UW::CODE Talk
Short Educational Videos Improve Older Adults’ Digital Literacy and Information Diets at Scale
Ryan Moore, PhD
Assistant Professor
School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
Online deception disproportionately affects older adults, threatening individual and democratic health while causing substantial financial losses. Yet few scalable interventions exist to build older adults’ resilience to such content. We developed short digital literacy videos for older adults teaching lateral reading, reading upstream, and reverse image search. Across three studies (N = 27,537), 15- and 45-second videos improved older adults’ (age 55+) ability to identify false content, reduced sharing intentions, and increased skill comprehension. Effects replicated and some were strengthened via booster doses. Critically, benefits extended to real-world online behaviors: analyzing ~8.6 million website visits revealed that older adults applied learned skills in everyday web browsing, improving the quality of their information diets. A field experiment in which videos were run as ads on YouTube improved skill comprehension among 300,000 older Americans, demonstrating that these interventions enhance older adults’ digital literacy at scale in a naturalistic environment.