Caring for My Father Online
When dad’s phone died I was the first one mom called for help. She always apologizes when calling for help. I’m not sure if she’s just being polite or she really doesn’t know the joy it brings me to be the one she can count on for this small part of life. Well… I can be a little short on patience when giving technical support so I see how it’d be confusing.
I had a phone on hand to send them. To save us all a lot of headaches I started setting up the phone for him before sending it. I go about with the usual suspects: Gmail, Facebook, and a tracker for the price of gold, possibly more important than the former two apps.
My dad has been bedridden for about a year now since the revolving door of medical care that started with a case of sepsis. He uses his phone a lot and every time I visit it’s more or less the same. I appreciate that I’m trusted with his digital life and helping him with whatever odd setting may have changed or apps disappeared.
Upon logging into Facebook on his new phone I found an eerie ghost town of AI generated videos, shock content, and engagement bait. A talking bowl of cereal. A lion about to pounce on someone. A vintage photo of a tough guy overlaid with the text “a real man always takes care of his family. Do you agree?”
A few months ago, I went through his feed and unfollowed a bunch of pages and downvoted a bunch of this type of content, which seemed to help in the moment. I’ve asked dad about it before and he doesn't want to see this stuff, but it sucks him in enough to tell the algorithm to show him more.
Following the posts back to the groups they came from, I found quite strange content. Things like environmentalism in South Africa, but the posts were videos of people in waist-deep water picking up plastic bottles, or textile factories in Southeast Asia, or nostalgia-slop content with images of celebrities with captions like, “There’ll never be another Chuck Norris. Rest in peace.”
As I was "leaving" these groups, sometimes a message would pop up with a message like: “Check this box so people can’t add you to this group again.” So... someone is adding him to these groups? My dad lived a full life, but he was not traveling the world collecting strangers on Facebook. As long as he has had Facebook, I have known pretty much everyone in his life. I started rooting around his friends list and many of these accounts were definitely not people he knew. They fell into a few big categories: hot woman as the profile picture, names in Cyrillic characters, or names from Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe.
They accounts appeared in clusters: an account would have several mutual friends, and those mutual friends were usually connected to one another as well. It may be due to Facebook’s setting limiting friend requests to friends of friends. Some of these accounts only had five or ten friends. My theory is that after you are friends with one they tell these other accounts to add you too. Once they are connected, they start adding you to these Facebook groups, and your feed fills up with group slop. Being in the groups also seems to make it easier to pull you into spam group chats.
During this exercise, his friends list shrunk from ~320 to ~120.
Being close to my dad and knowing him as well as I do, I can make pretty good guesses about who he actually knows. If all their posts are in another language, he probably does not know them. If they say they live in some faraway country, he probably does not know them. If all they post are ads for cheap Ray-Bans or promises of free tokens for some online game, he probably does not know them. Also, none of these accounts ever had direct messages or signs of interaction with my dad.
I hope it means his feed will have content that’s more enriching and less outraging… but who knows. This is the labor of digital caregiving that many people are now obliged to do. Unfortunately, many more people probably have no one to do it for them.
It's part of why I believe people need systemic protections. My dad could have been just a few messages away from being duped into sending his life savings through a crypto ATM to someone on the other side of the world. With my urbanist friends, I often voice concern for exposing local housing markets to global finance investors. Echoing that sentiment, we should do our best to avoid exposing local aging populations to global fraud networks.
Example profile: name in Cyrillic, photos of a gambling game, posts on wall all in another language.
