Why the Elderly Became the Main Source of Junk Info on WeChat Moments
Lately, WeChat Moments have been flooded with all kinds of rumors and junk information, mainly from my parents’ generation — people born in the 50s, 60s, and even 40s. They’re my elders, so I can’t bring myself to block them. I still have to occasionally like their posts to show respect. Annoyed and bothered, I’ve been thinking:
Why have the elderly become the main source of junk information on WeChat Moments?
This article tries to answer that question. If any “main sources” are reading this and feel offended, please pull out your Little Red Book of Quotations from Chairman Mao and recite: “Correct mistakes if you have made them, guard against them if you have not.” Whatever you do, don’t “knock me down and step on me, never to rise again.”
The internet hasn’t been new in China for a long time. But credit must go to Steve Jobs for making the internet accessible to ordinary households, letting even the young and old use it. For example, my mother in her 60s and my 6-year-old son can’t use computers to go online, but both use iPads. Especially the illiterate He Shiqian — he figured out all by himself where to tap to watch cartoons, where to tap to play games. The proliferation of mobile devices and the lowered barrier to use — that’s the premise for WeChat’s explosive growth.
- Catching Up
Junk information on the internet has been around since it entered China. As I recall, it went through several waves.
First wave: Web page rumors. Around 2000. The internet environment was extremely宽松 — no Great Firewall, no备案 required for personal websites. Almost every portal — Chinaren, Yahoo Geocities — offered personal web space. It was too easy to create a rumor page. A typical example was a website that wanted to see the world burn, spreading Nostradamus’s prophecy that the world would end in 1999. (Little did I know this prophecy would resurface in 2012 — but that’s another story.) The problem with web rumors was poor dissemination — not many people saw them.
Second wave: BBS rumors. Around 2002-2003, Tianya and Mop became popular. Forums moved from black-and-white telnet text to the web. These forums were full of clickbait and rumors. Some still have influence today, like the famous “Beizhou Lord Zhou” on Tianya. Dissemination was much stronger than web pages — clickbait thrived because people wanted others to click.
Third wave: Email rumors. In 2004, when I interned at Microsoft, there was a Friday afternoon habit of mass-forwarding non-work-related emails — called “white-collar emails.” It felt quite sophisticated. I remember some contained things like “weakly alkaline constitution” and “Yang Liwei’s satellite was carried by a plane, spun around once, and dropped.”
Fourth wave: IM rumors. The main platforms were QQ and MSN. The most典型 was “Ma Huateng’s birthday — forward this X times to level up your sun and stars.”
Fifth wave: Social network rumors. Kaixin, Renren, and later Sina Weibo. These rumors are countless and ongoing — no need to recap.
It’s not hard to see that the carriers for all five previous waves were PCs — Weibo barely counts as half a mobile app. The post-50s generation missed all of them. For many, WeChat is their first exposure to rumors and free social software. Previously, phone calls and SMS cost money — no one would mass-forward rumors via SMS; the cost was too high. Now it’s different. The WiFi set up by their children and grandchildren sits idle — forwarding costs negligible electricity. Zero cost. It’s a massive catch-up session — they’re making up for all five missed waves. This is why many antique rumors — the kind that online commenters would call “when I first saw this post, Ah Jiao was still a good girl” — have come back from the dead.
- Education and Life Environment
[Alas, 937 characters (excluding punctuation) hidden here. China has not yet reached the era where one can freely speak their mind and publicly discuss their views. The gist is: having gone through ten years of turmoil, they’re accustomed to a single voice in society, used to a single value system, without independent thought or judgment. They’re particularly susceptible to believing what others say. Phone scams target the post-50s and post-60s generation for the same reason.]
- Alleviating Loneliness
Retired, nothing to do at home. If their health isn’t great, they can’t go out and enjoy themselves. At home, what else can they do besides watching soap operas? Watching TV requires sitting up — too much of that and your back hurts. Time to lie down and play on your phone, scroll WeChat. One thing WeChat does well is syncing phone contacts to find friends. Old buddies, old comrades, old classmates, old colleagues — easy to find. Then create a group and start reminiscing about the good old days.
Last time I went to Tongji Hospital for a checkup, it happened to be a session for retired teachers — I was crashing the party. The room was full of retired Tongji professors. Despite their cataracts, many were on their phones using WeChat. I saw an old professor with a Redmi Note (with presbyopia, you need a big screen) that only had two apps installed — probably by his grandson. One was WeChat, the other was NetEase News. He was telling someone nearby that another old classmate in the WeChat group had passed away. It felt like as long as they had breath, they’d keep chatting and forwarding messages. If conditions allowed, their last act before dying would be to post a status: “This life is over. Next life, I’ll forward again. Not forwarding means you’re not Chinese.” Another person said there were so many messages in Moments and they didn’t know which were true or false — “Professor X always forwards them.” These are among China’s first generation of intellectuals, supposedly far more discerning than today’s college students. Yet they still can’t resist junk messages and rumors.
I read that Facebook’s growth among young people has stalled while elderly users are surging. I wonder if American grandparents are busy reposting on Facebook too.
Technology develops exponentially. Someday, we will all grow old, fall behind the times, and marvel at ever-changing technology. Fifty years from now, I might be lying in bed, with a brain-computer interface plugged into a virtual reality iBrain 6 Plus, sending a message to all my old buddies: “Fish brings heat, meat brings phlegm, greens and tofu keep you safe and sound.”