Every generation this stuff is brought up. And it always means nothing. Of course it’s wrong.
Rock and roll. TV. Videogames. Social media…
Indeed, but to riff on the article a bit - the thing that’s different is that social media has demonstrative harm.
We need to be teaching kids to use it responsibly, regulating tech companies to give it away responsibly, and not just banning it and grabbing screens out of hands.
the thing that’s different is that social media has demonstrative harm.
Is that actually a difference?
Rock and roll causes harm: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8580930/
TV causes harm: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/too-much-tv-might-be-bad-for-your-brain
Video games cause harm: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2000/04/video-games
Pretty much everything kids do that their parents didn’t has been “proven” to cause harm. Radio, cinema, comic books, even newspapers were “proven” to harm young people.
Authoritarianism is a far bigger threat than any of these.
I do want to point out that social media use may be one of the first of these ‘evils’ to meet actual statistical significance on a large scale. I’ve seen meta-analyses which show an overall positive association with negative outcomes, as well as criticisms and no correlation found, but the sum of those (a meta-analyses of meta-analyses) shows a small positive association with “loneliness, self-esteem, life satisfaction, or self-reported depression, and somewhat stronger links to a thin body ideal and higher social capital.”
I do think this is generally a public health reflection though, in the same way that TV and video games can be public health problems - moderation and healthy interaction/use of course being the important part here. If you spend all day playing video games, your physical health might suffer, but it can be offset by playing games which keep you active or can be offset by doing physical activity. I believe the same can be true of social media, but is a much more complex subject. Managing mental health is a combination of many factors - for some it may simply be about framing how they interact with the platform. For others it may be about limiting screen time. Some individuals may find spending more time with friends off the platform to be enriching.
It’s a complicated subject, as all of the other ‘evils’ have always been, but it is an interesting one because it is one of the first I’ve personally seen where even kids are self-recognizing the harm social media has brought to them. Not only did they invent slang to create social pressures against being constantly online, but they have also started to self-organize and interact with government and local authority (school boards, etc.) to tackle the problem. This kind of self-awareness combined with action being taken at such a young age on this kind of scale is unique to social media - the kids who were watching a bunch of TV and playing video games didn’t start organizing about the harms of it, the harms were a narrative created solely by concerned parents.
Well thought out and written. You bring up valid points. Thank you.
regulating tech companies to give it away responsibly
Is the regulation in the room with us right?
Ain’t nobody regulating shit in any meaningful way. Parents gonna need to learn how to parent or their kids will be fucked.
This has always been the case though.
Yep. As a Gen Xer with a teenage son, when I hear my peers freaking out about our kids and technology, I remind them what our parents said about MTV.
I mean there are huge issues with tech, but like, they’re in no way limited to kids… nor does it seem to affect them particularly strongly.
This is a tough and complex issue, because tech companies using algorithmic curation and control mechanisms to influence kids and adults is a real, truly dangerous issue. But it’s getting torn at from all sides to force their own agendas.
Allowing large corporations to control and influence our social interactions is a hugely dangerous precedent. Apple and Google and huge telcos may be involved in delivering your text messages, but they don’t curate or moderate them, nor do they send you texts from other people based on how they want you to feel about an issue, or to sell you products. On social media, companies do.
But you’ve got right-wingers clamoring to strip companies from liability protections from user-generated content, which does not address the issue, and is all about allowing the government to dictate what content is acceptable from a political standpoint (because LGBTQ+ content is harmful /s and they want companies to censor it).
And you’ve got neolibs and some extremely misguided progressives pushing for sites that allow UGC (which is by definition all social media) to have to check ages of their users by implementing ID checks (which also of course treats any adults without an accepted form of ID as children), which just massively benefits large companies who can afford the security infra to do those checks and store that data, and kills small and medium platforms, all while creating name-and-face tracking of peoples’ online activities, and legally mandating we turn over more personal data to corporations…
…and still doesn’t address the issue of corporations exerting influence algorithmically.
tl;dr the US is a corporatist hellscape where 90% of politicians serve corporations either willfully, or are trivially manipulated to.
PS: KOSA just advanced out of committee.
Yesterday I half read a Dutch (paywalled) article about the German tech enterpeneur Peter Thiel (paypal). Who was boasting about not caring about politics much, but that it was very convenient to have your own man at the top (jd vance). He claims to not believe in democracy or death (that’s the title)
I was thinking… dafuq are people like this even doing in politics and who let’s them have a say in politics? This is such a clear cut case of moneyoracy instead of democracy, it’s almost comedic.
The article, for those who care: https://fd.nl/bedrijfsleven/1531173/techinvesteerder-achter-jd-vance-gelooft-niet-in-democratie-of-de-dood
I mean I agree with that in principle, but: before the Internet, of course big corporations influenced kids and adults! Before the internet only big corporations had the resources and practical ability to distribute any information to a lot of people.
The promise of the internet was that we would have a society where we could all have a say and the flow of information would be democratized. You are right that, because of “algorithms”, that promise hasn’t really been fulfilled.
I’m not anti-internet at all, I’m all for the internet; I just think it’s best when it’s by and for individuals.
If I had my way, I’d ban corporations from operating anything online but digital storefronts. :P
I certainly agree that the Internet should be by and for individuals; whether we can in the long term do completely without corporations, I am not sure, but the current “algorithmic curation” is definitely a problem.
The tldr doesn’t match the text. Your elaboration is a lot better than your tldr.
large companies who can afford the security infra to do those checks and store that data
There is no such company. This is just another way to ban “harmful” content. Verifying your identity and age to access restricted content is practically guaranteed to result in your identity being compromised within your lifetime.
I never said afford to protect it, just to comply with the requirements for doing the checks and storing it. Passing SOC2 or PCI-DSS (if you’re doing verification via payment card) or whatever certification they decide to create to attest to this stuff, doesn’t make you more secure in reality, but if you can’t afford to do those attestations in the first place, you’re out of the game.
This is just another way to ban “harmful” content.
That is true, but it’s not the whole picture. KOSA applies a Duty of Care requirement for all sites, whether they intend to have adult (or “harmful”) content or not.
So your local daycare’s website that has a comment section could be (under the Senate version that has no business size limits) taken to court if someone posts something “harmful”. That’s not something they or other small sites can afford, so those sites will either remove all UGC or shutter, rather than face that legal liability.
The real goal of KOSA (and the reason it’s being backed by Xitter, Snap, and Microsoft) is to kill off smaller platforms entirely, to force everyone into their ecosystems. And they’re willing to go along with the right-wing censorship nuts to do it. This is a move by big-tech in partnership with the Right, because totalitarianism is a political monopoly, and companies love monopolies.
From the perspective of a teen. No shit the panic is wrong. Sure there are flaws in the tech. But those don’t just affect us. Also there has been moral panics on the “new thing” for a while. While it isn’t a true equivalent I think the DND moral panic is a decent comparison. Tech is a tool. If you are going to restrict its use based on potential danger you are not only being restrictive but you are ignoring both larger threats and the root of the problem
I had a very interesting experience watching Network recently, a film from 1976 about the influence of television, and I had a strange realization that TV then was nearly as old as the internet is now. This just feels like a natural point in the history of a communications medium that people begin to think critically about its effect on people and the way we think.
I remember reading once that in the very first years of the existence of the German Democratic Republic, television was the form of mass media that was most critical of the regime. It just wasn’t as influential yet as newspapers and radio, so they didn’t care about it as much; when it became more popular, it too came more under the control of the communist regime.
