Isolated, aging, alone, and online
April 5, 2019 9:41 AM   Subscribe

“ Four recent studies found that older Americans are more likely to consume and share false online news than those in other age groups, even when controlling for factors such as partisanship. Other research has found that older Americans have a poor or inaccurate grasp of how algorithms play a role in selecting what information is shown to them on social media, are worse than younger people at differentiating between reported news and opinion, and are less likely to register the brand of a news site they consume information from. “ Old, Online, and Fed On Lies (Buzzfeed) YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant (Bloomberg) “I might recommend adding Facebook poisoning to the diagnoses as well. In the tiny town in which I grew up, there’s no local paper anymore and nothing in the way of culture or things to do period. “
posted by The Whelk (56 comments total) 40 users marked this as a favorite
 
If anyone isn't listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything right now, they should. It is focusing on how our technology is enabling certain voices to have the reach they do, and it's quite good.
posted by rebent at 9:50 AM on April 5, 2019 [1 favorite]


Also, as a kind of preventative measure, if you can change the channel away from the Fox News network to something else, anything else, even just turning the damn TV off. That small act has far reaching results. I've made this kind of change/ask myself when I'm at the gym or at an airport bar. Every little bit helps.
posted by Fizz at 9:56 AM on April 5, 2019 [24 favorites]


I am an elderly political junkie who lives alone. I get all my political news from late night talk shows on YouTube and from Metafilter. And I can't help sharing the links.
posted by Miss Cellania at 10:05 AM on April 5, 2019 [3 favorites]


I am inordinately grateful for my parents: there was a period when they were having some renovations done on their house, and the contractors listened to Rush Limbaugh and FOX while they worked, so my parents got a concentrated dose of it every day for several weeks. However, instead of infecting them, this exposure just made them grumble about how sick of it they were getting and then retaliate by turning on MSNBC as soon as the contractors left for a palate cleanser.

My father occasionally clicks onto FOX while channel surfing, but only to amuse himself by flipping back and forth between it and MSNBC as a compare-and-contrast exercise. The most conservative media opinion I've ever heard them express is that "even though sometimes Rachel Maddow gets a little over-the-top we still like her a lot".

I do have a couple aunts and uncles that fell prey to FOX a little. But my parents have been some kind of weird ballast that has kept them all from falling too far into it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:26 AM on April 5, 2019 [10 favorites]


Here's the thing though. If you don't already lean towards a world view that tells you that things were better in the Good Old Days, and that change is bad, and that [insert group here] is trying to ruin your country, then the toxicity of Fox news doesn't have an impact.
posted by teleri025 at 10:39 AM on April 5, 2019 [12 favorites]


Here's the thing though. If you don't already lean towards a world view that tells you that things were better in the Good Old Days, and that change is bad, and that [insert group here] is trying to ruin your country, then the toxicity of Fox news doesn't have an impact.

Yeah, that's why I'm proud of my parents.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:50 AM on April 5, 2019 [5 favorites]


"If you don't already lean towards a world view that tells you that things were better in the Good Old Days... then the toxicity of Fox news doesn't have an impact."

A couple of things... First of all, if you are 60 or 70, there are really solid chances that things were better (for you) when you were young. I mean, at the very least you had better physical health, the optimism of youth, your whole life in front of you, etc.

And this article isn't about Fox, which is toxic in its own right, to be certain, but about algorithm's that often tend towards more and more extreme viewpoints, rabbit-holes of weirdness... Shit that is far beyond the banal evil that is in Fox news.

As far as change being bad... Well while that may not be true, I'm personally terrified of the recent changes of the world - the rise of Nazi's, the violence against minority religions, the change in the climate, etc, etc... I'm just saying that not all change is good.
posted by el io at 10:57 AM on April 5, 2019 [9 favorites]


Here's the thing though. If you don't already lean towards a world view that tells you that things were better in the Good Old Days, and that change is bad, and that [insert group here] is trying to ruin your country, then the toxicity of Fox news doesn't have an impact.

I think that there are plenty of people that get sucked into the kind of feel good kabuki theatre/propaganda that Fox News puts on display. Even if you don't lean towards the "good ol' days", it's easy to fall prey to the belief that there's this insidious "other" that is out to get you, that you've been forgotten, that your needs matter more than those who have come after you or who have less than you. I think a lot of it is purely psychological and less related to bigotry/racism/privilege.

I'm not denying that bigotry/racism/privilege don't have an influence in how this works, they certainly make it easier to get sucked into. I just also believe that people are easy to manipulate, especially when they're scared or worried about something. Fox is so much about fear.
posted by Fizz at 10:58 AM on April 5, 2019 [6 favorites]


*Also, I apologize if I've derailed this into a discussion about Fox News, I realize I referenced that up above and I know this article is about more than that (as @el io mentions). The reason I specifically called them out is because I've watched how that particular network has capitalized on manipulating their audience in such an extreme way.
posted by Fizz at 11:00 AM on April 5, 2019 [1 favorite]


Facebook poisoning in particular is so fucking insidious, and it really does seem to have an outsized effect on people of a certain generation.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around how people engage with social media in different ways. The horrid bigoted angermaking clickbait stuff is just one of the more obvious negatives, but I'm not entirely convinced all the clickbait, even videos of cute animals and memes and feel-good pablum, aren't connected to it in some way.
posted by aspersioncast at 11:11 AM on April 5, 2019 [3 favorites]


The listener story told on this week's With Friends Like These is about this (woman's mom goes down this rabbithole and culminates in sending a steady stream of horrific abusive text messages to her daughter when their relationship had not previously been abusive) and was just heartbreaking and mindboggling to me. My parents are conservative but not like this, and they've never gotten sucked into Fox and fake news memes. They're just regular Economist-readers. But they're also actively social, have a billion hobbies, and live in a major city.

But, you know, look at every thread we have about quitting Facebook. The #1 reason everyone says they can't do that is that that's how they keep in touch with their older relatives. What if you just... didn't do that? Would there be any impact if everyone just cold turkey stopped sharing their kids' pictures and life news with family via Facebook and used a non-social platform instead? (Mailchimp is free for up to 2000 subscribers! Break the "family life update letter" free from the chains of a single holiday card once a year! Weekly family newsletters for all!)
posted by soren_lorensen at 11:18 AM on April 5, 2019 [23 favorites]


I think a lot of it is purely psychological and less related to bigotry/racism/privilege.

Well, yeah, sorta. I mean, as social animals there is a strong inclination toward tribal thinking (in/out group). As such, we are psychologically primed to look for shortcuts to determine if someone is “in our tribe” or not. There are plenty of legitimate reasons why in/out group thinking is a good psychological tool. Racism and bigotry are what happens when in/out group thinking is poisonous and privilege is the result of said racism and bigotry.

So, in short, the psychology of racism and bigotry is exactly what is at work here.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 11:30 AM on April 5, 2019 [3 favorites]


Worth thinking about: Those of us who are not now old and who survive long enough are going to get old. Admittedly, climate change and social collapse may mean we're all living under tarps somewhere and dealing with bigger problems, but for the moment let's assume that we're just going to get old and isolated and have tight budgets. We'll also have at least some cognitive decline and maybe chronic pain and chronic illness that impair our concentration and our ability to keep up with new technology. What are we going to do to prevent some kind of equivalent red-pilling happening to us? It needn't be right wing stuff, especially - we could just believe terrible, stupid harmful things of a different valence.

On another note: It's a bit scary that the self is so fragile, right? Or so...constructed, anyway. So subject to drift. Spend enough time with any set of ideas and your norms will get reset; spend enough time with any strongly self-identifying group and you'll either join or break down. And then of course I am who I am in large part because of what I read and write, and to a degree I can hack that but not infinitely, and even then it's recursive. In a sense we're all getting red-pilled all the time rather than truthfully engaging with truth.

And: As part of my continuing effort to shore up my mental seawalls, I'm trying to get through Selections from the Prison Notebooks, which means of course Gramsci's prison notebooks. I've just managed the introduction, and there's a good bit about how all these quasi-Marxists and left-adjacent people from the early 20th century went futurist and then fascist. You can always say "oh, yes so-and-so went fascist because of [intellectual or personal failing]" but when you consider them as an aggregate it's pretty disturbing in re the stable subject.
posted by Frowner at 11:31 AM on April 5, 2019 [47 favorites]


In a population that has been stripped of its potency, (real or not,) aging workers who never had much, worn out grandparents, people who are in the end of life, but not in the end of misery, the internet offers a passion. Political passion is not porn, so feeling passionately about anything, is a stimulant. Feeling like a hero by pushing a button, is a positive internal reinforcement otherwise not available in real life. So they choose a hero, choose a fight, choose a resolution that puts them in a positive internal light. This simulation and stimulation of the central nervous system is what passes as life, for many mostly home bound individuals. They are a chorus, singing in a chorus, of heroes who hate, or love or judge, just like a video game for those who are more passive consumers. These are the stone throwing witch burners, who are too old to throw stones, abandoned by their previous employers, their children, their customers, the medical establishment, everyone. Other nations are making the kids take their parents back, China, even Japan to a certain extent. They have realized the abandonment of the elderly will harm their society, and sets a bad norm for times to come.

I see plenty of Askmefis if it is OK to not have relations with previously abusive parents, or troublesome family members. Just remember, Fox News is babysitting these folks, but building a reward system, a repetitive mindset, full of hatred and judgement against whomever their sponsors find profitable. This group makes a loudspeaker that blares out in text for anyone to hear, they are a siren call for sponsors, you know it is going to be weapons, unrest, and oil, seasoned with social shade.

We have to find, fund a better system of rewards for these folks. It has to be big, I mean knitting groups, animal rescue, can't compete.
posted by Oyéah at 11:38 AM on April 5, 2019 [12 favorites]


The last time I was at my parents' house (admittedly, several years ago--we're not close) my father had a YouTube channel going nearly non-stop on his TV. It was apparently a feed of right-wing propaganda aggregated from several horrid sites, fed through a computerized reader and then straight to YouTube. It's the most dystopian thing I've ever seen in real life: just terrible lie after terrible lie, delivered in a coolly neutral robotic voice to aging man who took it all in without question. I didn't even know such a thing existed until then.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 11:42 AM on April 5, 2019 [46 favorites]


And this article isn't about Fox, which is toxic in its own right, to be certain, but about algorithm's that often tend towards more and more extreme viewpoints, rabbit-holes of weirdness... Shit that is far beyond the banal evil that is in Fox news.

Fox is way past banal evil these days; obviously it's always been bad, but now it's directly plugged in to the online fash-osphere. Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham barely even bother being wink-wink-nudge-nudge about their white supremacism anymore. The huge population of Facebook and YouTube poisoned boomers (and younger generations as well, but the boomers are clearly the most susceptible as a group) has directly enabled this fascist turn, because that's what Fox's audience is used to now.

While talking about what we can do to protect ourselves and our families from this is important, the only real solution has to involve holding the propaganda media responsible. As long as these platforms exist designed to maximize engagement in a supposedly value-neutral way, this is going to keep happening. To Frowner's point, it won't just be the Nazis either, any kind of facilitated folie à plusieurs is all grist for the engagement mill: MLMs, cults, child pornographers, other terrorist ideologies, whatever so long as it increases page views.

They have to be broken up, as a literal matter of life and death, and the Wojcickis and Zuckerbergs and Dorseys of the world should be sued until they're grease-spots by the victims of the violence their platforms enabled. In Zuck's case at least, he's pretty clearly directed and enabled that crimes be committed, and he should face the full liability of that as well - I'm sure you'd find similar on plenty of the others if you shed enough light.
posted by strangely stunted trees at 11:52 AM on April 5, 2019 [13 favorites]


We are Canadian, but my mom is addicted to Fox and talk AM radio, while my dad is an aging lefty but reads RT every day (they say bad things about the USA, so he believes every word, even though I try to explain to him it is Russian propaganda) and sends me links (which I promptly delete). They don't talk to each other anymore. I don't talk about anything even vaguely political with my mom anymore. She yelled at my 8-year old son last year for making a comment that she thought was anti-Trump. We are making our annual obligatory weekend visit with them in a couple weeks. I am not looking forward to it.
posted by fimbulvetr at 11:52 AM on April 5, 2019 [3 favorites]


I'm happy that none of the seniors in my family are Fox news watching conservatives. For example, my sister's 75 year old country music guitar playing husband has a Bernie sticker on the back of his truck and spends a lot of time posting anti-Trump memes on Facebook.
posted by octothorpe at 11:57 AM on April 5, 2019 [2 favorites]


My parents have always been pretty well-insulated from this stuff even though they were both always introverts.

I tend to think that it's because they were good at amusing themselves - there was always something to read or something to do other than watch television or listen to toxic radio. Both of them were big fans of classical music, too, and you don't get a lot of Foxism on those stations. Both were fortunate enough to have had excellent educations, so reading and reflecting were fairly straightforward for them.

Obviously education doesn't protect you from being a terrible person (consider, eg, Jacob Rees-Mogg) but I do wonder if education can protect people from redpill experiences - not so much the content but the form. Like, "here is the secret of how the world works - it's really the [stigmatized group]!!!!" explanations are never going to appeal to my father because he's had access to many theories of how the world works and he's used to considering them. I'm not saying that anyone in my family is some kind of lost philosophical or strategic genius with incredibly profound thoughts about the way of the world, but totalizing explanations are unlikely to overwhelm us with their novelty.

I don't even think that what people need is some kind of Nine Rules of Critical Thinking or whatever; it's more that people could probably use the mere habit of trying to understand the world so that they don't assume that it can be explained in a paragraph.

And of course, most people are so badly served by our education system - people don't become fluent readers or writers or acquire any equivalent set of skills and so they just can't access or enjoy some of the stuff that has a protective effect.
posted by Frowner at 12:00 PM on April 5, 2019 [5 favorites]


On the bright side, none of my older relatives are on Facebook as they are all super paranoid about it.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:01 PM on April 5, 2019 [2 favorites]


On the bright side, none of my older relatives are on Facebook as they are all super paranoid about it.

That's the real trick we need to pull off. We need to make the olds distruct Facebook. That's shouldn't be too hard, as I distrust Facebook and I'm only mildly old.
posted by Caduceus at 12:08 PM on April 5, 2019 [6 favorites]


I feel like there's a gender aspect to this: Fox News appeals more to men, and the loopy Facebook shares that I see are usually from people's moms and grandmas, not from their fathers and grandfathers. I'm wondering if Facebook functions a little bit like Fox News for women. (I don't think it's only Fox News for older women: I see a lot of liberal-to-left stuff shared by Baby Boomer and older women.)
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:49 PM on April 5, 2019 [2 favorites]


Re: the first linked story, public libraries play a tremendous, unheralded role in helping seniors with technology. I wish people would recognize this more often.
posted by doctornemo at 1:33 PM on April 5, 2019 [9 favorites]


I have two elderly Facebook friends who spend the entire day posting links. I like them and don't want to mute them, so I've blocked every site they've shared that has the words "funny", "LOL", "Red", "Blue", "Trump", "Veteran", "beach", "Christian", "country", "cat", "dog" or "hippie" in them. Despite doing this every day for the last six months (maybe I've gone insane as well), I still get dozens of posts a day, including, like, every week, that meme about how possums are your friends because they eat ticks. Some of their shares are actually fine links to accurate news stories, but others are clearly untrue, and I flag those with a share to the pertinent "Snopes.com" link. Nothing stops them. In person they are lovely. It has to be a neurological thing, like people gambling at slot machines.
posted by acrasis at 1:39 PM on April 5, 2019 [12 favorites]


What are we going to do to prevent some kind of equivalent red-pilling happening to us?

My core philosophy has always been, "I don't trust a single one of you motherfuckers" which has frequently served me well in resisting various cultish things in the past. I mean, that's not entirely true, there are a few people I trust, but my list of behavior that I do not trust is lengthy. The #1 slot belongs to "any expression that the speaker has everything all figured out." No. No you do not. No one does. The world and everything in it is fucking complicated. I mistrust this just as much from the left as from the right, and that's the path I see in the various infamous cases of people going from hard left to hard right. Hard left people who have a grand unified sociopolitical theory of everything and if you would only just let them be in charge everything would fall into place morph very easily into hard right people with the same proposition. Same black-white thinking and same hubris, slightly different flavor.
posted by soren_lorensen at 1:44 PM on April 5, 2019 [11 favorites]


Fundamentally, we're talking about interlocking industries built to monetize rage and fear and hatred. It's like a science fiction story—like Star Trek's energy alien that fed off violent emotions.

I'm relatively fortunate in my choice of family—only a couple of my elderly uncles were fox news junkies, most of whom I rarely saw before they passed and the one I did see often was courteous or thoughtful enough not to inflict it on guests. I have an asshole cousin, but the rest of my family ranges from Republican-but-won't-talk-about-it thru NPR liberal. My mom spends a lot time with CNN and Facebook, but, fortunately, the worst I have to hear from her is "I really like that Wolf Blitzer."

Fox is way past banal evil these days; obviously it's always been bad, but now it's directly plugged in to the online fash-osphere

And I fear that it'll only get worse. SC State Rep. Lin Bennett (R) uses her Facebook to post Qanon memes. I doubt she's the only one. If Fox were to go full Q, who's to stop them? The amount of transphobic abuse and vitriol on twitter will make your skin crawl and I'm only surprised that it hasn't made the jump to being blared on FOX (or any of the other networks, really) 24/7.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:53 PM on April 5, 2019 [5 favorites]


If your previously kind and loving parent is suddenly abusive I might wonder what is causing this abrupt personality change. Is it ageing or something else? Alzheimer's/ dementia? Brain tumour? Stroke? Mental Illness?
My father is an ass but he has always been an ass so it's probably not dementia but a long standing untreated mental illness is not impossible.
posted by Gwynarra at 1:56 PM on April 5, 2019 [3 favorites]


Oh good, a nice ageist post to make my day. Two quick thoughts:

1) Quoting Buzzfeed, really? A post citing one or two of the 'four studies' would actually have merit. Else, we all may have trouble 'differentiating between reported news and opinion'. Or between actual news sources and quiz-carnival clowns.

2) Old people are: "more likely to consume and share false online news ... poor or inaccurate grasp ... are worse than younger people ... are less likely to register the brand of a news site they consume information from." Two quick sub-thoughts: stereotype much? How many people participated in these 'studies'?

This may the most dismaying post I've ever seen on MeFi.
posted by Twang at 5:48 PM on April 5, 2019 [3 favorites]


How does this work at a point when “fake news” is baked into the mainstream news media. I don’t want to claim “all news is fake news” but it’s increasingly looking that way.
posted by Middlemarch at 6:04 PM on April 5, 2019 [1 favorite]


You can see the studies that the Buzzfeed article linked to here and here and here. You're certainly free to critique their methodologies.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:06 PM on April 5, 2019 [17 favorites]


Buzzfeed? “Fake news”? The irony is astounding.
posted by Middlemarch at 6:08 PM on April 5, 2019


Quoting Buzzfeed, really?
It's almost like they have multiple Pulitzer-winning staff and have been finalists 2 years in a row for their much-lauded investigative journalism or something...
posted by CrystalDave at 6:18 PM on April 5, 2019 [44 favorites]


My parents have always been pretty well-insulated from this stuff even though they were both always introverts.

I think the "even" might more point to why they were better able to avoid the problem, as you go on to suggest a bit later in your reply. The OP did a good job in linking the different ways the problem manifests itself, with Fox News and the internet only being one part of it. Isolation and loneliness, especially perhaps for extroverts or those who lived lives based around person to person communication, which was obviously far more common prior to the internet, has serious effects on how we understand the world and our own mental health.

My father didn't go the Fox news/Infowars/redpill route, but he did suffer terribly from loneliness and would grab on to anything conversational that spoke to his understanding of the world, based in the previous decades, as something to share or take in as comfort. He cared for my mother, who had alzheimers, for years and after she died the last couple years he had were spent either with my sister and her family or at the bar playing scratch offs, not even drinking that much, just looking to talk to people. His view of the world became increasingly out of date, but never entirely toxic as his sources of exchange became more and more limited. He was too set in some points of view, like being anti-gun, to buy the package of hate, but he did still end up browsing some of the aisles when the hook was something outside his experience and send to him by some of the few peer relatives he had left who did Foxout more completely.

When all your friends and relatives in roughly the same age cohort die off in ever increasing numbers leaving you more and more alone and the world keeps changing without you feeling as if there is any control over it for having less and less relevance to your life history and making the skills and knowledge you've worked your life to obtain functionally useless outside that shrinking peer group, there can be a real sense of anger, fear, and loss. You're constantly being told you don't matter anymore, so people grab on to the voices that say you do, even or maybe especially, when they appeal to your prejudices and fears.

Of course most older people don't understand the internet as well as young people who grew up with it, how could they? We develop much of how we think and our skills for dealing with the world at younger ages and add the knowledge that comes from a history of experience that likely had nothing to do with today's world of the internet in a myriad of important interactive ways. This is how just how change and aging works. Some will manage to escape the worst of it and still find use in the world and value for it, but many more won't find that same sense of continued satisfaction of relevance and retreat or fade from the scene.

There is a real need to engage older people more productively in the culture rather than allowing them to be taken in by bullshit designed to rip them off or siphon their political strength to use for bad ends. A deeper community based culture wouldn't allow for that kind of disengagement from relevance, but we traded that in long ago for capitalism and now virtual culture, which can be a further concentrated form of control if left unchecked. I say this as someone getting up there in age myself and who sees where I'm being left behind in the culture and technology. The urge to fight against being left behind is matched by the interests of a lifetime and feeling of exhaustion at the thought of starting over virtually from scratch to learn things I'm not all that interested in for themselves.
posted by gusottertrout at 6:58 PM on April 5, 2019 [17 favorites]


I work with a 71 year-old fellow who lives alone with his chihuahua. He thinks Trump is the greatest hero in American history. In general, we get along because I have... strong mental discipline. But he reads news on his phone all night, and there's always a story in there about how "the blacks" have done something bad.

"I tell ya, people are really upset at what Michelle Obama/OprahWinfrey/Kamala Harris did today! People aren't going to stand for their bullshit much longer! If you ask me, the blacks need to be more grateful, etc."

It's hard to listen to. Lately, every time he mentions the blacks, I donate $5.00 to Kamala Harris's campaign.

Sigh. I have a recurring fantasy that I can travel back in time to the early '90s and have a long conversation with one of my old history professors. I'd like to explain it all to them -- 9/11, Iraq, W. Bush, Obama, the Internet, smart phones, Marvel movies, climate change, #MeToo, Facebook, Google, and Donald Trump.

It would all sound like fiction, like I was trying to write a cheeky imitation of Infinite Jest.
posted by Chronorin at 7:49 PM on April 5, 2019 [14 favorites]


@Middlemarch:
Buzzfeed? “Fake news”? The irony is astounding.
Buzzfeed has this sort of multiple personality thing going on.

One half of them publishes the "Top 10 Celebrities That Look Like Cakes"-type garbage that everyone knows them for.

But the other half actually produces longform, investigative pieces. (Example: this massive piece on Beto O'Rourke from the campaign trail.)

It's... odd.
posted by -1 at 8:31 PM on April 5, 2019 [1 favorite]


I’d like to explain it all to them -- 9/11, Iraq, W. Bush, Obama, the Internet, smart phones, Marvel movies, climate change, #MeToo, Facebook, Google, and Donald Trump.

I have this fantasy, too. And every time I think of it I realize that I’d sound like Bruce Willis in Twelve Monkeys.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:57 PM on April 5, 2019 [14 favorites]


Yeah, this happened to my dad. It was like something in him snapped after 9/11 and he got into more and more right-wing media since then. He used to have hobbies related to science and collecting. Now, he can't stop himself from sharing their talking points anymore. At this point, we are not speaking, and I hope to never speak to him again. The last time I saw him, he was yelling at me over the dinner table that he is not a neo-nazi, even though all I'd said was, "let's not talk about this." But I'd rather not delve into that on this beautiful Saturday morning with the birds outside singing. Instead, I'll just recommend the documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, which is also about this same subject.
posted by heatvision at 4:12 AM on April 6, 2019 [5 favorites]


Step 1: Quietly invest in big-budget reboot of "Logan's Run"
Step 2: Run for president on a "maximum voting age" platform
Step 3: Profit
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 4:37 AM on April 6, 2019 [1 favorite]


....Uh....some of us in this thread are over 30.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:42 AM on April 6, 2019 [7 favorites]


Here's the thing though. If you don't already lean towards a world view that tells you that things were better in the Good Old Days, and that change is bad, and that [insert group here] is trying to ruin your country, then the toxicity of Fox news doesn't have an impact.

I think positions like this are really drastically underrating the extent to which the conservative media environment operates by emphasis, omission, and spin, in ways that reinforce very common and pervasive biases in American society, or within certain groups.

Tucker Carlson isn't on Fox 24/7 saying blatantly outrageous things - most of their day is taken up with what sure looks like "impartial" news programs. But when they show pictures of immigrants in detention they don't show the young kids, they show pictures of adult men that look like every TV show's version of "hardened criminals." The Iraq Wars were sold as "America makes the world safe by taking on dictators" which made perfect sense to generations raised on the mythology that America saved the world in WWII. For all that Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly might sometimes yell and say openly horrible things, most of their shows are (were, in O'Reilly's case) a constant drone of "I'm just taking the reasonable position" or "It's just common sense", and you have to get info from other sources and do some thinking to recognize the elements of the stories that they are leaving out. As the Ferguson protests turned violent and chaotic, I can't tell you how many ostensibly white liberal folks I know IRL who put forward the idea that "If they'd just dispersed when the police asked them to, nobody would have gotten hurt" - which certainly sounds reasonable if all of your interactions with police have been respectful in both directions.

I think that there are plenty of people that get sucked into the kind of feel good kabuki theatre/propaganda that Fox News puts on display.

Yeah, Fizz certainly touches on something here, where again a lot of the conservative media spins stories as positive in a way that resonates with a lot of the American public, and just leaves out anything that might contradict that spin. "We're gonna bring back good small-town blue collar jobs!" - only they never follow up with the idea that it might be tariff wars that are helping to destroy those jobs. "We're keeping dangerous criminals out of the the country!" - well, duh, nobody wants more dangerous criminals in any country anywhere, but (again) the images and statistics are selected and fudged to hide or reduce the extent to which immigrants are not dangerous criminals. "Making the dangerous North Koreans do what we want!" - completely ignoring the fact that nothing substantial has actually happened regardless of administration posturing. "Bringing Christianity and morality back to American society!" - but very little examination of what this actually means in practice, and whose definition of Christianity or morality we're using.

For all that slippery slope arguments can be problematical, there really is an obvious pattern where conservative ideas get introduced and spread usually in a far more low-key way than Trump ranting and raving. And once you start to get drawn into the media - you started listening to Rush simply because he was on right after the morning sports-talk radio, you just settled on Fox while flipping channels because they had a cute dog story and then sat through Bill O'Reilly and then lo and behold Rush or Bill were grumbling about "the way teenage girls dress these days" which, I mean, what parent hasn't had that thought cross their minds, and you start to think, "hey these guys are pretty reasonable" and so you start to check them out regularly and now you have Fox News on all the time which means you completely miss the possibility that there were never any WMD in Iraq (because Fox would never mention that) and now you've spent 15 or 20 years getting less and less information and interpretation from non-conservative sources and then it all gets further reinforced by social media algorithms that just feed you more of what you're already seeing . . . .

You don't have to be leaning very far into that world view to get sucked in, is what I'm saying.
posted by soundguy99 at 6:23 AM on April 6, 2019 [14 favorites]


I was just listening to an episode of the dig which reminded me of a Marxian concept I had forgotten/not thought about *idiocy*, in its classical sense of privatized isolation, and how that could apply here.
posted by The Whelk at 8:50 AM on April 6, 2019 [1 favorite]


My mom passed away in 2015 in her eighties ... she was always a Republican, and in the early aughts, she started watching Fox News. Her siblings went the same route. Thankfully none of them was computer-literate or had a smartphone, so Facebook was not an option.

I miss her, but I have a strong feeling that had she been able to, she would have voted for T***p in 2016, and our relationship would have suffered as a result.

I'm really glad my staunch New Deal Democrat dad never saw any of this; he died during the first year of Reagan's presidency and I will always connect his death symbolically (if not causally) to the havoc wreaked by Reagan and his goons. I like to think he wouldn't have been sucked in by Fox News, but it's hard to say.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 10:29 AM on April 6, 2019


TV has been a conservative influence on isolated people and older people since before Fox.

The news was all disasters: crime, often in "bad neighborhoods;" fire; people getting stuck on roller coasters, getting sick from black mold, having their identities stolen, mauled by dogs, etc. If you were an active and social person, your life brought you the context that these were anomalies and most people to amusement parks and The Big City and play with dogs or shop online or whatever without incident, but for isolated people these stories were often the only exposure they had to certain aspects of modern life.

Newspapers were much more optimistic, because they had a strong subtext that readers lived in a well ordered society where mundane things happened successfully: cars got bought and sold, Macy's ran sales, kids won the science fair and Little League, the city council zoned property, recipes got made, etc.

Late night and daytime talk shows in their 90s heyday were also quite conservative. Jokes on Leno and Letterman regularly conveyed the idea that the government was dumb and inefficient and all the shows implied that everyone who didn't live a staid middle class lifestyle was worthy of mockery. Leno's endless stream of Clinton sex jokes was almost certainly a gateway drug to Rush Limbaugh, who mixed familiar Clinton sex jokes with wink-wink racism, for many people.
posted by smelendez at 11:52 AM on April 6, 2019 [15 favorites]


*idiocy* - The Whelk, that was also a Phil Dick theme, people caught in (I think) an idios cosmos, private world.
posted by doctornemo at 12:11 PM on April 6, 2019


I do feel there's a little begging the question going on with the age aspect - Voat and 4chan and t_d (and fucking Joe Fucking Rogan's audience) aren't exactly full of octogenarians. If you look at Facebook and Fox, your audience is obviously going to skew older.
posted by aspersioncast at 3:48 PM on April 6, 2019 [8 favorites]


My brothers and I talk about our father’s quiet descent into right-wing media and have no solutions. On one hand, at least he’s quiet about it - when we were growing up he’d never tell us who he voted for, claiming “that’s private.” On the other hand, it makes things that much more upsetting when he suddenly blindsides you with horrific political commentary out of nowhere. When you call him out on it he pouts and gives you the silent treatment for hours/days/weeks, and then the cycle starts again.

In the run up to the 2016 election my brother gave my parents a subscription to the Economist, which at least gave my mom a well-researched, international counterpoint to right-wing talk radio. But as long as I’ve lived, my dad’s life has revolved around watching the 5:00pm local news, 5:30 national news, the 6:00 local news on another station (“to get more information”), and the 10:00 local news (“to hear the weather forecast,” as if it hasn’t changed since 5:00 or 6:00). There’s no fixing those brain receptors now that right-wing news has been hooked in. On the other hand, paranoid, sexist asshole is gonna asshole, so I’m sure I would have found other ways to be disappointed in him.
posted by Maarika at 11:54 AM on April 8, 2019


I do feel there's a little begging the question going on with the age aspect

I've joked with some of my co-Gen-Xers that everyone older than us has been brainwashed by Fox and everyone younger than us has been brainwashed by YouTube. And as for us? Well, we just happen to be the exact right age group to not be brainwashed at all.

While, of course, this is just joshing around, sometimes I can't help but think that something about being in the generation(s) that straddled the advent of the internet as we know it might have shaped our understanding and consumption of information and media.
posted by mhum at 1:55 PM on April 8, 2019 [8 favorites]


I think Facebook is more insidious than Fox News. Anyone can turn on Fox and seem the exact garbage as everyone else, which at least slightly limits the magnitude of bullshit.

But on Facebook each individual sees something different depending on the groups they are in, their friends, and the Facebook algorithm. Lies and hatred sit among photos of pets and cute babies. A lot of people, especially here on MetaFilter, barely or never see this kind of thing on Facebook because Facebook knows they don't want to see it. Making matters worse is Facebook's history of selling out users to the highest bidder. I would bet that Facebook's data includes a measure of each user's gullibility.
posted by exogenous at 2:17 PM on April 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


I can't help but think that something about being in the generation(s) that straddled the advent of the internet as we know it might have shaped our understanding and consumption of information and media.

I'm in the Old Millennial/Gen-Y cohort - I think there's something to this. We straddled a particular line regarding information and misinformation, and were positioned to remember the pre-web world while coming of age as the web became ubiquitous. We remember proto-social media in its various incarnations, the messiness of primitive WWW, early phishing attempts, an inculcated distrust of everything online.

People on either side of that generational divide didn't necessarily have the formative parts of that experience.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:13 PM on April 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


Of course most older people don't understand the internet as well as young people who grew up with it, how could they?

Because we weren't actually born old. E.g. I'm 65 and I've been living with a pc since 1984, i.e., more years than some of you young folks have been alive, let alone online.

Have had home internet since forever (mid 90s??? frankly, I don't remember exactly, but we were relatively early on this front).

There is a fuck ton of ageist attitude in this thread—unfortunately, it's becoming all too common here.
posted by she's not there at 11:17 PM on April 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


There are actually studies on these things and older people have not adopted internet use at the same rates as other age groups. In the year 2000 70% of 18 to 29 years olds were using the internet compared to 14% of those 65+, in 2008 89% 18-29 vs 38% 65+, in 2018 98% 18-29 vs 66% 65+.

It shouldn't even take that kind of info, which is easy to find, to realize that if spends the majority of a long life interacting with the world in one manner then that will be the most familiar and comfortable way to continue even in the face of changing patterns of interaction by those who are younger. Older people watch more television because they are more accustomed to it than those who grew up with competing media choices and didn't have TV as their main source of information about the world. The way younger and older people use the internet differs for like reasons.

That isn't of course to say everyone within an age group acts the exact same way, individually there will be large differences in histories of interaction and knowledge, but as a cohort older people are interacting with media and taking in information in different ways than younger people. That doesn't mean younger people aren't finding their own paths to right wing values, some certainly are, or that all aging is a sure path to conservatism, it isn't, just that there are some clear indications and strong suggestions over how many older people do become engrossed in right wing propaganda. The articles are mostly focused on that aspect of the current political situation, not everything, so they are talking about that one facet of a larger whole, not all things older people do nor all ways anyone gets drawn into the extreme right.

Age matters, we aren't the same at 20 as we are at 50 mentally, physically, or by experience and we won't be the same at eight as we are at 50 in the same way noting that isn't ageist its just life.
posted by gusottertrout at 4:22 AM on April 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


Maybe this is better over on the gray, but at least two MeFites have now commented on ageist attitudes around this topic (which seem kinda built-in to the FPP in a way), and I do think this could be approached with a little more sensitivity and awareness, even if the general trends being discussed do point to actual generational differences.

I've generally gotten the impression Metafilter skews somewhat older than the general internet population outside Facebook, so it's interesting to hear the perception that the site or aspects of it feel hostile to people over a certain age. I certainly see anti-Boomer hostility in the politics threads. At the same time the IBM mainframe thread had a number of commenters who were presumably in their sixties and seventies based on their experience, so maybe this particular topic is causing some of the bad feels.

Anyway, a good reminder to consider, when discussing a group of people, how a member of that group might feel about how things are being discussed.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:05 AM on April 9, 2019


Yeah, my comment isn't to at all deny there are times where the discussion around age gets pretty bad or at least more fraught, particularly in regards to politics. I just don't see this post itself as the same kind of problem since the articles are fairly specific and limited in what they are saying, not just another "Damn old people!" thing.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:24 AM on April 9, 2019 [1 favorite]




So on an episode of the Antifada one of the Street Fight guys says he got his grandfather to come around to voting for Obama, twice, and support drug reform but then he moved to The Villages for five years and came out suoer racist and addicted to Alex Jones.

So it looks like we have these multiple levels of isolation, from Pepe being isolated in reality and turning to insular Facebook groups, people turning to Fox News, and literal actual isolated retirement communities where they foster far right sentiment.
posted by The Whelk at 6:56 PM on April 13, 2019


That Intelligencer article is good, but I suppose they included the bit about the opposite ("Dem-Boomer family who had gone mad for Maddow and Russiagate") just to sound balanced. It isn't the same, and I think they know that since they end with this:

“It just sucks because I know the people he hates so much are basically the same people as me.”

Politics is personal. I know and/or love all kinds of people who are targeted by right-wing beliefs. I am a woman and have endured insulting anti-abortion talk from my dad. I can't put away all the crap he has said as if it's meaningless.

Possibly even worse is that these extreme right-wing sources are apparently also broadcasting energy propaganda. My parents never gave the slightest crap about energy before, but the last time I saw them, they went off on rants about both wind power, and solar power, saying that the tech doesn't work, it's a scam, it's dangerous... They don't believe that global warming is a real thing. And they're not at all suspicious that they suddenly have angry opinions about green power, either. Seems normal to them.

I think to their generation, the news regularly uncovered scandals, from Nixon and Nader to all the 80's weekend news shows like 60 Minutes or 20/20. I think to them, this is a natural function of the news, and when they hear or see something that seems similar, they are inclined to believe it. The narrator in a video says a "fact" and numbers appear on screen, then a person appears on camera who is said to be an expert and they testify, and it all seems truthy. These right-wing sources are using familiar media language in their videos and online stories to tell their fans big "secrets" about what really going on and then they don't look at it critically.

I'm glad that so many people who posted in this thread aren't affected by this problem, but I think it's a product of the demographics of this site. I know quite a few people who are in this situation, and a few who are no longer on speaking terms with their parents. I was not jazzed this morning in the abortion thread, how one person talked about what their Republican family believes, and the thread turned into a lot of people doubting them about that, and talking about studies that show otherwise, and how Republicans are instead all purposefully cruel. People on this site love to say that: "the cruelty is the point," but I can only believe that in my most cynical moments. There are also studies that show that the extremely wealthy people who grow up separate from the rest of us really believe right-wing ideas because they've never had to be around people who would show them otherwise. I believe that people like my parents really 100% believe this shit, and they think it's of the gravest importance to the world. They feel frightened for the future because of all this crap, just like the TV says they should. I know this because I argued with them for 20 years.

When people like me say that our parents transformed or their brains rotted, that's what we're talking about. They really believe this shit. It's not a stance to feel superior to others. It's not a stance to allow them to be cruel. They have been indoctrinated to believe that they know the world's dirty secrets, that the world is in big trouble, and that leftists are the ones who have been fooled.
posted by heatvision at 4:23 AM on April 14, 2019 [3 favorites]


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