I wrote about what Fox News and Facebook are doing to our parents. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/internet-baby-boomers-misinformation-social-media_n_5f998039c5b6a4a2dc813d3d

Do I even need to spell out the problem? Losing older relatives to the right-wing information ecosystem is becoming a rite of passage for millennials.

It's an under-researched area, but so far, most studies that have looked at age as a variable have found older adults seeing and sharing more misinformation than younger adults. They also appear to be less susceptible to corrections.

The most obvious explanation for this is biology: Aging changes our brains in ways that make us more susceptible to scams of all kinds, including misinformation. There's some signs that Boomers are experiencing these declines earlier than their parents.

In some ways, online misinformation is an inequality story. The worst cognitive declines show up in older people with less wealth, poorer access to healthcare and higher rates of mental illness.

But the biological explanation is way too simple. Older people score worse on some cognitive tests but better on others. (It's also just kind of ageist and mean?)

The other obvious explanation is digital literacy: Older people are simply less savvy internet users. One-third of people over 65 think that their Facebook feed is curated by human editors rather than an algorithm.

This, too, though, is overly simplistic. Older people are actually better at spotting misinformation than younger people — when prompted to do so.

The real problem is that social media is structured to make people turn off these higher-order analytical skills. All the stories on Facebook look the same, making sources less obvious. You see the same information numerous times, buried between baby pictures, jokes and recipes.

There's also the issue of ideology. Older people tend to be more conservative. That puts them in contact with a media environment that is *far* more conspiratorial.

Fox News and MSNBC viewers have the same median age (65!), but there's a reason people don't talk about "losing" relatives to Rachel Maddow. Republicans simply see more garbage information than liberals, and that's reflected in their beliefs.

To me, the problem isn't actually misinformation. If large numbers of Americans believed bigfoot was real, if wouldn't affect our politics. The real problem is hyper-partisan information, a worldview in which Republicans are pure and Democrats are adrenochrome harvesters

There's been a million articles about how to talk to relatives who have fallen down the Fox News rabbit hole, but this really isn't a problem we can fix ourselves. The best way to solve it is through prevention.

(which is a whole big can of worms and this is already like 300 tweets long so fin)