Oh, the solution is pretty easy: Ban social media access for this vulnerable group! If it works with kids, it should work with other endangered members of society, too! Won't it?
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2026
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The people sharing the dumbest shit with you on Whatsapp are affected? .. ..what...nooo!
My tech illiterate mom is now supporting far right parties in local area, thinks that our country needs to be friends with Russians, scrolls tiktok and tells us always to consult chatgpt.
I can understand most of it but all together this is getting rediculous. She can't answer the question: "How do you think our country can be friends with Russia if Russia constantly blames us for trying to destroy them from inside by applying European values?" too much propaganda on tiktok ig...
Sidenote: she's tech illiterate because she doesn't read prompts her phone gives her in her own mother language, clicks some random buttons and always asks me why things do not work. All that instead of just pausing for a sec when prompt appears and read it through to understand what buttons do.
The same people who told us not to believe everything we see or hear....
Yeah, what a shame /s
they are obsessed with AI videos. an older couple i know, solely watches AI asian movie videos now.
Oh that's a thing. Never seen the Asian movie videos
specificaly AI generated chinese "drama videos"
“Water is wet”.
This is based on my personal observations. The Boomers in my own family distrust all doctors because of what ever adolf1488 or whoever is posting on Twitter. And they seem to be entertained by some of the most obvious AI slop videos that feels like the digital version of jingling keys in front of a toddler’s face.
The same people that told me that “TV will rot my brain” seem to have no information literacy.
Yeah, I am a millennial, 39 this year, and my dad is far more addicted to his computer than I am, I even work in IT.
He used to sell railroad safety systems (and was a brilliant sales person who actually knew and still knows the technical details of the system)
Good on 'em. I wish trains were more prevalent in the states.
You and me are pretty similar ages.
I do have some Gen X friends who I think are not doing much better.
I wonder it being a “digital native” gives some level of defense against this kind of stuff versus people who were born when information was newspapers, radio, and the TV news one hour out of the day.
Gen X here. Newspapers, radio and TV news is what made me sceptical about stuff in the first place. Moving to the internet and forums where that stuff was being peddled by random amateurs didn't make me less sceptical, that's for sure.
I think this is an important comment.
I also was becoming skeptical of what was and what wasn’t being reported through those channels right about the time that I got access to the Internet. That skepticism towards what we now call “legacy media” did prime me to be way more open to hearing people on the Internet claiming to know “what’s really going on”. Not proud to say it, but I did have a brief season where I was tuned in to what Alex Jones was saying.
Had smartphones been a thing then? Maybe I would have turned out like the very folks this thread is talking about.
Digital natives know to be more skeptical. These people lack basic literacy and don't understand that people can lie on the internet. In fact, it's mostly lies, always has been.
Agreed. They also in many cases remember when the Internet "was good." When every single website, tool, or product wasn't tracking every microinteraction, when your email spam was Re: Re: Re: Re: forwards, when social media was a microcosm of what it is today , and when bots didn't make up like more than half the user traffic. So the shit purpose built to engage kids and boomers falls flat.
And to your point about lying on the Internet, they forget (or flatly refuse to acknowledge) that like a corporation or government can and have easily create user accounts that look like normal people to convince people of things. Just because the name "John Goodbrown" sounds like a down to earth American and his picture is of him and his truck and cowboy boots doesn't mean it's not one of thousands of bot accounts created specifically by the FSB to cause chaos and stir opinion.
Yeah, have family who 80% of their retired day is sitting in the lazy boy with an iPad locked on Facebook in one hand and cable news on the tv. We’re in Canada, but it’s a lot of CNN.
And it’s not just my family, lot of friends have the same.
It’s a Skinner box. We need to ban these companies, but the government doesn’t have the spine to ban the obvious foreign interference.
Part of the problem here is that too many people live to work, instead of the other way around. Once they retire, they have no idea what to do with themselves and take the least-effort path to occupy their time. Which makes them perfect targets for the addictive aspects of social media.
Maybe what we need to do is flood Facebook and Instagram and all the rest with material about the rewards of volunteering for charity.
(Sometimes I'm almost thankful my mother is a technophobe.)
The problem is that their only connection to the world is electronic. The generation before would go to bridge clubs and the VA. They just talk to some Russian disinformation bot on facebook and it takes the place of socializing.
I'm gen x, and I'm about as close to a digital native as possible, been around computers since 1981 and ever since.
My advantage in this allows me to have conversations online and with actual digital natives, so I think you're right that being around the tech and using it yields a cultural advantage.
Most people my age (over 50) are hopelessly just sucked into any little app or service with zero thought about repercussions. And they are now the absolute worst to deal with because they have a strong sense of entitlement on top of the ignorance. It's embarrassing.
GenX here - certainly in my friendship circle we're doing better because we grew through both the start of home computing and the beginning of the home internet etc... we remember what it was like before the social media and 10 second videos crap and are generally using the current tech without it
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Boomers are definitely weak against AI slop.
I have one parent that’s silent generation and one that’s boomer and the silent generation parent is way more functional on this than the boomer.
Something about that generation made them pretty unprepared for life.
Weak to slop and they don't seem to have an internal "okay that's enough I should put my phone down" voice.
Even young people I know who are on their phones a lot have some concept that it's time to look up and forward, but endless content seems irresistible to the brains of boomers.
I think their general mindset is that everything is for them so of course more scrolling because it’s more for them!
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Yeah no shit. Boomers fucking love Facebook.
This one doesn’t.
Almost as much as under-45s love tiktok
This one doesn't.
What, 45? Like, people who saw that shit start when they were well into their thirties? Is that a thing?
Feels very late to hop on that bandwagon.
Yup. I've had to tell more coworkers in their early 40s than I'd care to admit, and 2 women I've dated, to stop sending me tiktok links
Unsurprising to anyone around boomers. Grandma asks Gemini everything. Dad scrolls shorts all day. Grandpa rage posts on Facebook.
Then you talk to them about real life shit and they act like they understand, but how could they understand when they haven't been present for years? Their opinions and beliefs are no longer based in reality. They say stupid out of touch shit and have absolutely no hobbies anymore. The disconnect between me and my parents and grandparents makes me physically sick and there's legitimately no amount of effort I can put in that would get any of them to stop... Because it's addictive as fuck.
For fucks sake any time I'm with my dad he's just scrolling short videos and laughing/making comments trying to bring everyone else into what he's watching and holy shit it's legitimately the most annoying fucking thing. Put your fucking phone down and experience real life. YOU think it's so awesome because they know EXACTLY what you like but nobody else fucking cares.
I see everyone around me mentally degrading because of this shit and I'm feeling worried. It makes me feel like I need to make a Facebook account just to fill their feeds with less slop but I deleted my Facebook 10 years ago. I don't know how else to get through to them. If anyone has ideas that've worked on their family, lmk. Rant over.
this sounds like everyone i meet. except... they are not boomers. they are millennials.
and when i say i like doing stuff in real life they get very confused and often angry.
and if i say 'lets go to a movie' they say 'it's too long and hard to pay attention'. and if i say I like to read, they tell me I'm weird and pretentious.
and they can't hold a conversation on topic for more than like a minute or two. and then when I don't want to interact with them anymore... they tell me I'm the problem.
I used to actually kinda like talking to my co-workers and people my age... now I just hate it. Because everyone's brain is destroyed, everything is instant gratification echo chamber nonsense or anxiety-fueled social comparison.
and when I go on social media... I am just repulsed confused how anyone could enjoy the endless slop it serves up, and often turned off by people to the point I just block them. I'd rather remain ignorant than look at their try hard posts about how happy and wonderful their life is... because when you talk to them IRL they are anxious and depressed.
God, I've seen so much of this.
Only reason I'm commenting is the movie thing, cause the "hard to pay attention" is wild to me, even as someone with severe ADHD.
I don't like going to, or sitting down for, movies most of the time because of dermatillomania (warning on images there) secondary to my ADHD resulting in me usually creating entirely new holes in my fingers/hands absentmindedly while I'm watching. There's a secondary ADHD "itch" due to the drive for spontenaeity, but I get hooked easily on what I'm watching once I do -- it's more of a "but I could be working on X project or something" thought, but then I'll sit and watch a 2 hour episode of Dimension 20 with no distractions like it's nothing.
I just... I don't get how people could pivot to being so short-attention-spanned they don't want anything like that. Those of us with ADHD are very used to how short attention spans feel, but they're almost never that short. What the hell.
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Folk on Facebook are a lost cause. They have lost their minds, beyond redemption. Meta needs to be absolutely hoofed into the ether.
Hardcode the DNS for social media to 127.0.0.1 on the router lmao. Nothing to lose.
My dad already has "WiFi issues" and isn't even on the network most of the time, just uses 5G. I think it's because my pihole blocks ads on his phone games that give him rewards... Sigh.....
I feel you and your frustrations, same for me on all accounts. Mom wonders why I don't visit often but then sits there on Facebook the entire time.
I tried to fight it online, you won't win. Their algorithms bury your stuff, your comments get the stupid laughing emoji, it's not worth it. Plus it just starts to suck you in so it's a lose lose.
The only thing that helps is getting them off their phones. There's no silver bullet there, but simply disconnecting them somehow. Starting a hobby with them, or hiking, or something that isn't being in their phones. If you ban phones you're the villain so be careful, but you can do things that are less phone involved. When they're not memorized by their phones they come back a little.
Tracie is one of more than 50% of adults aged over 55 who use social media at least once a week, according to a 2026 YouGov poll.
"It's an epidemic," she said. "We are addicted to the scroll."
That...seems like an awfully expansive definition of addiction.
I'd bet that an awful of us here use the Threadiverse at least once a week.
And define "use". My father "uses" Facebook at least once a week for marketplace. That is pretty much the extent of his social media presence. Even if he checked it daily, he's not addicted in any way.
TIL I’m addicted to my banking app.
Also, only 50%?
Oh wow, the people who consistently vote conservative are addicted to platforms owned by billionaires which constantly spew disinformation and create echo chambers by design. There's probably nothing more to look into, there.
Its across the board... super popular with everyone around me. Feels like almost every day someone is trying to show me some TikTok Insta nothing of a video where its just some words with a person dancing in the background talking about how mad drive thrus make them or a rescue kitten. I watch my wife randomly get super passionate about incredibly specific topics like some murder from 1998 or a new product that totally solves some problem we never had until then and inevitably when I ask about it yep, Instagram story. Depression + fear + a stream of bullshit to sell seems to be a winning formula and I'm just so fucking tired.
Lets ban social media for them as well! And then for the rest of us too! Then at least we can stop with the age verification...
Yes the men literally type nice rack on their cousins photos.
Limited to boomers? Isn’t it affecting a whole lot more many demographics ?
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It's unfortunate.
One has to consider that your boomer parents and family members are at this point literally living in a different reality, because functionally, that's what these big social media sites with algorithmically-weighted content do. They present a reality that keeps people's eyes glued to the screen, often by convincing them whatever dumb shit they believe is correct but also keeping them perpetually outraged, and all to buy cheap garbage produced in Indonesia or something.
I think this is also tied to a decline in mental faculties. My mom had dementia and I had to dig her out of various situations, like having multiple car warranties, and destroying her inbox by clicking on literally anything. She hit a point where the gates that would validate or invalidate a decision vanished entirely. If a salesperson came to her door, the chances they left without landing a sale were slim to none. They just had to be charismatic and sound positive. It’s the reason she got stuck with one of those whole-house water softeners.
I think AI slop hits similarly. It’s made to tap into their most basic hooks. Religion, family, cute stuff, etc. Their brain drives past any of the gates that we have where we ask why anyone would watch this over actual videos of animals, people, etc. They’re a deer in headlights being entertained by the rudimentary dopamine hits, while all of the technical details go over their heads.
got stuck with one of those whole-house water softeners.
Wait, what other kind of water softener is there? Maybe it's just because I live in an area where our water is practically more limestone than water, but I've only ever heard of whole house water softener.
As far as the rest of your comment. My experience is slightly different. I have several older relatives who have no known mental issues who have the same issues as your mom. But on the other hand my dad who doesn't use social media because he has MS and it makes it hard for him to type, is still sharp as a whip when it comes to spotting scams. He's pretty tech illiterate but he can still easily spot and ignore dogey emails and links. It seems almost like social media has conditioned most boomers to be more likely to fall for scams. Of course corolation doesn't imply causation. Maybe it's just that more scam savvy people are more likely to recognize most social media as being a scam so they don't use it.
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I’m not addicted. I can quit anytime I want.
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