It's this, the tech was new and boomers as a group tend to be more skeptical of new things (this is not a unique quality either, older people tend to be more resistant to radical change). As the years went by though it became an entrenched form of media supplanting all other traditional news media, they have been immersed in an environment where internet is the dominant form of media distribution and it has become legitimized.
They still have the contrarian "skeptic" brainworms just now there's a million grifters peddling shit online and the algorithm loves a good scheme that appeals to bias/emotion.
I think it is possible that boomers going on about "never believing anything you read on the internet" has actually made them more gullible. The phrase was always meant as a condescending message to younger people with the implied understanding that the boomer saying it was above falling for this sort of misinformation. As any con artist will tell you, fooling people who think they can't be fooled because they are smarter than everyone else is extremely easy.
Never believe anything you read on the internet, but if the nice man on the color TV set says it, it must be true. Also, you are important, so if someone from the IRS calls you and says you need to pay them with iTunes gift cards, it's automatically legit.
Also, a pretty big part of it was they discovered that they could be racist online. So much of Boomer psychology don't really make sense until you look at it through a lense of "does this confirm my opinions on black/brown people, and can I get punished for saying them out loud?". Thats also why they like Trump so much, because despite being a queeny bitch for his entire life, he was allowed to be racist in public, and so he was a real man's man.
It never flipped, they were always gullible. They were just making up reasons why a new technology wad bad.
It's this, the tech was new and boomers as a group tend to be more skeptical of new things (this is not a unique quality either, older people tend to be more resistant to radical change). As the years went by though it became an entrenched form of media supplanting all other traditional news media, they have been immersed in an environment where internet is the dominant form of media distribution and it has become legitimized.
They still have the contrarian "skeptic" brainworms just now there's a million grifters peddling shit online and the algorithm loves a good scheme that appeals to bias/emotion.
I think it is possible that boomers going on about "never believing anything you read on the internet" has actually made them more gullible. The phrase was always meant as a condescending message to younger people with the implied understanding that the boomer saying it was above falling for this sort of misinformation. As any con artist will tell you, fooling people who think they can't be fooled because they are smarter than everyone else is extremely easy.
Never believe anything you read on the internet, but if the nice man on the color TV set says it, it must be true. Also, you are important, so if someone from the IRS calls you and says you need to pay them with iTunes gift cards, it's automatically legit.
Also, a pretty big part of it was they discovered that they could be racist online. So much of Boomer psychology don't really make sense until you look at it through a lense of "does this confirm my opinions on black/brown people, and can I get punished for saying them out loud?". Thats also why they like Trump so much, because despite being a queeny bitch for his entire life, he was allowed to be racist in public, and so he was a real man's man.