Social media

Lately, a moral panic has been brewing. People in the media, government, and across the internet are declaring that children are suffering an unprecedented mental health crisis and that smartphones and social media are to blame. But is this even true?

I talked to danah boyd, the top researcher on kids and social media use, about some of the problems that young people today are facing, why quick fixes like banning social media apps are never the answer, and what we can actually do to help younger generations.

I have to admit that it’s breaking my heart to watch a new generation of anxious parents think that they can address the struggles their kids are facing by eliminating technology from kids’ lives. I’ve been banging my head against this wall for almost 20 years, not because I love technology but because I care so deeply about vulnerable youth. And about their mental health. And boy oh boy do I loathe moral panics. I realize they’re politically productive, but they cause so much harm and distraction.

I wish there was a panacea to the mental health epidemic we are seeing. I wish I could believe that eliminating tech would make everything hunky dory. (I wish I could believe many things that are empirically not true. Like that there is no climate crisis.) Sadly, I know that what young people are facing is ecological. As a researcher, I know that young people’s relationship with tech is so much more complicated than pundits wish to suggest. I also know that the hardest part of being a parent is helping a child develop a range of social, emotional, and cognitive capacities so that they can be independent. And I know that excluding them from public life or telling them that they should be blocked from what adults values because their brains aren’t formed yet is a type of coddling that is outright destructive. And it backfires every time.

I’m also sick to my stomach listening to people talk about a “gender contagion” as if every aspect of how we present ourselves in this world isn’t socially constructed. (Never forget that pink was once the ultimate sign of masculinity.) Young people are trying to understand their place in this world. Of course they’re exploring. And I want my children to live in a world where exploration is celebrated rather than admonished. The mental health toll of forcing everyone to assimilate to binaries is brutal. I paid that price; I don’t want my kids to as well.

[…]

Please please please center young people rather than tech. They need our help. Technology mirrors and magnifies the good, bad, and ugly. It’s what makes the struggles young people are facing visible. But it is not the media effects causal force that people are pretending it is.

Six years ago, NYU social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind. In the book, he and Greg Lukianoff argued that parents are doing a real disservice to their kids by overprotecting (coddling) them, rather than giving them more freedom and allowing them to make mistakes and learn.

This year, he’s back with a new book, The Anxious Generation, arguing the exact opposite in the digital world: that social media and smartphones have made kids under-protected, rewiring brains and increasing teenage depression rates.

Haidt tries to address this obvious contradiction in his book with the standard cop-out of the purveyor of every modern moral panic: “This time it’s different!” He provides little evidence to support that.

In this new book, Haidt is coddling the American parent: providing them with a clear, simple, and wrong solution to what is ailing their children. But—as with historic moral panics—parents, schools, and politicians will embrace it, absolving themselves of their own failings in raising children in our modern world and pointing to an easy villain.

 As they hyperventilate about TikTok, US politicians are so eager to appear “tough on China” that they’re suggesting we build our very own Great Firewall here at home. There is a small but growing number of countries in the world so authoritarian that they block popular apps and websites entirely. It’s regrettable that so many US lawmakers want to add us to that list.

Several of the proposals wending their way through Congress would grant the federal government unprecedented new powers to control what technology we can use and how we can express ourselves – authority that goes far beyond TikTok. The bipartisan RESTRICT Act (S. 686), for example, would enable the Commerce Department to engage in extraordinary acts of policing, criminalizing a wide range of activities with companies from “hostile” countries and potentially even banning entire apps simply by declaring them a threat to national security. 

[…] 

The law is vague enough that some experts have raised concerns that it could threaten individual internet users with lengthy prison sentences for taking steps to “evade” a ban, like side-loading an app (i.e., bypassing approved app distribution channels such as the Apple store) or using a virtual private network (VPN). 

[…] 

A ban on TikTok wouldn’t even be effective: The Chinese government could purchase much of the same information from data brokers, which are largely unregulated in the US.

The rush to ban TikTok – or force its sale to a US company – is a convenient distraction from what our elected officials should be doing to protect us from government manipulation and commercial surveillance: passing basic data privacy legislation. It’s a matter of common knowledge that Instagram, YouTube, Venmo, Snapchat and most of the other apps on your phone engage in similar data harvesting business practices to TikTok. Some are even worse. `

The relatively measured tone adopted by top intelligence officials contrasts sharply with the alarmism emanating from Congress. In 2022, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., deemed TikTok “digital fentanyl,” going on to co-author a column in the Washington Post with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., calling for TikTok to be banned. Gallagher and Rubio later introduced legislation to do so, and 39 states have, as of this writing, banned the use of TikTok on government devices.

None of this is to say that China hasn’t used TikTok to influence public opinion and even, it turns out, to try to interfere in American elections. “TikTok accounts run by a [People’s Republic of China] propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022,” says the annual Intelligence Community threat assessment released on Monday. But the assessment provides no evidence that TikTok coordinated with the Chinese government. In fact, governments — including the United States — are known to use social media to influence public opinion abroad.

“The problem with TikTok isn’t related to their ownership; it’s a problem of surveillance capitalism and it’s true of all social media companies,” computer security expert Bruce Schneier told The Intercept. “In 2016 Russia did this with Facebook and they didn’t have to own Facebook — they just bought ads like everybody else.”`

Public lecture on 21 November 2023 by Prof Carl Bergstrom from The University of Washington. This lecture was part of the AIMOS 2023 conference (http://aimosconference.com/).

Over the last few years, staying informed has become increasingly difficult. With the chaos brought by social media algorithms, influencers, and advertising, finding reliable news requires effort. For me, one tool remains as relevant as ever - RSS (Really Simple Syndication). While many have deemed RSS obsolete, it is more essential than ever for making sense of the overloaded modern media landscape.