Concern about children and screens is justified. What is less useful is treating an earlier, less connected childhood as the answer to every problem created by today's internet.

I started thinking about this after reading an Economist article about older adults and screen time. The response I heard was about children at dinner tables, board games, and time lost to technology companies. Those are real concerns, but they do not answer the article's point: digital harm is not confined to children.

Vulnerability changes with the audience

Older adults can face a different combination of risks: unfamiliar interfaces, social isolation, accumulated savings, persuasive scams, and synthetic audio or video that makes an urgent request appear to come from someone they know.

A 2019 study of Facebook use during the 2016 US election found that sharing links from domains classified as false was concentrated among older users. The result does not mean age alone explains susceptibility, and it should not be used to stereotype a whole group. It does show why digital-literacy work should not stop at schools: Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook.

Children still need privacy controls, age-appropriate products, and adults who model healthy behaviour. Older adults may need clearer fraud warnings, trusted recovery channels, help checking sources, and financial institutions that recognize social-engineering patterns. These are different threat models, not competing moral causes.

The problem with the golden-age answer

Nostalgia compresses the past into a tidy standard that did not exist for everyone. “People used to talk to each other” does not tell us how to handle a cloned voice asking a retiree for an emergency transfer. It shifts the discussion from a present control problem to a general complaint about modern life.

The better question is specific: who can be harmed, by what mechanism, and which intervention reduces that harm without creating another one?

That question may lead to device limits for a child, a call-back rule for a bank, training at a community centre, or stronger identity checks in a messaging product. None requires pretending that one generation has a monopoly on unhealthy technology use.

Remembering what was good about older habits can be useful. Treating those memories as a security model leaves current risks unaddressed.