By Baroness Foster
THE government recently argued that under-16s should be banned from social media, but it’s old people like me, the Tory peer who claimed an octopus mascot on University Challenge was antisemitic, who’ve been making making tits of ourselves. Here’s why my age group must be kept offline.
We make idiots of ourselves
Who hasn’t assumed that a fluffy octopus mascot belonging to a University Challenge team was an allusion to the tentacles of Zionism like some vile Nazi conspiracy theory? And then immediately gone on Twitter to libel an innocent student who got death threats? Alright, maybe it was just me, but after paying hefty damages I realise now it was a bad thing to do. I’ll probably do it again in a few weeks though. You know what us old people are like with the internet.
We get addicted
Imagine being a hugely successful billionaire who can afford to do literally anything with your time, and yet you choose to spend it arguing with plebs and trolls on Twitter. JK Rowling is a couple of years shy of 60, and yet she seems to be as addicted to incessantly and unhappily posting on social media as the average pensioner. Just like your mum bitterly bitching about people parking outside her house on the neighbourhood Facebook group. But more likely to hire expensive barristers to sue people.
We believe everything we read
It’s often thought that young people are naive idiots who believe any old shit they read on the internet, but us over-60s are actually worse. Remember when Jordan Peterson believed an April Fool’s joke claiming Justin Trudeau was going to spend $100 billion adding a bike lane to the TransCanada highway and went on a huge, embarrassing rant about it on Twitter? What a bellend. And there’s no bellend like an old bellend, as they say.
We lose our jobs
Can you imagine getting the sitcom you starred in back on television after a two-decade absence? And then can you imagine having it cancelled after two months because you couldn’t stop yourself from typing out racist things and posting them for all the world to see? You don’t have to imagine it if you’re Roseanne Barr. You’d think she’d know better at the grand old age of 71, but she absolutely doesn’t.
We are incapable of thinking before we post
Young people are denigrated as fools but none of them would be as f**king stupid as Danny Baker when he tweeted an image of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex holding hands with a chimpanzee with the caption ‘Royal Baby leaves hospital’. Ageing Mr Baker is an experienced broadcaster so you’d think he might have realised references to monkeys can be construed as racist, but apparently not. He’s probably a bit doddery and confused.
It’s expensive to bail us out
It’s not just me being a menace on the Worldwide Web. My fellow Tory Michelle Donelan is only 39, but she deserves an honorary place as a befuddled old dimwit with scant grasp on acceptable things to tweet after falsely accusing an academic of being pro-Hamas. Sadly, the £15,000 legal bill she racked up has been footed by the tax payer. Will she resign? Of course not. That would suggest there was some consequence for being an online idiot, and we couldn’t have that.
