Barring Kids From Social Media
An odd set of Senators have a really bad idea.
NPR (“Kids under 13 would be barred from social media under bipartisan Senate bill“):
A bipartisan group of senators announced a new piece of legislation this week geared towards protecting children from aspects of social media they say are contributing to the mental health crisis impacting America’s youth.
The Protecting Kids on Social Media Act would set the minimum age of social media users to 13. For teens between the ages of 13 and 18, parental consent would be required, and platforms would be banned from using algorithms to recommend content to those young users. Adults would have to create an account for their teens, providing a valid form of ID to become users on a platform, according to the bill.
Children under 13, however, will still be allowed to view content on social media sites, the bill says, as long as it doesn’t require an individual to log in to do so.
There are four lawmakers sponsoring the bill, Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Alabama’s Katie Britt alongside Democratic Sens. Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, who say America’s mental health crisis weighs most heavily on adolescents, especially young girls.
“The business model of these apps is simple, the duration of time the user spends on the app and the extent to which they engage with content is directly correlated with ad revenue,” Schatz said, arguing that companies want users to spend long amounts of time on their platforms but the results can be “catastrophic.”
“Social media [companies] have stumbled onto a stubborn, devastating fact: The way to get kids to linger on the platforms and to maximize platforms is to upset them,” Schatz told reporters at a press conference announcing the bill on Capitol Hill Wednesday.
[…]
The senators cited disturbing results from a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, which found 42% high school students surveyed experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness over the last year.
Twenty-two percent seriously contemplated attempting suicide, with one in four young women going as far as to formulate a plan on how they would carry it out.
Murphy, a father of two, said the warning signs of social media’s impact on kids are abundantly clear and that now is the time to take action.
“This is a reality that we don’t have to accept. The alarm bells about social media’s devastating impact on kids have been sounding for a long time, and yet time and time again, these companies have proven they care more about profit than preventing the well-documented harm they cause,” he said. “None of this is out of Congress’s control.”
A statement issued by several advocacy groups that focus on the safe use of social media raised concerns about the legislation. They include Common Sense Media, Fairplay for Kids and the Center for Digital Democracy, which said though the bill is “well-intentioned,” some aspects take the wrong approach.
The advocacy groups said they support the banning of algorithmic recommendations targeting minors; however, they believe the bill is burdensome to parents, creates unrealistic bans and could be harmful to kids in unhealthy living situations.
“By requiring parental consent before a teen can use a social media platform, vulnerable minors, including LGBTQ+ kids and kids who live in unsupportive households, may be cut off from access to needed resources and community,” the group statement reads.
The group also said the minimum age requirement tied to parental consent jeopardizes an adolescent user’s privacy. James P. Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, said in the statement that the group appreciates the senators’ efforts and they look forward to working with them in the future, “but this is a life or death issue for families and we have to be very careful about how to protect kids online.”
It’s not at all clear from the reporting how much support the bill has. If it were just Cotton, I would dismiss it entirely but the fact that Murphy is a co-sponsor is interesting. I don’t see those two agreeing on much.
My kids are 11 and 14 and I’ve allowed them essentially unfettered access to YouTube and various social platforms for quite some time. We talk about what they’re seeing but I don’t see much use trying to shelter them from the online world.
That said, I’m not all that persuaded by the notion that we should put the kids in charge because some subset of parents are “unsupportive,” much less because of “adolescent user’s privacy.” While my parenting style is relatively free range, others are more restrictive and, so long as it’s not abusive, that’s their call to make.
Aside from thinking social media bans all but unenforceable, the immediate objection that came to my mind when reading the report is that this would force all social media users to provide valuable information to the companies who own them. Right now, it usually requires nothing more than an email address—and it doesn’t even have to be one that has your real name on it, much less your primary account. But, suddenly, you’d be required to give them your drivers’ license—and thus your photograph, date of birth, home address, any disabilities, etc. That’s some substantial personally identifying information that I would prefer not to give up.
That’s entirely intended–by the government. Having to register with an ID means that nobody is anonymous online anymore. The government can get a warrant or subpoena (or just a little intimidation) to identify anyone who “gets uppity”.
This is a bad solution to a problem that society is only now come to grips with. A way to deal with this maybe to restrict the providers ability to advertise to pre-teens, along with not using logarithms with under 18.
I really glad my kids are now adults. We went through child rearing during the early days of personal computers and then cell phones. We had some basic ideas on how to deal with all the issues, mostly by arranging the home environment where there was a lot less private space around the electronics. No computers in bedrooms. The family computer was in the family room in full view of everyone. Therefore no privacy. (I also fibbed and told the oldest boy that I put a key logging program on the computer). There were no TVs in the bedrooms for that matter. Cell phones rolled in but the main concern was the kids accidentally dropping the phone into the toilet. By the time social media came around, the kids were more mature and needed less minding.
I’m not sure how I would handle everything today.
There’s a difference between protecting your kids from bad things and protecting them from the algorithm which generates endless amounts of Drake. Banning kids from social media is about the latter and not the former. The algorithm is in fact terrible, but what are you going to do? And would you want to isolate your kids away from ‘normality’?
Not in charge, but I definitely think you are underselling this. I can speak to this a person who grew up LGBT in a wildly abusive, unsupportive home. My coming out stories coming out to my parents are awful. If I tried to come out as a kid I would have been subjected to more and worse abuse.
The only outlet I had to understand what I was, was though Yahoo groups, some early AOL groups and couple of specific websites. Those were the only places I could be me safely. The only I was lucky that my parents were an alcoholic and an addict was that I got free access to the family computer while everyone was asleep. This was the early 90’s.
BTW, my parents were outwardly quite liberal and supportive of LGBT people (and racial minorities) but learning that THEIR kid was queer was awful, shameful and a painful reflection on them that was unacceptable and needed to be stomped out.
I say this so that you can maybe think though that part a little harder. I get that people don’t like to think about abusive unsupportive families, but it’s quite common.
@Beth: I’m sure that’s quite common. I’m just not sure we should make our laws with the default assumption that parents are bad. Typically, we do the opposite and then have failsafes built it, such as petitioning a judge.
@James Joyner:
I think that’s the wrong framing. The current default is that children are property. This sort of thing doesn’t change that default much, certainly not to all parents are bad. We need to shift generally to a framework where kids are individuals from birth and should gain more autonomy, especially over their own beings as they get older.
I don’t mean this as a dig against you, but many people with a more conservative world view also accept a level of abuse as normal. My grandparents did it, my parents did it and I’ll do it to my kids to teach them something something is a very common very damaging world view.
The experience of lots of LGBT people is that otherwise loving, supportive parents become wildly unsupportive or actively hostile when they find out their kids are LGBT.
Ugh, now I have to contact my senator and tell him I think this idea is wildly out of touch with how young people interact with the world. I am all for regulating big social media companies, but this “think of the children” is lazy. Protect everyone from the over reach of biased algorithm, don’t throw kids out of the platforms. My 9 year old uses a social platform to message with my mom and my sister. She used youtube to look up origami videos. The horror! As a parent, I am responsible for teaching her how to safely navigate this, pointing out how it manipulates and distorts. If we wait til age 13, it will be much harder.
That last sentence reads like a threat to me.
If it read like a threat to the social media companies, then perhaps that would be all that is needed — but if they are going to have a harmful product, then poorly drafted legislation that regulates them is what they get.
My preference has long been to remove Section 230 protections from the recommendation algorithm, as that isn’t simply showing user-generated content, it is deciding which user-generated content to show — it’s a very explicitly editorial decision, which is currently used to keep people enraged and on the site.
Let them be held liable when their algorithm pushes people down an extremist rabbit hole where they shoot up a school, and I expect that they will push a different set of content — a bit blander, a bit less dangerous, and a bit safer for society.
(YouTube is notorious for a couple of recommendation death spirals once you step anywhere near them — there’s a lot of entrances to the alt-right death spiral, and the children-doing-yoga pedophile approved death spiral. Google knows and does nothing because they perform well — they’re very sticky! There’s also a cute guinea pig spiral, but that’s just adorable and harmless)
Sigh. You cannot ban algorithms. It’s like banning air.
i want to cry.
Given an IP address and the type of browser, you often don’t need a login to recognize the person. Safari for iPhone? Yeah, that’s one person, and the same one who was using it yesterday. Behavior will quickly show their age…
The login makes a profile portable across devices, and distinguishes among multiple users on the same device. Eliminating a login does nothing to protect a kid with their own phone.
@Dutchgirl:
Just to be contrary — you need to teach your kid to not walk into traffic, but we also have school zones with lower speed limits because kids congregate there and we know kids are kids and not very bright so they will wander into traffic anyway.
Cutting the manipulation and distortion of social media, even just for children, could be a good thing if done well. I don’t think this bill does it well.
My daughter at age 4 was given her first computer. She sat and stood in front of it for hours, day after day. By about age 8 she was notorious at the local Apple store as the kid who had gotten into ResEdit and bricked the machine. By contrast, my approach to computer issues is yelling at ‘the damned thing.’ The idea that I was going to be able limit was she did with a computer was ridiculous. And it would have been bad parenting – you don’t take young Wolfgang Amadeus’ piano away. Does that mean she saw a lot of things it would be better if no one saw? Yes. Nothing in life comes without a downside.
This solution of wanting to ban all kids from Social Media seems to be mostly members of the Right/GOP/GQP trying to do the equivalent of imposing a ban on teaching sex education or only teaching/discussing abstinence to today’s youth. It has been proven that only discussing abstinence in schools does not work. Teens will be teens, if a teen is in the middle of nowhere it is inevitable that they will find other teens to congregate with and it would be best if they were knowledgeable about the birds and the bees, and how to take precautionary measures to prevent an unwanted pregnancy.
What will happen, is that teens, well really their parents, will find a fairly simple workaround to this issue by setting up a profile for their kid that makes FB, Twitter, Youtube think they are 18+ years old, and for the parents that do not do this we will end up with a whole chunk of youth who are left out of the equation (as there will be plenty of parents in red/blue/purple states that do not work to provide their child with full access to the internet).
As Scott notes just a few comments before mine, there are ways to provide full access to the net (including social media), but still monitor your kids actions. A bill to ban kids from tiktok is not needed, rather FB/TikTok, Twitter just need to do a better job of making parents aware of parental controls that they have access too, let them set-up their kids accounts so they can turn on the controls that will make it harder for a kid to view pornographic content, and stuff like that.
If so many members of sites like Tik Tok were not so good at trolling/doing the on-line equivalent of pantsing folks like Trump, and other prominent, mostly GOP members of Congress, they would not be trying to shut-down sites like Tik Tok (which I do not use at all as an older than 50 years old person).
Also, please do not tell me that trying to close down access to Tik Tok is about preventing the theft of our countries secrets. Tik Tok is at best one of hundreds of different routes the Chinese and Russians are taking to try and disrupt things in the United States and abroad.
Heck, we just had a National Guardsman go all traitor on the United States, that is on us, not the Russians or Chinese.
The GOP has spent decades doing a great job trolling liberals, but in the past several years Liberals have started to do a better job trolling the GOP and what has been revealed for all to see is that the GOP is very skilled at dishing things out but really poor sports when they get a dose of their own medicine. The GOP becomes the very definition of fragile snowflakes when they get hoisted on their own petard.
Again, that is what this feels like, folks like Trump being embarrassed by teens on social media sites, so that cannot stand. It is an affront to his fragile ego so most of the GOP want to fall in line and try to prevent Trump from being embarrassed by Tik Tokers.
I say good luck with that.
A less obvious goal here is to protect the incumbent social media companies from the threat of the growing use of ActivityPub creating a decentralized social media environment that can’t be monetized.
Right now anyone can set up a Mastodon server, but adding costly verification requirements to anyone who wants to assures only organizations with significant capital backing can ever hope to enter the space.
I’d note that under this law, OTB qualifies as a social media platform, and if it passes will be required to either eliminate the comments or start age verifying all the commenters.
@James Joyner:
It’s not about assuming parents are good or bad; it’s about assuming children aren’t property.
@Gustopher:
Hear, hear.
@Stormy Dragon:
I thought of that, too.
I also thought it may not be the intent, then I recalled how much of laws as passed are usually written by lobbyists.
That’s the surest way to increase ID theft by a MASSIVE amount. It’s as dumb as the legislators in Louisiana that are pushing to require you to send your ID to ALL adult sites (act 440).
It’s like these morons don’t know how VPNs or the internet itself works.
@Matt: I know I only have vague notions of how it works, so I don’t anticipate that they’re more likely to understand it.
@Beth: That really does seem terrible. When my own daughter came out as trans, I spent about two weeks alone in my office, filled with feelings. One of the feelings was “she’s trans because of me. Her life got harder and it’s my fault”. I worked hard to keep these feelings to myself, and for her part she was still cautious around us.
Eventually, a (trans friendly) friend said to me, “Oh, that’s nonsense. That’s what they’ve been saying about the parents of gay people forever and it’s garbage.”
Which kind of snapped me out of it. (This friend also mentioned that feminists tend to have a harder time with trans people than others. That was before I ever heard of a “terf” etc.)
I observe that a lot of the drama these days specifically is framing the parents of trans kids as child abusers.
Which I deeply resent. Go ahead, try and prove I harmed my child. I dare you.
@Gustopher: I don’t see that as contrary, but complimentary. And I am all for regulation on the social platforms.
Two comments on this.
1…some school cultures are cruel no matter what the medium. When I rode my bike to my first day of high school in 1964, I was told by an upper classman at the curb that “we don’t ride bikes at this school.” That was the first agression of thousands I suffered as a nerdy kid in high school. My personal response was “Watch me!” For three years, out of 2400 students, I was the only kid to ride a bike to that school, and I grew to hate most of my peers, counting the days I could graduate and get away from them. Bullying does not take social media, but it does turn it into a 24/7 thing, which is a hard problem.
2…As a tech savvy high tech retiree, I volunteer at a high school mentoring STEM kids. Realistically, a lot of these kids would be able to get around the kinds of limits the bill on the table proposes without much effort. No adults necessary. And some of them would help their non-technical friends do the same.
For all that is good and bad about these technologies, they are there, like it or not, and they accelerate what we like, what we don’t like, and some of what we don’t even know about. Yeah, we can try to regulate what platforms are allowed to do, but good luck with that. …and don’t get me started on unintended consequences…