Biden State Of The Union Will (Again) Blame The Internet For Harm To Kids

Policy

from the again-and-again-and-again dept

Tonight is President Biden’s State of the Union address, and according to notes released from the White House, he will (for the second year in a row) throw in something blaming the internet for harming kids’ mental health, and pushing for things like a ban on targeted advertising. He did the same thing last year as well. Here are the notes that the White House released:

Protect kids online. There is compelling and growing evidence that social media and other tech platforms can be harmful to mental health, wellbeing and development. Children, adolescents, and teens are especially vulnerable to such harm. More than one-third of American teens say they use a major social media platform “almost constantly” and that they spend “too much time on social media.” Far too often, the platforms do not enforce their own terms of service with respect to minors who use their products and services. Children are also subject to the platforms’ excessive data collection vacuum, which they use to deliver sensational and harmful content and troves of paid advertising. Children also suffer from bullying, harassment, abuse, and even sexual exploitation by other users online. And platforms use manipulative design techniques embedded in their products to promote addictive and compulsive use by young people in the name of “user engagement” – all to generate more revenue. The Administration will build on the Surgeon-General’s Youth Mental Health Advisory, the Department of Health and Human Services’ new Center of Excellence on Social Media and Mental Wellness, and the recent passage of the Children and Media Research Advancement Act. Platforms and other interactive digital service providers should be required to prioritize the privacy and wellbeing of young people above profit and revenue in their product design, including safety by design standards and practices for online platforms, products, and services. The President is calling for bipartisan support to ban targeted advertising online for children and young people and enact strong protections for their privacy, health and safety online.

Of course this is somewhat misleading. As we were just noting, a recent Pew study found that most teens actually get real value out of the internet, and only a small percentage struggle with it. And it’s not at all clear how many of those situations involve individuals who might have struggled with mental health challenges in the absence of the internet. That is, there seems to still mainly be evidence that people having mental health challenges use the internet a lot, but not that one causes the other.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t work on helping improve mental health, though ironically, one thing that might work would be targeting ads to those in most need of help — which Biden’s proposed plan would ban. Oops.

We keep seeing this same moral panic over and over again. And it’s been debunked over and over again. Back in 2019 we covered a massive study out of Oxford finding no evidence of social media having a negative impact on kids’ well being. As the author that study found, “99.75% of a person’s life satisfaction has nothing to do with their use of social media.”

And yet, here we are. It’s a convenient scapegoat that, once again, allows the government to avoid taking the blame for its own failings, and its own inability to deal with wider issues around mental health and a deteriorating healthcare system. Rather than admit that our government has failed us, it’s way easier to say “oh, it must be social media,” and to pass silly laws that won’t actually help.

The next section of the release also talks about “platform transparency,” again with none of the necessary nuance or discussion of the relevant tradeoffs.

Strengthen data privacy and platform transparency for all Americans: Big Tech companies collect huge amounts of data on the things we buy, the websites we visit, and the places we go.  There should be clear and strict limits on the ability to collect, use, transfer, and maintain our personal data, especially for sensitive data such as geolocation and health information, and the burden must fall on companies – not consumers – to minimize how much information they collect. We must also demand transparency about the algorithms companies use that far too often discriminate against Americans and sow division. The President has called for imposing much stronger transparency requirements on Big Tech platforms and is calling for bipartisan support to impose strong limits on targeted advertising and the personal data that companies collect on all Americans.

Transparency is good, and we advocate for it all the time. But government-mandated transparency creates all sorts of risks. In some cases, it better enables gaming by malicious actors. In other scenarios, the transparency itself acts as a backdoor way of pressuring companies to act in ways that the government wants, but which it would be unconstitutional to demand. And, of course, the transparency demands can have negative impacts on competition, which would undermine the supposed focus of the administration on enabling competition (i.e., the transparency mandates may limit the ability of smaller companies to actually compete).

There are a number of other problems with this as well, but fundamentally, demanding transparency around “algorithms” is no different than demanding that news organizations reveal their editorial decision making process, such as how they decide which stories lead and which ones get buried. There’s a reason that kind of information is considered private for news organizations, and it seems dangerous to demand that it be revealed publicly without any discussion of what that would actually mean.

Of course, these are the same lines that Biden has trotted out since his campaign, and despite multiple experts highlighting these issues to the administration, he just keeps repeating them, verbatim, with zero attempt or even expressed interest in understanding how to improve his policy positions.

It’s disappointing. Biden could have been a leader on these issues, but instead has chosen to be a follower, trotting out easy lines without actually digging in and understand the nuances and tradeoffs of his proposals.

Filed Under: blame the internet, depression, for the children, joe biden, mental health, moral panic, protect the children, social media, state of the union, transparency