Kids: The emotional costs of social media
“Something terrible has happened to Gen Z,” said Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic, and a preponderance of evidence shows that Facebook’s products are to blame. Facebook points to several studies suggesting “only a tiny correlation” between digital-media use and worsening teenage mental health. But most of this research combines data for boys and girls and “lumps all screen-based activities together.” Zoom in and you find intense harm specific to girls, with no plausible explanation besides social media, and especially Instagram, for “the massive, sudden, gendered, multinational deterioration of teen mental health.” When teens went from “texting friends on flip phones in 2010 to posting carefully curated photos and awaiting comments and likes by 2014, the change rewired everyone’s social life.” Social-media platforms weren’t initially designed for children, but they’ve made kids “the subject of a gigantic national experiment.”
An investigation into Amazon’s data collection practices reveals surprising ways kids rely on Alexa, said Chris Kirkham and Jeffrey Dastin in Reuters.com. One reporter found that Amazon had “collected more than 90,000 Alexa recordings of family members between 2017 and 2021—averaging about 70 daily.” The reporter’s young children asked Alexa to offer “detailed instructions on how to convince their parents to buy them video games.” Other recordings captured the ways kids discover the world now through at-home tech, such as when the children asked, “Alexa, what does bondage mean?”
Children aren’t being helped by teachers and coaches who are pressuring them to join groups or ‘like’ pages, said Julie Jargon in The Wall Street Journal. Young kids are being pushed into apps such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Discord not just by classmates but by “school clubs, sports teams, and even churches.” One father I spoke to tried to enforce “a firm rule with his three children: no social media until age 13.” Then his 11-year-old daughter’s science teacher asked her students to post their projects on Instagram.
“As we spend more and more time being voyeuristic online, we feel less capable of connecting with people in real life,” said 22-year-old entrepreneur Jamie Lee in MsMagazine.com. It’s not inevitable that this will be our future, but the people who invest in and run social media companies have trouble imagining the alternatives. “When raising money for my social media company Flox, which encourages groups of friends to meet together in person, I had at least one investor tell me to ‘be more like Zuck.’” Anyone who believes that could possibly be the way to fix social media is really missing the mark.