Don’t blame TikTok for Americans’ opinions
Social media can have an outsize and sometimes pernicious influence on society, and lawmakers can unfairly use it as an excuse to deflect legitimate criticisms.
Young people are overwhelmingly unhappy about U.S. policy on the war in the Gaza Strip? Must be because they get their “perspective on the world on TikTok” — according to Sen. John Fetterman, a strong pro-Israel Democrat.
Consumers are unhappy with the economy? Surely, that’s TikTok again, with some experts arguing that dismal consumer sentiment is a mere “vibecession” — feelings fueled by negativity on social media rather than by the actual effects of inflation, housing costs and more.
It’s not just TikToc
It’s no secret that social media can spread misleading and even harmful content, given that its business model depends on increasing engagement by amplifying inflammatory content, with little to no guardrails for veracity. And, yes, TikTok, whose parent company is headquartered in Beijing and which is increasingly dominating global information flows, should generate additional concern.
But that doesn’t make social media automatically and solely culpable for whenever people hold opinions inconvenient to those in power. Social media can act as a bypass around censorship and silence and reveal people’s real experiences.
Credible estimates of heavy casualties inflicted among Palestinians — about 40% of whom are children — by Israel’s monthslong bombing campaign may make a more engaged younger population justifiably critical of President Joe Biden’s support of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Israel blocks access to foreign journalists outside a few embedded ones under its control.
Young people do face huge economic challenges now, and that’s their truth even if their grasp of what happened a century ago is off. Housing prices and mortgage rates are high and rents less affordable, resurgent inflation has outpaced wages until recently, groceries have become much more expensive, and career paths are much less certain.
Why don’t we know more about TikTok’s true influence, or that of YouTube or Facebook? Because that requires the kind of independent research that’s both expensive and possible only with the cooperation of the platforms themselves.
Social media hides data
But they hold key data we don’t see about the spread and impact of such content. It’s as if tobacco companies privately compiled the nation’s lung cancer rates or car companies hoarded the air quality statistics.
For example, there is a strong case that social media has been harmful to the wellbeing of teenagers, especially girls. The percentage of 12- to 17-year-old girls who had a major depressive episode had been flat until about 2011, when smartphones and social media became more common, and then more than doubled in the next decade.
Pediatric mental health hospitalizations among girls are also sharply up since 2009. Global reading, math and science test scores, too, took a nosedive right around then.
The multiplicity of such findings is strongly suggestive. But is it a historic shift that would happen anyway even without smartphones and social media? Or is social media the key cause? The claim remains contested partly because we lack enough of the right kind of research with access to data.
Lack of more precise knowledge certainly impedes action. As things stand, big tech companies can object to calls for regulation by saying we don’t really know if social media is truly harmful in the ways claimed — a convenient shrug, since they helped ensure this outcome.
Meanwhile, politicians alternate between using the tools to their benefit or rushing to blame them, but without passing meaningful legislation.
Back in 2008 and 2012, Facebook and big data were credited with helping Barack Obama win his presidential races. After his 2012 reelection, I wrote an article calling for regulations requiring transparency. I concluded with “you should be worried even if your candidate is — for the moment — better at these methods.”
The Democrats, though, weren’t having any of that, then. The data director of Obama for America responded that concerns such as mine were “a bunch of malarkey.” No substantive regulations were passed.
Social media strikes a chord
The attitude changed after 2016, when it felt as if many people wanted to talk only about social media.
But social media has never been some magic wand that operates in a vacuum; its power is amplified when it strikes a chord with people’s own experiences and existing ideologies. Donald Trump’s narrow victory may have been surprising, but it wasn’t solely because of social media hoodwinking people.
Do we need proper oversight and regulation of social media? You bet. Do we need to find more effective ways of countering harmful lies and hate speech? Of course. But despite the heated bipartisan rhetoric of blame, scapegoating social media is more convenient to politicians than creating sensible legislation.
Worrying about the influence of social media isn’t a mere moral panic or “kids these days” tsk-tsking. But until politicians and institutions dig into the influence of social media and try to figure out ways to regulate it, and also try addressing broader sources of discontent, blaming TikTok amounts to just noise.