When Trust Facilitates Risk: Older Adults’ Navigation of Deceptive Content in Urban China

Older adults in China are increasingly active digital users, but they encounter distinctive challenges when navigating deceptive content online and offline, including misinformation, disinformation, and cyber fraud. Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews with older adults aged 50+ in urban Beijing, this exploratory study examines how older users encounter, interpret, and respond to deceptive content in everyday digital practices. Instead of relying solely on individual cognitive skills, participants described resilience as emerging through interconnected multiple layers of support, including family consultation, peer discussion, platform-level safeguards, and institutional assistance. The analysis identifies a recurring tension within trusted social networks: While relational expectations and norms of reciprocity may encourage information sharing, they may also discourage correction, creating what this study conceptualizes as a human sentiment barrier. This concept builds on sociological research on the downsides of strong-tie social capital, illustrating how the same relationships that provide emotional support can also facilitate the circulation of misleading information. By illustrating how older adults’ evaluations of digital content are shaped by relational, cultural, and institutional contexts, this study reframes digital resilience as a socially embedded practice rather than an individual skill. Findings highlight the need for interventions that strengthen the social and infrastructural environments through which older adults make sense of online information.