The cruelty of the Facebook algorithm and its threat to seniors

It’s interesting when a government website like the FBI’s makes a judgment about a whole group of people. It’s more interesting when what the FBI says is, by any sane judgment, totally correct.

"People who grew up in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were generally raised to be polite and trusting," the site reads. "Con artists exploit these traits, knowing that it is difficult or impossible for these individuals to say ‘no’ or just hang up the telephone."

There you have the FBI as the dispenser of wisdom and common sense: "Seniors are nice and scumbags are not." What’s next? Will the FBI be telling me that Ivy league undergrads are bedwetting ninnies, or my wife was right to not allow me to teach LSAT prep to kids in Liberia in the middle of the 2014-15 Ebola Outbreak?

What the feds were jawing on about wasn’t naiveté, it’s kindness — seniors born of another era’s classy culture know how to treat human beings like … well, human beings. But as Facebook (and other social media) use by the elderly crosses the fifty percent threshold, I wonder exactly what good it’s doing them.

My guess is that despite the conveniences of the internet, social media is about as healthful for seniors as it is for anybody else. Meaning, I think seniors need to be on Facebook or Instagram like I need to run through a beekeepers' expo naked and covered in honey.