The Adult Children Cleaning Up Their Parents’ Feeds ⇥ nymag.com

Jessica Lucas, in a fascinating New York magazine article about older people succumbing to compulsive social media use, and the adult children who are trying to stabilize their feeds:

Most adult children seem to know instinctively that their parents’ social-media use has long since outstripped whatever cognitive good it once served. They have watched their parents surrender ever-larger portions of their lives to their phones, triggering a kind of grief and, occasionally, anger. Every hour handed over to the feed can feel like a choice on their parents’ part to willingly accelerate their own deterioration. Anne, a 55-year-old writer living in New York, regularly travels out of state to visit her mother, Rosa, who is in her 80s. She often arrives to an unsettling scene: Rosa on the couch, “hunched over” her phone, “slack-jawed.” Over the years, Anne says she has watched her mother abandon crossword puzzles, newspapers, and books in favor of the feed. “I don’t think a younger version of her would have recognized that behavior as something she had as a goal for herself later in life,” she tells me.

Lucas also describes a kind of A.I.-generated video genre that preys on seniors; these videos are everywhere. If I am not signed into my YouTube Premium account, I often see ads from some company named Oathill Media with A.I.-generated seniors extolling the benefits of cheap life insurance. I cannot imagine this is wholly legitimate, and I know people who have been tricked by similar videos.

More broadly, this is one reason I think age-based regulations are insufficient. We should expect more from the giant corporations that make their money from, apparently, building compelling venues for advertisers. That should not be solely because Google and Meta collect an enormous amount of data to enable targeting. The platforms they manage are not actually safe; they are just popular. And, with descriptions like those in this article, it seems difficult to argue even the most frequent users are actually enjoying themselves without further intervention.