Fighting corrosive effects of social media
In the age of connectivity, how do we get underage kids to disconnect for their own good?
As social media and mobile phones take over our lives, schools can no longer remain fair game. Classrooms are sacred spaces, students are special and time is precious in the school day.
Four Ontario school boards are suing three social media giants for $4.5 billion. This month, the provincial government has announced a tougher ban on cellphones in classrooms while trying to curb the all-pervasive influence of these massive platforms.
Public opinion polling shows adults massively want students to put their phones away during the school day — even if grown-ups have a hard time modelling that behaviour during the work day. Politicians — who are more addicted to mobiles than most of us — can see the trend lines.
It was easy enough to read the room this week at a Democracy Forum at Toronto Metropolitan University looking at the impact of social media and mobiles on local schools. Our panel agreed that there is no single antidote for the new algorithms of anger and addiction, but there are three potential angles of attack:
Litigation. Legislation. Prohibition.
Each comes with its own limitations, but taken together they can rein in the almost limitless power of the big platforms. As I reminded our in-person audience, the online reach of the platforms has scaled up to unfathomable orders of magnitude:
Meta (Facebook and Instagram) now boasts five billion active users; TikTok has 1.7 billion users dancing to its tune; Snapchat has a smaller base of 800 million mostly young users who generate nearly five billion “snaps” a day to keep up their winning “streaks.” Now imagine all the intrusive notifications, aggressive cyberbullying, and seductive algorithms that run the gamut from distracting to destructive.
First, litigation: Why hand it off to lawyers?
The Toronto District School Board’s chair, Rachel Chernos Lin, explained why it teamed up with three other Ontario boards in suing Meta, TikTok and Snapchat earlier this year — following the lead of nearly 500 other school districts in similar actions across the continent.
“We decided that it was important to hold the social media giants accountable for the harm that they were creating and the disruption in our education system,” she told me.
Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist who won global attention as a whistleblower, said litigation is the logical extension of what she achieved by releasing thousands of internal documents about Meta’s operations. Lawsuits are a powerful tool for school boards to demand the disclosure of confidential records detailing how they traded off addiction or depression for monetization.
Compared to her own whistleblowing efforts, school board lawsuits “have brought out 10 times as much information through discovery,” Haugen argued. “I brought out 22,000 pages of documents; 75 per cent of it was around the idea that Facebook knew a lot about how its algorithms worked.”
The effects were especially insidious at Instagram, according to documents she unearthed: 13 per cent of teen girls had more frequent suicidal thoughts, 17 per cent said their eating disorders got worse, and one-third said the platform made them feel worse about their bodies.
As for the second pathway — legislation — Haugen believes new laws can set the frameworks we need for ongoing accountability and transparency. Lawsuits can tell us what’s been happening under the hood, but only legislators can set guardrails for how these online platforms operate in future, which is why she is a strong supporter of Canada’s online harms bill now being debated in the House of Commons.
The third approach — prohibition — is being pursued anew by Education Minister Stephen Lecce, who broached a tougher ban on cellphones at a TMU Democracy Forum earlier this year. He followed up this month and went further this week, promising to protect kids’ privacy and limit access to harmful content online — especially on devices provided by schools.
Psychologist Alexia Polillo, a staff scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, cautioned the audience that if phones become the forbidden fruit, they could be even more sought after by young people.
A Leger Research survey for the Dais think tank at TMU shows young people are far less enthusiastic than adults about the putting their phones away — with more than one in three opposed.
But the research about causality remains inconclusive, Polillo says. The current furor reminds her of “moral panics” of the past, when adults fretted about the impact on children of video games, rap and rock music.
That said, asking addicted students to self-regulate is asking a lot: “The notification pops up — can you control yourself to not check your phone in that second?”
Self-control is hard. Yet Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat keep trying to reverse the onus on everyone else, asking all of us to selfregulate.
A better ask would be to demand that these platforms self-regulate themselves — while also facing stronger government regulation. Social media isn’t going away — it’s a war of attrition on multiple fronts, requiring more than one angle of attack.
That means self-regulation but also regulation, legislation, litigation and prohibition.
There is no single antidote for the new algorithms of anger and addiction, but there are potential angles of attack
DISCLOSURE: I AM A SENIOR FELLOW AT TMU.