Australia Completely Loses The Plot, Plans To Ban Kids From Watching YouTube

Stupidity

from the down-under-and-upside-down-policymaking dept

Last fall, heavily influenced by Jonathan Haidt’s extremely problematic book, Australia announced that it was banning social media for everyone under the age of 16. This was already a horrifically stupid idea—the kind of policy that sounds reasonable in a tabloid headline but crumbles under any serious scrutiny. Over and over again studies have found that social media is neither good nor bad for most teens. It’s also good for some—especially those who are in need of finding community or like-minded individuals. It is, also, not so great for a small group of kids, though the evidence there suggests that it’s worst for those dealing with untreated mental health issues, which causes them to use social media as an alternative to help.

There remains little to no actual evidence that an outright ban will be helpful, and plenty to suggest it will be actively harmful to many.

But now Australia has decided to double down on the stupid, announcing that YouTube will be included in the ban. This escalation reveals just how disconnected from reality this entire policy framework has become. We’ve gone from “maybe we should protect kids from social media” to “let’s ban children from accessing one of the world’s largest repositories of educational content.”

Australia said on Wednesday it will add YouTube to sites covered by its world-first ban on social media for teenagers, reversing an earlier decision to exempt the Alphabet-owned video-sharing site and potentially setting up a legal challenge.

The decision came after the internet regulator urged the government last week to overturn the YouTube carve-out, citing a survey that found 37% of minors reported harmful content on the site.

This is painfully stupid and ignorant. The claim that 37% of minors reported seeing harmful content is also… meaningless without a lot more context and details. What counts as “harmful”? A swear word? Political content their parents disagree with? A video explaining evolution? What was the impact? Is this entirely self-reported? What controls were there? Just saying 37% is kind of meaningless without the details.

This is vibes-based policymaking dressed up in statistics. You could probably get 37% of kids to report “harmful content” on PBS Kids if you asked them vaguely enough. The fact that Australia’s internet regulator is using this kind of methodological garbage to reshape internet policy tells you everything you need to know about how seriously they’ve thought this through.

But also, YouTube is not just effectively the equivalent of television for teens today—it’s often far superior to traditional television because it’s not gatekept by media conglomerates with their own agendas. The idea that you should need to be 16 years old to watch some YouTube programs is beyond laughable, especially given the amount of useful educational content on YouTube. These days there are things like Complexly, Khan Academy, Mark Rober, and plenty of other educational content that kids love and which lives on YouTube. Kids are learning calculus from 3Blue1Brown, exploring history through Crash Course, and getting better science education from YouTube creators than from most traditional textbooks. This isn’t just entertainment—it’s democratized education that bypasses the gatekeeping of traditional media entirely.

This isn’t just unworkable—it’s the construction of a massive censorship infrastructure that will inevitably be used for purposes far beyond “protecting children.” Once you’ve built the system to block kids from YouTube, you’ve built the system to block anyone from anything. And that system will be irresistible to future governments with different ideas about what content people need to be “protected” from.

And the Australian government already knows that age verification tech is a privacy and security nightmare. They admitted as much two years ago.

Of course, kids will figure out ways around it anyway. VPNs exist. Older friends exist. Parents who aren’t idiots exist—and they’ll help their kids break this law. The only thing this accomplishes is teaching an entire generation that their government’s laws are arbitrary, unenforceable, and fundamentally disconnected from reality. It’s teaching kids to have less respect for government.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum, either. Australia is part of a broader global trend of governments using “protect the children” rhetoric as cover for internet control. The UK’s porn age verification disaster, the US Kids Online Safety Act, similar proposals across Europe—they all follow the same playbook. Identify a genuine concern (kids sometimes see stuff online that isn’t great for them), propose a solution that sounds reasonable in a headline (age limits!), then implement it through surveillance and censorship infrastructure that can be repurposed for whatever moral panic comes next.

The end result will be that Australia has basically taught a generation of teenagers not to trust the government, that their internet regulators are completely out of touch, and that laws are stupid. But it goes deeper than that. This kind of blatantly unworkable policy doesn’t just breed contempt for specific laws—it undermines the entire concept of legitimate governance. When laws are this obviously disconnected from technological and social reality, it signals that the people making them either don’t understand what they’re regulating or don’t care about whether their policies actually work. It’s difficult to see how that benefits anyone at all.

Filed Under: age verification, australia, bans, social media, teenagers, youtube ban
Companies: youtube

DeSantis Vetoes Terrible Social Media Bill… Only To Support One That’s Just As Bad

Free Speech

from the no,-just-kidding dept

I had thought that maybe, just maybe, now that DeSantis had dropped out of the Presidential race, maybe (just maybe?) he’d stop pushing blatantly unconstitutional laws. That’s not to say that DeSantis has any good ideas. But it felt like over the last few years, he really leaned into the nonsense culture wars in an attempt to boost his own profile for a hilariously inept Presidential run. He seemed to think that going to war with a “woke Disney” would somehow appeal to the brainwashed fools who now make up the base of his party. It didn’t work.

During the past few years, though, DeSantis passed a long list of culture war bills and watched as Florida taxpayer money was thrown away and one after another was tossed out as unconstitutional.

And there were a few signs that maybe a slightly more reasonable DeSantis was emerging. A few weeks back he talked about how he supported amending legislation that was being used to ban books in school to be more explicit in not banning books (even though he knows full well that’s the intent of the law).

And then, there’s HB 1. This is yet another new anti-social media law, which we wrote about earlier this year. The bill was from Rep. Tyler Sirois, whose website claims he is “dedicated to the principals of limited government, individual responsibility, and constitutional liberty.” (Also, fwiw, he means principles, not principals, but I think we’ve established that Tyler Sirois is not the sharpest knife in the legislative drawer).

And his first bill of this session violated all three of those things. It’s a big government bill that removes individual liberty in a clearly unconstitutional way. So, of course, the Florida legislature passed it.

A few weeks back, DeSantis made some noise suggesting he would veto it, knowing that it was unconstitutional:

“I think that I’m not going to be supporting if I don’t think it’s going to be something that’s going to pass legal muster in the courts,” Ron DeSantis said in Cape Coral.

[….]

“What I’ve said previously, these things have huge legal hurdles. They’ve been held up in courts. I don’t want to go down the road of doing something that is not going to be going to pass muster legally,” DeSantis said.

[….]

“I don’t want to have anything where government is forcing the disclosure of folks. But when you’re talking about verifying ages, if you do that in a way that’s ham-handed, you’re going to lead to that,” DeSantis said.

That sounds almost reasonable? It sounds like someone who has had multiple laws he supported thrown out as unconstitutional and who is no longer running for President, so he doesn’t need to go “full culture war.”

But, come on, this is Ron DeSantis we’re talking about here. Did anyone think he’d actually give up on unconstitutional, censorial nonsense?

On Friday, he did, in fact, veto the bill. But, he immediately said he’d be supporting another bill that he thought was better.

I have vetoed HB 1 because the Legislature is about to produce a different, superior bill. Protecting children from harms associated with social media is important, as is supporting parents’ rights and maintaining the ability of adults to engage in anonymous speech. I anticipate the new bill will recognize these priorities and will be signed into law soon.

So what is that “different, superior bill”? Turns out it’s HB 3. It’s not that different. It’s definitely not superior. It’s just as bad and (importantly) just as unconstitutional.

It bans social media for anyone under the age of 16 (already found to be unconstitutional elsewhere). It requires parental controls/parental consent for accounts under 16 (already found to be unconstitutional elsewhere).

Therefore, I’m going to suggest that DeSantis doesn’t really much care about whether or not he supports a clearly unconstitutional bill, or that he will be wasting more taxpayer money defending it. He just didn’t like this one unconstitutional bill and appears to prefer a different one. That’s not progress. It’s moving sideways.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, florida, parental consent, ron desantis, social media, teenagers, tyler sirois

Governor Newsom Desperately Begs NetChoice To Drop Its Lawsuit Over Unconstitutional AADC Bill

Overhype

from the this-is-embarrassing dept

We’ve written a lot about AB 2273, California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) that requires websites with users in California to try to determine the ages of all their visitors, write up dozens of reports on potential harms, and then seek to mitigate those harms. I’ve written about why it’s literally impossible to comply with the law. We’ve had posts on how it conflicts with privacy laws and how it’s a radical experimentation on children (ironically, the drafters of the bill insist that they’re trying to stop experimentation on children).

We’ve also written about how NetChoice, an internet company trade group, has sued to block the law as unconstitutional, and how I filed a declaration explaining how the law would violate the rights of both us at Techdirt and our users.

That lawsuit has continued to move forward, with California filing a pretty laughable reply saying that it doesn’t regulate speech at all. NetChoice has filed its own reply as well, highlighting how ridiculous that is:

The State claims that AB 2273 regulates data management—“nonexpressive conduct,” Opp. 11—not speech. Nonsense. AB 2273’s text expressly requires services to “mitigate or eliminate” risks that a child “could” encounter “potentially harmful … content” online. Content was the through-line in the legislative process: Defendant Attorney General Bonta praised the Act precisely because it would “protect children from … harmful material” and “dangerous online content”—in other words, speech—and Governor Newsom lauded the law for “protect[ing] kids” from harmful “content.” The State’s own expert, who mentions “content” in her declaration 71 times, derides preexisting laws specifically because they “only” cover data management, not content. Radesky Decl. ¶ 98. The State cannot evade the Constitution by pretending the Act regulates only “business practices … related to the collection and use of children’s personal information,” Opp. 11, when the law’s text, purpose, and effect are to regulate and shape online content. Like California’s last attempt to “restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed,” Brown v. Ent. Merchs. Ass’n, 564 U.S. 786, 792, 794 (2011), AB 2273 violates the First Amendment

It appears that Governor Newsom may have realized how badly this case is going to go for him. Days after NetChoice filed that reply, Newsom sent NetChoice an angry letter demanding that it drop the case.

The text is quite remarkable… and bizarre. Newsom sounds… angry. Perhaps because he realizes (per the above) that his own words in support of the bill and how it should be used to block “content” are going to make him lose this case.

Enough is enough. In light of new action and findings released by the U.S. Surgeon General, I urge you to drop your lawsuit challenging California’s children’s online safety law.

Except, as we just detailed, the Surgeon General’s report does not find that the internet harms kids, and actually makes it clear that most kids benefit from social media. Straight from the report that it appears Newsom did not read:

A majority of adolescents report that social media helps them feel more accepted (58%), like they have people who can support them through tough times (67%), like they have a place to show their creative side (71%), and more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives (80%). In addition, research suggests that social media-based and other digitally-based mental health interventions may also be helpful for some children and adolescents by promoting help-seeking behaviors and serving as a gateway to initiating mental health care.

But, Newsom appears to have only read the headlines that misconstrue what’s in the actual report. His letter then goes into full on moral panic mode:

Every day as our children browse the internet to connect with one another, build community, and learn, they are also pushed to horrific content and exposed to data mining and location tracking. This reality is dangerous to their safety, mental health, and well-being. That’s why, last September, I was proud to sign the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act — a bipartisan, first-in-the-nation law that protects the health and privacy of children using online platforms and prohibits online services from encouraging children to provide personal information.

Except, nearly everything in that paragraph is wrong. Embarrassingly so. There is no evidence that children are “pushed to horrific content.” It is true that there may be horrific content online, but the idea that companies are pushing kids to that content is not supported by the evidence. Furthermore, it’s rich that he’s complaining about “data mining and location tracking” while saying that this bill prohibits companies from seeking “personal information” from kids when the law’s “age assurance” requirements suggest the exact opposite. To comply with the law, websites will be effectively required to demand information from users to determine a likely age.

As I explained in my own declaration in the lawsuit, at Techdirt we have bent over backwards to learn as little about the folks who read our site as possible. But under the law, we will likely be compelled to institute a program in which we are required to determine the age of everyone who visits. In other words, the law requires more data mining, not less, and explicitly requires it for children.

Newsom continues the nonsense:

Rather than join California in protecting our children, your association, which represents major tech companies including Google, Meta, TikTok, and Twitter, chose to sue over this commonsense law. In your lawsuit, you have gone so far as to make light of the real harms our children face on the internet, trivializing this law as just being about teenagers who “say unkind things, insufficiently ‘like’ another’s posts,” or are unhappy about “the omission of a ‘trigger warning.’”

Again, nothing in this law actually protects children. Instead, it puts them at much greater risk of having information exposed, as we’ve noted. It will also make it next to impossible for children to research important information regarding mental health, or to find out the information they need to help them deal with things like eating disorders, since it will drive basically all of that content offline (at least where kids can reach it).

As for the claim that NetChoice is “trivializing this law,” that’s obviously bullshit to anyone who has read the filings in context (which apparently does not include this angry Governor Newsom). The references in that paragraph are in NetChoice’s motion for a preliminary injunction, but taken completely out of context. They’re not trivializing the issues children face: they’re pointing out that the way the law is drafted (i.e., very, very badly), it also applies to those more “trivial” situations. From the preliminary injunction filing:

AB 2273 also adopts a boundless conception of what speech must be restricted, including speech that cannot constitutionally be restricted even for minors. The requirement that services enforce their own policies, id. § 1798.99.31(a)(9), will lead them to suppress swaths of protected speech that the State could not restrict directly. See supra § IV.A.1.b. The bar on using algorithms and user information to recommend or promote content will restrict a provider’s ability to transmit protected speech based on the user’s expressed interests. And the law’s restrictions on content that might be “detrimental” or “harmful” to a child’s “well-being,” id. § 1798.99.31(a)(1)(b), (b)(1), (3)-(4), (7), could restrict expression on any topic that happens to distress any child or teen. This would include a range of important information children are constitutionally entitled to receive, such as commentary or news about the war in Ukraine, the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the United States Capitol, the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, school shootings, and countless other controversial, significant events.

More fundamentally, the “harm” the law seeks to address—that content might damage someone’s “well-being”—is a function of human communication itself. AB 2273 applies to, among other things, communications by teenagers on social media, who may say unkind things, insufficiently “like” another’s posts, or complain harshly about events at school; the use of language acceptable to some but not others; the omission of a “trigger warning”; and any other manner of discourse online. See, e.g., Mahanoy Area Sch. Dist. v. B. L., 141 S. Ct. 2038 (2021) (Snapchat post “fuck cheer” made high school students “visibly upset”)

So, no. The lawsuit is not trivializing harms children face by saying that it’s nothing more than kids saying unkind things, NetChoice is (accurately) pointing out that the broad language of the law means that it could be applied to those situations, rather than ones dealing with actual harm.

It’s pathetic and embarrassing that Newsom would imply that this paragraph was trivializing harms. His complete and total misread of what’s in the lawsuit is trivializing the seriousness of his state’s own law that is violating 1st Amendment rights.

Anyway, Newsom goes on:

Yet at the same time you are in court callously mocking this law, experts are confirming the known dangers of online platforms for kids and teens: Just days ago, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on the profound toll that social media takes on kids’ and teens’ mental health without adequate safety and privacy standards. Your association and its members may be interested to learn of the Surgeon General’s urgent findings about the sexual extortion of our children, and the alarming links between youth social media and cyberbullying, depression, suicide, and unhealthy and dangerous outcomes and behaviors.

Honestly, this is making me wonder if Newsom ever reads anything. Because, as we discussed that is not what the Surgeon General’s report says at all. It literally says that there are widespread benefits to social media and then says “we do not have enough evidence” regarding whether or not it’s harmful. It notes there are concerns, and some “correlational” studies, but nothing proving a causal link. It notes that we need more research on that point.

So how the hell is Newsom claiming that it is claiming there is a “profound toll” from social media? The report does not say that.

As for the “Surgeon General’s urgent findings about the sexual extortion of our children,” again Newsom is blatantly misstating what the report says. It notes that the internet has been used for sexual extortion, which is a fact, but nothing in the AADC will stop bad people from being terrible. The report does not say anything about this fact being “urgent” or requiring social media companies to magically make people stop being bad. It just mentions such things as the kind of problematic content that exists online.

As for the “alarming links between youth social media and cyberbullying, depression, suicide, and unhealthy and dangerous outcomes and behaviors” that’s AGAIN misreading the Surgeon General’s report. Again, it does mention those things, but does not discuss “alarming links.” It highlights correlational concerns again, and suggests further research and caution. But does not mention any sort of causal link, alarming or not.

In fact, with regards to cyberbullying, the Surgeon General’s recommendations talk about better educating teachers, parents, and children on how to deal with such things. And, its one policy recommendation around cyberbullying is not to force websites to censor content, as the AADC does, but rather to “support the development, implementation, and evaluation of digital and media literacy curricular in schools and within academic standards.”

In other words, what the Surgeon General is kinda saying is that our policy makers are the ones who have failed our kids by not teaching them how to be good digital citizens.

Governor Newsom, that one’s on you.

So, so far we have Newsom lying about the law, lying about the filings from NetChoice, and now lying about the Surgeon General’s report. I know it’s a post-truth political world we live in, but I expect better from California’s governor.

But he’s not done yet:

The harms of unregulated social media are established and clear.

The Surgeon General’s report — not to mention the even more thorough report from the American Psychological Association — literally say the opposite. They say it is not clear, and much more research needs to be done.

Governor Newsom, you should stop lying.

It is time for the tech industry to stop standing in the way of important protections for our kids and teens, and to start working with us to keep our kids safe.”

Stomping on 1st Amendment rights and lying about everything is not “keeping our kids safe” Governor.

Filed Under: aadc, ab 2273, age appropriate, data, gavin newsom, moral panic, social media, studies, surgeon general, teenagers
Companies: netchoice

APA Report Says That Media & Politicians Are Simply Wrong About Kids & Social Media; Media Then Lies About Report

Studies

from the parents-need-to-parent,-news-at-11 dept

What if the media and the politicians threw a moral panic about kids and social media… and the actual experts didn’t come along? The American Psychological Association has put out a thoughtful, nuanced study, about kids and social media, that suggests that the hyperventilating we’ve heard about is misplaced, and that there are some simple common sense approaches that parents can and should take to make sure their kids are having a healthy experience with social media.

But it seems that the media is so bought into the moral panic narrative, that they’re completely misrepresenting the study, claiming it supports the moral panic.

The core findings, similar to what we’ve been saying all along, and which is supported by multiple other studies, is that social media is not inherently bad for kids. For the vast majority, it’s neutral or positive. There is a small percentage who seem to have issues with it, and we should focus our attention on dealing with those cases, rather than pushing for things like outright bans. From the findings of the APA report:

Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people. Adolescents’ lives online both reflect and impact their offline lives. In most cases, the effects of social media are dependent on adolescents’ own personal and psychological characteristics and social circumstances—intersecting with the specific content, features, or functions that are afforded within many social media platforms. In other words, the effects of social media likely depend on what teens can do and see online, teens’ preexisting strengths or vulnerabilities, and the contexts in which they grow up.

Adolescents’ experiences online are affected by both 1) how they shape their own social media experiences (e.g., they choose whom to like and follow); and 2) both visible and unknown features built into social media platforms.

Not all findings apply equally to all youth. Scientific findings offer one piece of information that can be used along with knowledge of specific youths’ strengths, weaknesses, and context to make decisions that are tailored for each teen, family, and community.

Of course, If you’ve been paying attention lately, we’ve been talking a lot about the ongoing moral panic regarding kids and social media. We’re hearing over and over again that social media is dangerous for all kids. Full stop. We’ve pointed out repeatedly that the data and research on the issues do not support literally any of the claims that politicians (and the media) are making about the impact of social media on kids.

But neither the media nor politicians seem to much care about the facts here. Claiming that social media is bad for kids and “something must be done” appeases voters who have been sold this line of bullshit. And, of course, if you scratch the surface a little, it’s not difficult to find the legacy entertainment industry pulling strings behind the scenes. After all, they’ve always hated the internet, and they own the major TV news providers as well, so it’s somehow easy for them to present nonsense as fact and have everyone buy it.

For example, around the same time this report came out, saying that social media is not inherently harmful to kids, I received a press release from a group, announcing a new “PSA” from famed Hollywood actress Laura Linney which really plays up the nonsense claims, stating that within 15 seconds of a child getting on social media, the services are trying to deliberately feed that child dangerous information.

“Within 15 seconds of logging on to social media, the algorithm has your daughter in its crosshairs.

“It sends her a steady flow of messages telling her she isn’t thin enough, pretty enough. They invade her brain, causing body dysmorphia, anxiety, depression – leading to the worst rates of eating disorders, self harm and suicide we have ever known. All while she is sitting right next to you, on her phone.

“Congress knows but it refuses to act. Don’t let her suffer the secret pain alone. Use your voice. Demand a plan.”

This bit of pure manipulative disinformation comes from a Hollywood group, the “Entertainment Industry Foundation” and a moral panic outrage operation called The Center for Countering Digital Hate, which seems to believe that flat out lying to people is a reasonable approach to attacking social media.

But, again, none of this is new. The Pew study we talked about in the fall, found that the vast, vast, vast majority of teenagers either found social media beneficial or neutral. Only a small percentage found it harmful. Lots of people like to (misleadingly) cite the documents that Frances Haugen leaked to the Wall Street Journal, but as we’ve detailed over and over and over again, what the main study found was that in 23 out of 24 categories they studied, a large majority of teens felt better or neutral about themselves, and there was only one single area (teen girls regarding body image) where just slightly more girls felt worse about themselves than better (and it was still just in the range of 1 out of 3. And, the whole reason this slide existed with this headline was because Meta found that single bad result to be a problem and so they were talking about how to deal with it.

None of this presents a world in which these companies don’t care, or are deliberately “invading her brain” with negative messages about herself.

And, on top of that, all of these moral panics seem to assume the only answer is to ban kids completely or block all discussions of certain types of speech even though we have years and years of detailed studies showing that that does not work. At all. COPPA is supposed to keep kids under 13 from using internet services, but parents recognize that many of those services are useful for their kids, so they teach their kids to lie in order to use them.

And for complex topics, like eating disorders, multiple studies have also shown that banning those topics actually made things worse. The kids still found a way to talk about those things, but in ways that were more difficult for adults to monitor, and where it was more difficult for people to go into those conversations and provide help to those who needed it to help them try to deal with their eating disorders.

In other words, the moral panic is not only wrong, it’s dangerous.

The APA’s recommendations are careful, thoughtful, and nuanced. They suggest kids (with the help of their parents) learn to use social media in a productive, healthy manner.

Youth using social media should be encouraged to use functions that create opportunities for social support, online companionship, and emotional intimacy that can promote healthy socialization

Data suggest that youths’ psychological development may benefit from this type of online social interaction, particularly during periods of social isolation, when experiencing stress, when seeking connection to peers with similar developmental and/or health conditions, and perhaps especially for youth who experience adversity or isolation in offline environments.

The APA specifically notes that social media may be particularly helpful to marginalized teenagers or those facing mental health challenges:

Social media may be psychologically beneficial particularly among those experiencing mental health crises, or members of marginalized groups that have been disproportionately harmed in online contexts. For instance, access to peers that allows LGBTQIA+ and questioning adolescents to provide support to and share accurate health information with one another is beneficial to psychological development, and can protect youth from negative psychological outcomes when experiencing stress. This may be especially important for topics that adolescents feel reluctant to or are unable to discuss with a parent or caregiver.

They also suggest that when kids are younger, it’s appropriate for parents to help kids with social media, to teach them how to use it appropriately and safely, but as they get older, it’s important to let them discover things for themselves:

In early adolescence (i.e., typically 10–14 years), adult monitoring (i.e., ongoing review, discussion, and coaching around social media content) is advised for most youths’ social media use; autonomy may increase gradually as kids age and if they gain digital literacy skills. However, monitoring should be balanced with youths’ appropriate needs for privacy.

Brain regions associated with a desire for attention, feedback, and reinforcement from peers become increasingly sensitive beginning in early adolescence, and regions associated with mature self-control are not fully developed until adulthood. Parental monitoring (i.e., coaching and discussion) and developmentally appropriate limit-setting thus is critical, especially in early adolescence.

Adults’ own use of social media in youths’ presence should also be carefully considered. Science demonstrates that adults’ (e.g., caregivers’) orientation and attitudes toward social media (e.g., using during interactions with their children, being distracted from in-person interactions by social media use) may affect adolescents’ own use of social media.

Preliminary research suggests that a combination of 1) social media limits and boundaries, and 2) adult–child discussion and coaching around social media use, leads to the best outcomes for youth.

The report does suggest helping kids avoid content that advocates for harmful or illegal behavior, and recommends that social media sites prioritize de-prioritizing such content but the report also recommends that the best way to handle much of this is to train children to learn how to recognize problematic content such as online racism and how to properly deal with it:

Adolescents should be trained to recognize online structural racism and critique racist messages. Research shows that young people who are able to critique racism experience less psychological distress when they witness race-related traumatic events online. As noted above, adults’ monitoring and active discussion of online content can also reduce the effects of exposure to cyberhate on adolescents’ psychological adjustment.

There are a few other recommendations in there, but on the whole, the report repeats what we’ve been saying all along. Most kids get value out of online services, and the best way to handle things is to better educate them and prepare them for what they may see online. Teach them how to deal with the real world, don’t hide it from them and then dump it all at them when they hit a certain birthday.

So, given this thoughtful balanced approach that goes against the media narrative, how do you think the media covered this report? NPR Morning Edition did a whole segment focusing the attention on the exact opposite of what the report actually said: “Major psychologists’ group warns of social media’s potential harm to kids” blares the title.

Honestly, I don’t see how you could read this report and have that be your takeaway, because most of the report is literally saying the opposite. Michaeleen Doucleff’s full report is even worse, because it flat out pats itself on the back for claiming it predicted there was “mounting evidence” of harm caused to kids… which against IS NOT WHAT THE REPORT SAYS.

And, as NPR has reported, there’s mounting evidence that social media can exacerbate and even cause these problems.

It’s like Doucleff decided what she wanted the report to say and just pretended it said that. Hilariously, there’s really only one paragraph saying that the report has 10 recommendations, and notes that the recommendations are “primarily for parents” and then IMMEDIATELY quotes some random therapist who disagrees with the report to say it’s wrong.

NPR is usually pretty good about reporting things, but this is just laughably bad.

Thankfully, much of the other reporting on this report is more accurate, with the focus being on the APA’s recommendations to better train kids in how to use social media appropriately. But still, the report has received almost no coverage at all from the mainstream media outside of NPR, and certainly none that I can see from Hollywood-owned news properties which have been promoting the FUD about social media and kids for over a year now.

Of course, none of this will stop politicians from pushing forward their bills that go exactly against the recommendations here. And we’ll still continue to hear people insist that it’s “proven” that social media is damaging and making kids kill themselves or get eating disorders. The reality is a lot more nuanced and complex, and it would be nice if some of the institutions we’re supposed to trust — media and politicians — actually paid attention to the data.

Filed Under: digital literacy, health, kids, moral panic, parenting, social media, teenagers
Companies: apa

Arkansas Governor Signs Social Media Bill Into Law, Even As Bill’s Own Sponsor Appears Confused About Who It Covers

Legal Issues

from the backwards-lawmaking dept

What could possibly go wrong? Earlier this week we wrote about an Arkansas bill, SB396, which was modeled after Utah’s recent unconstitutional social media bill, and tries to ban kids from social media. Except, as we noted, it appeared to explicitly exempt pretty much all of social media, except for maybe Facebook and Twitter. The wording is so unclear, but also, oddly specific. For example, it says it exempts:

Social media company that allows a user to generate short video clips of dancing, voice overs, or other acts of entertainment in which the primary purpose is not educational or informative

Which, yes, seems strange. However, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who also recently signed into law a bill to end the process of age verifying workers in meat processing plants, is suddenly concerned about the welfare of children, and so happily signed this bill, claiming it will protect children.

Yes, now only meat packing plants can get away with exploiting kids for profit in Arkansas.

And, of course, all of the evidence suggests that this law will actually put many kids in much greater danger, as well as harm everyone’s privacy. Age gating sites will require intrusive age verification procedures, which create all sorts of security nightmares. Requiring parental permission will put kids who are estranged from their parents, or who engage in activities or beliefs at odds with their parents, at risk.

But, still, the bill is so poorly worded that even the sponsor of the bill, Senator Tyler Dees, is confused. Again, the bill appears to explicitly exempt social media that involves “short video clips of dancing” (which could likely exclude TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube in some form). But the sponsor claims it’s targeting those very sites.

“The purpose of this bill was to empower parents and protect kids from social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat,” Dees said in a statement. “We worked with stakeholders to ensure that email, text messaging, video streaming, and networking websites were not covered by the bill.”

Except it sure looks like you exempted most of those.

Either way, this bill is just as unconstitutional as the Utah bill. It’s privacy invasive, and it rips apart the right of children to access information, which has long been established by the Supreme Court.

Filed Under: arkansas, protect the children, sarah huckabee sanders, social media, social media ban, teenagers, tyler dees
Companies: facebook, instagram, meta, tiktok, youtube

Utah Lawmakers Rushing Through Bills To Destroy The Internet… ‘For The Children’

Policy

from the utah-again? dept

The evidence-free moral panic over social media keeps getting stupider, and when things get particularly stupid about the internet, you can pretty much rely on Utah politicians being there to proudly embrace the terrible ideas. The latest are a pair of bills that seem to be on the fast track, even in Utah’s short legislative session. The bills are HB311 from Rep. Jordan Teuscher and SB152 from Senator Michael McKell (author of a number of previous bad bills about the internet).

Both of these bills continue the unfortunate (and bipartisan) trend of taking away the autonomy of teenagers, treating them as if they’re babies who need to be watched over at every moment. It’s part of the typical moral panic that suggests that rather than teaching kids how to handle the internet and how to be prepared for real life, kids should effectively only be allowed to access a Disneyfied version of the internet.

Following California’s recently passed and horrific AB 2273 (again, these are bipartisan bad ideas), both bills would require websites to age verify people who visit.

Beginning January 1, 2024, a social media company shall verify the age of a Utah resident before the Utah resident may:

(a) continue to use the Utah resident’s account on the social media company’s social media platform if the account existed before January 1, 2024; or
(b) create an account with the social media company’s social media platform.

This is one of those things that people who have never actually studied this issue think is a good idea, but where everyone who has any experience at all in this knows it’s a terrible idea and a privacy nightmare. As we recently noted, even the French Data Protection Agency (which is one of the most anti-internet regulatory agencies around) has called out that every possible solution for age verification is terrible for privacy. And for good reason. As we’ve discussed, the biggest age verification tool around happens to be the one owned by the company behind Pornhub.

In other words, Utah politicians may be requiring every Utah resident to be giving their private data over to a porn company. Nice one, McKell!

Of course, there are new entrants in the age verification market who say it’s no big deal, you’ll just have to have your face scanned (for a few seconds, so they can get a “proof of liveness”) for every website you visit. How very dystopian.

Also, for all the talk of how scary and bad TikTok is because of how much data it collects and possibly sends back to China, it’s worth noting that this bill will require TikTok to collect way more information and private data on children. Way to go, Utah!

Believe it or not, McKell’s SB152 bill gets even worse. If someone is under the age of 18 (as “minor” is defined in the bill), then any social media company has to give parents access to their kids’ accounts.

Beginning January 1, 2024, a social media company shall provide a parent or guardian who has given parental consent for a Utah minor account holder under Section 13-63-102 with a password or other means for the parent or guardian to access the account, which shall allow the parent or guardian to view:

(1) all posts the Utah minor account holder makes under the social media platform account; and
(2) all responses and messages sent to or by the Utah minor account holder in the social media platform account.

So many problems, so little time. First off, even while it says that “other means” should be available, the idea that a law is requiring a website to hand over passwords is absolutely ridiculous. Because no website should be able to access passwords themselves. They should be encrypted, meaning that even the website shouldn’t have access to the passwords in a form that they could give to parents.

Utah has actual computer security people living in the state, right? Because it’s clear McKell’s team spoke with none of them if this made it into the bill.

But, more substantially, this is nuts. No, parents should not be able to spy on everything their teenagers do and say to others. There may be times and places where that’s appropriate for some families and some kids on the younger end, when they’re just learning how to use these services, but teaching 17 year olds that they should be surveilled all the time by their parents is ridiculous, and takes away their own basic fundamental rights.

And, I mean, it’s pretty fucking rich that these Utah politicians claim they need to do this to protect the children, when, well, stories like this are common and easy to find with just a quick search. Maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t the internet.

Finally, the bill says that social media cannot be accessed by kids between 10:30pm and 6:30am. The social media company has to block them. Does McKell not know that parents can install pretty easily accessible tools to do this for themselves? Why does the government need to do this?

As for HB 311, there’s some overlap here. It also requires age verification, and has all the problems we discussed above that come with that. But then it also says that no one under the age of 16 is allowed to have a social media account. Again, this is beyond stupid. We already know how this works out, and it appears that no one in the Utah legislature bothered to do even the slightest amount of research. Most websites these days ban children under 13, to avoid having to deal with federal COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) regulations. And, because many of these services are still useful, even for kids, we’ve built a system where parents are teaching their kids to lie about their age to access these sites.

I know plenty of families with kids who have set up Gmail accounts, Zoom accounts, Discord accounts and other such things by lying about their kids’ ages, because those tools (used properly) are really useful for kids to communicate with family members, especially grandparents. From the link above (from over a decade ago):

Many parents want their children to have access to free email accounts, like those provided by Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Gmail. Instant messaging access is often important to parents and video and voice chat services like Skype are especially important to immigrant parents who have extended family outside of the U.S. When Dr. boyd asked parents why they wanted their children to have access to email, IM, and other chat services at a young age, the explanation was consistent: to keep in touch with family. Grandparents were most frequently cited as the reason why parents created accounts for their young children. Many parents will create accounts for children even before they are literate. One parent explained that “giggle vision” was an extremely important way for his daughter to communicate with her grandparents. Although some parents create accounts for children as young as 6 or 8, these parents are very involved in when and how these accounts are used.

By middle school, communication tools like email and IM are quite popular among tweens (ages 10-12). Tweens pressure their parents for permission to get access to accounts on these services because they want to communicate with their classmates, church friends, and friends who have moved away. Although parents in the wealthiest and most educated segments of society often forbid their children from signing up to social network sites until they turn 13, most parents support their children’s desires to acquire email and IM. To join, tweens consistently lie about their age when asked to provide it. When Dr. boyd interviewed youth about who taught them to lie, the overwhelming answer was parents. Dr. boyd interviewed parents who consistently admitted to helping their children circumvent the age restriction by teaching them that they needed to choose a birth year that would make them over 13. Even in households where an older sibling or friend was the educator, parents knew their children had email and IM accounts.

Of course, the Utah politicians pushing this will say that such studies don’t matter, because with “age verification” they won’t be able to lie. But beyond the privacy issues, you can bet that people will quickly figure out how to get around those things as well.

And the idea of keeping kids away from the tools to communicate with schoolmates is laughable. Kids always find a way. I’m reminded of the story from a few years back when schools had banned social media to avoid kids communicating that way… so the kids essentially turned Google Docs (which they needed access to for school) into their own private social media network.

Kids are going to find a way to communicate, no matter how much the overly paternalistic Utah politicians wish they’d stay silent.

These bills are about taking away the rights of teenagers, because a few stuffy Utah politicians have forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager and wish to inflict maximum pain on teens, and take away their basic rights to communicate with one another.

And, boy, are they being obnoxious about it. At a hearing earlier this week, apparently some politicians demanded to know whether or not those speaking out against the bill had children — as if that was any of their business.

At least some people were speaking out against the bill… including teenagers!

Not everyone was in support of the bill, and some — including 13-year-old Lucy Loewen — said the benefits of social media can outweigh the downside. Lucy said teenagers can use social media to connect with friends and that those connections can help them deal with depression and suicidal thoughts.

“Will this really be creating responsible teenagers and adults if the government is just taking over and not letting us choose for ourselves?” she asked the committee. “We want to stop government intervention, so why would we let the government control our lives?”

Lucy’s right, on multiple levels. As we discussed recently, new research from the Pew Research Center found that most teens get real value out of social media. And it seems like, as Lucy notes, the way to deal with those who struggle with it is to help create responsible teens: that means not just teaching them how to handle difficult situations, but also showing that you trust them. That doesn’t mean spying on their every move, helicoptering over them and demanding their private info. It means preparing them for the real world instead of totally sheltering them from it.

And, of course, with bills like this already being passed in California and now being considered in Utah, you can expect them to spread, perhaps even to the federal level. Already, Rep. Chris Stewart seems to have copied HB311 at the federal level, introducing a bill in Congress to ban social media for kids under the age of 16. We didn’t even mention it above, but this would be pretty blatantly unconstitutional anyway, and I’d celebrate the teenager who took that case to the Supreme Court to remind these busybody politicians that teenagers have 1st Amendment rights themselves.

Tragically, it seems that actually trusting kids and teaching them how to be good citizens is not the sort of thing that Utah elected officials believe in. Which is a real shame.

Filed Under: age verification, hb311, jordan teuscher, michael mckell, sb152, social media, surveillance, teenagers, trust, utah

The Latest Moral Panic Focuses On Discord

Overhype

from the stop-the-moral-panics dept

Techno moral panics are back in fashion, it seems. There have been multiple (misleading) stories about “kids and social media“, and then there are always attempts to dive into specific “new” services. Last fall, it was all about the kids and their TikTok challenges. But, Tiktok is so last year. So now CNN is back again, and this time the target of its moral panic is Discord. It has a whole scary article about “the dark side of Discord for teens.”

Except if you replace “Discord” with any other ways that teens talk to each other the story wouldn’t be much different. I’m reminded of earlier freakouts about instant messaging. Or the widespread moral panic in the 1980s about kids in day care. Or how about the moral panic of kids who went to raves in the 1980s and 90s. Everywhere you look, they all seem to have the same kind of pattern. This new thing is putting kids at risk and something must be done!

The CNN piece does include some harrowing stories of teens who were approached by strangers on Discord. But it makes no effort to examine how widespread this actually is, or if it’s any different or more prevalent than any other situation involving kids. Obviously it’s bad if kids are put at risk via the internet, but the solution to that is not to attack a single tool. Because if it’s not Discord it’s going to be a different app. People talk to other people. And sometimes those people are not good.

In the past people used telephones to talk to others, and I can assure you that in the olden days some adults made inappropriate phone calls to children. We should never think that’s okay, but we similarly shouldn’t blame telephones for that. We should blame the adults and hold them liable.

Indeed, the CNN piece lumps together a wide variety of “harms” as if they are all the same and can be dealt with the same way, even though that’s nonsense:

CNN Business spoke to nearly a dozen parents who shared stories about their teenagers being exposed to self-harm chats, sexually explicit content and sexual predators on the platform, including users they believed were older men seeking inappropriate pictures and videos.

Being exposed to sexual predators is an entirely different category of problem from “self-harm chats” or even “sexually explicit content.” But CNN (conveniently) lumps them all together, and focuses mostly on those predators, the most sensational aspect of the story, rather than figuring out how big of an issue it actually is.

As for “self-harm chats” that can mean a wide variety of things. Often, teenagers are exploring complicated emotions, and researching things is part of that process. As we wrote in our case study about kids and eating disorders, the research actually shows that allowing kids to read about it often helped to get them to realize they had a problem, rather than driving them towards more harm. Hiding all that content doesn’t change that. As for “sexually explicit content” — again, that can mean a lot of things, and if we’re talking about teenagers, you kind of have to expect that some of them are likely trying to understand and explore their own sexuality. That’s not to say it should be a free for all — obviously. But, both of those may be cases of teenagers being teenagers and trying to figure out who they are.

That’s quite different from being preyed upon.

Similarly, the thing that is starkly absent from the CNN piece is any sense of parental responsibility. And by that I don’t mean parental surveillance. So much of the CNN piece seems to hint that if only Discord enabled parents to constantly spy on their kids, this wouldn’t be a problem. But that’s not helpful. Kids need to learn how to handle challenging situations — in the same sense that parents should teach their kids how to have some level of street smarts for when they will be walking alone on the streets, parents need to teach their kids to be digitally smart: to know how to avoid problems online and how to respond should they come across something they shouldn’t.

But, rather than tell that story, it’s easier to write a whole scare story about how “Discord is dangerous for kids.” It’s lazy reporting and it leads to really bad overreactions by politicians and parents. CNN: do better.

Filed Under: kids, moral panic, online safety, teenagers
Companies: discord

CNN Goes Full Moral Panic About Kids And Social Media

Culture

from the have-we-no-balance? dept

CNN, the news organization that, until recently, employed Chris Cuomo, and still employs Jeffrey Toobin, and is (for the moment at least) owned by AT&T which funded an entire extremist propaganda TV network just to appease President Trump (not to mention being absolutely terrible on privacy issues), wants you to hate social media. There may be reasons to hate on social media, but it’s difficult to take CNN seriously when it presents itself (1) as some unbiased party in this discussion, and (2) puts forth an article that is nothing more than blatant moral panic propaganda about kids and social media.

Are there dangers to kids on social media? Maybe! Are there benefits for kids on social media? Maybe! Does the article only present one side full of anecdotes without any actual data? You bet. The article presents a couple of anecdotes about teens with depression, and then just insists that it’s because of social media. Apparently it may surprise CNN’s reporters to learn this, but teenagers (and adults) have been dealing with depression for a long, long time, including before social media existed. Again, it’s entirely possible that social media creates image problems for teens, but the article repeatedly just insists its true without evidence. It opens with a pure anecdote that is designed to pull at the emotional heart strings.

Last September, just a few weeks into the school year, Sabine Polak got a call from the guidance counselor. Her 14-year-old daughter was struggling with depression and had contemplated suicide.

“I was completely floored,” said Polak, 45, who lives in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. “I had no clue she was even feeling remotely down at all. When I asked her about it, she just kept saying she wanted to get away from it all … but I didn’t know what that meant.”

After taking her to a crisis center, which banned phone use for anyone checking in, Polak learned from her daughter that the pressures of social media were driving her increased anxiety. The main source of stress: waiting for her friends to open and respond to messages and photos on Snapchat.

Okay. But people had anxiety pre-internet as well. It’s easy to blame it on these services, but what actual evidence is there? The article presents literally none.

And the only attempts at pointing to “evidence”… doesn’t say what it seems to think it says. There are just some of the documents Frances Haugen revealed, which showed a study that Facebook/Instagram conducted showing that some teens self-reported that Instagram makes them feel worse about themselves. But what nearly all of the reporting left out — and CNN of course ignores — is that same study showed a much larger percentage said that Instagram made them feel better about themselves.

That doesn’t mean that anyone should discount those who are depressed, or those who claim that Instagram and social media make them feel worse about themselves. Because anything that can be done to help should be explored. But presenting a totally one-sided article that suggests social media is all bad for kids and dangerous ignores all the people (again, a much larger percentage) who found that social media helps them.

It seems most likely that much of it depends on existing personality types and how people use social media. If you use it to make connections and maintain friendships, it can be super helpful. If you use it as a barometer of how much better other people’s lives are, it’s easy to see how it can be damaging. But how do you allow one and prevent the other?

Unfortunately, the CNN piece explores exactly none of this nuance. Instead, it just runs the party line: “social media = bad for teens.” And in doing so it ignores all the many teens who are able to connect with people, or find their communities, or explore interests that their local schoolmates might not have, all thanks to the internet’s ability to bring them together.

Any serious look at the challenges and negative impacts of social media has to take into account the flipside as well, and come up with some sort of plan to balance the two, and explore how do you help encourage more of the good kind of connectivity, and minimize the problematic kinds. But that’s not what CNN gives you. If you read the CNN article you’d naturally assume that all social media is bad for all teens, and the only solution is to take the phone away from your kid.

Later in the article, there’s a second bit of “evidence,” but it comes from Bark, a company that sells parental snooping software and has a huge economic incentive to scare parents into believing their kids are all being lead astray by social media. Again, a thoughtful exploration of the challenges of teens and social media might look for a more credible source, but that’s not what CNN’s reporters were doing. They had a narrative, and they needed to support it, so this is what they got.

Some data also support that mental health issues among young people on social media are on the rise. Bark, a paid monitoring service that screens social media apps, personal messages and emails for terms and phrases that could indicate concerns, said it saw a 143% increase in alerts sent around self-harm and suicidal ideation during the first three months of 2021 compared to the year prior. (Parents receive alerts when Bark detects potential issues, along with expert recommendations from child psychologists for how to address them.)

“Our children’s lives are buried deep within their phones and the problems live within their digital signal in places that parents don’t go,” said Titania Jordan, chief marketing officer of Bark. “If you’re not spending time in the places where your children are online, how can you be educated and then how can you give them guidance?”

Yeah, quote the person trying to sell subscriptions to the service, because that’s reliable and credible.

And the article does basically nothing in exploring the challenges of what you might actually do about this if it were true. There are suggestions of taking away these services from kids, which again kind of ignores that many more people find these services helpful and useful than find them harmful. Or there’s the suggestion — I kid you not — of forcing kids to watch The Social Dilemma.

Polak, the mother whose daughter had suicidal thoughts, has proposed a Mental Health Awareness Week at her daughter’s school that would include screenings of Childhood 2.0 and The Social Dilemma — two documentaries that touch on how platforms are impacting the well-being of its users.

As we’ve explained, that documentary is almost entirely misinformation about how social media applications work. So the “solution” to the bad things that social media does to kids (unsupported by any facts) is to… share with them a propaganda film full of disinformation? Genius.

In 20 years or so, we’re going to look back on these moral panics and laugh, just as we did with moral panics in the past. Rock and roll, Dungeons & Dragons, TV, radio, pinball, etc., all promised to rot our brains. This time around it’s social media.

Filed Under: anxiety, depression, evidence, moral panic, social media, teenagers
Companies: cnn, instagram

Cell Phones Still Somehow Get The Entirety Of The Blame For Teen Depression

Overhype

from the little-too-convenient dept

For years now a strong narrative has emerged that the increase in teen depression (and suicides) is almost single handedly being caused by social media and cell phone use. Though quite often when you look a little more deeply at the studies in question you’ll find they’re a bit undercooked, tend to make overly broad assumptions about trends, and are often contradicted by other studies.

For example, a 2019 study out of the UK of 12,000 adolescents found that most links between life satisfaction and social media use were “trivial,” overall accounting for less than 1% of a teenager’s sense of wellbeing. Another study from last year combed through 20 different studies on social media’s impact on young adults and kids and found “there doesn?t seem to be an evidence base that would explain the level of panic and consternation around these issues.”

There’s clearly a lot going wrong in the world, and a lot of it emotionally exhausting. Yet for whatever reason cell phone social media usage continues to often get the entirety of the blame for teen depression. An opinion column in the New York Times last week, for example, points to a new study showing a dramatic spike around the world in “teenage loneliness” starting in 2012:

“In a paper we just published in The Journal of Adolescence, we report that in 36 out of 37 countries, loneliness at school has increased since 2012. We grouped the 37 countries into four geographic and cultural regions, and we found the same pattern in all regions: Teenage loneliness was relatively stable between 2000 and 2012, with fewer than 18 percent reporting high levels of loneliness. But in the six years after 2012, rates increased dramatically. They roughly doubled in Europe, Latin America and the English-speaking countries, and rose by about 50 percent in the East Asian countries.”

But again that whole causation/correlation monster rears its head. The author of the piece and study even proceeds to acknowledge that they couldn’t actually make the link the article itself is trying to forge:

“These analyses don?t prove that smartphones and social media are major causes of the increase in teenage loneliness, but they do show that several other causes are less plausible. If anyone has another explanation for the global increase in loneliness at school, we?d love to hear it.”

I imagine that the heavy dose of shallow peer comparison on social media and ceaseless marketing likely does contribute to some teen depression. And too much social media use likely isn’t the healthiest thing in the world. But blaming cell phones entirely for the problem of teen depression seems utterly too convenient. Often these platforms and technologies are just windows to cultural and environmental dysfunction, which, if you hadn’t noticed, there’s a hell of a lot of at the moment.

There’s structural racism, the continued threat of a white nationalist movement, the collapse of a stable environment leading to countless, recurring disasters, incompetently run and financed education systems (at least here in the U.S.), substandard mental health care (at least in the US), rampant mass murder via firearm (at least in the US), and examples everywhere you look of leaders proving themselves either too corrupt or incompetent to handle the challenges of the modern age. That the biggest contributor to teen angst is the fact they now have a supercomputer in their pocket — itself doesn’t really compute.

Filed Under: blame, culture, depression, mobile phones, moral panic, teenagers