Boomers Are on Social Media Too

The poll that shifts the frame

A YouGov poll conducted in 2026 found that more than half of people aged 55 and over use social media at least once a week. On its face the number is not dramatic. What it does is move the frame. The public conversation about social media addiction has largely pointed at teenagers, while the user base quietly aged.

Tracie, 62, describes the pattern plainly: she picks up her phone and forgets to put it down. She says many people her age are caught in the same loop, scrolling without a clear stopping point.

Nothing in that description belongs only to adolescence. What differs is the surrounding infrastructure. Teenagers have parents, schools and regulators watching the behaviour. Older adults mostly get one word: loneliness.

What going online removes

Brigitte Stangl, an associate professor at the University of Surrey, argues that social media is effective at easing loneliness among older people. Her reasoning is practical: going online removes the problems created by limited mobility or difficulty with transport, and those obstacles hit older people hardest.

The logic is easy to follow. Meeting someone in person requires physical capability, transport and time. Sending a message requires none of those. When the offline version of a relationship gets expensive, the online version stops being a substitute and becomes the default.

That is worth saying out loud, because it tends to get lost in debates that treat screen time as pure cost with no offsetting benefit. For someone whose world has narrowed, a group chat is not a downgraded form of company. Some days it may be the only form available.

Connection, and a shorter attention span

Kerri Hedley-Cheney, a 61-year-old actor, offers a concrete case. Social media let her join a performance organisation, build contacts and support other people in it. That is the tool working as intended.

She also admits she can lose hours to it. The more specific detail is what it has done to her attention. She says her attention span has shortened to roughly 10 seconds — much like younger users.

That line is worth pausing on. Short attention spans are usually filed under youth problems, and the standard explanation is generational: phones raised a cohort that never learned to concentrate. A 61-year-old reporting the same interval points somewhere else — at format rather than age. Short posts, infinite scroll, and a recommendation system that always has another item ready do not care what year the person watching was born.

One account does not settle the causality question, and it is not meant to. But it makes usage patterns, not birthdays, the more useful variable to look at.

What the numbers can and cannot say

A poll can describe a distribution. It cannot establish causation, and it cannot separate frequency from dependence. Using social media at least once a week is a low bar; plenty of that group may be checking a family group chat and nothing else. Reading addiction into the figure would be overreach.

Taken together, though, the three accounts describe two sides of one thing. Social media lowers the cost of staying in contact, and it takes time in return. For someone whose range of movement has shrunk, the first effect may be worth a great deal. The second is rarely measured.

If there is a policy question here, it is probably not whether older adults should use these platforms. It is what fills the hours that scrolling takes, and who is expected to provide it.