Who do you imagine are the people peddling conspiracy theories on Facebook, and spreading AI slop all over your Instagram feed? Who is it that you believe is responsible for disseminating lies, fomenting hate, spreading racism and generally polluting the information ecosystem we all increasingly inhabit, for better or worse, on social media?
I tell you who’s definitely not responsible – under-16s. Under 16s, in the main, are messaging their friends on Snap, hanging out on Discords, finding new friends and communities and interests across Tumblr and TikTok. Meanwhile, their parents and grandparents are swimming in resentment, hate and anger in Facebook groups, and nodding sagely as they RT @EthnoNationalist1488 on to the timeline of their 17 followers on X.
We need to talk about old people and social media.
A late-2025 piece of research by SocialProfiler, looking at 756m public profiles across Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok, found that older users (aged 46 and over) are more likely to promote political polarisation, and to embrace conspiracy theories.
They’re the ones liking Facebook posts with titles like “Yesterday’s Britain, It Was A Better Britain”, and enthusiastically agreeing with their peers posting “we all know WHY it was better even if we can’t say!”, sharing AI-generated videos of all-white British high streets.
“Granny’s gone a bit racist,” isn’t a joke any more. Research shows that 34% of over-65s in the UK say Facebook is their only social media platform, and 75% consider it their main app, or website. Given the isolation and loneliness felt by older people, this is hardly a surprise, but that’s a lot of time to be spending on a platform that we have known for years is one of the most effective radicalisation vectors ever invented.
Obviously you know how algorithms work – after all, you’re smart! But your average boomer won’t necessarily understand that clicking on a post showing photos of Bolton from the mid-60s will lead directly to invitations to join groups with titles like “Remigration Now!”
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How did we arrive at last year’s summer of racist marches and flag-waving? What was it that prompted hundreds of red-faced men and women in their 50s and 60s to spend their evenings testing the fire safety of asylum hostels? Where have the tropes of a “foreign invasion” of the UK come from, along with all those crazed ideas that we’re facing the introduction of sharia law, that it’s impossible to walk six minutes in London without being jihaded to death by a mad imam?
The thing is, social media is real life now. This stuff bleeds. Nearly 70% of support for Reform UK comes from the over-50s – and these people always come out and vote. Spending between three and four hours a day marinating in a bath of racist lies is going to turn people a bit funny, regardless of how old they are.
You only need to look at the radical turn taken by some of our most social media-poisoned politicians to see the effect it can have. Did Rupert Lowe always believe that it is impossible for a non-white person to be British, or is this an insanely racist opinion that he’s come to since spending hours looking at posts by actual Nazis on X, all of whom clap like seals when he turns the “white nationalism” dial up a little?
It’s impossible to look at the direction political discourse has taken in the UK – driven, to be clear, by a cadre of politicians much older than 16.
So leave the kids alone. Let them muck about on social platforms, let them find themselves and each other. Instead, we need to ban their parents and grandparents. If we’re coming round to the idea that perhaps it’s not a great idea for a nonagenarian with failing eyesight to be in command of a vehicle, perhaps we should also agree that letting generations that can’t distinguish between actual news and racist propaganda have a Facebook account is a bad idea.
Matt Muir is writer of the webcurios.co.uk newsletter on tech and the internet
