fabian s. klinkeWhat Old Men Are Actually Seeing Online
Source: What old men are actually seeing online, Phil Edwards, 18:59, uploaded 2026-09-27.
Phil Edwards adopts the online identity of James Smith, a fictional 75-year-old American retiree, to follow the routes through which recommendation feeds bring older users into contact with scams. The planned thirty-day experiment starts with fresh accounts, a Hotmail address, a PC, and little deliberate searching. Its central argument concerns the relationship between ordinary recommendations, cheap AI content, and fraud: an engagement can become the entry point to a progressively narrower environment in which strangers offer intimacy or financial rescue.
From a new account to a familiar audience
James begins on Reddit, Facebook, X, and YouTube. Reddit immediately supplies geographically relevant material, and Edwards follows prominent posters in news and politics. Facebook fills the feed before James has uploaded a profile picture, including religious imagery such as a dog giving communion. On YouTube, a search for cowboy movies and a subsequent video about extreme stump removal provide enough activity for a recognisable recommendation pattern to emerge. X supplies White House rapid-response material from an account James has not followed, while Facebook serves political content and other older men.
Edwards describes this as placement in an algorithmic bucket: the platforms infer what James may want from people they consider similar to him. The explanation is his interpretation of the feeds he observes. The experiment does not isolate age, location, viewing history, or other signals, and it cannot establish the internal operation of each recommender.
On day four, an account impersonating Charlize Theron follows James on X. Its biography links to the real Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project, and its photograph appears plausible. James treats these borrowed signs of authenticity as reassurance and follows back. The account asks about films he has seen, discusses her performance in The Devil’s Advocate, and moves the conversation to Telegram. The genuine charity link functions as a credential for someone who has no demonstrated connection to it.
Different routes to a payment
Edwards places the encounter beside figures he attributes to the Federal Trade Commission’s report on older consumers. He reports more than 1,000 for older people with around $250 for younger people. He also gives comparisons of 400% for tech-support scams and 39% for romance scams. These are the video’s account of reported fraud, whose underlying definitions and denominators are not reproduced in the description; they should not be read as measured probabilities for every older internet user. Edwards explicitly acknowledges that the report cannot describe the newer flood of AI video he encounters.
He uses the term pig butchering for a process that first attracts a person, then cultivates trust or desire, and finally seeks payment. The Charlize impersonator takes time to exchange hobbies, daily routines, and selfies. Facebook offers a faster route despite James having no friends or groups: repeated AI-generated women, including an account called Elizabeth P., tell viewers to follow a link in the comments. Visible errors include a floating phone and an extra arm.
The link leads through an apparent adult site to another destination, SoulfulDate, rather than to the woman in the video. There, women are available to chat even before James supplies a profile picture, and continued interaction requires purchased credits. Edwards suspects that his correspondent Liudmila is also artificial, but finds no disclosure. That suspicion remains distinct from the directly observed redirection and credit system.
By day twelve, Edwards describes James’s YouTube feed as almost entirely AI content, ranging from destruction to sexualised imagery. Clips and AI recaps of The Devil’s Advocate also appear. He develops the film as an analogy: small changes in the characters’ surroundings gradually isolate them and give someone else control over their social world. A recommendation bucket becomes a hole because each additional view reinforces the profile that produced it.
The platforms differ within this account. Reddit continues to offer birds, cowboy-film suggestions, and cowboy fashion advice, while Facebook repeats sexualised invitations and YouTube supplies impossible factories and machines. On X, celebrity accounts post brain teasers whose replies expose potential targets. An account follows a respondent, waits for a reciprocal follow, and then begins a private conversation.
An Elon Musk voice and a demand for secrecy
One such account claims to be Elon Musk and calls James with what Edwards identifies as an AI impersonation of his voice. The supposed proof of identity is itself part of the deception: the caller says he is contacting supporters because other people have been impersonating him. He asks about Tesla cryptocurrency and moves the conversation to Telegram.
James presents himself as a retiree on a fixed income. The impersonator offers to multiply an investment tenfold within hours, entertains questions about Mars and robots, and instructs him to send money through Cash App to Barbara Thrower, supposedly a receptionist. When James struggles with the payment, the account switches to Apple gift cards. Edwards contrasts this investment pitch with the romance approach and says investment scams account for the largest losses among the older Americans covered by the figures he cites, while business and government impersonation exceed romance scams in scale.
The narrated exchanges become increasingly absurd as James asks about a Mars ID and a crater named after him. When shop staff supposedly question the story, the impersonator tells him to conceal the relationship, first claiming to be a cousin and then to be sending money to an aunt. At Barnes & Noble, James introduces another clerk, Robert, into the story and asks for a voice message establishing their family relationship. The reply mixes up uncle and cousin while continuing to demand payment screenshots.
The humour exposes a practical mechanism: outside advice threatens the payment, so the scammer tries to make secrecy a condition of future wealth. The voice can provide an apparent personal connection without making the story internally consistent. Edwards does not present a completed payment or a successful investment.
The network that keeps supplying targets
More Elon impersonators arrive, while Charlize continues the small talk. Edwards names bank transfers and payments, cryptocurrency, cash, and gift cards as loss channels identified by the FTC. The feeds also repeat their established patterns. Some Facebook links now lead to Emin, whom Edwards describes as an Azerbaijani businessman accused of assisting Russian interference in US elections, although he does not establish the relationship between that destination and the accounts supplying the links. YouTube grows more violent and misogynistic in his account, while Reddit remains comparatively focused on cowboys.
On day twenty-five, James tells Charlize that he will leave the internet on day thirty. The impersonator promises a visit to the United States, sends more selfies, and introduces an assistant who requests James’s name and address. A VIP pass and a proposed meeting at an expensive hotel extend the promised intimacy. By day thirty-two, the elaborate courtship resolves into a familiar demand: Charlize supposedly needs Apple gift cards to decrypt her computers.
Edwards returns to The Devil’s Advocate to distinguish the people involved. Desire and greed can make a victim responsive to a promise, while some scam workers are themselves coerced into forced labour or employed by larger organisations. His main criticism falls on the network that brings the parties together and repeatedly rewards the activity surrounding the scam. He notes that the real Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project has warned about impersonation, yet those warnings must compete with an environment that keeps reinforcing the private relationship.
He closes by referring to an Australian proposal to let users disable personalised “For You” recommendations. Within his argument, the contrast between platforms makes recommendation design a consequential choice: the observed narrowing of the feed is not an unavoidable property of internet use.
Evidence limits
The experiment follows one constructed identity and selected interactions. It illustrates possible routes into scams but does not measure their frequency, establish a typical older person’s experience, or prove that recommendations alone caused every encounter. The account above follows the complete English caption track and description; visual material beyond what the captions describe has not been independently inspected. Surfshark sponsors the video, and Edwards promotes its VPN and filtering services during the experiment. That segment supplies commercial context rather than comparative evidence that the product prevents the scams shown.
References
- Federal Trade Commission, report on older consumers cited by Edwards. The description does not identify the exact edition or link to it.
- The Devil’s Advocate, the film used throughout the argument about isolation and temptation.
- Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project, whose identity is borrowed by the impersonator and whose warnings Edwards mentions.
- Edwards’s accompanying notes on Patreon, linked in the description and not used as additional evidence here.