If we won’t trust teenagers online, we definitely can’t trust Grandpa
Australia now bars anyone under 16 from holding a social media account. Britain just followed, and Canada is due to finalize theirs soon enough. The logic is bulletproof: some people can’t be trusted online, so the government decides who logs on. Fine. Let’s apply it honestly and start with the generation that actually needs saving.
Won’t somebody think of Grandpa?
The data is alarming. People over 65 share nearly seven times as many fake news articles on Facebook as adults under 30. They are defenseless against autoplay, infinite scroll and rage-bait headlines they share before reading past the first line. Do you hear it now? The reels are playing even now in the background as they call you on the phone for IT support.
Online safety is the real crisis. Older Americans reported losing $2.4 billion to fraud in 2024, quadruple the 2020 figure, and the FTC estimates the true cost runs as high as $81.5 billion. Scammers increasingly hunt them on social media with romance scams, gift-card emergencies and “your grandson is in jail” calls. This population is groomed daily by people they have never met, and children cannot supervise their parents around the clock.
Big Tech knows it. The platforms are engineered to addict, they profit from boomer isolation, and they refuse to redesign a thing. If a 15-year-old deserves federal protection from an algorithm, surely a 70-year-old wiring his retirement to a Facebook “crypto advisor” deserves it more. Government must step in. For their own good.
The paternalism, said out loud
You see where this is going. Every argument for the under-16 ban applies more forcefully to the oldest users, not the youngest. Nobody proposes checking Grandpa’s ID at the social media door, because the moment you say it aloud the paternalism is obvious. Banning competent adults from a communications tool because some of them misuse it is absurd. It is no less absurd when the target is 15.
The enforcement is the giveaway. Australia’s law threatens platforms with fines up to $49.5 million, so the real mechanism is mass age verification: every user, of every age, uploading an ID or submitting to a face scan to prove they are allowed to speak.
The tools that actually work don’t require a ban. Digital literacy, parental controls and fraud friction at the bank treat people as capable of learning, not as problems to be walled off.
So don’t ban the boomers. Don’t ban the teenagers either. Join the movement!