About once a week, my uncle posts something cryptic on Facebook—“Pizza near me open now,” or just “Is Target open?”—as though Mark Zuckerberg personally reads each status and whispers answers gently back into his earpiece. My mom sends screenshots of obvious scams from “Nigerian princes” asking if it’s legit, her skepticism evaporating at the first courteous mention of inheritance.
It’s endearing, almost, except when it isn’t—like during elections, pandemics, or whenever someone forwards me a meme that reads as if it was created by a particularly bored Russian troll farm.
In its early days, the internet wasn’t an educational utopia or a gateway to human genius—it was just weird. You could end up on a site teaching you how to knit sweaters for cats or spend four hours reading forums about crop circles.
It didn’t feel particularly noble or enriching; mostly, it felt like wandering through the world’s largest, most eclectic garage sale. We were explorers, thrilled by novelty, before anyone tried to convince us the internet was serious business or a solution to human ignorance.
Then society panicked—not about cat sweaters or crop circles—but about “the children.” Every expert seemed convinced the younger generation would either drown in digital content or become morally bankrupt through pixelated exposure. We implemented restrictions, passwords, parental controls, as though navigating a chat room was akin to defusing a bomb.
The spread of misinformation now primarily comes from adults who display no signs of clumsiness or digital mishaps. Their social media feeds contain passionate arguments about subjects they learned about from suspicious websites just ten minutes ago. Algorithms create endless manufactured outrage that fuels their sincere anger despite their lack of understanding or desire to question them.
The situation feels especially ridiculous because we spent many years trying to protect children from online threats and digital dangers. The irony exists because adults like Uncle Jeff who share fake cancer-curing vinegar images through poor photo editing have become victims of modern digital predation without recognizing their status as targets.
Why this reversal?
Adults made an incorrect assumption that their current knowledge base would be sufficient for digital fluency because they failed to recognize the need for a completely new set of skills. The younger generation naturally understood that digital content requires warning labels, but adults entered the internet like clueless tourists who refused to use maps.
It might be time to pivot. The target audience for digital literacy classes should change from twelve-year-olds to fifty-year-olds because they need to learn skepticism. Workshops for adults should teach them two essential digital skills: how to identify scams and how to understand their Facebook posts remain public to Zuckerberg and their Google searches do not trigger public announcements.
We’ve spent countless hours worrying about how young people interact with the internet. The actual recipients of these worries are the adults who distribute suspicious content while wondering why Facebook shows them pizza recommendations.
Because, in the end, the internet absolutely did get smarter. It was humanity that missed the upgrade.
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