Ian Hislop warns older people over chatbot misinformation as he marks 40 years at Private Eye

Ian Hislop has marked 40 years as editor of Private Eye with a wide-ranging interview in which he warned that older people are now just as vulnerable as younger people to misinformation spread online, including material generated by chatbots.

He said the problem was not confined to the young. He had assumed young people were rejecting authoritative sources for material written in bedrooms. 'It now appears that older people are just as bad,' he said. Older people were spending too much time online, reading 'a lot of chatbot rubbish' and repeating claims taken straight from their feeds. He called this dangerous and said it was always worth correcting.

Asked why he had stayed in the job for four decades, Hislop said the obvious question was why he had not gone. The answer, he said, was that editing the magazine was 'too much fun'. He named the Post Office scandal as its biggest hit, pointing to a long-running campaign and institutional failures involving Fujitsu, the Post Office, the government and much of the state apparatus. He credited campaigners such as Alan Bates and Lee Castleton with doing the real work, but said Private Eye had been part of the megaphone. He described the affair as a case of 'computer says no', in which investigators, courts and others believed the computer rather than the postmasters and postmistresses who were telling the truth.

Hislop rejected the idea that Britain was broken. Satire, he argued, aimed at reform, not merely at showing that things were bad. Exposing failure was a moral imperative, and he remained an optimist about the UK, even if progress could never be proved. He said critics might ask what Private Eye had achieved, and his answer was that matters might have been worse without it.

On politics, Hislop noted that five prime ministers served between his arrival in 1986 and 2016, while seven had served since 2016. He linked the faster turnover to shorter attention spans and social media. People now demanded more, became disillusioned and wanted a curated politics that reflected their own views. He said voting meant choosing the person you disagreed with least. He also criticised the attack on mainstream media, noting that the phrase had been used by Joseph Goebbels to steer readers towards party newspapers. Relentless misinformation, he said, affected people and was worth correcting.

After the interview, a studio panel discussed his warning. One guest said older people could be just as susceptible as the young, citing recent conversations about Bill Gates and the Illuminati and the return of conspiracy theories that many had thought were dead. Another said they used social media little, mainly to post about work, and preferred reputable sources for reading, calling that better for mental health. A further guest said social media was a common source of news but that AI-generated material often carried warning signs, and argued that companies profiting from harmful content should be regulated more tightly, whatever the age of the user.