Australia has moved to require social media companies to prevent under 16s from holding an account, and there’s always talk of us following suit in the UK. I want to talk a little today about why I think that’s a bad idea.
Is Social Media Harmful?
This is something of a misleading heading because I specifically don’t want to retread this debate. There are a lot of very strong opinions out there as to the harmful nature of social media, and a few of those strong opinions even try to bring with them something resembling evidence.
One framing I really like (from one of my supervisors at the OII, Andy Przybylski) is: “harmful compared to what?”
Are you imagining that if children weren’t spending hours each day on social media, they’d be out selling lemonade, climbing trees, and generally living in 1950s America? I mean, minus the smoking, lead paint and the polio. And all those comics that are “rotting their minds”. Or maybe you’re comparing it to the 1990s - where the average American child spent about 4 hours per day watching TV, with the violence, passivity, and developmental harm. The moral panics of the past - now recast as the virtuous alternatives of the future.
“Is social media harmful” isn’t really a legitimate question unless you also consider the replacement activity. It’s like studying the social impact of vaping without considering the replacement activity (smoking).
Won’t anybody think of the children?
Kids these days spend all their time on their phones. Technically true (or at least, they spend an awful lot of time there). But you know who else spends all their time on their phone? Everybody else. Adults use social media just as much as children/teens, and they do so in pretty much just as habitual a way (self promo is allowed, right?).
Ah, but the adults aren’t damaging their mental health with their TikToks and their YouTubes. Children are.
Except there’s not really the evidence to support that. We’ve got correlational “evidence”, but that exists for both children and adults. The better designed the study, the less convincing the results. And honestly, the majority of studies here don’t focus on the mental health impact of social media on adults.
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