The 75-Year-Old Screenagers

Once a week, Jim sits down with his phone, logs in to his mother’s Facebook account, and scrolls through her feed.

His goal is simple: serve his mother’s algorithm a steady stream of inoffensive content he thinks will delight her and make sure anything inflammatory or scammy-looking is stamped NOT INTERESTED. At this point, it has become routine. He’ll tap the LIKE button under posts about Dick Van Dyke’s birthday, a few photo albums uploaded by distant family members, and the occasional cute cat video while blocking long-defunct Obama fundraising pages and clips of AI-generated men speaking directly to “the older woman holding this phone.”

Jim is a 48-year-old graphic designer who lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two cats. On one of our first video calls this past summer, his faintly stubbled face appears next to his now-80-year-old mother, Gloria, whose feed he has actively curated since April. Where he is unassuming and clean-cut, Gloria radiates a free-spirited energy; her cropped white hair is tucked under a blue headscarf covered in white mandalas, and she wears a tie-dye T-shirt. The two have an easy rapport. Occasionally, they break into side chats or finish each other’s sentences. “It’s just nice having somebody that knows me so well that they can even communicate for me if I need them to,” Gloria tells me.

She and her son have always been close. But their relationship deepened after Jim’s father died in 2024 and Gloria moved into an independent-care facility in Milwaukie, the nearby suburb where she was born and raised. Her husband had done the cooking, the ordering, the taxes. “I had it good,” she says. Without him, the apartment was quiet in a way she wasn’t used to. She felt lonely, especially at night. Her phone, she said, became a source of on-demand comfort.

Jim, meanwhile, watched his mother undergo a kind of transformation. Gloria had been a secretary; she is the daughter of an artist and painted portraits in her spare time. She used to read, and she liked card games. But after the death of her husband, she seemed increasingly distracted, somehow older. She was scrolling all the time — when she woke up, during movies. At lunch, she would pull out her phone to show the rest of the family a picture and instead begin thumbing aimlessly down her timeline, forgetting why she had originally unlocked it. Her and her son’s conversations often came to involve tangents about clips she saw: animal-rescue videos, advertisements for various supplements and health remedies touted by what Gloria describes as “sweet old ladies like myself,” AI-generated sermons in exotic settings. “She’d bring up a video she saw just like a kid would talk about a show,” Jim says, “and not really be able to describe it.”

Soon, he began to notice Gloria’s memory deteriorating. She missed social appointments she’d confirmed hours earlier, forgot the PIN number she had used her entire adult life, reached for words that wouldn’t form. The change was so swift he feared that she’d had a stroke without realizing it or that dementia had crept in. He took her to her primary-care doctor, and she was given a mini cognitive test, which she passed. The doctor assured him nothing serious was happening, so Jim began investigating on his own — which is when he realized his mother’s Facebook timeline was littered with 2 a.m. time stamps. He concedes it’s difficult, if not impossible, to draw the line between behavior directly caused by social-media use and the natural effects of aging. Still, he is convinced her screen-time binges were disrupting her sleep and if not directly causing her memory loss, at least worsening it. “It was taking away from her,” he says. That was when he intervened.

Gloria’s generation is the first to enter its most vulnerable years with unfettered access to the internet and, like the rest of us, it has trouble looking away. Americans over 60 now spend more than half their leisure hours in front of screens. But unlike millennials and most Gen-Xers, who have spent years navigating engagement bait, stealth marketing, and AI slop — and have developed a working instinct for what to trust — older adults tend to have little idea of what they’re looking at. This susceptibility is creating an entirely new type of responsibility for the adult children of these suddenly very online parents, who flock to Reddit to ask things like, How do I stop my dad from watching fake Bruce Lee AI slop? Is it possible to curate a feed for my anxious, elderly mother? and How can I stop my aging parents from believing fake news? “My mom spends countless hours on her iPad. Won’t even get out of bed until 11AM. By that time, her brain is so fried that she can barely comprehend or function,” one user writes. “Advice needed: Parent with early stage neurodegenerative disease worsening with AI YouTube,” says another. “YouTube AI ‘Doctor’ is telling my dad to skip his blood pressure medicine and my dad is thrilled!”

These adult children describe watching their relatives — call them iPad parents — ingest content they have no context for, slipping into a zombified state of consumption that their loved ones often believe is exacerbating their decline. “It seems like an addiction,” says Beth, a 51-year-old lawyer from Ohio, who tells me she has watched her 84-year-old mother’s attention span atrophy over the past few years. “It kind of has the same symptoms — getting fussy if she’s not online or just constantly going back to try and get online.” Her mother uses TikTok during all waking hours, including while watching TV shows and movies. Beth says she finds managing her mother’s screen time much more challenging than managing that of her two teenagers, who are largely analog and refer to their grandmother as a “screenager.”

Jim describes the kind of care required to monitor his mother’s screen use as overwhelming at times. He’s no tech expert, and strategizing against a feed designed to keep Gloria hooked can feel futile. There is also the fact that, in the past few years, his mother’s world has shrunk. Unlike managing her medications or her finances, regulating Gloria’s social media, which is a source of fun, a reflection of her life and interests, can make Jim feel as though he’s infringing on one of her few remaining outlets. When he first grew concerned about her Facebook use, he asked to delete the app from her phone entirely, leaving only Messenger. But Gloria refused — she wanted to access family photos. Who was he to stop her?

Marti DeLiema, a gerontologist at the University of Minnesota who studies elder financial exploitation, likens the process to getting an adult to give up driving in their later years. “Driving is part of your identity. It’s like a mark of freedom and independence,” she says. The online world is “also a source of your social connection.” All of this amounts to a particularly tricky balancing act for adult children: figuring out how to preserve their parents’ independence while protecting them from an ever-advancing slop-filled ecosystem. “It’s just like this slow chipping away at their agency,” says one child of an iPad parent from California. She has inherited her mother’s entire technological world, all the way down to her automated sprinkler system. “It’s very, very hard for me to know if I’m doing too much,” she says, “or not enough.”

For most people caring for iPad parents, the early days of their relatives’ online lives appeared harmless or even charming. As teens and young adults started using Instagram and TikTok, baby-boomers seemed to become Facebook’s beating heart; over the past decade, as smartphone ownership among seniors has more than tripled, they have nimbly joined groups, commented on pictures of one another’s grandchildren as they left for college, and hunted down old school friends. Occasionally, they ventured onto YouTube or Nextdoor. Jim’s early memories of his mother on Facebook were mildly embarrassing: He had a gig in marketing for a ballet company, and Gloria would often comment on his boss’s posts to boast about what a good job he was doing. “If they were to meet in person, she would probably just say the same thing,” Jim says. “But this is on a megaphone.”

The research around this early kind of internet access seems mostly positive. A meta-analysis published in 2025 pooled over a hundred studies of elderly adults and found that those who used digital technologies — which often require learning new skills, such as navigating software updates and jumping between digital interfaces — consistently had better cognitive health. Michael Scullin, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University who co-authored the study, calls the kind of skill sets learned through active online engagement “technological reserve.”

Then came a shift. “They both really started getting into it around COVID,” says one child of iPad parents in Oklahoma; after the 2020 election, their social-media addictions “seemingly skyrocketed tenfold.” Many adult children I spoke with associated the change in their parents with those months. The pandemic confined members of a generation that was already slowing down and isolated them from the church halls, card clubs, and grandchild rearing that had structured their weeks. Instead, like people of all ages isolated by lockdown measures, they turned to the internet for stimulation and connection — right around the time shortform video arrived on Facebook in the form of Reels.

While there isn’t much data on how endless clip-scrolling affects the brain, there is plenty of research on what preserves the health and function of the aging mind. Learning something new and difficult, staying physically active, keeping up social ties, and sleeping are all protective behaviors, Scullin says. Passive consumption — such as watching a lot of television, which decades of studies have tied to the risk of faster cognitive decline and shrinking gray matter in later life — is not one.

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.

Anne describes her parents, who live in a continuing-care community, as “very competent people who have led very rich and full lives.” She has found it difficult to watch her mother lose many hours of her day to her phone. A few years ago, Rosa was diagnosed with a mild form of cognitive impairment, and her doctor’s advice involved working out and being social, but instead, “she’s just scrolling,” Anne says. She has found herself recoiling at the true-crime videos Rosa likes to watch, chiding her mother over her screen time. Watching Rosa immersed in her Reels, Anne sometimes becomes so aggravated she has to leave the room. “I do sound exactly like my mother would talk to me,” she says. “I say things like ‘Mom, stop watching those videos.’”

For many iPad parents, though, social media isn’t simply a way to pass time — it creates a numbing world outside of whatever pain, discomfort, and grief they have faced in old age. This is particularly true for women, 60 perfect of whom outlive their husbands in the U.S. Nicole, who lives in Southern California, has a mother in her 70s who has been bedridden for the past three years with complications from multiple knee surgeries. Things felt manageable when Nicole’s father used to visit every day, but since his death last year, her mother, like Gloria, has retreated further and further into her phone. “She doesn’t want to sit in her wheelchair. She would rather lie in bed, look at her phone, and watch TV,” says Nicole. Her mother was once an avid reader, golfer, and bowler; now, the majority of her time is spent watching what she refers to as “books”: text scrolling over an image of a couple in a romance novel–esque pose with a narrator reading graphic erotica aloud. “If they are having sex, you hear it,” Nicole says wryly. She often nags her mother about how it might impact the 100-year-old woman with whom she shares a room. “Your roommate’s over there,” Nicole often tells her. “What are you doing?”

Natasha Schüll, an anthropologist at NYU, likens this form of screen use to a phenomenon she researched over a decade ago: gamblers, including elderly women using slot machines for hours and losing all sense of time, space, and self. Shortform-video feeds, in fact, share many of the same design mechanisms as slot machines — including autoplay and pull to refresh — but for free. “They love disappearing,” says Schüll of the people she spoke to for her research. “It was like a medicine. It just immediately removed, whether it was bodily aches or loneliness, so many different things they were escaping from.”

It should come as no surprise that the arrival of free-to-use AI in 2022 made an already unreliable, often predatory internet much, much worse. Since then, the number of AI-generated “news” sites tracked by the media watchdog NewsGuard has gone from a few dozen to several thousand. One study published last year estimated that roughly a fifth of the videos served to a new YouTube user were AI slop. The elderly are among the least likely to detect it and have the most time to consume it. (Across many studies, they have also been the most likely to share misinformation.) Once iPad parents start watching AI, their children say, it’s all the algorithm seems to serve. “The more you look at them,” says Nicole, “the more the Facebook app knows.”

For a generation that often struggled to contextualize much of what it saw online, AI created a hyperpersonalized fantasyland. When Sandy, a 29-year-old part-time teacher, moved from her native Pennsylvania to live with her husband’s family in Canada, she knew she was signing up for caregiving. Her husband’s mother, Nora, had suffered a series of strokes; Sandy considers her a second mother and was more than happy to help. She did not, however, anticipate the role YouTube would play in her days. At any given hour, Nora can be found listening to AI-generated 1950s music that “sounds like someone singing in a tin can,” Sandy tells me. There are also 40-minute AI prayer videos — “This AI Jesus with a fake glow behind him just constantly going,” Sandy says.

Sandy noticed her mother-in-law was often served videos of AI-generated doctors speaking in her native Tagalog and touting natural remedies in place of her diabetes medications. Nora trusted these doctors: At one point, she became convinced that two eggs a day would prevent another stroke. Several adult children I spoke with report similar stories. One man in Los Angeles tells me his aunt stopped taking her cholesterol medication after watching videos that advised her against it; she readily believes any ad that features “somebody in a white doctor suit,” he says. Another woman watched her father slip down a “QAnon health funnel” that eventually led him to adopt a meat-only diet. “When I go over there,” she says, “I’m always trying to help them incorporate vegetables.”

These videos, seemingly custom-fit for aging bodies, have become a trademark of the slopverse. The playbook is remarkably consistent: A deep-faked celebrity, a white-coated doctor, or, sometimes, an Amish person — basically anyone an older American may be predisposed to trust — delivers a heartfelt testimonial for a supplement that promises to strengthen cognitive function, relieve joint pain, or replace a prescription. In one video that circulated this summer, AI-generated Bill Gates and Samuel L. Jackson sold a supplement falsely marketed as a treatment that could reverse memory loss. Gloria was hopeful about one brand of joint-pain supplements in particular because they were advertised to her by a familiar face — Today weatherman and anchor Al Roker. That scam was so successful that the Today show ran a segment about it in March of last year. Gloria paid hundreds of dollars before Jim noticed the charges and canceled her subscription.

Fraud or not, these schemes are making Meta a lot of money. The company’s internal projections attribute $16 billion of its 2024 ad revenue to scams and prohibited goods. (A Meta spokesperson told Reuters that “was a rough and overly inclusive estimate.”) Last year, the FBI added a dedicated AI-fraud section to its annual internet-crime report, which logged close to $900 million in losses across 22,364 complaints. Nearly 40 cents of every one of those dollars came from someone over 60. But while lawmakers have sought to protect children and teens by suing social-media companies and restricting their use of the platforms, few such efforts prioritize older Americans. The rules in place for them are largely designed to help after they have already been scammed: freezing withdrawals, asking older adults to name “trusted contacts” who can step in if fraudulent payments are suspected, and, at the far end of the spectrum, conservatorships, which require a court to find that a senior can no longer make safe decisions for themselves.

iPad parents make appealing targets for scammers. According to Nadia Brashier, an assistant professor of psychology at UC San Diego, people of every age detect deep fakes at a rate of just 55 percent. Older adults “may not even be aware that synthetic videos are possible, let alone how to spot them,” she says. We also tend to become more trusting with age. Brashier explains this as a potential quirk of evolution, which, ironically, some researchers consider a survival adaptation since increased frailty in later life necessitates greater reliance on the people around us. Many seniors are also less able to manage their finances. “It is one of the first areas of cognitive functioning to decline, even in normal aging,” says DeLiema, the gerontologist.

Jim recently ran an experiment on his mother. He pulled up her Facebook feed and asked her to identify which posts were AI — by his estimate, about a third of them were. Gloria couldn’t reliably pick out one, including posts she had shared. It nagged at Jim that his mother, once able to discern features well enough to paint them, couldn’t distinguish the synthetic from the real. “You know how the face is supposed to look,” he told her.

These kinds of conversations, in which iPad parents are confronted with their naïveté, can quickly become an emotional minefield. “It’s like telling someone that Santa Claus isn’t real every day,” says Sandy, “having to go through that disappointment.” She can see each correction affecting Nora’s self-esteem. “To have someone look at you and be like, ‘That’s not real,’ but she’s looking at a person and they’re talking. Of course that creates confusion,” she adds. “And I think when we feel confused, we can feel cornered like an animal.” Sandy knows her mother-in-law’s wounded pride can cause her to become defensive; Nora has often shut down when confronted with a fact-check over an AI video she gleefully shared with the rest of her family. “I know she’s not hearing ‘I care about you,’” Sandy says. “She’s hearing ‘You’re stupid.’”

The etiquette of parenting one’s parents is difficult. Not wanting to slight her mother-in-law, Sandy decided to gently steer Nora instead. At first, she spent hours with her husband on her mother-in-law’s YouTube, clicking DO NOT RECOMMEND on each slop-seeming video. Eventually, they came up with a better idea: signing Nora up for a supervised teen account through Google and upgrading her to YouTube Premium. It allows Sandy to oversee all the videos her mother-in-law accesses and grants Sandy control over what Nora can and cannot watch. It also means no longer encountering the kinds of spammy ads Sandy has often found lurking in her mother-in-law’s beloved AI-generated prayer videos.

One thing Sandy favors about this approach is that it gives Nora a sense of autonomy. She sows Nora’s feed with accounts she thinks her mother-in-law will like: a channel that uploads old Turner Classic movies or travel vloggers from the Philippines, which Nora can no longer fly to. One by one, Sandy saves them in Nora’s watch-later list and waits. When her mother-in-law appears delighted — “Look, I’m watching this movie. I forgot about it. It’s so good ” — Sandy says only “You found that? That’s so great.”

Keeping her interventions a secret is extremely important, Sandy says: “I think that sense of pride would really get to her, and I think that would be almost more harmful.” Giving her mother-in-law the opportunity to discover things on her own, even if they’ve been deliberately planted, helps her feel more independent, more capable. “It’s so much better to see her be her own person,” Sandy adds.

Daniel, a 39-year-old from Virginia, has embarked on a similar project with his own mother, an 81-year-old widow. She has grown so frightened by right-wing videos about crime that she is afraid to walk around her building complex, which has manicured gardens and a koi pond. Every few weeks, he opens her subscriptions page and quietly unsubscribes her from conspiracy and pseudoscience channels, purges her notifications, and spares only the balance-exercise videos for seniors. Then he searches for gardening videos and clips of cats and likes them on her behalf, hoping the algorithm takes the hint. He also signed her up for a Premium account hoping to kill the ads, which had been engineered around her fears, he tells me; one had already talked her into buying life insurance she didn’t need. Even then, the videos he’s trying to shield his mother from come back every few weeks if he doesn’t intervene. “If I could figure out how to get rid of her likes, I would,” he says.

Nicole, meanwhile, secretly monitors her mother’s iCloud account with Google Family Link. “I’m doing everything I can to protect her,” she says. She tells me her mother spends at least an hour a day messaging, by Nicole’s last count, seven fake accounts for two Hallmark movie actors. Having manual approval over downloads is the only way Nicole can prevent her mother from downloading apps that the scammers behind these accounts could use to extract personal or financial information. At this point, she can laugh at some of it; her mother used to leave comments — like “so sexy” — on photos of the two actors, unaware that other people could see them. She once played Nicole a voice note from one of them — “Hey, beautiful, I hope you’re having a good day” — and the voice had a discernible foreign accent.

Mostly, though, the experience has left Nicole with an overwhelming sense of loss. As with Gloria, her mother’s screen time crept upward after Nicole’s father died, and she knows in many ways it’s a weak salve for loneliness. She cringes at the thought of what her mother and the Hallmark bots must be talking about, but she stops short of actually reading the messages. That would be “almost like me looking in her diary,” Nicole says.

Jim tells me his family decided to talk to Gloria about her screen time over Mother’s Day weekend this year. Jim’s sister came up from Reno for four days and slept on an air mattress in Gloria’s small apartment so someone could make sure she stayed off her phone long enough to get a full night’s sleep. Together, she and Jim proposed a deal: Facebook during the day but not at night. Gloria’s phone would charge in the kitchen instead of beside the bed. “She didn’t push back at all,” Jim says.

He was able to block her from accessing the app in the evening by placing some controls on her router with her permission, and the change, he adds, was “night and day.” She seems to be sleeping, and every time Jim checks her Facebook feed, her posts’ time stamps reflect normal hours. Managing her digital life now involves keeping a spreadsheet of her account information, which he shares with his sister; he reads Gloria’s bank statements for surprise charges and has most of her two-factor codes routed to his phone. She does not describe any of this as a loss. “He’s my crutch,” she says. “I’m just lucky to have a son that’s informed in the technical world.”

But even with his interventions, there’s only so much Jim can control. Gloria is getting older. She thinks her memory has improved “in some ways,” she says, but it certainly isn’t what it used to be; Jim says they have good days and bad. It weighs on him that the bulk of their conversations involves the logistics of her care and that she has abandoned most of her hobbies. When she moved into the facility, Jim and his sister set up an easel in her room, but Gloria hasn’t touched it. At this stage in her life, Jim often feels powerless. Recently, when he asked Gloria’s doctor whether she should have a knee replacement, the answer was “No, not at her age.” Jim bristled at the idea that betterment has an age restriction. “I’m like, ‘Okay, so anything at her age?’” he says.

When it comes to her feed, he can “only do so much before it starts happening again,” he says. Much of what she sees is still synthetic. “I would love it if I could just take away her Facebook account,” he admits. But he knows it would be a cruel thing to do. There’s that friend she stays in touch with in Washington; there are pictures of babies from distant cousins, the animal videos she still posts to her feed, things she can send out into the world when she feels particularly isolated.

Besides, Jim says, Gloria is a diabetic, yet the family lets her have dessert every once in a while. “What are we gonna do? Take everything away from her?” he asks. “Just hand her a physical book and give her some carrots?”