Teen addiction: The insidious pull of social media
There’s one easy solution to the problem of kids and social media, said Rich Lowry in National Review: Just shut it down for anyone under 18, period. Last week, a bunch of tech CEOs were hauled before Congress again to testify about the dangerous and addictive nature of their platforms. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg apologized to the families of victims of online child sex abuse, some of whom had taken their own lives. He’s “very sorry” for that. But don’t expect Zuckerberg, whose billions come from Facebook and Instagram, or his peers to volunteer to surrender billions of dollars out of some moral obligation. The “lived experience of families is, overwhelmingly, that the takeover of adolescence by social media hasn’t been a healthy phenomenon.” Let “Zuckerberg & Co. make their fortunes exclusively off adults.”
Zuckerberg’s “seemingly impromptu” apology wasn’t the only bit of theater, said Casey Newton in Platformer. We’ve had hearings like this since 2017, and they all play out in the same way, with “outraged lawmakers scolding, questioning, and interrupting their witnesses for hours on end.” The case has already been made that Meta, TikTok, and others haven’t taken the steps they need to prevent harm to children. The stern words continue, while bills to address this “languish without ever being passed.”
This isn’t the first time Congress has gotten fired up in a moral panic, said Nathalie Voit in Reason. “When video games peaked in popularity in the 1980s, they were blamed for an increase in real-world violence and acts of aggression.” Now social media is the target. Critics ignore the positives that come out of giving kids “a forum that connects friend and family.” Consider how such platforms provided vital “social support for teenagers deprived of human connection during the Covid-19 era.” The decision to keep teens off TikTok and Instagram “ought to rest with the parents, not the government.”
The point of legislation is precisely to give parents control, said Michael Toscano in The Dispatch. Social media is built with algorithms and tools designed to be addictive to adults and kids, to “keep their attention for hours on end” so they can be fed targeted advertisements. One study found social media companies “derived nearly $11 billion in ad revenue from U.S.-based users younger than 18.” They did it with features like infinite scrolling and algorithmic recommendation that neither parents nor kids can control. It’s time to pass a bill like the Senate’s bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act which will let families opt out of social media’s most addictive and invasive features, and give our kids “relief from platforms that prey upon them by design.”