Risks and Harms, and Youth and Social Media ⇥ zephoria.substack.com
Since the “social media is bad for teens” myth will not die, I keep having intense conversations with colleagues, journalists, and friends over what the research says and what it doesn’t. (Alice Marwick et. al put together a great little primer in light of the legislative moves.) Along the way, I’ve also started to recognize how slipperiness between two terms creates confusion — and political openings — and so I wanted to call them out in case this is helpful for others thinking about these issues.
In short, “Does social media harm teenagers?” is not the same question as “Can social media be risky for teenagers?”
This is pretty clearly a response to arguments pushed by people like Dr. Jonathan Haidt. One thing he often laments is the decline in kids walking to school and, he says, playing outside with relatively little supervision. This is something he also griped about in his previous book “The Coddling of the American Mind”, co-written with Greg Lukianoff. If you start poking around a little, the factors parents’ cite for their reluctance to allow kids to get to school independently are safety risks: drivers, vehicles, roads, and strangers. You see it in articles from Australia, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These are undoubtably risks but, as Haidt himself points out in supplemental material for “Coddling”, efforts should be made to “prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child”.
Then again, why not both? Kids can be educated on how to use new technologies responsibly and platforms can be pressured to reduce abuses and hostile behaviour. Legislators should be passing privacy-protecting laws. But, as boyd writes, “I don’t think that these harms are unique to children”. If we design roads which are safer for children, they will probably also be safer for everyone — but that does not eliminate risk. A similar effect can be true of technology, too. (I just finished “Killed by a Traffic Engineer”. I found the writing often insufferable, but it is still worth reading.)
I do not have a stake in this game beyond basic humanity and a desire for people to be healthy. I have no expertise in this area. I find it plausible it is difficult to disentangle the influence of social media from other uses of a smartphone and from the broader world. I am not entirely convinced social media platforms have little responsibility for how youth experience their online environment, but I am even less convinced Haidt’s restrictive approach makes sense.
See Also: On the same day boyd’s essay was published, Dr. Candice Odgers and Haidt debated this topic live.