Graham doesn\u2019t remember his mother ever sharing her political views. He\u2019s not certain she even voted until she met his father, who was a big Labour supporter. She went along with that, only once voting Tory as an act of spite towards the end of their relationship. She later married a farmer who was more conservative, and leaned towards leave in the Brexit referendum. \u201cBut, honestly, beyond that, she would never even speak of politics. She just wasn\u2019t interested.\u201d<\/p>\n
Graham, who works in the transport industry in the Midlands, noticed a big change in his mother during the Covid pandemic. \u201cI remember walking home from work one day and I got this phone call and all of a sudden she was listing off these conspiracy theories at me.\u201d He now realises how much time she was spending online, on her phone and iPad, cut off from friends, family and the church life that had always been so important to her.<\/p>\n
Five years later, Graham\u2019s mother, who is retired and in her 60s, supports the hard-right agitator and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson with what her son describes as a religious fervour. She has told him Keir Starmer is a communist trying to \u201creplace us all with Muslims\u201d and Covid was a hoax. He says she spends hours on social media and uses her TV only to stream YouTube videos.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went to see her a few nights ago and everything started off as normal and then the conversation just switched,\u201d Graham says. \u201cAll of a sudden it was about Muslims in prisons forcing others to convert at knife-point, then somehow Starmer became part of it, and I just had to leave. I\u2019ve been trying to help her, but I don\u2019t really understand politics and I end up making it worse. We\u2019ve always been close but I feel like I\u2019m losing her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Graham has never had a clear idea of what, exactly, his mother is consuming on her screens, or how she has become radicalised. But he is far from alone in grappling with the sometimes extreme rightward political drift of an older relative. While so much research and concern has focused on radicalisation in young people \u2013 particularly young men \u2013 less is understood about the effects of a fragmenting political and media landscape on increasingly online boomers, the generation now aged from about 60 to 80.<\/p>\n
Polls have long indicated that, on average, we get more conservative as we age. And the generation gap shows signs of growing. YouGov polling<\/a> in the 2024 general election showed the traditional fall-off in the Labour share of the vote with rising age was steeper than in previous elections, dropping from 45% for those aged in their late 20s to 20% in those 70 or older. Meanwhile, recent analysis<\/a> of US and UK survey and polling data by the Financial Times shows that, whereas the cohorts now aged over 46 are on traditional, rightward political trajectories, millennials \u2013 those now aged 29-45 \u2013 appear to be resisting it after two decades of economic turmoil.<\/p>\n I spoke to dozens of people about the painful faultlines opening up in their families, where these rightward shifts are becoming more marked. They painted a picture of alienation driven by misinformation.<\/p>\n N adine\u2019s parents separated when she was in her teens. Like Graham\u2019s mother, hers hadn\u2019t previously expressed political views. But in the past few years, she and her new partner have become fixated on race and immigration, frequently \u201claunching into tirades\u201d about small boats. \u201cMum is on her iPad on the sofa, while her partner is usually at his desktop computer, shut away in another room,\u201d says Nadine, who is in her early 40s and lives in northern England. \u201cI\u2019ve no idea what forums or YouTube channels and other platforms he\u2019s on, but I know they\u2019re both on Facebook<\/a> a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n Sara Wilford, an associate professor and specialist in computer ethics at De Montfort University in Leicester, has been trying to chart the online waters in which her own demographic now swims (she\u2019s 61). The founder of Smidge<\/a> (Social Media Narratives: Addressing Extremism in Middle Age), an EU-funded research project, she says older people are spending an increasing amount of their free time online. In 2025, the industry regulator Ofcom found<\/a> that Britons aged over 65 now spend a record three hours and 20 minutes a day online.<\/p>\n At the same time, the moderation of networks such as X and Facebook has become more relaxed, potentially bringing traditionally fringe messaging into ageing hands. Ofcom\u2019s survey found for 75% of social media users over 65, Facebook is their \u201cmain\u201d social media app; for a third it\u2019s the only such platform they use.<\/p>\n Wilford identifies \u201cnostalgia porn\u201d as a common first step on a radicalisation pathway. Good old-fashioned \u201cback in my day\u201d content is now getting the AI treatment. A rash of social media accounts with names such as Nostalgia Cat, Purest Nostalgia and Maximal Nostalgia pump out soft-focus clips of fresh-faced (almost always white) youngsters unsullied by the bleak realities of the 21st century. \u201cI had one the other day that was a boy walking around the streets in the 80s saying how much better everything was,\u201d Wilford says.<\/p>\n double quotation markThey say they don\u2019t do social media, but they go on neighbourhood apps to check when the bins go out, and these can be full of rightwing content<\/p>\n The 1980s or 90s setting of much of this generative content reveals its origins in the hands of gen Z creators. They are feeding demand for nostalgia among fellow young digital natives who fetishise a pre-smartphone era of mix tapes and Blockbuster stores; think Stranger Things without the monsters. But their videos are hitting a nerve among older cohorts becoming accustomed to a diet of \u201cboomerslop\u201d \u2013 clips that range from weird AI twists on traditional cat content to the kinds of unhinged videos being shared by rightwing influencers including boomer-in-chief Donald Trump.<\/p>\n Wilford keeps an X account as a window into what can happen next. When she started it, she followed a few right-leaning but fairly mainstream accounts, and says, \u201cI now get a very interesting \u2018for you\u2019 feed.\u201d She started getting content from several rightwing accounts, including the MP Rupert Lowe, who lost the Reform whip<\/a> last March and has pursued a particularly hard line on immigration. \u201cI also get a lot of Maga people, then random posts that are smothered in misinformation. But they\u2019re also clever. In three well-written lines, they\u2019ll say something about immigrants and rape gangs or benefit cheats, and if you don\u2019t have the inclination to do some checking, you\u2019d swallow it whole.\u201d<\/p>\n Wilford is concerned older online users don\u2019t always recognise how vulnerable they can be. \u201cThese are people who haven\u2019t grown up as digital natives,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I\u2019ve had so many conversations where people say, \u2018Oh no, I\u2019m not being influenced by anyone\u2019 and they\u2019re blithely pottering along, not factchecking anything. Or they say they\u2019re not online, or don\u2019t do social media, but then you ask and they\u2019re on neighbourhood apps and local forums. They go there to check when the bins go out, but these apps can be full of rightwing content.\u201d<\/p>\n A spiral of misinformation and distrust of government and the mainstream media can lead people who might not have joined a hard-right organisation into pretty dark places. Data analysis by the Guardian last year identified<\/a> a network of far-right Facebook groups from the profiles of some of the people who were charged with online offences in connection with the riots after the murder of three young girls in Southport<\/a> in summer 2024. The 51,000 posts analysed as part of the project revealed patterns of anti-immigrant rhetoric and conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n While, traditionally, these ideas have flourished on platforms with a younger user profile, including 4chan, Parler and Telegram, sites such as Facebook and X are making them more accessible to a wider \u2013 and older \u2013 demographic; the more than 40 administrators or moderators of the three biggest Facebook groups in the Guardian\u2019s research were men and women over 60.<\/p>\n Wilford says the mainstreaming of racism on these platforms is emboldening people who might previously have kept a lid on offensive views. She believes participation in these communities can offer a powerful sense of recognition at a stage of life when people can feel socially redundant, or even invisible. \u201cThey go into these chatrooms or forums and they\u2019re actually listened to and taken seriously,\u201d she says. \u201cFor somebody who feels society doesn\u2019t care about them any more, this is a revelation. They feel they\u2019ve got a community again.\u201d<\/p>\n Last year, Smidge produced A Family Tea, a six-minute film<\/a> made to reflect the potential impact of this within families. A mother looks at anti-immigrant propaganda on her laptop while her husband reads a newspaper and their grownup son looks at his phone. The mother, a nurse, gets angry about losing out on a promotion to a foreign colleague. Tensions flare and soon she\u2019s repeating lies about the white-nationalist \u201cgreat replacement\u201d theory. Her son, whose partner is an immigrant, walks out. \u201cIf you go on like this, you might not see your grandchildren grow up,\u201d the father says.<\/p>\n S arah, who\u2019s in her 60s, almost became that mother. She recalls voting for the Liberal party, aged 22, in the 1979 general election, when Margaret Thatcher swept to power. \u201cTheir policies seemed more gentle to me, they seemed to be considering more people,\u201d she says of the Liberals. \u201cBut when my brother found out, he said, \u2018What are you doing? Dad votes Conservative, I vote Conservative, you must vote Conservative.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cI wasn\u2019t really that into politics. I thought, well, if they think that, I\u2019ll follow them, which is a bit pathetic but I was very young. There weren\u2019t the sources of news you get now, so I changed to voting Conservative.\u201d<\/p>\n Sarah, who lives in rural East Anglia, thinks buying a home aged 24 also helped shift her politics. She came to admire Thatcher, and tolerated John Major. It wasn\u2019t long after Tony Blair\u2019s victory in 1997 (\u201cTerrible!\u201d) that Sarah says concern about Europe inspired her to vote for Ukip. \u201cI liked what they stood for and I thought they were more patriotic,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n As she grew up, Sarah\u2019s daughter, now in her mid-30s, developed very different views: \u201cI can\u2019t think of anyone on either side of her family who would ever have voted Labour, but perhaps it was the influence of her teachers and schoolfriends. By her teens she was saying, \u2018Mum, I don\u2019t understand why you\u2019re supporting these people. You\u2019re a really nice person. It doesn\u2019t make sense.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The gap widened as Sarah began campaigning for Ukip. Then came Brexit. \u201cMy daughter valued her freedom of movement and believed the hype that people who didn\u2019t want to lose their sovereignty were bigots and racists. We had extremely heated arguments, which we\u2019d never had before. Our relationship was at breaking point.\u201d<\/p>\n Sarah now votes for Reform. She admires Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, and says \u201cthe Muslim way of life worries me on a daily basis\u201d, a view she recognises as racist. Yet she also resents the idea that people over 60 are clueless about the internet or desperately seeking purpose and recognition online. She says she gets most of her news from GB News and the Telegraph. She only uses Facebook to stay in touch with friends, says X isn\u2019t really for her, and that she knows how to factcheck.<\/p>\n \u2018Brexit broke everything.\u2019 Illustration: Carl Godfrey\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Sarah isn\u2019t the only person who told me about their own rightward shift. A man in his 60s from Surrey said he had considered himself \u201csolidly on the left\u201d until a decade ago. His views have also put him at odds with his grownup daughter. \u201cIt\u2019s impossible to have a sensible debate \u2026 As soon as [the left] are presented with facts and logic, they get angry, use insults, then walk away.\u201d<\/p>\n Andy, an academic in his early 50s, says his parents, who are in their 80s and live in the home counties, have needed no exposure to extremist X accounts or conspiracy-filled Facebook groups to drift heavily to the right in a way that has created a big family rift. \u201cI think the worldview they get from the newspapers they\u2019ve always read is far more dangerous,\u201d he says via Zoom. \u201cWe can still argue about the way-out conspiratorial stuff on the basis that it\u2019s just crazy, but the things they\u2019re reading are just seen as normal \u2026 It\u2019s basically the same worldview expressed in a more polite manner.\u201d<\/p>\n Andy, who now lives abroad, says his mother was once a Lib Dem voter, while his father was always an \u201cold-fashioned Tory\u201d. They respected his environmental activism as a student in the 90s. His mother even once voted Green in sympathy. But in the past 25 years \u2013 most noticeably after 9\/11 \u2013 \u201cthe discourse on immigration has radicalised them\u201d. When Andy married an immigrant in 2005, \u201cIt was always, \u2018Well, we don\u2019t mean her.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Their views have grown more extreme since Brexit and the rise of Reform, which they now support. \u201cWhen leaving the EU came up, it was impossible to have any kind of conversation about it. Brexit broke everything.\u201d During one row about Europe, fuelled in part by alcohol, Andy says his father threatened to punch him.<\/p>\n His parents live comfortable lives, Andy says, largely unaffected directly by the issues they get most agitated about, including immigration. \u201cBut it\u2019s like they\u2019ve lost the ability to think critically, so they\u2019re in this sort of self-reinforcing cycle of ignorance. But they also can\u2019t imagine they\u2019re ignorant because they\u2019re educated people who know about the world. They fundamentally believe people of different races don\u2019t mix and foreigners shouldn\u2019t be living in Britain.<\/p>\n They\u2019re very Islamophobic, but these aren\u2019t seen as extreme views any more by a lot of people. Zack Polanski and the Green party have been talking about making hope normal again. I think we also need to make prejudice strange again.\u201d<\/p>\n Andy blames centrist politics for failing to offer people such as his parents a more positive worldview. \u201cNobody has defended civility and multiculturalism, or a liberal vision of Britain as a humanist power that supports human rights and the rule of law,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s the natural place where my parents should be, but when parties like Ukip started to rise up, there was just this collective panic about losing voters to them.\u201d<\/p>\n A lison, whose brother has shifted hard to the right, thinks social media has taken such a hold that it is radicalising people who may never have had an X or Facebook account. \u201cI don\u2019t even know if my family are on social media, but the fact that it surrounds us, and that people are getting this polarising information on the front pages of their newspapers or on the radio, means it almost doesn\u2019t matter any more,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n She grew up in a working-class family in London. Her brother, who is in his 60s, runs a pub. When he mentioned at a recent family wedding that he was now a Reform voter, she was surprised and asked him why. \u201cHe said, \u2018We\u2019re losing our identity.\u2019 I asked what he meant by \u2018identity\u2019 and he just exploded and told me to fuck off, that I\u2019m naive and ridiculous and don\u2019t understand what it\u2019s like. Then he stormed off. Everyone stood there shocked, because he\u2019d never said anything like that, so full of anger and hate. It was really upsetting.\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation markIt\u2019s hard to see glimpses of the loving parents I remember, only for them to disappear into cult-like nonsense the moment social media spins them up<\/p>\n Now a corporate coach, Alison says an education gap in her family has made it harder for her and her brother to see eye to eye. She has found reasoning with him and other relatives who have drifted to the right only seems to make them angrier. But she wonders if the rage is misdirected. \u201cIt felt to me that because I had asked a question he couldn\u2019t answer, the anger was actually not at me, it was at himself. And then I felt sorry for him.\u201d<\/p>\n Alison\u2019s brother apologised and they have managed to continue their relationship, even if it is now damaged. But dozens of other people I heard from talked of family ties that have snapped. \u201cMy family are now pretty much estranged from my aunt due to her far-right views on Facebook,\u201d a woman in her 40s from Hampshire says. An American says only duty to care for a sick relative has halted her estrangement from her family since her parents \u201cshifted so far to the right as to be almost unrecognisable \u2026 It\u2019s hard to see glimpses of the loving parents I remember, only for them to disappear into cult-like nonsense the moment social media spins them up.\u201d<\/p>\n A mong hundreds of responses to a Guardian callout about older relatives shifting to the right politically, there was a noticeable subset: those bucking the trend and becoming more leftwing as they age. One woman says she and her friends have become more liberal: \u201cLiving longer gives us a chance to see things aren\u2019t as simple and dichotomous as we once thought.\u201d A retired publisher in his 70s also describes a leftward drift: \u201cIt\u2019s partly to do with guilt at our comfortable postwar lifestyle, and feeling we owe a debt to society.\u201d<\/p>\n Tracey Laszloffy, who has worked in the US as a marriage and family therapist for more than 35 years, says opposing values have always been a feature of her work. \u201cBut politics itself has exploded in the past few years. And here, it\u2019s really where they line up on Trump and Maga. I\u2019ve never seen anything this divisive.\u201d<\/p>\n The strength of feeling can make it hard for Laszloffy to unearth root causes, often tied up in old resentments. \u201cI only use politics as an opening, because conversations about Trump are not going to go anywhere,\u201d she says. She saw one older couple whose marriage was threatened by differing views of Trump (he was a fan). As it turned out, the man, who had a manual job that paid much less than his wife\u2019s, had since become angry because Trump\u2019s promised economic resurgence had not materialised. \u201cHe was struggling with issues around masculinity and identity, and acknowledging that vulnerability created the ground they needed to re-engage in a meaningful way.\u201d<\/p>\n Janet Reibstein, a psychologist at the University of Exeter, says she\u2019s reminded of her own background in the US, from where she emigrated to the UK decades ago. \u201cMy whole family was against the Vietnam war, but I had one cousin in the army who used to come and deliberately provoke us,\u201d says Reibstein, the author of Good Relations: Cracking the Code of How to Get on Better. The solution was the one she still prescribes: give up on the idea that you\u2019re going to change anyone\u2019s mind. Instead, draw boundaries around the minefield, and retreat to common ground. \u201cI told him he couldn\u2019t visit if he talked about the war, and he respected it. The problem is, when the dominant discourse is one of divisiveness, it\u2019s harder to have those conversations.\u201d<\/p>\n Family estrangements, promoted on social media and Reddit accounts as \u201cgoing no contact\u201d, have apparently mushroomed. Data here is scant but a YouGov poll in the US last year suggested<\/a> more than a third of adults were estranged from a parent, child, sibling, grandparent or grandchild. Separate research just after the 2024 election by the Harris Poll suggested<\/a> half of all US adults were estranged from a close relative, with 18% citing political differences as the reason.<\/p>\n