Many voices have argued for a ban on social media for children. I have argued on some occasions that an age ban on social media is a senseless and even dangerous idea. What I’ve argued is that the problem is not the children’s age, but the sickening business model of social media.
But hey! I changed my mind. We need age control on social media. I believe people over 60 should be banned. To understand why, let’s first define the problem we want to solve with such a ban.1
The problem with Big Tech socials
In a nutshell, the problem lies in the Big Tech business model of “free” services. Social media platforms are of course not free, but earn money through harvesting our data for advertising. This means we don’t pay with our money, but with our attention, which is hunted after by algorithms competing in a wild west to fill our timelines with the most addictive content. As it turns out, our attention is best drawn by stuff that makes envious or angry. This means that we get to see mostly posts of people who do better than ourselves on LinkedIn, and obvious or less obvious fake news on Facebook or X. There is no incentive whatsoever to show us content that is fun or true. Even worse, some social media giants have strong ties with autocratic governments, paving the way for micro-targeted propaganda. Indeed, not only our mental sanity is at stake, but the health of our democracy.2
The problem with elderly
Now, pick from all people you know, the person who is most helplessly stuck in some algorithmic web of lies. What is this person’s age? Highly likely, they are over 60. What’s the issue with social media use of the elderly?
A large problem is that elderly are highly susceptible. It is no coincidence that scams target the elderly, never school-going teens. This weakness manifests itself most strikingly when elderly engage with social media. Where most people under 60 have developed a natural understanding of the dynamics of social media media, having witnessed the rise of mis- and disinformation in their shaping years, elderly tend to fall helplessly for AI fakes or trolls spreading propaganda.
The problem is amplified by the fact that elderly have lots of time. Where for decades, elderly spent their days behind the television, today’s elderly fill their lives doom-scrolling Facebook, accepting every suggested video on Youtube, and getting sucked into the darkest rabbit holes on X.
This all were not so alarming, if elderly weren’t the most influential group in politics in many western democracies. In the Netherlands, for example, they cast over one third of the votes. Even worse, many active politicians are social media addicted elderly themselves! This means the influence of polarizing content on social media feed gets multiplied if it targets elderly.
I believe we cannot let social media platforms destroy our democracy, using our elderly as their vehicle. We need to fix this hole where the rain gets in, and ban elderly from social media. We can discuss the exact age, but I think 60 would be a safe choice.
Postscript
I truly hope I didn’t convince you with the arguments above. What I aim to illustrate is how easy it is to make up arguments for a social media age ban for any age group other than your own. When older politicians argue for a social media ban for children they not only show a lack of inter-generational solidary, but also very little self-reflection. However, The biggest issue is: The lazy argumentation behind such proposals leaves untouched the actual problems of Big Tech-dominated social media.
We shouldn’t take social media from elderly, nor from the youth. Social media have great potential for all of us. For connecting, for fun, for democracy, for co-creation. To make social media great again, we should break free from the stranglehold of Big Tech in our online lives.
You may be surprised to learn that fun and healthy social media are already widely available, you just need to adopt them. Some alternatives are already so much better than the evil Big Tech standards that they are adopted by the masses already. For example, Signal and Matrix chat are more functional than Meta’s Whatapp and switching is painless. Mastodon and Bluesky are becoming ever more valuable open alternatives for Twitter. The Fediverse, of which Mastodon is only a branch, offers many other platforms in different stages of maturity, from video platform PeerTube and photo sharing app Pixelfed to alternatives for online marketplaces or community tools. Try them out and give feedback to the developers.
Whether you’re young or old, you don’t want to spend the rest of your online life like a lazy and dusty conservative, do you?
- By defining the actual problem, I do better than 9 out of 10 advocates of a social media ban for children, who don’t bother explaining which precice problem is being solved by a ban, and how. ↩︎
- This is the main reasson for setting up Basel Punkt Social, an activist research project for the Fediverse. ↩︎