the shopping cart for 24 hrs.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:57 AM
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I love that my 93 year old father-in-law is on facebook because he ends every comment on one of my posts with "Love, Dad", like it's a postcard.
posted by Furnace of Doubt at 7:29 AM
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my problem is I have aunts whom I love dearly, who refuse to have a phone with data, or non dial up internet. they were back to the landers who joined the peace corps to protest segregation in the 1960's, and now I cannot easily share all their grand-niece photos with them, i print things out and mail tem, and don't do it often enough and feel bad about being phone-call avoidant.
I bought them online photo frames, but i will have to try to walk them through the install over the phone.
but yeah, my dad was always a Limbaugh dittohead, which just means fox news disinfo. he works in computer security, so he avoids google and facebook, but i wish i could block fox news from the TV, that s a much bigger problem than scams. or maybe it s the biggest scam. i don't want my kids to be subject to racist bullshit when they are over there, can we please just put on the LSU game
posted by eustatic at 7:37 AM
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i feel like i've been in the trenches of this battle since '08; my engagement in this undeclared war has felt dirty and unpleasant and full of skullduggery and yet somehow it still feels like losing
posted by i used to be someone else at 8:11 AM
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Last year, I launched a website for my church. I'm 68. I wanted the congregation to fact check and give feedback, but had a hard time explaining how to do that to people my age and many who were younger. No one knew what a URL was, nor a "website address." They never heard of copy or paste. These are people who are constantly on their phones. Turns out that most of them didn't know that the internet consisted of anything besides Facebook.
So if there is anything new on the website, I have to post a link on Facebook for them. I embed lots of links and videos, but I doubt anyone knows what to do with them. Sigh.
posted by Miss Cellania at 9:11 AM
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> As someone close enough to 60 (THE DANGER ZONE!!!!!!!!!!1111!!!!!) I recently quit facebook. This was really hard, unlike leaving Insta a few years ago. I used and wanted fb for keeping in touch with friends and family, my neighborhood groups, some cat groups. But increasingly my feed was filled with so much garbage.
My 2026 New Years resolution was to avoid sites with algorithmic feeds. I've mostly kept to it, aside from occasionally hopping onto bluesky/mastodon to check big news (like this week's infosec stuff) or my city subreddit for emergency events. The result: while I haven't cut down on my screen time, I have cut down on my doomscrolling, and am probably overall happier for hanging out in, for lack of a better word, "local internet" places like MeFi.
I've also started, faintly, to think about "aging in place on the internet." I don't feel like I'll ever be as vulnerable on the internet as the parents in the OP, but intellectually I know that it's a possibility. I'd rather not lose the parts of the net I grew up with and value, but I'm also not exactly sure what "aging in place on the internet" would look like. Other than, I suppose, to hope that when I hit that age, the legacy text-based communities like MeFi are still around and kicking.
posted by postcommunism at 10:39 AM
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My mother-in-law is doing hospice at home and I've been around at her place a lot on and off for caregiving reasons, and so have had a B-plot the last few months of discovering just how inane the stuff on her TikTok feed is. Like nothing I hadn't conceived of in terms of content (and thankfully nothing ideologically gross), but it's exactly the sort of thing I aggressively laser out any hint of on my own feed.
Stuff like: the obviously grifty ads, which she doesn't engage with but will let loop five times; the AI-generated airline etiquette/injustice drama (the rude/stubborn passenger in the wrong, the kind/pleading passenger victim in the right, the stern stewardess who comes in and dresses down the stubborn tyrant) that are so stiff and cookie cutter its hard to know how someone could sit through a hundred variations of them; the occasional Schroedinger's-slop footage of someone having a mental health crisis on an airplane and the long repetitive and screaming confrontation that proceeds (only reason I think not slop when overhearing is that degree of nuanced and hard-to-listen to panicked human distress doesn't seem like an established part of the oeuvre); the goes-absolutely-nowhere negotiations over the sales price of specific high-end designer handbags...
My wife has had less Very Online exposure even second-hand to a lot of that class of slop and bait and so was pretty taken aback when she was first overhearing it.
And it's frustrating to know that she's half-consuming this crap when she used to read a lot and still watches a certain amount of at least human-crafted long-form television, but at the same time, she's not buying shit and she's not because of the limits of her app/internet use facing a lot of the major attack surfaces for scams etc. And, like, I'm not gonna tell her what she has to do with her time when she's counting it down; having bad but not dangerous taste in video feeds doesn't qualify as a problem let alone a crisis under the circumstances. But I can't help but worry that there'll be some transient moment in decline where somehow it'll shift to being more of one.
This is not shit I thought to worry about when I was a bright-eyed teenager excited about the prospects of the internet.
Todd "The Absolute" Lokken
posted by cortex at 12:29 PM
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OMG I'm posting right below Cortex!
I feel comfortably savvy about detecting engagement bait, stealth marketing and even cognitive warfare but AI will still fool me. My millennial son has helped teach me by sneering "Dad, that's AI" and then explaining how he knows. It's a sense or a feeling that I'm getting much better at deploying.
It's not the internet we all imagined when I first discovered it thirty years ago in middle age.
The absolute
posted by Alcedinidae at 1:15 PM
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So there's a VFX studio that has a Youtube channel I like a lot. Their usual videos are deep dives into different VFX scenes in film or movies, but they've started adding more "debunking AI" things now. And in one of them, it's about teaching parents how to spot AI stuff. (And they also have a few shots where they do precisely that, and their moms all successfully spot AI.)
That's not the only "how to spot AI" video they have either. There's even a subset where they buy things with AI generated images to prove that the item doesn't match the description.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:43 PM
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Mom and I have a little disagreement about Dad's youtube choices. Dad's got a bit of mental decline, and he gets lonely since he needs more care and lives in a residence without Mom. So yeah, he watches a lot of stuff. Sometimes old shows he likes, but also some youtube. I even set up a youtube channel with him, so I can share videos. But it's not very easy for him to get to that channel (Stupid thing that youtube app or maybe the various smart TV vendors could fix-- let me set up a deeplink on the home screen of the smart TV to take him straight to a curated selection). Anyhow.
Last time I visited he was showing me one of the videos, about celtic singing, and I could tell immediately it was likely AI (tons of the same people, lot of very short shots with nothing more than a few seconds continuous, etc). So I told him, and he was grouchy: "I think they should have to tell me!" (Yeah, Dad, I agree).
Mom thinks as long as he's happy, and what he's watching isn't itself offensive or disinformation, then we shouldn't tell him. Maybe she's right. I'm not sure. But I agree with Dad: Youtube should flag AI-generated stuff so we can filter it out.
posted by nat at 3:18 PM
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I forgot to sign off..
the so fucking tired
posted by nat at 3:19 PM
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A lot of what people are describing in this thread is CRIME.
It's one of the great puzzles of American politics. The same generation that gave us lifetime imprisonment and an enormous police state in response to largely imaginary threats is now, finally experiencing a real crime wave that targets them personally and it's all "oopsie, someone stole my life savings, I guess that's on me."
posted by eraserbones at 3:44 PM
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I wonder if showing people how easy it was to create AI pix and videos would help sensitize them. I don't use genAI as a rule, but I would be willing to do that.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:03 PM
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The absolute phunniemee
DC is really scraping the bottom of the barrel now
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:34 PM
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I just talked with my mom and she assured me that she never visits YouTube or tiktok and hardly goes on Facebook at all. She said all she needs is Netflix and her house flipper shows. She seems to be pretty aware of the level of scammy slop sloshing about, but I told her to be careful and to warn her friends in the retirement community.
posted by supermedusa at 5:22 PM
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Apparently, all of us over 60's are just complete dumbasses. I'll try to remember that when I'm explaining to GenX, Millennials and GenZ how to tell when something is fake, and when I'm teaching them not to feed the trolls, and explaining to them how they can lock down their financial accounts.
Ageism is alive and well on Metafilter, I see. I thought I'd give it a try again, several years after so many of us left in large part because of the ageism, but I see that nothing has changed. Funny how this site has put so much effort into trying to figure out what happened, and how to get people to come back, and yet never seems to see the obvious.
posted by MexicanYenta at 10:50 PM
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Apparently, all of us over 60's are just complete dumbasses
sssshh! if the kids find out we can codeswitch, they're going to tell the church
posted by flabdablet at 11:29 PM
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Apparently, all of us over 60's are just complete dumbasses.
Maybe the article wasn't about you?
I'm over sixty, and I knew that it wasn't about me. I do spend over fifty-percent of my leisure time in front of a screen, but I use ad blockers. I don't click on spam. I don't watch endless streams of engagement bait. I chat with friends. I read fiction. I write fiction. Occasionally I code.
But I recognize that I'm atypical for people our age. Most of them haven't been using computers since 1978. Most of them weren't on the internet from its inception. Most of them probably don't spend much time looking for new things to learn.
So yeah, it's not all old people, but it is a lot of them, and it is a problem for them.
posted by Tabitha Someday at 9:23 AM
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Concerns of ageism are valid, but I think we can acknowledge that it is KNOWN that older people are deliberately targeted by scammers. Many people of all ages are savvy enough to protect themselves, but we should do what we can to make sure the targets are knowledgeable so they too can protect themselves, right?
posted by supermedusa at 12:12 PM
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"...we can acknowledge that it is KNOWN that older people are deliberately targeted by scammers."
AND we old people have the issues of cognitive decline. Most of it seems to be with people who have long abused their bodies, alcohol and such. Then there are the myriad diseases that afflict people who remain sedentary into their old age which a lot of people I know do. The younger bodies can put up with that easier.
Doesn't stop the resentments of old people who get labeled with the same brush.
posted by aleph at 1:33 PM
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Posts on sports betting apps that point out the vast preponderance of males who get caught up in that shit do not trigger defensiveness in this male, nor do studies that show males in longterm cis/hetero relationships fail to take an equal share of the domestic tasks and childrearing and emotional labour
My eyesight and hearing are beginning to fail "and I know that it won't be long"
Getting old sucks but we cannot fault the young for not knowing that like we know it, besides this crowd skews pretty old so it's a self-hating ageism?
posted by runsrealgood at 11:26 PM
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Getting old sucks
Still beats the hell out of not getting old.
posted by flabdablet at 1:33 AM
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"Working hard or hardly working"
we can do this all day
posted by runsrealgood at 6:06 AM
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how bout them jets
posted by flabdablet at 8:26 AM
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Every single person in my family over the age of 65 has fallen for scams and/or slop. Anecdata, but also clearly a major vulnerability. My "aunt" who doesn't have any money to pay for assisted living was sending $20K a year to various questionable charities. My uncle who is better off (I don't know what the number is) has two dozen calendars sent to him by similar charities, so he may not be giving a ton of money yet. But he's obviously on a list as someone who might. My mom watches AI stuff and just sent me a handwritten postcard, but the "art" was AI. Stepfather and father-in-law both fell for separate tech support scams, luckily in the hundreds of dollars. It's not ageism when there's an epidemic.
posted by wnissen at 8:42 AM
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I think it would be pretty worthwhile to try to tease out how aging relates to falling for scams.
What part is generational/experience-related, so a Millennial or a retired tech worker would not be vulnerable?
What part is social, so older people who feel isolated, neglected or without purpose are vulnerable not because of their age but because society is failing them since TBQH retired people are god's own gift to volunteer projects and should never need to feel useless.
What part is literally cognitive decline?
What part is culture, where some subcultures are watching Fox and getting kind of culturally dumbed down in general?
What part is fatigue/depression/physical pain? I think of this one because my dad is sharp as a tack fundamentally, but he fatigues a lot more (he's over 80) now and when he's fatigued, he gets anxious and I could see that the right scam at the right moment could work even though 99% of the time he easily spots scams. There may be people who are fine fundamentally but who are in pain or worn down and thus vulnerable.
Knowing this would help all of us because it could help us address specific causes instead of just having a vague sense that age=scammable.
posted by Frowner at 9:09 AM
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