Guidelines for Reducing Risk of Social Media Usage for Thai Elderly

Communication technology has influence on people's everyday lives. Elderly people are one of sectors that highly use communication technology due to having a lot of leisure time. Previous research reveal that elderly people used social media at higher ranks. Therefore, this research analyzed factors leading to risks of social media use at older ages. The data was collected from 85 people aged over 60 years using interviews and fieldnotes. The result revealed that there are three influential factors leading to extremely high risks of social media use, i.e., eyes being blurry after looking down on your phones after a while, being happy to share statuses, photos, and feelings with public privacy setting on, and being lack of knowledgeable on how to set privacy settings on social media. The significant factors from the results were then used to propose guidelines for reducing the risks. There are five guidelines, i.e., providing knowledge and training on how to use social media; providing knowledge about physical fitness of the elderly; providing media and technology literacy; changing habits to use technology effectively; providing social media skills; and providing knowledge about the appropriate time to use social media.