Active aging involves participation and social engagement. Older individuals in Hong Kong began to reintegrate into active lifestyles after the relaxation of COVID-19 social distancing measures. However, a news story emerged alleging abuse of the senior travel concession, known as HK$2 fare, which went viral on Facebook - a platform where approximately 50% of Hong Kong people consume news. Existing literature indicates that news framing could shape societal perceptions. Yet, the impact of the news representation on older individuals using the concession, particularly its potential role in perpetuating ageism, remains largely unexplored. The present research aims to examine how older individuals were portrayed in the narratives of such news.
Methodology: A commercial web crawler from Apify - Facebook Post Search Scraper - was used to scrape publicly available Traditional Chinese Facebook posts regarding the concession, with 15 Chinese search terms equivalent to "senior travel concession" and "HK$2 fare". Data collection targeted posts from local Hong Kong news media pages starting from 28th February 2023, coinciding with the lifting of the COVID-19 mask mandate. A mixed-method content analysis was conducted on the extracted data, including quantitative word frequency analysis and qualitative thematic analysis.
Preliminary findings: A total of 1,915 posts were scraped. After filtering out duplicates (N = 701), non-news Facebook pages (N = 910), and irrelevant posts (N = 44), 260 valid posts remained for examination. The findings showed that negative narrative was predominantly used in the posts, such as "deficit"; "Hong Kong faces challenges with an aging population and suboptimal post-COVID economic recover"; and "government subsidy expenditures are largely increased". Such negative frames might contribute to negative societal attitudes towards older individuals.
Conclusion: The negative portrayal of older individuals might reinforce alleging abuse of the senior travel concession while ignoring positive impacts of the concession on active aging.
