It doesn't really matter whether "social media" is good or bad for "kids"
Look wider than social media, and even when you think you are looking wide – look wider still.
Some US states are suing social networks for damaging kids' mental health or discussing bills that would force the same networks to verify the age of all their users. Internet veteran Mike Masnick has argued in at least three pieces that "the claim that social media is bad for kids’ mental health is still totally unproven", and that both those lawsuits and age verification bills would do more harm than good.
Masnick is right to oppose certain proposals. Some arguments in those articles, however, are weak or counterproductive, and the whole controversy is badly framed to begin with. Here, I first synthesize some points Masnick makes in those articles, labeling them for easier reference, and then explain the limits I see in sticking to those points, and framing, as bases for any discussion about "kids and social media".
Part 1: summary of the articles
Article A: US States... To Sue Meta Based On Highly Questionable Theories Of ‘Harm’ To Children
(A1) In early 2023, a study of the American Psychological Association concluded that social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to kids. A massive study found that most teenagers found social media helpful and an ever bigger one found no evidence of social media increasing psychological harm.
(A2) Facebook tries to increase engagement [with algorithmic feeds]? Of course it does. What website isn’t? Besides, recent research found that when there are chronological feeds, instead of algorithm-curated ones, users get a lot more misinformation and junk they don’t want to see.
(A3) Multiple studies found that if teens want to discuss eating disorders or any other troublesome topic online, attempts to stop them on any platform will just make teens use coded language to elude automatic filters, or move to other platforms.
Article B: New Study In The Journal Of Pediatrics Says Maybe It’s Not Social Media [...] That’s Making Kids Depressed
(B1) The stats that show upticks in teen suicide rates that correlate with the rise of social media are incomplete. More complete charts show that, while the uptick is a concern, current suicide rates are still way below what it had been in the 1990s (pre-social media).
(B2) A recent study in the Journal of Pediatrics suggests that the decline in children's mental health is due not to social media, but to helicopter parenting, which leaves kids no spaces to just hang out with each other and be kids without adult supervision.
(B3) If losing such spaces is a leading cause of mental health decline, depressed kids are more likely to seek out such spaces, and will do it on social media if given no other choices. Therefore, shutting "kids-only" spaces down, or even letting parents monitor them, could likely cause much more harm than good.
(B4) Therefore, perhaps it’s time we realize that social media fits into the category of more “dangerous” play for kids that needs to come back.
Article C: The Surgeon General’s Report On Kids & Social Media: It’s Not What You Heard
Masnick first shows these two quotes from the Surgeon General to prove his thesis:
(C1) "Social media can provide benefits for some youth... _especially important for youth who are often marginalized" (C2) "A majority of adolescents report that social media helps them feel more accepted (58%)"
Then criticizes the warning, from the same Surgeon General, that:
(C3) "Our children and adolescents don’t have the luxury of waiting years until we know the full extent of social media’s impact. Their childhoods and development are happening now. While social media use can have positive impacts for some children... [there should be] significant concern with the way it is currently designed (=for ADULTS, not kids), deployed, and utilized... At a moment when we are experiencing a national youth mental health crisis, now is the time to act swiftly and decisively to protect children and adolescents..."
because, to Masnick, that whole paragraph looks like saying:
(C4) “Cars are beneficial to people because they help people traverse long distances which has many benefits. Cars are also dangerous because they can crash and kill people. So, while there are benefits and negatives, we have to ban all cars to stop the negatives.”
Part 2: the bad, the good, and more
The bad
(A1) Speaking of all the recent and future studies on these issues and the related controversies: first of all, depression is just one issue. Someone may have (or feel...) zero depression, and still have enough problems not caused, but worsened by social media, from porn addiction to sleep deprivation, lower literacy or insufficient physical activity.
Second, who is "kids"? What age range? Dumping everybody less than 18/20 years old in one "kids" box, as it often happens in colloquial speech, is not acceptable in this context. Even if "kids" could be split only in teenagers, preteens and children, each group would deal with "relevant information" or anything else, so differently from the others to require a completely separate discussion.
Third, technology is changing fast, at increasing pace. But even if the whole Internet and technology in general completely stopped changing today, the teenagers of the 2030s will have very different relationships with "social media" than the ones of today... simply because both the members of each group and their parents will have been immersed in said media much more, much earlier in their lives, when they were in the previous age range.
Basically, not only this stuff is more complicated than a single class of polls or studies may grasp, but evidence or lack of evidence of any effect of social media on "kids" needs constant re-evaluation. I can't exclude the possibility that social media has had no real negative impacts on today's teenagers as a generation(more on this below), but nobody should take that as a guarantee that this will be true ten years from now.
B1: Suicide rates are still much lower than in the 1990s. Great, but so what? If social media were a significant contributor to that uptick, that would be bad anyway. See above.
A2, C1, C2: Social networks are already full of adults drooling for "relevant information" proving that the Earth is flat, the US 2020 elections were rigged and similar stuff. AI may soon give voting adults so much more of "what they want to see" to basically freeze, rather than influence, their thoughts. As far as teens are concerned, it shouldn't be too hard to find, in any period or country, lots of adolescents reporting that the things that "help them feel more accepted" by their peers always include exactly the kind of stuff, from smoking to TikTok, that results less than healthy in the long run. Besides, if 10% of all the hype around AI is real, there is some non-negligible possibility that AI tools could be soon used to automate child grooming", targeting thousands of kids at a time, thus requiring much more attention than today.
In other words, and do NOT take this as an endorsement of censorship: with social media it is so much easier to get "too much of a good thing" than it is with, say, food or sleep, that what adults or teens "want to see" doesn't seem enough of a guarantee to not worry, especially now that the near future may be so different from the near past.
( B4) It's pretty hard to add social media to the category of independent, kids-only spaces to restore, for one simple reason: unlike with physical spaces, in digital ones it would be impossible to be sure that nobody is a meddlesome or dangerous adult... without fool-proof age verification, which only exists around the Goblet of Fire.
(C3) What's wrong with the Surgeon General recommending prudence (apart from less sales of smartphones, connections and software, of course)? Considering the issues in the previous paragraphs, it seems just common sense to me. Masnick himself criticized in 2021 the Facebook attitude that "once Facebook passes some imaginary boundary, then they can go back and fix the parts of the world they screwed up. It doesn’t work like that, though. And that’s a problem”.
(C4) The cars argument really fails to positively impress me. A non trivial part of how we cope with the two realities that cars are both beneficial and dangerous is exactly by not letting kids drive them.
The good
(A3), (B3) "Social media" is a deceitful term. The whole internet is a social medium, and even if it weren't, any of its parts (apps, online games, anything), can have some "social" component. If you start censoring "social media", you'll be able to stop only after censoring the whole Internet. However the mental health lawsuits may end, Masnick is surely right to say that minimum age limits and error-free age verification systems could never work as intended, and if they did they would make more harm than good (to see why, read my "Rube Goldberg solutions", or this).
(B2) Yes, kids do need more "dangerous" playgrounds, and Masnick is right to join me and everybody else saying that before social media, the problem is overparenting. That Journal of Pediatrics study (well explained here) just quantified what has been evident for many years to everybody who was paying attention:
N.B.: Could someone please investigate whether those upticks in mental health problems mark the moment when the number of parents who totally lost the parenting plot thanks to their own internet addictions passed some generational threshold?
And what would be ugly to ignore
I hope to have shown why, as a minimum, we shouldn't blindly trust any finding about the harmlessness of social media so far to remain valid more than a few years. Caution is good here. Apart from that, it seems to me that Masnick is so (rightly) tired of regulators' incompetence about anything digital to leave behind, in those articles, a couple of things that are essential for parents or anybody else who needed to form an informed opinion about "social media" and "kids". Indeed, I argue that focusing on the benefits or damages by social media as such is harmful for all present and future "kids".
One reason is that only offline spaces can be kids-only, and they MUST have priority on online ones. Even if social media didn't exist, today's parents should demand policies that give all kids (even pre-teens) physical outdoor spaces for regular unsupervised, self-organized activities, instead of chasing online age checks that could never work, or waste money on the delusion that adult-directed stressful sports may replace those spaces and activities.
The other danger is to forget that, even if science definitely proved tomorrow that, on the whole, something like the social media of today is actually good for most "kids", it would almost surely be because both the present and the likely future for the young suck.
That is, as things stand today, there is a non negligible risk for all present and future "kids", especially if science did prove for good that they actually improve their lives. The risk that social media and their REACTIONARY successors) are implicitly, but de facto sanctioned as the new painkillers or antidepressants: a godsend way to mask symptoms, that makes it possible to never solve the root problems below.
Final reminder about the teenagers of TOMORROW
A sure problem for tomorrow's teenagers is being abandoned now, years before they could theoretically be able to handle it, to the lonely, unrestricted, uncontrollable exposure to the whole internet that only a personal smartphone can provide. And that's the parents' fault, not of any government or corporation.
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