This may be true. The other thing that’s been bothering me for a while is that Millennials were really the last generation to be given an understanding of how computers worked. The computers they grew up with had hierarchical file systems, file types, programs that understood both, etc.
From iTunes onwards (yes, iTunes, this didn’t even start with the cloud), there’s been an attitude of “Computers are too hard to understand so let’s dumb it down and hide everything” from computer makers. This got ramped up when everything moved to the cloud and/or mobile devices, the latter doing everything practically possible to avoid giving anyone some language in which they could understand what the computer was doing underneath.
Hell yeah, I’d expect people to fall for online scams when they’ve had the ability to understand what they’re looking at ripped away from them by a short-termist industry that’s just, today, looking for ways to charge people for stuff they could do themselves like manage their own data.
And I’ve seen this dumbing down impact other things too. People furious about the idea of using BBSes other than Reddit because… I honestly don’t know, but there’s always massive support for their opinion. People who, likewise, describe Mastodon as “too hard” because they have to pick a server. Even in tech communities, people who you’d assume had no problem picking a mobile phone carrier, or an ISP, or an email provider, have a massive problem with picking a Mastodon node, and when you talk to them, not only are you flamed to hell and back by everyone else, but it becomes clear that actually, no, they didn’t pick a mobile phone carrier, they used their parent’s. They didn’t pick an ISP, they picked Xfinity because Comcast already gave them TV. They didn’t pick an email provider, they didn’t even realize you could, they just signed up to GMail.
Ten years ago, none of this was true. People as a whole, especially those who were discussing tech topics, were not that tech ignorant. Today? We are regressing as a society.
While that’s true, the boomers entering the “oldsphere”, to coin a term, are the ones adjacent to Gen X who weren’t scared of personal computers when they started to become a thing during the 1980s. They’re people who have been using computers in offices for the last 30+ years, and they’re very used to how they work. I genuinely think they’re less likely to fall for an online scam.
Older boomers, sure, but those are people who were, as a group (individuals are different! I can name plenty of awesome technically skilled boomers of that age group, I’m just making a generalization which for statistical purposes is reasonable) were more suspicious of computers and which contained a large number who managed to reach retirement age without going into jobs that absolutely required computer knowledge.
Those people are not the majority of people crossing the 60-65 age barrier today.