Nothing helps the elderly against the fake news they consume and spread

Elections are heating up the political debate and frenzied forwards are helping the elderly voters build on their biases

Baby boomers in India have seldom been kind to their children. Force-feeding green vegetables was often followed by life lessons on education, society and religion, and a few years later, drugs, alcohol and marriage. Never mind those mutually awkward conversations about sex — without a word about sexuality. They also had little respect for the privacy of their own crop. Late nights or locked rooms, there was a constant tussle for space. We have all since grown up. But here’s why growing up with them feels like much of the same.

Facebook, for instance, has been their most recent conquest. Their numbers are swelling like an epidemic: 500,000 more people above the age of 55 are likely to join the social network this year, according to a survey by market research company, eMarketer. And this is just in the UK. Think about India, where they are a force of 130-million strong. It’s the country that led the growth of Facebook’s daily users to 1.52 billion in the last quarter. If these two unrelated numbers aren’t evidence enough, look at how they are starting to get “LOL” right. Ignore their friend requests all you want, but the fact is they have moved on. They came, they saw, they conquered. 

It’s almost like they are steering the next big innovation in their favour. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, at the annual F8 developers conference last week, said that the redesigned Facebook will have “communities as central as friends”. While any change to the layout is bound to confuse them (LOL), groups are what the oldies are gung-ho about. Facebook for them may have started as a medium to find those long-lost friends, estranged relatives and forgotten neighbours, but now it’s increasingly becoming about sharing interests — cities, hobbies, spirituality and even TV shows. 

Good for us that Facebook understands how the “future is private”. Zuckerberg said the company is gearing up to prioritise end-to-end encrypted private messages over public sharing. But FB is not the only social sword at the disposal of the old guard. There’s WhatsApp too.

 

Stand up and be counted if you have been forced to exit, delete or, at the very least, mute WhatsApp groups (and still have to check them occasionally) because of an onslaught of long jokes with double-spaced lines, memes filled with nauseating sentimentality and passionate political debates. Family groups on WhatsApp feel like those living room discussions that you were not just made to sit through but participate in. They will summon you and you will have to respond. It’s funny how young entrepreneurs are losing their creations to the old lot. These invaders are not far away from Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. (But let’s please not tell them about Telegram.)

Our parents and their parents have established their turf by the sheer force of numbers. But here’s where it gets tricky. They haven’t yet learnt to navigate its treacherous paths. And they will need more than just their own vintage fellow travellers to do so.

My 62-year-old mother spends hours on her phone every day. When she’s not making travel plans with one of her more intimate groups on WhatsApp (50 members, easy), she’s chatting with the rest of them, watching videos on Facebook or singing duets on a Karaoke app called Smule. It’s been going on for a few years.

I would have remained oblivious to this if not for her sudden love for aloe vera and bitter gourd. She kept harping on about its “proven benefits” against diabetes. She was relying on old wisdom, but also on a WhatsApp forward. In her case, she knew what she was doing. Bitter gourd and aloe vera do help maintain blood glucose levels. But a lot of the other messages were not that harmless.

One of the widely shared messages on Ayurveda that I reviewed started with “Be your own doctor” and had one concoction each for over 30 ailments common in old age. Some had made-up quotes attributed to well-known doctors and others cited research from fake medical journals. There were texts, videos and even infographics with all sorts of dubious claims.

It’s not that the older adults don’t know that the internet is plagued by spam, half-truths and fake news. But most of that generation has not been online long enough to research, look for authenticity in the URL or apply a reverse image or video search to check its timestamp and origin.

“Peer influence becomes a strong factor,” says Sameer Malhotra, director of mental health and behavioural sciences, Max Super Specialty Hospital in Saket, New Delhi. The person who shares the information becomes more important than the source itself.

A recent study published in the medical journal Science Advances estimated that people over the age of 55 were four times more likely to share a hoax than users between 18 and 29. But Malhotra cautions against categorising the social media usage of the elderly in a single bracket. “A lot depends on their personality. Their experience could also give them insights and a balanced approach,” he says. 

The elderly being more susceptible to disinformation is an emerging pattern and not a statistical claim. But it’s a fact that you are more likely to find dodgy health advice and home remedies being circulated in their groups simply because they are looking for them. And unlike adolescents, they are unlikely to run them past another adult in the family.

Internet use among those aged 65 and above grew 150 per cent worldwide between 2009 and 2011, the largest growth in a demographic group, according to the Pew Research Centre. And yet, in a rapidly ageing world, the conversations on fake news, propaganda and online abuse revolve only around young internet users — and not new users.

This is why being the administrator of such a group on Facebook or WhatsApp becomes a real-time job. “Large groups are not the most efficiently managed but most abusers are slowly weeded out,” says Kanwar Pal Singh, 65, a retired banker who spends about four hours on social media a day and shuttles between many groups on Facebook and WhatsApp.

When you are new to the internet, something should prepare you for the kind of abuse that makes it so infamous. Samita Nair, 51, a retired government official who lives alone in Ranchi, deleted her Facebook account two years ago after her picture was morphed and posted on her timeline. “I didn’t know about privacy settings. I was so disgusted that I asked someone to just delete my account,” she says.

“People in that age tend to be more sensitive and are often deeply affected by online abuse,” says Paritosh Baghel of S L Raheja Hospital in Mumbai, who has several patients over 50. Nair has no plans to rejoin Facebook.

Most digital literacy programmes in India target the rural population. A few initiatives, such as the one run by the NGO HelpAge India, teach the elderly how to use Google Search and Maps, book cabs and access social media, but there’s little initiative by tech giants to engage with this growing chunk of user base.

Google says it recently organised an event called “Back to School” for senior family members of its employees and also the “Unmukt Senior Citizen Festival” to talk about online safety, but it doesn’t say anything about the spreading of fake news among that age group.

Now, with elections heating up the political debate, frenzied forwards are helping the elderly voters build on their biases. Groups are being flooded with political propaganda. It’s a difficult time for old and young alike, and it falls upon the ones in the middle to protect them both. Start by introducing them to Alt News and Boom Live. But if you can’t train them in time, dislodge the Wi-Fi routers to take computers offline. Plant screen time restrictions on Apple phones. And when up against an Android user, maybe it’s best to just snatch the phone and run.