What about the impact of social media on older people? - Andy Brown

Don’t the elderly need protection from the risk of sending their life savings to an online predator who has offered them love and affection but now claims to have hit difficult circumstances which require the remittance of a significant sum of money to help overcome a problem?

Don’t we need help to avoid being persuaded by a blogger sitting in Russia that they are actually a plausibly attractive potential partner who offers friendly conversation and takes an interest in our lives? Prevent us from being drawn in until we are so emotionally involved that we fall for a tale of woe that deprives us of a good chunk of our bank balance.

Then there are the more routine scams. Your relative or friend has just sent you an email from abroad where they’ve lost all their money and desperately need you to wire them a small amount to rescue them from serious trouble. You just happen to need to send them your bank account details and a lot of private information to get that money to them. Or more accurately to empty out the account and run up as much credit card debt as possible before you realise your mistake.

Your bank has just told you that your credit limit has been reached. Your email supplier is going to delete all your photographs. Your supermarket has just awarded you a cash prize. And the tax people need urgent information.

That’s quite a routine set of messages which might appear in the inbox of a pensioner who grew up in an era when the only computers were ones that you walked inside and struggled to do simple tasks like run a payroll calculation within 24 hours.

The risks of letting us loose on the risky modern information minefield are extreme.

Then, of course, there are the other kinds of nasty con messages which are even easier to fall for. You look online and see that lots of people are voting for far right extreme nationalist groups and that everyone like you is desperately unhappy about the risk of the white race becoming tainted by the multi-cultural elite. Or that climate change is a hoax invented by a privileged woke collection of extreme liberals that wants to stop you driving. Or that taxation on the rich and powerful is much too high and that nice Mr Musk must be allowed to retain every penny that comes his way.

The originators of such messages are often not ordinary people but teams of professionals employed by trillionaire emigrants from South Africa, or owners of oil companies, or billionaires who have been getting rich quickly whilst too many people in your once proud local community have gone in the other direction.

It is increasingly hard to distinguish between a genuine online opinion of a free individual and a paid for political campaign designed by those who have bought control over social media because they want to use it to manipulate even more of our lives to suit their own warped purposes.

So there is a case for suggesting that the elderly and vulnerable need protecting from the risk of seeing such content and it should be us who get banned not the youngsters.

I am of course deliberately going over the top. Yet there is a serious point behind my exaggerations.

What right have the old to tell the young that they are not entitled to make use of new technology? Surely it is the job of the government and of anyone who claims to acquire any wisdom along with their great age to find ways of protecting young people from harm which are rather better than an outright ban.

Is it not the responsibility of social media organisations to exert some control over their software? Should we not be heavily fining a trillionaire owned company that allows users to strip naked a young girl or boy and publish what artificial intelligence thinks their body would look like in a pornographic pose?

Do we want to allow dark forces who are determined to end inter racial mixing to pour out hatred unchallenged? Is it fine for deliberate lies to be disseminated more energetically than proven scientific facts?

Surely what needs limiting is the actions of the billionaires who are seeking to control our lives for their own benefit, not the ability of 15 year olds to talk to their friends in another part of the country or to exchange thoughts with classmates when they get home from school.

There is no point in shutting young people off from addictive content only to subject them to a torrent of filth when they turn 16. Please let's go after the source of the problem, not the victims.

Andy Brown is Green Party councillor for Aire Valley.