Kids Are Smart: Teach Them To Be Safe Online
from the don't-hide-the-ball dept
Last April, Utah Governor Spencer Cox noted that “Kids are smart, they’ll find ways around” Utah’s new social media bans. But that’s not the reason why these laws will fail teens in Utah, Arkansas, and Texas. These laws will fail teens because state leaders don’t believe kids are smart enough to learn to use social media appropriately.
Florida, on the other hand, had the good sense to turn to education as a tool for keeping teens safe and healthy online.
You read that correctly — Florida. The same state that launched an unconstitutional attack on Section 230 last year. The same state actively working against the First Amendment. The same state picking fights with Disney, creator of the only mouse welcome in US households. Clearly, the state has problems. But sometimes it gets things closer to correct.
Florida’s not alone either. A bill from the California legislature, the same state that passed the first problematic age-verification law, is also leaning into education as an alternative to bans. If only that’s where the desire to regulate the internet “for the children” ended.
It may be a bit too soon to say, given the bipolar attitudes of these states toward tech, but this year they both acknowledged the reality of the situation and moved in a more positive direction. When it comes to the “future of society,” as Jonathan Haidt put it, kids become adults and move away. If we don’t equip them with a basic understanding of the world online because we’ve hidden them away, we’ve failed them.
As retired Utah teacher Linda Bettinger put it, “Media literacy is education for individual empowerment.” But in the face of rising teen depression, which some attribute to teen social media use, legislators across the country looked for a shutoff valve in the form of legislative age-gating.
To be sure, the list of serious issues teens face online is a long one, including cyberbullying and child sexual exploitation. Some in Utah felt that bans were the most appropriate solution to teen “algorithm addiction.”
When all of the above are merged into a one-pager, these issues become paramount in the minds of legislators, even in the face of clear privacy and cybersecurity risks.
But there’s also a long list of healthy and beneficial uses of social media. It can be useful for learning creative applications of physics and engineering, remembering the birthdays of faraway friends and relatives, discovering symptoms of difficult-to-diagnose diseases, finding jobs, and networking with professionals, just to name a few.
Each of these is contemplated in Florida’s law and notably absent from Utah’s. Florida’s approach also accounts for the efforts of social media companies to introduce tools and resources for parents.
Far from complacent, social media companies and internet service providers (ISPs) have responded to online threats by developing safety tools. The prevalent approach among them is giving parents a say in their children’s browsing experience using time limits. At the user level, social media companies and smartphone makers alike have also begun employing tools to give parents access to child accounts and blacklisting known harmful websites.
Of course, even though the trust and safety teams at social media companies, ISPs, and device manufacturers have unquestionably reduced the baseline level of risk out in the wild, some believe the danger to teens is still too great.
But where safety tools may fail, education and parental involvement have a major role to play in picking up the slack.
In this sense, states should look to update their educational curriculum instead of banning teens. Hefty civil penalties against social media companies may play well in headlines, but teens will pay the price if forced to grow up without learning to navigate the complex online world.
Florida’s Governor may have called the state the “Utah of the Southeast,” but when it comes to teen social media use, Florida leads the field.
Caden Rosenbaum is the technology and innovation policy analyst at Libertas Institute in Lehi, Utah.
Gavin Hickman is a technology and innovation policy intern at Libertas Institute in Lehi, Utah.
Filed Under: california, florida, media literacy, regulations, social media, social media addiction, utah
Comments on “Kids Are Smart: Teach Them To Be Safe Online”
Nah. History has definitely taught us that bans work, especially when applied to teens.
Alcohol? Gone. Drug war? Won. Vapes? Non-existent.
Re:
laughs no it didnt bruh what did you smoke to make you think that
Re: Re:
I think what he was smoking was sarcasm
Or do they want to ensure that kids look to their parents rather than their peers for their lead when they are old enough to vote?
Teen depression never has anything to do with the world being fucked up. It’s just social media, or rock, or reading books.
Re:
you forgot the /s ?
Re: Re:
I think the /s was implied.
These laws will fail teens because state leaders don’t believe kids are smart enough to learn to use social media appropriately
They do in fact believe exactly that. They fully believe and know that kids will use it appropriately, and that they cannot stop kids from using it appropriately.
They also know that the “problem” is impossible to measure in any way, and that the laws will barely even impact the “problem” regardless. That too, is a desirable and intended part of the effort, as it ensures that they can obtain ever-increasing penalties from disfavored companies (and consequently reward favored companies), all while still exhorting the public to vote in favor of passing ever more laws which achieve nothing and cannot be followed. Those are, after all, the most useful kind of laws.
Why don’t any of these schemes tp protect kids from themselves involve parents being responsible for their own kids? Is that too much to expect?
Re:
This ^^
If I have to be responsible for my dog crapping on other people’s lawn and my pet hyena biting little Mary-Sue on her foot, then parents need to claim responsibility for their offspring that in theory can understand the same language.
That would mean parental responsibility and we seem to be adverse to that(well except when it comes to banning library books). Give a 12 year old a smart phone and unfettered internet access, and ham up the outrage when tech companies didn’t stop them.
Kids
The best way to get a kid to do something is to tell them that they can’t. That said, this argument has little or nothing to do with children. They’re just a convenient pawn in the ongoing censorship war being waged by a small portion of our society that insists that everyone obey a cherry-picked set of rules from a centuries-old document of dubious origin. On the other side, we have a larger group of people that prefer we follow a different document, this one only several HUNDRED years old, and of much less dubious provenance.
Am I alone in thinking that it’s time we come up with some NEW ideas in this crazy new “Information Era” before we destroy all that we’ve built by essentially driving while looking in the rearview mirror? Corporate lawyers write the majority of our legislation while our elected “leaders” spend their time on campaigning, fundraising and SOUND BITES.
Time to DEFUND THE POLITICIANS.