Two Major Studies Indicate the Social Media Panic Doesn’t Hold Up ⇥ techdirt.com

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

For years now, we’ve been repeatedly pointing out that the “social media is destroying kids” narrative, popularized by Jonathan Haidt and others, has been built on a foundation of shaky, often contradictory research. We’ve noted that the actual data is far more nuanced than the moral panic suggests, and that policy responses built on that panic might end up causing more harm than they prevent.

Well, here come two massive new studies — one from Australia, one from the UK—that land like a sledgehammer on Haidt’s narrative — and, perhaps more importantly, on Australia’s much-celebrated social media ban for kids under 16.

The Australian study is sprawling, with over 100,000 youth participating over several years, though it should be noted it uses self-reported data only from weekdays and only for three hours after school. The study’s authors say that this “may not fully reflect total daily or habitual use”. (Also, they seem to have excluded nonbinary youth.) Still, the findings support a reasonable conclusion that children who spend a “moderate” amount of time using social media — about two hours daily or less — tend to have better outcomes, and it depends what they are doing.

The British study, on the other hand, found “distinguishing between active and passive use of social media played a limited role in our overall findings” suggesting “the distinction may be overly broad and does not sufficiently predict mental health”. So even the supposed quality of screen time might not have as much of an effect as we imagine.

The Australian government may have banned providing access to social media for people under sixteen, affecting millions, but these studies indicate it is an over-broad response to a complex topic. In explaining the limitations and caveats, the Australian researchers pointed out “[h]igher after-school social media use may also indicate fewer extracurricular or social opportunities” including those that may result from too much time spent on homework. That is not to say it would instead make more sense to me to ban homework, but it seems banning social media is both a red herring response to our built environment and has the potential to limit the actual socialization that takes place in these apps.

Canada is one of several countries working on a similar ban. Marie Woolf, Globe and Mail:

Prof. [Taylor Owen, of McGill University] warned that without a regulator, when a child hits the age when social media is allowed, they could “jump right into a social-media ecosystem that has no protections in it whatsoever.”

He said there is a need to address problems on platforms, which include certain kinds of content, “the incentives within them, the way the algorithms boost that content, the lack of guardrails, the lack of accountability, lack of safety teams and measures.” He added that a teen social-media ban would not resolve these problems on its own.

I am not knee-jerk opposed to considering the many harms created or exacerbated by online platforms; I think Owen is right in arguing for a more comprehensive vision. But if we are looking at correcting for failures in platform accountability, social media use by youth seems somewhat less important. The problem is that trying to make platforms in any way responsible for user-generated material will break the internet. It is much more straightforward — in theory — to add an age gate.

There is plenty of blame to go around, however, for our agency over our attachment to our devices, and I have no problem doling some out to platforms. “Time spent” is a bullshit metric that has nothing to do with user satisfaction, and encourages aggressive strategies like autoplaying the next video after one finishes and suggesting an endless scroll of entertainment. These features might not have an outsized effect on young people. But we should consider that the operators of these platforms are not building their apps with the happiness of people in mind. They are adding and continuously refining this functionality because it increases the time people spend using their thing instead of the competitor’s thing, thus making it more valuable.

Then again, perhaps we ought to limit social media use by age. Not for children, though: anyone over 55 gets read-only access to a maximum of six verified accounts, akin to broadcast television.