However, the thing that works in younger peoples favour is they are less isolated.
Generally people are very social when young and then as life and routine sets in they stop socialising as much and when they do it’s usually with the same people.
Isolated people don’t have the personal experience to be aware that the ads on Facebook are just ads and not the actual conversation going on around them.
And therefore we have this perception that old people are so dumb and easily fooled, while IMO it’s purely the social aspect that’s at work.
(There is also some contribution from lack of technical literacy but honestly even some of my 30s IT coworkers lack that).
My favorite explanation of this was an analogy to cars. Early drivers had to be mechanics, able not only to drive, but maintain and service their cars. Modern drivers just need to know how to drive, and often have no idea how a car works...
I think that maps well to computers. Early geeks had to know how to build, upgrade, program, network, etc. Current users just have to know how to _use_ an application and often have little idea of the 'behind the scenes' stuff..
But I have an aunt who is slightly older and rebuffs attempts to broach political discussion. And she is, so far as I can tell, stable and content with things, even after the passing of her husband. I recall visiting when I was young and the husband carefully managing the TV remote to mute commercials - there was a definite control over exposure and conscious decisions about faith that my own parents would never attempt and only enacted on us children haphazardly.
With people of roughly my generation, I can see the long-term indoctrination creeping up as they settle into careers. It comes and goes more easily early in life, for sure. By eighteen you're molded roughly into whatever society said you should be, and the onset of that is precisely the thing that makes so many teens commit suicide, and so many others foot soldiers to some ideology. But afterwards things become a little more self-inflicted, built off subconscious voices trying to justify how you ended up where you are. Many people do make a break away into "standing for something" that can take them away from the political sphere and engage with life in a more concrete way like my aunt. The terrified, reactionary elderly, I think, never got there, and ended up in a place where they have no pursuits or rules of conduct that would ground them and make them reconsider their concerns about new information. Once you're attached to bad ideas and you have a media source to reinforce them, all your energy starts going to their defense and you have nothing left for yourself - you just hate everything all day and your personal decline only motivates going deeper and rejecting friends and family; additional socialization by itself doesn't do it, it leads to "drama at the dinner table" as the entire conversation is pulled towards their topics of choice; every word out of their mouth inevitably leads back to their attachments. It's really on society to cut off the supply and deescalate, but for now, the war continues, I suppose.
> The younger generations, with their higher level of fluid intelligence, are able to approach things with better critical thinking
Personally I try to write "are more often able to", or "tend to ...", so it sounds more bell-curvish
edit: that goes for myself as well. I'm lazy enough not to verify stuff unless I think its 'important'...