A Slot Machine for Feelings in Every Pocket ⇥ platformer.news

Casey Newton is not very impressed by the recently published study the effect of screen time on over 25,000 Manchester-area youth, the same one I linked to last week. Newton is especially dubious of the conclusions drawn by two of the researchers in an article for the Conversation:

Here the researchers extend their conclusions beyond what their data can support. On one hand, I believe them when they suggest that banning social media for under-16s will not instantly improve the median teen’s mental health. On the other, though, blanket bans do offer a simple solution to any number of ongoing problems on these platforms: the ease with which they connect predators to children; addictive mechanics like “streaks” and notifications that roil classrooms and wreck sleep; predictive algorithms that introduce young girls to disordered eating and related harms; and the unsettled feeling that comes from staring way too long at a feed you had only intended to look at for a minute.

Though Newton links to Mike Masnick’s coverage of two studies, Newton only dissects the one that is not behind a paywall. I get it; the other study is $45 USD, and I only read free Platformer articles. But it would behoove him to try to find both for a more comprehensive article. For example, the Australian researchers found usage of under two hours a day was not correlated with negative outcomes, but a good retort is that teens are spending an average of nearly five hours across seven social media apps per day. I would say get a friend in academia, or see if your local public library has access to JAMA Pediatrics, Newton.

Anyway, one thing you will notice about Newton’s list of harms is that only one of them is actually child-specific: assuming a blanket ban is entirely effective, predators would indeed find few-to-no children on these platforms.

The rest of the list contains problems without any age limit. I have plenty of friends in their thirties and forties — and older — who bemoan the time-sucking quality of social media apps, and the forced engagement mechanics they employ, though not in those words. We have decreasing control over our experience on these platforms. I can use whatever newsreader I want, but if I want see my friends’ Instagram pictures, I have to wade through a jumbled-up mess in my feed of posts from accounts I do not follow that could be several days old. I have little control over this because Meta thinks it knows what I want better than I do.

Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch — Newton links to this article approvingly — write of finding “mountains of evidence” in Meta’s research into the damaging effects of its own products. Over thirty studies which, they are careful to note, span a gamut of ages. Nevertheless, they conclude that “social media is not safe for children and adolescents”. If there are legitimate questions of product safety that also impact adults, perhaps a mere age check is insufficient. Newton says “there are no 13-year-olds in casinos because we know that the environment is designed to exploit them”, which is true enough, but if we are all carrying a little slot machine in our pocket, maybe that is a different problem.

Newton is right: age-gating is a “simple solution” compared to writing regulations that could limit these gambling-adjacent features and withstand inevitable legal challenges. But if the risks are as grave as portrayed by Newton, and Haidt and his collaborators, perhaps this is not an issue of carding every user.