189 points by tartoran 8 hours ago | 121 comments on HN
| Neutral High agreement (3 models)
Media · v3.7· 2026-03-15 22:20:02 0
Summary Privacy & Family Dynamics Acknowledges
This BBC Reel video examines rising screen time among aging adults through the lens of family relationships and intergenerational concern, featuring journalist commentary on behavioral change without addressing digital surveillance or privacy rights. Editorials acknowledge family integrity, dignity, and cultural participation in discussion of aging and technology adoption, while structural tracking infrastructure (11 third-party domains) undermines privacy protections without explicit consent, creating tension between editorial openness and behavioral data collection.
Rights Tensions2 pairs
Art 12 ↔ Art 19 —Family privacy rights (Article 12) conflict with viewer behavioral tracking (Article 19 expression freedom compromised via profiling); content normalizes family surveillance while platform infrastructure conducts silent user surveillance.
Art 16 ↔ Art 12 —Family integrity (Article 16) framing coexists with structural privacy violations through behavioral tracking that profiles family media consumption without consent.
Fortunately, I could never get used to the small screens of mobile phones as a serious computing or web browsing device. So my use of my mobile phone is limited to basic tasks like making calls, sending messages, and sometimes, reluctantly typing emails when I don't have a laptop handy.
My primary computing and web browsing device remains my laptop, with Emacs and Firefox being my main tools. One thing that does manage to distract me sometimes is YouTube recommendations. As a result I have written a little userscript for myself to disable shorts and recommendations: https://github.com/susam/userscripts/blob/main/js/ytx.user.j...
So far the userscript has been successful. As a side effect of disabling the recommendations sidebar, the video panel expands to occupy a larger part of the screen which I quite like. Here is a screenshot: https://susam.github.io/blob/img/userscripts/ytx.png
Also, I still depend heavily on physical textbooks, a rollerball pen and a stack of plain A4 paper for most of my learning and exploration activities. This routine has helped me to stay away from modern attention media too.
My aunt is 80 and thank goodness she has an iPhone. She’s bedridden and spends all day on it. She has no children but I lived with her for a while when I moved out of my parent’s, and we text often.
I was reading up on some RCTs on social media and mental health recently and one of the surprising findings is that social media is actually worse for older people.
I really wish iPhone/Android had better parental controls so I could monitor my dad's screen time and the type of content he was allowed to see on YouTube.
This feels similar to how you'll see rows and rows of elderly people mindlessly pushing the slot machine buttons in casinos. It makes me wonder if impulse control starts breaking down for that crowd.
Of course, I also wonder if non-digital natives also just have less of a thick skin for this sort of thing.
Social media is a cancer and more people need to realize this. No amount of platforming will fix this. It’s designed to extract behavioral traits about you. It’s designed to spy on your shopping and browsing habits. It’s designed to build a model of you. Everyone fell right in.
Over 3 years ago I was in the hospital - they put me on shared room with other men of various ages. The oldest ones liked to talk for hours, doing all sorts "memberberries", elaborated expertises on current state of European, world affairs. Because what the hell else you can do when you have vertigo or tampons in your nose and you need to lie down.
Anyway, the oldest over 80-something man was given some older Samsung phone by his great-grandson with instruction to launch tiktok whenever he feels bored. And bloody hell, that thing looped so much content with every launch but this man still tried hard to find something remotely interesting. I wouldn't say he was glued but that's a random guy who liked to attend his orchard and bees, going fishing etc. - he had something to do in the real world.
I'm witnessing more elderly people around me actually struggling using touch-capable devices - it's like they're smacking fingers in frustration that there's no tactile sensation. They were told that there are buttons to press/tap but there's no feedback they'd expect. For them smartphone screen is no different than tv.
I see it a different way. Parents reach a period in life where their kids strike out on their own and want little to do with them beyond a safety net. That’s normal and natural and the parents move onto a new phase too. In fact they might just not be that into you anymore. It’s ok if visits upset their routine and holidays are somewhat irritating. Same for being not overly enthusiastic about taking on care giving roles for grandkids. They’re still individuals and it’s not like old age causes someone to lose their inner world. They’ve seen a lot and not as much is novel likely. They’re facing loss, mortality and decline. If they feel compelled to scroll let em scroll. I’m so glad assistive technologies and a11y will be there when I’m decrepit so I can have something more stimulating than TV. Maybe ask grandma to play some Lethal Enforcers the next time you visit you’d be surprised — mine did.
This is something ive started to notice, the older generation becoming victims to doomscrolling, my dad being one of them. What makes it worst is that unlike kids who group in the social media world, and therefore have some ability of discerning between whats real and fake, the older gen are so gullible when it comes to fake news, propaganda, and ai generated content.
Not only that but they then go on to spread this false news among there whatsapp friends
I've been saying this for a while. For all the talk about kids, seniors are the ones addicted to phones. Doomscrolling on Tiktok, Facebook, even locked into mobile games. Its very depressing.
My Grandad lives alone and has in the past 12 months really gotten into YouTube. He's long used it to learn the latest practices in plumbing, electrics, gardening and woodwork (he's a seriously capable 86yo, always has been) and honestly our subscriptions are very similar...
But he's addicted to shorts. Doomscrolls endlessly in his downtime. Doesn't question whether obvious GenAI is real or not, and having looked over his shoulder a few times, most of it is horribly fake. Loves showing my kids what he finds.
I'd rather he have this than boredom, but also it does mean he doesn't need to socialise outside the family. If I worry about anything, it's not knowing and addressing any extreme or views he's lapping up. I know first hand how insular interests can be once you express one on YouTube and it can get pretty shitty pretty quick.
As others have said, this is exactly the same worries we have for our children except I feel we have some control. No devices or screen time and content limits. It's all very easy. It's harder to address that with your parents' parents.
to curb the doomscrolling (laptop is as bad as phone) , i gave my father a big old Lego box - a Volkswagen beetle (which stayed for years, assembled by my kids.. which don't play that anymore. So i disassembled it). He had never tried those. Took him a week to build it, rearranged the room, studied the book like plant-specs-long-time-ago.. Then i gave another one, of similar size ~1500 pieces. i have one more ready-to-give "set". And then i plan to give him the rest 40kg well-sorted-but-in crates Lego, and the heap of model-books ~100+ , and let him do whatever he wants.. hoping he'll start improvising one day. Though.. may need a new empty room :/
I see a lot of elderly people watching AI content on youtube shorts, one after another. The monotonic voice is a dead giveaway. Their feeds have optimized around it because they cannot tell the difference. Its sad.
Wider society spends an awful long time talking about the effects of social media on young people. I personally think that is somewhat blinkered because its an everybody issue. What do old people and kids have in common, lots and lots of free time. That's it. Same with unemployed, under employed people, people with no real interest or hobbies.
If there's a hole you need to fit and you do nothing with it, social media is the easy way out, and given that it does have addictive tendencies, we end up where we are.
Try Unhook (desktop) and Untrap (iOS). At this point, my YouTube experience is just the channels I subscribe to, and the video player. It reduced my usage to almost zero.
I'm not exactly curing cancer, but my media consumption is more moderate and mindful now.
My Dad’s got early stage dementia and Facebook is an absolute nightmare. The apps infested with AI slop and the algorithm seems to fill his feed with stuff designed to get him worked up (currently badly behaved cyclists even though he no longer drives).
It’s definitely not limited to Facebook. About half of the 50-70 year olds in my family and my wife’s family are screen addicted without Facebook. They live on questionable news websites, messenger apps, Nextdoor, and some others.
It’s strange to hear a 60-something rant about how evil Facebook is and then go on to regurgitate countless conspiracy theories they picked up from whatever websites they’re reading this month.
The parents who scroll Instagram and Facebook feel downright tame in comparison.
In my opinion it's best from short content feed out there but it's still useless. Too much AI slop in there. Needles to say I did get some interesting creators in there but I believe people I'm searching for are using YouTube as long videos platform and do not properly use the short term format.
It's weird. I was born with the internet being largely a business or academic tool, with normal people barely having a reason to have an email address.
When I was in high school, flip phones could let you text friends, as long as you didn't mind your parents later using your soul to pay the phone bill.
When I was in college, the most addictive thing the internet could offer was foul bachelor frogs and rage comics.
Along the way, I learned how dangerous even those unrefined sugars were. It was like chewing coca leaves or sugarcane. Enough t get you a buzz, but not enough to ruin your life. So I know not to touch the algorithmic fentanyl feeds of TikTok and the like.
But good god, nobody younger or older had any protection from this. My parents and spouses parents, and my zoomer cousins both basically got handed giant bags of refined gigasugar without even the vaguest warnings. I'll refrain from likening it to opiates against because they are on a whole different level, but good god it does seem more dangerous than even refined sugar.
> That’s normal and natural and the parents move onto a new phase too.
Is it really ? I would say the "natural" way of things is older generation gets supported by children and they help take care of grandchildren while their children are working. The whole late retirement/both parents working situation we have these days is reliably leading to a population collapse.
old folks and children both face the same problem with the internet— their initial exposure is to the current internet that has been ab tested into a hyper-addictive hellscape and they are cognitively unprepared. Jumping straight into the deep end before you know how to swim.
Whereas genX and Xennials had the privilege of wading into a pre-social media internet during their formative years which served as a vaccine of sorts. We are by no means immune to tech addiction and disinformation, but we seem much better equipped for spotting trolls/ragebait and giving the side-eye to addictive dark patterns in apps
> Parents reach a period in life where their kids strike out on their own and want little to do with them beyond a safety net. That’s normal and natural and the parents move onto a new phase too.
This is at best extremely cultural. It is certainly not a global norm and not really viewed as desirable, just necessary.
Average American doesn't move very far at all from their parents and America is where the idea of time limited parenting is most prevalent.
The problem with social media is precisely the platform, it ranks what keeps people addicted, seeing more ads. Creators conform to the Algorithm and produce slop to capture some of that scarce attention. Nobody cares about users. Same shit happens on Google Search, YouTube, Amazon Search, Google Store, App Store... all platforms produce shitty feeds and search results. And before them we had TV and newspapers as slop making platforms.
My parents moved from Texas to Chicago this year to be near my sister instead of me (their son) because in their very traditional minds they need to be taken care of by a daughter in their old age. I get to send checks. I thought it was a terrible idea, they have friends and family here and Chicago is very cold. That being said they moved into a community of her 11 kids and their spouses and their kids — probably 30+ relatives in their orbit. And they are surrounded by people who love them and help them. It’s really been good for them. Much less scrolling and much more conversation, group meals, board game playing, storytelling.
Someone bedridden is not the focus of the article or conversation; once you are no longer capable of being active, it is obviously true that you’ll partake in more sedentary activities.
Older generations have an implicit trust for what is on screen because they grew up in an era where getting something on screen was not easy, and thus had an implied credibility.
Take advertising as an example. Before Google Ads and the so-called democratization of advertising, it was expensive, and you didn't get an ad on a TV program or a national publication without some level of quality and/or trust behind your product.
Similarly, content was not easy to produce and certainly not cheap to get in front of eyeballs in the limited medium that was television. People were selective in what they watched so in order to be watched it needed to meet a minimum threshold for quality.
These days however, the barrier to entry for advertising and content are so low that any implicit trust should be ridiculous. Unfortunately for our parents and grandparents however, that is what they know - and old habits die hard.
I tried something like that with Chrome Extensions but it doesn't age well. WHen it worked, it surely saved me some time to do more productive things: https://github.com/oldeucryptoboi/Homer
Yes, this! We spent so long (and rightfully) worrying about what it was doing to our kids, we forgot that there was a whole other generation equally unprepared for this.
I'm also such an old PC (Linux) person. However, I'm using the phone more these days, either to read books while I'm out and waiting and have nothing else to do, or to listen to audiobooks while I'm walking or working on menial tasks.
i dont see whats cancerous about social media conceptually. sharing photos online with a local network of contacts, setting up digital event flyers, instant messaging, etc ... yes these tools were used for subjectively nefarious purposes like cyberbullying, but on the whole they probably added more benefit than was subtracted from the community.
social media that has been gamified into an infinite scroll loop with the express intent to destroy attention spans and rebuild them around an advertising/behavioural structure of mark zuckerberg's ("they trust me ... dumb fucks") choosing? now yes that is cancer. but thats not really social media. theres nothing social about it.
i like the way someone put it here a few weeks back. we used to call these things social networks. then they became social media. so in that sense i do agree with you on a literal basis, although im not sure that was your intended point.
Video presents diverse perspectives on aging, technology, and family relationships; reports on emerging social phenomena (grandparents' screen time) without censorship.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Video presents journalist commentary (Charlie Warzel) on social trend without editorial restriction.
Content addresses intergenerational communication and technology adoption openly.
Tracking configuration captures and analyzes viewer behavior across 11 third-party domains, profiling interest patterns.
Inferences
Editorial openness and uncensored reporting on aging and technology supports free expression framework.
Behavioral tracking of viewer consumption patterns constitutes indirect chilling effect on expression freedom through profiling.
DCP modifier of -0.2 applied for tracking affecting Article 19.
Video centers on family relationships and intergenerational dynamics; respects family integrity by treating all family members as stakeholders in conversation.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Video title and framing emphasize family concern and intergenerational relationships.
Content positions family communication and mutual concern as central theme.
No paywalls or access restrictions prevent family members from viewing together.
Inferences
Editorial focus on family dynamics and mutual concern affirms family unit as protected by Article 16.
Structural openness (free access, no registration required) enables family participation and discussion.
Video explores surveillance of aging adults through family device checking and observation; frames intergenerational monitoring as family concern rather than privacy violation.
FW Ratio: 57%
Observable Facts
Video content discusses family members monitoring grandparents' phone usage patterns.
Page configuration enables tracking via Optimizely, DoubleClick, Permutive, Nielsen, Comscore, and other services.
No cookie consent banner detected on page load.
Dotcom configuration shows analytics enabled with multiple third-party vendor integrations.
Inferences
Editorial framing of family surveillance as relational concern normalizes monitoring practices relevant to privacy debates.
Structural tracking without explicit consent mechanism violates right to privacy in family and communications.
DCP modifier of -0.2 applied for tracking infrastructure affecting this article.
Content is openly accessible and publishable; editorial independence affirmed. However, tracking and profiling applied to viewer speech patterns undermines free expression protections.
Title 'grandparents are glued to their phones' uses adhesive metaphor suggesting compulsive, pathological behavior rather than neutral technology adoption.
appeal to fear
Subtitle 'families are worried' frames elder technology use as threat warranting family concern and intervention.
