They help seniors push back against a deluge of health misinformation

Seniors are particularly vulnerable to scams and false claims about medications, but individuals and groups are helping them sort fact from fiction.

Older people face unique risks concerning online misinformation and fraud. Some have cognitive decline. Others may lack tech or social media savvy. (iStock)

CULPEPER, VA — Gladys Williams has been a nurse, a social worker and a special ed teacher.

Now, she’s a one-woman bulwark against a geyser of misinformation and disinformation about health, medicine and money directed at older Americans in her community.

“Here,” she said, her eyes scanning the crowded luncheon tables at the senior center in Culpeper, Virginia, where she’s worked for 42 years, “they can come to me.”

As the senior administrator, she makes sure everyone is well fed, well entertained, well exercised — and well informed.

In recent years, “well informed” has become more challenging, as older Americans get inundated by misinformation and disinformation aimed at scamming them, scaring them — or both.

Herbs that give long life. CBD treatments for Alzheimer’s. Super vegetables that conquer cancer. Unproven stem cell therapies for arthritis. Miracle cures for just about any ailment delivered right to your door (as soon as you hand over your credit card number).

“It’s a multimillion-dollar business, defrauding Americans. … And a lot of it is health,” said Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University who studies disinformation, including its risk to older people.

Over sweet potatoes, ham, seasoned greens and apple crisp, five friends in their 70s and 80s — Ruby, Esther, Mary, Pauline and Miriam, whose friends call her Mimi — all said they considered themselves reasonably alert to disinformation. The women spoke on the condition that they be identified by first names only as they described their challenges and vulnerabilities and those of their spouses, friends and siblings.

The women — White, Black and Latino, married and single — don’t have big online presences. Only one was still on Facebook. Two had migrated to TikTok because that’s where their grandkids and the good cooking videos are these days.

Yet even without a lot of social media use, disinformation finds them. It’s on their phones, in their texts, in their email and through the grapevine.

The women swapped stories about fraudsters and purveyors of fake cures. Several had received emails informing them that coronavirus vaccines harm their hearts or brains. Pauline had filled out an “arthritis survey” that turned out to be a front for a CBD and gummies merchant that kept trying to get her to make purchases. Several had gotten late-night calls seeking to cajole them into sharing sensitive financial information.

The quintet fretted about a mutual acquaintance who, despite grave health problems, was shunning standard medicine, including antibiotics, in favor of 36 supplements a day peddled by a natural “healer” a few towns over.

When these women come across health advice that sounds fishy, some consult their doctors. Others ask Williams.

“If I don’t have the answers, I know where to get them,” Williams said, referring to the network of health experts she’s built up over four decades.

Seniors like these lunch mates aren’t the only targets of digital snake oil; pretty much everyone is. But older people have unique risks. Some have cognitive decline. Others may lack tech or social media savvy. A few studies have also found that seniors are more likely to share and thus inadvertently spread disinformation, and that they may overestimate how well they personally can spot bad information.

Among policymakers and lawmakers, the threats to older people generally get less attention than the risks to kids and teens. But efforts are underway, in government, academia and health-care settings, to come up with tools to better protect seniors.

It’s an uphill battle.

Doctors and nurses see the harm when patients spurn sound medical advice because of something they see online or maybe what that nice lady down the hall saw online.

“There’s a lot of ‘drive-by science,’” including attention-grabbing headlines online, that’s flat-out wrong, said Kit Bredimus, vice president and chief nursing officer at Midland Health in west Texas. Bredimus has become somewhat of an evangelist for having nurses, who consistently poll as the most trustworthy profession and who spend a lot of bedside time with patients and their families, take a more active role in helping people sort out health fact from fiction.

That’s what Williams is doing on a small scale, table by table, in her quiet little Culpeper center. But not everyone has a Gladys Williams.

In Gentry, Arkansas, retired art teacher Lynn Garside, a widow, is pretty savvy. She knows about checking the veracity of rumors and scary stories on the Snopes website; she has her own internal alarm that warns her when something on Facebook seems too good to be true.

The day she saw “Kelly Clarkson” weight-loss keto gummies, promising to just melt away the pounds without diet or exercise, that alarm went off. But Garside ignored it.

“I knew they were too good to be true,” she said ruefully. “But I wanted it to be true. I wanted pounds to just melt off.”

She ordered a month’s supply, for $39. But the gummies that arrived in the mail weren’t magical fat-melters, and Clarkson had nothing to do with them. The marketing was an AI-generated deepfake manipulation of one of Clarkson’s music videos. And not only did the gummies keep coming, other supplements Garside hadn’t purchased and didn’t want arrived, too, despite her attempt to cancel her order and stop the monthly bills. Her bank finally helped her cancel her credit card and start afresh.

Garside said she learned her lesson and knows it could have been worse. “At least I didn’t use my debit card,” she said with a laugh.

For some people, it is worse. Carrie Pannone’s elderly father, Richard, was deluged with misinformation, much of it via the rumor mill in his senior living apartment near Cumberland, Maryland, and, Pannone suspects, what he saw on TV. He ended up paying for duplicative warrantees for a car that, at 80 and diminished, he couldn’t drive. He was resistant to moving to a safer setting after hearing wild stories about what could happen to him there, and then — although he had taken the initial covid shots — he encountered misinformation about boosters.

Pannone isn’t sure whether he got all the recommended shots — she doubts it. Soon after the family was finally able to move him into a long-term-care facility, he got covid-19. He died soon after.

With these kinds of tragedies in mind, more organizations in and out of government are developing tools for tracking and countering the misinformation. The Food and Drug Administration’s BeSafeRx and the Federal Trade Commission both have guidance, for seniors and their caregivers.

The Poynter Institute, a journalism research center, developed an easily accessible online media literacy program called MediaWise: Seniors.

“Wherever you go, as an older adult, you run into this — unfortunately,” said Poynter’s Alex Mahadevan, the director of MediaWise.

A program called iHeard, which began at Washington University in St. Louis and spread to other cities, conducts regular community surveys to track the buzz about public health — accurate and inaccurate.

“Older adults in our community panels consistently have higher exposure to misinformation claims and repeated exposure to the same information claims over time,” Matthew Kreuter, a professor at Washington University’s Brown School and a founder of iHeard, said in an email. Seeing misinformation over and over makes it more likely that it sticks — and that it spreads.

A research collaborative based at the State University of New York at Buffalo has developed a free video game called DeepCover to teach online safety to older Americans, drawing on nostalgic pop culture references from their youth. The conceit is that the player is a retired secret agent, being pulled back into duty to thwart an evil agency called SCAMM.

“It’s got a narrative woven through the story that where you have potential victims of particular types of scams, and you’re solving puzzles, to uncover the plot and save the day,” said Cynthia Stewart, the program director of the Buffalo center. Officials are adding content, including more on health.

Stewart knows that not everyone will play the game, but if everyone who gives it a whirl then helps friends and neighbors to be more aware, then — just like a real secret agent — they’re “helping protect the community,” she said.