Children and Social Media Links

Peter Gray calls it a moral panic; Jean Twenge panics over teenage depression; Haidt and Rausch panic over TikTok; Corbin K. Barthold panics over age-verification laws

Peter Gray writes,

If you wanted to reduce petty theft and teen pregnancy in Victorian times, all you had to do was stop the publication of “penny dreadfuls” in England or “dime novels” in America. During the Great Depression of the 1930s you could do the same by closing the movie theaters to kids under 18 not accompanied by an adult. During the the post-war 1940s and ‘50s, you could do it, and at the same time improve kids’ sleep, by stopping the sale of horror comics. The implicit message, rarely stated so bluntly, is that you can cure kids’ ills without having to deal with more complex problems that are meshed into the structure of the social world we adults have created. The crusaders also gloss over, ignore, or deny the positive gains kids might be getting from their chosen media activities, creating the belief that closing it off to them would entail no loss.

To people a generation from now, will the fears about social media and children look like 1950s-era fears about comic books and children look to us today? That seems to be his wager.

Jean Twenge writes,

we can conclude:

1. The increases in depression from 2012 to 2019 – the years when smartphones and social media went from optional to nearly mandatory for teens – are much larger than the increases in depression from before to during the pandemic.

2. There were sharp increases in depression from before to during the pandemic (2019 to 2021), but these increases had already receded significantly by 2023, just two years later.

3. All of the changes are larger for girls than for boys, suggesting that environmental factors had a bigger impact on girls’ depression than boys’.

Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch write,

As one internal report put it:

“Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” in addition to “interfer[ing] with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.”

Although these harms are known, the company often chooses not to act. For example, one TikTok employee explained,

“[w]hen we make changes, we make sure core metrics aren’t affected.” This is because “[l]eaders don’t buy into problems” with unhealthy and compulsive usage, and work to address it is “not a priority for any other team.”

They took these quotes from evidence submitted to the Supreme Court regarding the case to force TikTok to either sell the company to an American firm or be banned in this country.

Corbin K. Barthold writes,

The point of online age verification is to protect children. But online age verification works only if everyone does it. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re an adult until you prove it (to the extent possible; all online age-verification systems can be gamed). To establish your age, you must tender some kind of personal data, thereby placing it at risk of exposure. Online age-verification laws thus burden the First Amendment rights of adults, by hampering their ability to post and view material on the Internet in anonymity. (They often burden the First Amendment rights of children, too, for example by excluding all minors from online spaces high schoolers are old enough to enter.) The courts have issued a string of preliminary injunctions blocking such laws from taking effect.

So we have a case of Fear Of Others’ Liberty. If children are free to use social media, and China is free to own TikTok, some harm seems to ensue. In theory, laws to prevent this harm sound like good ideas. But the consequences of these laws could go well beyond preventing harm, so that the laws themselves could prove harmful. And it could turn out that the FOOL was overblown.

substacks referenced above: @

TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale

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The pandemic was bad for teen mental health. The smartphone and social media were worse.

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#62. A Brief History of Moral Panics Concerning Kids and Their Chosen Media