Youth and Social Media
Just this week, in New Mexico, Meta has been ordered to pay $375 million for failure to protect young users from predators and misleading families about the safety of their apps. The next day, a jury in California awarded $3 million in compensatory damages from Meta and YouTube causing the mental health harm to a young woman. Punitive damages could raise the total to $6mil
A number of countries: Australia (16); Malasia (16) Spain (16); France (15) have restricted the age of young people using social media outlets along with 15 other countries actively considering similar bans because of rising concerns about youth mental health issues (anxiety; depression; reduced attention span; lower life satisfaction; and suicide risk}. There is also the fear of online predators, sextortion and exploitation.
Three questions:
1. If governments ban social media for under 16s what does it say about our theory of childhood and agency?
2. Are these bans a form of necessary protection, or are they another example of moral panic dressed up as public policy?
3. What responsibilities do churches have if social‑media bans become widespread—pastoral, educational, or prophetic?
Note to S of F hosts, while I have put this in Purgatory (because I think there can be frank policy debate here); this may be put in Epiphanies too especially if it begins to discuss how social media apps are affected us.
Therefore, feel free to place it on the more appropriate message board.
A number of countries: Australia (16); Malasia (16) Spain (16); France (15) have restricted the age of young people using social media outlets along with 15 other countries actively considering similar bans because of rising concerns about youth mental health issues (anxiety; depression; reduced attention span; lower life satisfaction; and suicide risk}. There is also the fear of online predators, sextortion and exploitation.
Three questions:
1. If governments ban social media for under 16s what does it say about our theory of childhood and agency?
2. Are these bans a form of necessary protection, or are they another example of moral panic dressed up as public policy?
3. What responsibilities do churches have if social‑media bans become widespread—pastoral, educational, or prophetic?
Note to S of F hosts, while I have put this in Purgatory (because I think there can be frank policy debate here); this may be put in Epiphanies too especially if it begins to discuss how social media apps are affected us.
Therefore, feel free to place it on the more appropriate message board.
Comments
I don't think you can give a child internet access and expect them not to be able to access the whole internet. Just like if you let them go out to play you can't stop them playing in the road or going swimming in the sea - you have to talk to them and set boundaries and help them develop a sense of the dangers. And if you send them to school you have to help them navigate social interactions, deal with bullying and so on. There are parental controls, but we're naïve if we think those are totally effective. All a social media "ban" does is impose one particular set of parental controls in a rather hamfisted way.
One feature of the debate is that it very often seems to be driven by adults, often adults who have not had to raise teenagers for several years. As is so frequently the case, well-meaning people with no direct experience of the issues telling those who are dealing with the problems what they should do. In putting together the section of our (Scottish Green Party) manifesto dealing with children and young people, which will also include a statement on our policy re: social media, we relied heavily on our Young Greens and their perspective which was that a social media ban does not solve the problem with a recognition that we can't trust social media companies to self-regulate and voluntarily take action to protect users.
There's a gut reaction that is attractive in it's simplicity, "this is dangerous, ban it for young people", which has parallels with other things - we ban smoking for young people, heavily restrict alcohol etc. But, bans carry risks of driving the activity underground. As parents raising teens, is it better that we know they're on social media and have conversations about what they're seeing, or that they go on social media behind our backs and don't talk about it because they know they shouldn't be doing that? How do we equip our children to navigate the world if they're blocked from accessing part if it through formative years, and suddenly get thrown in the deep end when they pass the age of 16?
We need both an enforcement of standards on social media companies that protects everyone, not just teens, from the most harmful stuff out there, and also to do better to train and guide our children to safely access what social media offers.
And, we need to listen to those most invested in this. That includes our young people, but also organisations representing those who have been most impacted by the problems of social media. There was an excellent, balanced statement issued by a range of organisations recently, it's included on the pages of the Molly Rose Foundation (and probably on the pages of the other organisations who signed that). This calls a ban a "blunt response" that "would fail to deliver the
improvement in children’s safety and wellbeing that they so urgently need", instead calling for strengthening the online safety act and a "fundamental reset of our expectations on tech firms" with social media firms having "strong and unambiguous duties to build and promote responsible, child centred products that once and for all promote and reinforce agency, healthy interaction and exposure to high-quality content."
I am aware that other groups representing parents and families of children harmed by social media are pushing for bans. It's not a simple question, and people will have different views - but we shouldn't let arguments to centre just on ban or no-ban, we can't let the discussion on the benefits and risks of a ban prevent us from taking other action in regulation of social media firms and support for all to get the best from social media.
I’m generally in favour of openness but recognise only too well the dangers of deception and entrapment. “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil” are wise words.
It’s unrealistic to expect growing minds to have developed the necessary self protection from deceivers. Both moral awareness and a healthy scepticism take time to acquire.
I agree with Arethosemyfeet about blunt instruments. I think the seeds of moral awareness and a questioning approach are best sown by both parental and school teaching operating in tandem. The aim is to give growing minds the tools to navigate the dangers. That process does involve a degree of protection plus an agreed awareness of its necessity.
It takes a village to bring up a child but it had better be a benevolent village! That’s not guaranteed.
1. I think it recognizes the affect that environment has on child development. We know the brain is developing well into the early twenties.
2. Should countries "permit" access to platforms for youth when the evidence indicates that at the very least there is a strong correlation between using these sites and mental challenges.
3. Can you elaborate what you had in mind while posing this question?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/27/anxious-generation-jonathan-haidt
Having read the book, I agree with the criticism. The author makes too much of correlation, although I wouldn't dismiss his "findings" completely.
And Haidt responds to Odgers: In response to Odgers' criticism, Haidt on X (formerly Twitter) argued that he and his co-researcher, Zach Rausch, have compiled numerous experimental studies, most of which support his claims. While there are many correlational studies, Haidt asserted that his research also includes evidence for causality. He argued that its timing and international scope point more directly to the rise of smartphones and social media. Haidt asserted that Odgers pinned all the causes of mental health declines on the 2008 global financial crisis. At the same time, Haidt also asserted that his book's critics - Odgers in particular - lacked "an alternative explanation" for mental health decline. (According to Haidt, since his book's critics lacked alternative explanations, Haidt's explanation remained valid.) Haidt also wrote that life could not have gotten "much worse" during "President Obama’s 2nd term, as the economy was steadily improving". Haidt defended his employment of studies by saying that they did not promise to prove his point in the first place.[17]
[17]Haidt, Jonathan [@JonHaidt] (April 1, 2024). "A review in Nature, by @candice_odgers, asserts that I have mistaken correlation for causation and that "there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children's brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness." Both of these assertions are untrue.
[...]" (Tweet). Retrieved September 10, 2024 – via X (formerly Twitter). Yet Odgers and the other skeptics focus intently on studies that operationalize social media in one crude way (total # of hours per day), and then correlate that number with some measure of anxiety, depression, or other mental ailment. When the correlations turn out to be around r = .15 for girls (which is actually a number we agree on, as I explain in the previous link), the skeptics conclude that this is not large enough--by itself--to explain the epidemic, so social media must be only a trivial contributor to the epidemic. This is an error caused by an overly narrow operationalization of a complex phenomenon: the radical transformation of daily life that happened for teens between 2010 and 2015. Only a sliver of the story is captured by the crude measure of "hours per day" on social media.
The skeptics' skepticism would be more compelling if they had an alternative explanation for the multi-national decline in mental health that happened in the early 2010s, but they do not. Odgers claims that the "real causes" of the crisis, from which my book "might distract us from effectively responding," are the lingering effects of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, which had lasting effects on "families in the bottom 20% of the income distribution," who were "also growing up at the time of an opioid crisis, school shootings, and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence."
I agree that those things are all bad for human development, but Odgers' theory cannot explain why rates of anxiety and depression were generally flat in the 2000s and then suddenly shot upward roughly four years after the start of the Global Financial Crisis.