Rich Johnston, a father of two school-age children in Atlanta, thought AOL Instant Messenger was bad enough. Johnston recently told me that “distant messages planted in people’s minds,” oppressed them. The self-proclaimed millennial also loves the firehose of information that is X, formerly Twitter, and yes, you know it’s weird.
“Now we have Snapchat and TikTok and Instagram, and that’s bound to get worse in 10 years,” he said. “That’s the scary part of raising a kid in this environment.”
He is not the only one who feels this way. There is now a nationwide and alarming movement to ban smartphones from the hands of children and young people from social media, pointing to a link between young people spending more time online and the increase of mental health problems. US surgeon Vivek Murthy even asked for warning letters on social media platforms earlier this year.
This week that panic came to a head.
Congress on Wednesday came one step closer to passing the Children’s Protection and Privacy Act (KOSPA), as tech companies pushed ahead with what would be landmark legislation by the best of the internet for decades.
And just a day before the bill was to be marked up in the House, Meta announced that it is revamping Instagram with a new effort called Youth Accounts, which privately creates accounts for users under the age of 18. , prevent night alerts, and give parents. childcare options. It doesn’t really take Instagram away from the youth, but it can significantly change the way they use it. This is the latest move by social media companies to make their platforms less accessible, scaring parents. YouTube and Snapchat made similar announcements this month.
Whether this development will be good for children is still an open question.
All this is happening against a backdrop where seven countries have passed bans on schools, and 14 more are considering bans. There is also a wave of cultural pressure, fueled by NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, whose latest book, Anxious Generationurges parents to work together to “swim against the tide of increasing screen time.” One of his colleagues, psychologist Jean Twenge, was one of the first to raise the alarm about the link between young people’s mental health and time online in 2017 when he asked in an interview The Atlantic, “Have smartphones ruined a generation?”
To be clear, researchers like Haidt and Twenge aren’t saying we should ban kids from holding smartphones or browsing social media. We really don’t know how such restrictions or even policy changes would affect the mental health of young people. Meanwhile, nationwide school phone bans do not control what parents do at home. However, we are starting to use the term “phone blocking” more than ever.
Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics, who has been studying children’s education and technology, Sonia Livingstone said: decades. “We’ve lost control of our corporate supply chain, and we’ve lost control of our education and our health and our families’ lives by accepting — as part of any kind of Faustian contract. – commercial buildings.”
In other words, we let the tech companies win.
Companies like Meta make money by getting their users to engage more with their products, so they can collect data about them and sell targeted ads accordingly. The new Teen Instagram accounts may make parents feel like they have more control over how their kids engage in these things, but their kids’ attention is still a product.
However, KOSPA focuses on the business practices of social media platforms. The law, which combines the Children’s Online Privacy Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teen’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), will prevent advertising directed at children, allow users to turn off algorithmic sorting of feeds see, and reduce to a minimum. the age requirement for online accounts from 13 to 17. It would also create a so-called “duty of care” for social media companies that would make them responsible for harmful content on their forums. The definition of what constitutes harmful content is being clarified in the language of the bill.
We do not yet know the fate of KOSPA. Its leader, KOSA, passed the Senate in July with 93 votes in favor, 3 against. Tech companies and their supporters have argued against it, as have free speech advocates who believe it would open the door to censorship. Combined with whatever social media freedoms they decide to adopt, such sweeping rules can make it difficult to raise children in our increasingly digital world. But it doesn’t guarantee an end to the youth mental health crisis.
Kids can learn social media etiquette – and so can you
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has an entire portal dedicated to children and technology. A good starting point is the 5 Cs of Media Use – Child, Content, Peace, Flow, and Communication – which help you assess your child’s special needs. The AAP points out that while we are used to safety standards for children’s products, such regulations do not currently exist for technology. “This means that children are using platforms and applications that may be designed for adults — not children at their different developmental stages,” according to the AAP.
Parents should also follow basic guidelines for appropriate digital media use, such as turning off notifications, avoiding screens before bed, limiting social media use, and putting your phone away sometimes. You can live without looking at it for longer than you think.
To do that, Livingstone told me, we need to study the causes of young people’s mental problems, rather than focusing on the effects of screen time. Linda Charmaraman, founder and director of the Youth, Media, and Wellbeing Lab at Wellesley College, pointed to the surgeon general’s call for warnings on social media as a sign of “a little panic.” He added that solving the mental health problem will require more than just the use of smartphones.
“People are looking for something to stop the increase in mental illness like it’s going to be tips,” Charmaraman said. “I think it can make people look away from other causes of mental illness.”
It’s not just kids, after all, who have trouble navigating life online. Surgeon General Murthy in August issued advice on the mental health and well-being of parents, and with it, the wringing of hands over children and technology began to resemble an ouroboros of anxiety. In an article in the New York Times about this advice, Murthy even pointed to “the influence of social media on the mental health of young people” as a source of mental health problems for parents.
Murthy wrote: “Stress, loneliness and fatigue can easily affect people’s mental health and well-being. And we know that the mental health of parents has a direct impact on the mental health of children.
No wonder everyone feels nervous. As Congress convenes to address children’s online safety and give parents more control over what their children see and do online, parents are always on edge. They are burdened by a child care crisis that Congress still won’t solve. They suffer from an epidemic of loneliness that has no end. A 2022 Harvard study found that 20 percent of mothers and 15 percent of fathers reported anxiety, compared to 18 percent of teenagers. And nearly 40 percent of teenagers said they were “somewhat worried” about their parents’ mental health.
We don’t yet know how changing the way social media serves children will affect their mental health. There is a possibility that turning off algorithmic feeds can reduce the risk of them containing malicious content. It is certainly possible that removing targeted ads will have a positive effect. Better privacy is a must to keep children safe from strangers online. If nothing else, at least we’ve started talking more about how these platforms work and can work better. And how we can feel better online and off.
“You can’t protect them from it forever,” said Johnston, an Atlanta father. “So you have to train them to use it as smartly, safely, fearlessly as you can.” .
A version of this story also appeared in the Vox Technology newsletter. Register here so don’t miss the next one!
#youths #fear #technology #completely #wrong