No iPad Till After Dinner, Mom

For Intelligencer, Jessica Lucas offers a smart but depressing look at the seniors who are increasingly glued to their screens, mindlessly scrolling YouTube videos and Instagram Reels, often into the wee hours of the morning. It’s hard not to wonder if this constant passive consumption exacerbates cognitive decline. Some of the adult children Lucas speaks with routinely reset their parents’ feeds: fine-tuning algorithms to serve safer content, marking AI slop, or unsubscribing from harmful or fake news channels. Others have gone so far as to set their elderly parents up with teen accounts or secretly curate and monitor their activity.

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.