The Social Media Moral Panic Is All About Confusing Risks & Harms
from the some-important-truths dept
What if the reason we’re so worried about teens on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat is because we’ve fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the digital world? What if we’re confusing the everyday risks of growing up online with the specter of unavoidable harm?
No one is better at covering the moral panic about “the kids these days and their social media” than danah boyd. She literally wrote the book on this a decade ago (a decade ago!) and every time she weighs in, it’s with something deeply insightful and enlightening.
Her latest is a must-read. It makes a very clear point on something that had been bothering me, but which I was unable to put into words: there’s a difference between risk and harm, and the people pushing the moral panic about social media harms are deliberately blurring the lines between those two things:
In short, “Does social media harm teenagers?” is not the same question as “Can social media be risky for teenagers?”
The language of “harm” in this question is causal in nature. It is also legalistic. Lawyers look for “harms” to place blame on or otherwise regulate actants. By and large, in legal contexts, we talk about PersonA harming PersonB. As such, PersonA is to be held accountable. But when we get into product safety discussions, we also talk about how faulty design creates the conditions for people to be harmed due to intentional, malfeasant actions by the product designer. Making a product liability claim is much harder because it requires proving the link of harm and the intentionality to harm.
Risk is a different matter. Getting out of bed introduces risks into your life. Risk is something to identify and manage. Some environments introduce more potential risks and some actions reduce the risks. Risk management is a skill to develop. And while regulation can be used to reduce certain risks, it cannot eliminate them. And it can also backfire and create more risks. (This is the problem that María Angel and I have with techno-legal solutionism.)
This is a point I’ve tried (and failed) to get across for a while, so I greatly appreciate the way she put it here. No one is saying that social media is a riskless environment. But nothing is truly a riskless environment.
In the past, I’ve sometimes described this as one of the lessons I learned growing up. In the neighborhood where I grew up, there was a deli four blocks from my house. But to get there, you had to cross a pretty busy street. When I was little, I wasn’t allowed to go there alone. As I got older, my parents taught me how to cross that street safely, and later I was allowed to go with friends, and eventually, by myself.
There was still some risk involved, but we managed the risk by teaching me about it, and teaching me how to minimize the risk and to walk to the deli safely. There was always still the possibility that I wouldn’t be careful enough. Or that a car would be speeding much faster than it should have gone. Or a car could have gone out of control.
There’s still risk. That risk could lead to harm. But walking to the deli is not an inherently harmful activity.
I think about this a lot in relation to Jonathan Haidt and his books. In his earlier books (and even, to some extent, in The Anxious Generation), he’s a huge proponent of the “free range kids” movement, which is all about teaching kids how to move about in the world freely, without supervision. As with my parents and the deli, it’s about allowing kids to go into risky situations, but doing so in a way that gives them the tools to minimize those risks.
Yet, now, in the virtual world, he acts as if risks can’t be managed must be harms, rather than risks (even if the data completely disagrees with that).
danah’s piece (you really should read the whole thing) talks about risky activities, including crossing busy streets, but also activities like going skiing. Skiing is risky. I still do it (well, snowboarding), and I know there’s some risk in it, but I try to manage that risk as well. Still, every year, I see plenty of people (of all ages) end up hurting themselves on the mountain. There are risks. We know that. Yet many of us still get enjoyment out of it, and try our best to manage the risks.
This is the nature of living.
So why are we treating social media so differently?
As danah notes:
Can social media be risky for youth? Of course. So can school. So can friendship. So can the kitchen. So can navigating parents. Can social media be designed better? Absolutely. So can school. So can the kitchen. (So can parents?) Do we always know the best design interventions? No. Might those design interventions backfire? Yes.
Does that mean that we should give up trying to improve social media or other digital environments? Absolutely not. But we must also recognize that trying to cement design into law might backfire. And that, more generally, technologies’ risks cannot be managed by design alone.
Fixating on better urban design is pointless if we’re not doing the work to socialize and educate people into crossing digital streets responsibly. And when we age-gate and think that people can magically wake up on their 13th or 18th birthday and be suddenly able to navigate digital streets just because of how many cycles they took around the sun, we’re fools. Socialization and education are still essential, regardless of how old you are. (Psst to the old people: the September that never ended…)
This essay contains so much important information to understand, and it is (as usual) so clearly stated.
This paragraph, though, represents so much of what I feel and what all of the actual research seems to support:
Better design is warranted, but it is not enough if the goal is risk reduction. Risk reduction requires socialization, education, and enough agency to build experience. Moreover, if we think that people will still get hurt, we should be creating digital patrols who are there to pick people up when they are hurt. (This is why I’ve always argued that “digital street outreach” would be very valuable.)
Also, this:
Returning to our earlier note on product liability, it is reasonable to ask if specific design choices of social media create the conditions for certain kinds of harms to be more likely — and for certain risks to be increased. Researchers have consistently found that bullying is more frequent and more egregious at school than on social media, even if it is more visible on the latter. This makes me wary of a product liability claim regarding social media and bullying. Moreover, it’s important to notice what schools have done in response to this problem. They’ve invested in social-emotional learning programs to strengthen resilience, improve bystander approaches, and build empathy. These interventions are making a huge difference, far more than building design. (If someone wants to tax social media companies to scale these interventions, have a field day.)
There’s so much more in the essay, and I feel like it’s something I’m going to keep pointing people to for a long, long time. But if I keep quoting it, I’m just going to end up reposting the whole thing here. So I’ll just say go read the whole thing, as there’s plenty more in there that’s worth reading, thinking about, and understanding.
Filed Under: danah boyd, harms, jonathan haidt, kids, moral panic, privacy, risks, safety by design, social media, teens
Comments on “The Social Media Moral Panic Is All About Confusing Risks & Harms”
This needs to be required reading before any future social media regulations is considered.
While I agree regulation is needed, I’d like it done in a way that doesn’t burn down the whole internet in the process and solves nothing in the end.
Different because...
All risks are not created equal.
Social media is relatively new and poorly understood, especially by older people. The risks and appropriate precautions for crossing a busy street are relatively predictable, and widely known and accepted, but the same cannot be said for social media yet.
It’s more like sending your child through a door into a room in which you cannot see, and in which you have no idea of what’s going on now, or what might go on in the future.
And whereas it’s easy to see when the stoplight turns green, it’s devilishly difficult to navigate social interactions. How can you expect young people to exercise good judgment about what’s safe and what’s not when you have 40% of the US population fervently believing the absurdities spewing from the mouths of Trump and his ick. Oops, ‘ilk.’ I meant ilk.
I agree that legislating yourself out of social media risk or harm is an impossible task. But just because the risk can’t be legislated away doesn’t imply that social media can’t wind up doing great harm to a meaningful portion of the population, and doesn’t mean that wanting to reduce the risk of harm is silly.
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This is why I wish that Danah had written about what she thinks accountability for harm should look like. It can’t all be about building resiliency and outreach and helping and healing after someone gets hurt. Sometimes, part of outreach and help programs in real life is aiding the people who’ve been hurt in getting some manner of justice or closure.
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Bingo. Arguably, we’re not actually treating social media any differently. It’s the same weighing of pros and cons we do for anything else. But not everything has the same ratio of pro to con, even if it’s the same underlying process of evaluating risk vs payoff.
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What you’re applying to digital also applies to offline, though.
There’s no doubt that social media enables great depression by making youngsters feel inferior compared to their peers, but one thing I haven’t seen from social media ban advocates is how they plan to manage the same thing that happens off Instagram. The same parents championing a phone ban have absolutely no problem dismantling their kids’ self-esteem by comparing grades, friends, achievements and so on.
Removing social media is also going to hit the LGBTQIA+ community especially hard, so… good luck with that. You do not fuck with the LGBTQIA+ community here. Especially not on Techdirt.
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Interacting with random people online is much easier for me being introverted. I doubt it’s only me. But a bunch of oldsters sure know better how we should interact with each other, because “do as we say,” I guess 🤷
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Thank you for speaking up on behalf of those who do not conform to heteronormative tyranny.
Love will win. Love must win.
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Which no responsible parent does, which is why parents should monitor (but not helicopter) their children’s online access.
Thank you for pointing us to this essay!
Like you, many of us have wrestled with the same problem. A zillion kids are using social media, but relatively few have been reported harmed. When we eliminate risks, we also eliminate learning to manage those risks. The Internet isn’t going away!
We must teach how to manage the risks, just as we taught our kids to walk to school safely. (Oh, my bad. Kids are no longer allowed to walk to school… That makes you wonder what they’ll do when encountering a risky situation as an adult.)
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“The internet isn’t going away!”
If the fellas calling for child-proofing of the web get their way, it might.
Although that may just be my cynical side speaking. But that aside, you’re completly correct. Kids aren’t gonna be able to handle the world as adults if they’re never taught how to navigate it as one.
I’ve read through the piece. I understand the parts about increasing people’s digital resiliency and the idea of educational programs in school to help with that. The idea of a ‘digital street outreach’ is nice and Danah Boyd made her point about that quite well.
I have an issue with this more recent piece that stems from just wanting her to go more in-depth. It would have been great if she talked about how she would like people and groups and platforms, to hold people accountable when they harm others. She says that it’s reasonable that those who inflict harm should be held accountable. I really wish that she would talk about what she thinks that accountability should look like. I think that a lack of accountability for those that perpetuate harm online is something that has led to, to borrow a bit from Danah’s 2021 piece, a crumbling of infrastructure and social contracts. That crumbling has led to people less interested in reaching out to others and helping to knit a healthy social digital fabric.
Part of helping build digital resiliency and a healthy digital social fabric is, in my opinion, going to have to center on coming up with tools that can be used to hold people accountable. It’s one thing to pick up people when they’re hurt. But it’s another, equally important thing altogether to figure out ways to decrease the amount of people that you have to pick up. Like, is the person you’re helping even going to want to stay on the platform and participate in a digital social fabric if there’s clear risk of them being hurt again?
I don’t really see the distinction here? Risk is also casual. The only difference is that it’s probabilistic (not everyone will be hurt). For instance, someone might choose to ski even if they know they will get jamb their toe every time or whatever (look at how say, professional athlete’s bodies end up).
I don’t see a huge distinction here, if anything a harm is just a risk with 100% probability. You still end up weighing the pros/cons in the same manner. That said:
I think this misses the argument. Ultimately, the argument is whether the risk is too high or not, relative to the pay off. For some things, the risk is worthwhile, and the best you can do is manage the risk. But for others the risk is too high, and we simply do not do them. Ultimately the main argument/conversation is whether it the pros outweigh the cons, and people will weigh different parts differently. It’s subjective.
For instance, we consider the risk of crossing the street to be worth paying, for the benefits that it opens up, that can’t be made up elsewhere.
In particular, the argument tends to be focused on risks that don’t necessarily have large trade offs, or are unnecessary, or not easy to monitor. If you ditch a recommendation algorithm for a chronological feed, you still can use the service. Some enjoyment might be lost, but the delta is smaller.
This is true, and is an important part of designing laws. But at the same time, generally speaking, laws are how we enforce collective action as a society, so in many cases they’re unavoidable. While we do need to take care, we also need to be comfortable with using the tool. This is especially true, given that for-profit companies are often very poorly situated for collective action. Markets are not designed to optimize social benefits.
This, I think misses the point. The question is not whether harm will ever happen. It’s whether it’s been minimized (and whether the trade off is worthwhile).
I think I fundamentally disagree with this approach. Better urban design is worthwhile in and of itself. It still has benefits, and therefore is not pointless. It’s just much better if we do both (and we should do both). If you don’t do both, you end up squandering most (but usually not all) of it. This is particularly true when it’s easier to do one over the other, it might take society longer to get on board to doing both.
I don’t see how schools failing is relevant. For one, school is much more necessary/unavoidable. In terms of pros/cons, the trade off is just massively different.
But also, just because schools suck at managing this liability doesn’t mean we need to suck elsewhere. Really, it just tells you that schools should suck less at this. A failure in one sector (and one that parents don’t really like to begin with) is not a justification for failure in another.
Kids will have to face the world eventually. But how, and when they do it matters. To go back to the sidewalk analogy, we don’t just toss toddlers out onto the street because they need to be exposed. This is literally the exact same argument. (Never mind the assumption that kids won’t face things like racism unless it happens in this particular place. As someone who grew up pre-social media, I can safely say that as a white kid I was exposed to it.)
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No doubt both you and the author are degenerate liberals who oppose school choice and believe teachers’ unions should continue to get fat off the taxpayer teat.
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“The people who I expect to perform the tasks of childcare, counseling, education, psychologist, EMT, and sports coach for my kids should be the least qualified and lowest paid people the state could find!”
Such a weird position to take.
On much the same way that antivaxxers lie about “Harms” from vaccines.
In*
Danah’s article was a good read.
Trying to age-gate the internet to protect the children seems really stupid especially when kids have 1st amendment rights just like everyone else in the USA but of course you have parents who don’t prepare them for what’s on the internet and of course their kid dies/gets injured/depressed and they blame the internet for their failings and honestly that neglectful bullshit just infuriates me like Jfc.
I was checking any news on KOSA earlier and found two articles that made me go wtf and makes me think someone or some group wants KOSA to pass extremely badly.
Article 1: https://punchbowl.news/article/tech/kosa-proponents-take-advocacy-direct-to-mike-johnson-home-turf/
The advocacy groups pushing for KOSA are trying to pull similar bs like they did in Times Square in New York to pressure Schumer in July in this case using digital ads around a two mile radius by Tiger Stadium during LSU vs Ole Miss to pressure Johnson who is doing the coin toss for that game to pass KOSA during lame duck session.
I highly doubt this strategy by the advocates is going to work plus their strategy reeks of extreme desperation because it doesn’t seem very likely to pass.
Article #2: https://www.reuters.com/technology/britain-us-set-up-working-group-improve-childrens-online-safety-2024-10-10/
I wouldn’t be surprised if Beeban Kidron has something to do with this especially since she wants KOSA to pass badly since the California AADC got blocked by the 9th Circuit Court.
Just pointing out I still don’t think KOSA is happening this year considering it’s a election year plus McMorris Rodgers pissed off the GOP house leadership with her antics and considering both parties realized that KOSA would censor each other during the 1st House Committee markup.
Honestly I’m getting really sick and tired of these advocates/neglectful parents acting like the internet is to blame for their neglectful parenting and we have to suffer for their mistakes like seriously they need to GTFO with their lies and bullshit.
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I wish KOSA would just, go away already.
I’m so tired of this game with politics, it just never ends.
I don’t know what it’ll take to stop it, feels like it’ll just keep going untill they finally kill all forms of expression, community, etc online.
Don’t know if I want to live in a world like that. (No, I’ll still keep living even if it happens, don’t get worried. I just would find it really, really sucky.)
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Me too on that.
So sick of these neglectful parents/advocates/politicians pushing for this piece of shit bill when the odds are stacked against it and yet they ignore the reality that it won’t pass and they act like KOSA still has a chance in hell to pass. “facepalm”
These advocates just don’t seem to live in reality but rather punish the internet for their awful parenting instead of owning up to the facts that their errors got their kids killed/harmed because they could’ve a better job of preparing their kids from the internet but of course nope.
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My issue is that I think it DOES have a chance to pass, and maybe will. If not now, then a few months later.
The courts are about the only bit of reassurance I got.
(I can’t say the same for legislation that targets section 230, meanwhile. That one just seems fucked if legislation ever passes to repeal or otherwise narrow it.)
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please don’t go into defeatism
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Trump is going to win next month, and he’ll begin deporting you and your faggot friends in February.
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Piss off weirdo.
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…posted no American, ever.
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lol, bring it straight trash. Who’s going to cut your hair and bring your coffee when you’ve deported half the country?
I’ve half a mind to make “they” my new pronoun, just because it fucks you up on the inside.
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It will keep on happening until they start getting punished for it. If politicians were to find sponsoring KOSA is a good way to get thrown out onto their asses they’ll suddenly find better uses of their time.
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I don’t understand how when they push for it, the politicians listen. But when NGOs and other groups against it push for them to not go through with it, it just goes in one ear and out the other.
It’s just not fair. It’s not fair we have to lose so much just because the other side screams louder.
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Part of it is also you got anti-internet politicians like Blumenthal who sees the “oh social media killed my child” stories and of course he uses these sob stories to justify that the internet is a terrible place (which it isn’t most of the time) and bills like KOSA will protect children but in reality would lead to censorship.
Even when other groups like EFF for example call out KOSA for what it really does the politicians bury their heads in the sand and go “lalala we can’t hear you” but when groups like FairPlay/ParentsSOS come knocking then the politicians pushing for TOTC (think of the children) laws lift their heads out and go we are listening.
They will keep trying but even if this does happen it’s practically guaranteed it will be blocked/killed in court because you can’t censor users first amendment rights on the internet and yet even if it fails they will keep trying and trying again til it sticks or they somehow give up.
I feel like someone very high on the wealth leader really wants to kill the internet or censor it to the point where we have no privacy because this individual/individuals are scared something that could cause them to lose their reputation/power possibly due to something highly illegal that they are doing and will do anything to prevent that by any means necessary.
That being said I still don’t think KOSA will happen this year because it’s an election year plus lame duck session rarely anything gets done or passed during that too.
I expect Blumenthal and the advocates to try again next year but it all depends on what new Congress we get in January but KISA would have to go thru the same hurdles the last few years all over again.
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At this point I’m just lost on what they’re hoping to accomplish if they’re this desperate to have it pushed forward. Even if it went through the House and was also approved by the president (be it Biden or Trump/Harris, whoever wins the election), it doesn’t have an immediate effect. Kids with mental health issues wouldn’t suddenly feel better, transgender kids wouldn’t magically detransition and kids’d continue to get exploited. I have to assume it’s to get the chance to just ban specific kinds of speech, but I’m pretty sure even American legislature says a representative can’t just decide ‘yep, [speech] is now 100% illegal starting Now’.
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I’m not sure, but I believe laws like KOSA aren’t an entirely new thing. Previous attempts to create something similair have been passed federally and struck down by the courts, I think.
Section 230 is, after all, a remnant of a much larger bill that got stripped down after being deemed unconstitutional. Maybe we can get KOSA stripped down similairly, and keep whatever good ideas are buried in it.