The problem in a word – innovation. The answer – more innovation?
Has Australia got the answer: banning anyone under 16 from using social media? Or does the answer to the web related issues harming young people lie elsewhere.
Richard Linning
With the end of online fact checking and moderation, young people the world over have been handed the equivalent of a lump of information Play Do and told to sort the truth from the lies for themselves. Oh .. and by the way while you are surfing the net be aware of attempted radicalization or grooming, cyber bullying, sexual exploitation, toxic tribal identification, mis and dis information.
And that without mentioning encryption – such as Apple’s ADP – which the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children describes as the front line of child abuse, allowing as it does, abusers to share hidden content.
To misquote Charles Dickens – It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates recently told the UK Sunday Times “I work in innovation, new ways of doing drugs, AI, vaccines, understanding malnutrition, climate change – that is all going better than expected – but it is the world in which innovation is being delivered – whether it’s US polarization or European, or instability in China, Russia and Africa that worries me.”
“The whole social media networking problem, including how it affects young people, and allows crazy non-factual things to achieve critical mass, worries me.” He is not the only one who is worried.
Too late now I am afraid to turn the clock back, to ignore the1991 instruction to the janitors – This machine is a server – DO NOT POWER DOWN – and throttlethe world wide web at birth.
Life today without the web is inconceivable. As is life without ChatGPT or Deep Seek … both “extension(s) of individual human wills” in the words the Open AI founders. Echoes here of Marshall McLuhan – the medium is the message – but not of his concern about the implications of new technology beyond its specific context or original purpose.
And boy, oh boy the world wide web has really gone a long way beyond its original purpose.
The web remember was developed to make automated information-sharing between scientists across the globe possible. In his novel “The Fear Index”, Robert Harris refers to it as the opening of a “Pandora’s Box. Or the Law of Unintended Consequences. You start by trying to explore the origins of the universe and you end up creating e Bay.” The unintended consequences are evident.
A trigger warning. You may disagree with what follows.
The legacy media did – does – a good job of separating fact from fiction and opinion but the same cannot be said of social media with its increasingly unmoderated tsunami of information, conspiracy theories and opinion masquerading as fact.
But the problems go beyond those of content.
Chief among them are the behavioral difficulties being experienced by children and young adults. Little wonder really after being bombarded by online content for hours on end.
In 2023, in the United Kingdom 4 and 18 year olds spent an average of 127 minutes per day on TikTok, 40 minutes on Instagram,15 on Facebook. In the United States, time in front of the screen was higher – 5.3 hours every day for girls, 4.4 for boys. (www.statista.com/statistics).
And the result even with the best of intentions a campaign such as that to engage young people in the climate change debate has had negative consequences. Instead of activist eco-warriors it has produced anxious eco-worriers. A Greenpeace UK survey found that four in five primary-aged children (78%) are now worried about climate change while teachers say they face challenges in tackling eco-anxiety at school.
There is another unintended consequence, and it is global.
World Health Organization data reveals a sharp rise in problematic social media use among adolescents. More than 1 in 10 adolescents struggle to control their use and experience negative consequences. This from a Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study of 280 000 young people aged 11, 13 and 15 across 44 countries.
And it is not just children who are suffering.
We are all encouraged to flit from reality to virtual reality, from actual and settled communities to “online communities”, from personal relations to chat with AI generated “partners”.
The term maladaptive day-dreaming (MDD) was coined a few years ago by Eli Somer, a clinical psychiatrist at the University of Haifa. His definition – “fantasy activity which replaces human interaction and/or interferes with academic, interpersonal or vocational functioning.”
Surprise, surprise – social media is a trigger for fantasy, the result of time spent scrolling through … well, through appropriate and – yes – sometimes inappropriate online content.
With temptation only a click away, of course there is a problem for a child constantly tempted by the stimulation a Google search or quick-fire YouTube, Instagram or TikTok clips.
In seeking a solution society faces big and complex choices between competing visions of freedom … freedom from something {negative freedom) and the freedom to do something (positive freedom).
In protecting its youth from social media is the Australian approach of banning children under 16 access the right course of action? Or is it in the best interests of their empowerment and self-determination that they be allowed unfettered access.
Both concepts are important. Obviously in practice there have to be trade-offs – what is in it for me naturally leads to what is in it for us.
The abrogation of responsibility by the online social media moguls for content only compounds the problem.
A search for “online safety for kids” produces plenty of apps and advice, including that for children growing up with digital technology, there isn’t any difference between on-line life and off-line life -it is all part of one life, their life. True, in the pre internet age too there was concern about what a child might see or hear, who they talked to and how this might affect their behaviour. Don’t talk to strangers!
The answer to the question of how to provide safety on-line might lie in re purposing the algorithms which currently mine and monetize data to instead focus on moderating what a youngster sees and hears from whom. Afterall if having discovered my inside leg measurement (as it has) an algorithm can propose a range of unsuitable clothing surely it can identify and tailor content suitable for an individual adolescent. But what do I know?
I don’t pretend to know the answer but like many others I do recognize there is a problem. Nor am alone in asking the innovators who created the problem to, through further innovation, if not solve, then certainly mitigate the negative consequences of the genie they released from Pandora’s box.