For those of us who have returned to live with boomer parents during lockdown, we’re being faced with the fact they are suddenly incredibly online. While Gen-Z and millennials may be spending their quarantine on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, boomers are obsessively sharing Facebook memes, beefing on community pages and above all else obsessively sending each other messages that they were forwarded on WhatsApp. A Twitter keyword search yields thousands of complaints over the past month from adult children who have received misinformation from their parents on WhatsApp. The messages being forwarded range from suggestions to microwave your money to rid it of coronavirus to clearly fake messages from medical staff that begin “this is a text from an NHS worker”.
WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, announced on Tuesday that it would be limiting the way in which users can forward messages amid the Covid-19 outbreak. “In recent weeks, people have also used WhatsApp to organise public moments of support for frontline health workers,” it said in a press release. “However, we’ve seen a significant increase in the amount of forwarding which users have told us can feel overwhelming and can contribute to the spread of misinformation. We believe it’s important to slow the spread of these messages down to keep WhatsApp a place for personal conversation.”
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