If TikTok, Snapchat aren’t harming children, they should prove it
US surgeon-general Vivek Murthy has issued a warning that social media could be harming children. His social media advisory is a welcome road map for what policymakers, tech companies, parents, children and researchers should be doing to better understand the effect of platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat on the developing brains of adolescents.
There are yawning gaps in our knowledge of social media’s effects at this critical point in development. Many of Murthy’s recommendations centred on filling those gaps. And while he also offers advice for parents, educators and even children themselves, the most urgent recommendations in the report are ones that companies need to take the lead on.
He would like to see companies adding scientific advisory boards to guide safe product design, reacting swiftly if evidence of harm emerges, and doing more to enforce age minimums. Policymakers, who have been fumbling to put the social media genie back in the bottle via unconstitutional bans, should be pursuing these types of realistic recommendations about the design and use of these platforms.
One recommendation that particularly resonated was Murthy’s call for transparency. He wants technology companies to share data relevant to the“health impact of their platforms with independent researchers and the public in a manner that is timely, sufficiently detailed, and protects privacy”. Legislators should ensure that they do.
INTENSE FOCUS
As Mitch Prinstein, a psychologist and neuroscientist who studies adolescents’ social interactions at the University of North Carolina, pointed out to me: “Companies are assertively hiring psychological scientists from our own programmes and labs, but we don’t know what they’re doing and what information they have.”
Given the huge amount of data collected from companies and their intense focus on the influence of their algorithms, it wouldn’t be surprising if they already were experimenting with and studying how social media is being used and is affecting specific groups of children. Academic researchers such as Prinstein would get so much out of any data they are collecting.
For example, are they asking what happens when children see more of certain kinds of posts or see posts in a different order? Are they experimenting with what happens when children see “likes” more or less often? All of that could tell us a lot about children’s reactions to social media and overall wellbeing when using it, Prinstein says.
Critics might see Murthy’s warning as merely stirring up moral panic over new technology — the latest chapter in a long history of panicking over how children’s brains and behaviour will be affected by shifting cultural norms. Consider, for example, earlier warnings about violence on TV or in video games.
More than once when contemplating my concerns over social media and children, I’ve paused to ask myself if I’m having a Tipper Gore moment. She famously stoked hysteria over the dangers of exposing children to explicit music or movies (a campaign kicked off after she bought her 11-year-old daughter Prince’s Purple Rain, which this opinion writer will note is one of the best albums ever made and has been played many times for her own 11year-old daughter).
But unlike a single song or scene in a movie, social media permeates a teen’s day. Nearly every teenager in the US — 95% — is on social media, and the report notes that a third of teenagers report using it “almost constantly”. Meanwhile, some 40% of children between the ages of eight and 12 are users. And even the ones that aren’t active participants are surely passive ones — parents such as me who have held the line on social media and phones know that even when their child doesn’t have their own TikTok account, they’re seeing it on the playground or after school.
That constant barrage of content might include being exposed to material that some parents might find problematic — such as videos that glamorise suicide or eating disorders. And perhaps more profoundly, it is also potentially changing the way they connect with other humans. The surgeon-general’s report notes that one of the critical questions is how interacting online versus in person affects children’s mental health, and in particular, their feelings of connectedness or isolation.
In the end, the advisory is raising a red flag not about what we know to be dangerous, but about all that we don’t know — and as a society, have a right to know — about social media’s effect on adolescent development. It’s a call for good data. What’s the harm in that?
Without it, parents and legislators will be left wondering why social media companies, if confident their products aren’t harmful, wouldn’t simply share the proof.
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A THIRD OF US TEENAGERS REPORT USING SOCIAL MEDIA ‘ALMOST CONSTANTLY’
Bloomberg