Study finds age bigotry on social media site

Facebook urged to protect seniors from hate speech

Canada’s International Federation on Ageing is petitioning Facebook to ban age-related hate speech after a recent Yale University study found seniors were targets of bigotry on the social networking site.

Of the 84 public groups investigated by researchers, with 25,489 members among them, 74 per cent vilified older people, 27 per cent infantilized them, and 37 per cent advocated that they be barred from such activities as driving and shopping.

One group even proposed that anyone over age 70 face death by firing squad.

Jane Barratt, secretary general of the IFA, said it’s unacceptable that Facebook doesn’t protect seniors from such attacks in its Community Standards on hate speech, which currently address race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability and medical condition — but not age.

“We have to be very rigorous in our condemnation of humour around the functioning and cognitive abilities of older people,” said Barratt. “You can move down the slippery slope of discrimination very easily.”

Importantly, the groups discussed in the study — many of which have since been abandoned — represent a sliver of Facebook’s billion-plus active users. To that end, a spokesperson for the site told Postmedia they “believe this study paints an incomplete picture.”

The research in question, published February in the journal The Gerontologist, used dozens of keywords to identify non-commercial, publicly accessible groups concentrating on older people between July 2011 and January 2012.

The investigators uncovered 84 such groups, and only one featured a description with nothing ageist or negative in it. For instance, 41 per cent referred to physical debilitation, 27 per cent to cognitive debilitation and 13 per cent to both.

“They are cheap, they smell like (expletive) … they are senile, they complain about everything,” stated one.

Becca Levy, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health and the study’s co-author, emphasized that exposure to these posts wasn’t limited to group members.

Not all of the ageism they uncovered was mean-spirited. A group dedicated to stopping elder abuse, for example, was flagged for likening seniors to defenceless children.

Though Levy said better public education is what’s needed to address the latter stereotyping, she argued that age needs to be included in Facebook’s list of official protections to curb genuine bigotry.