from the stop-experimenting-blindly dept

We’ve been talking for a while now about how the rush (much of it driven by politicians’ obsession with Jonathan Haidt’s mostly debunked book) to ban kids from social media is dangerously stupid. It misdiagnoses the problem and creates a solution that both does not work and makes actual problems worse. Previous reporting has already shown that a massive number of kids easily get around the bans, and among those who haven’t were those who actually relied on these services for community. Given the obvious failures and the clear damage already done in Australia, it’s bizarre that so many other countries are still rushing to copy it.

But with France’s Constitutional Council recently blocking Emmanuel Macron’s version (shoved into law almost immediately after he sat down with Haidt), some sense is finally creeping into the conversation, with a growing number of experts speaking out against blanket blocks:

The rash of new laws and the subsequent backlash is prompting people to ask if social media bans are going too far, too fast — and whether there may be a smarter way to protect kids online than forcing them off.

Lorena Giuberti Coutinho, an online safety commissioner for Brazil’s independent data protection authority, told POLITICO that social media bans increasingly appear “quite hard to impose,” and questioned whether global momentum for that approach would persist.

“The incentives for teenagers to continue on social media are quite strong because this is where they communicate,” said Coutinho.

This matters, because for the last year or so it’s felt almost inevitable that social media bans would become the global default — despite the science not supporting them, and despite nobody having any real evidence about what the bans themselves would do to kids. Indeed, for all the people running around screaming about how this needs to be done to stop companies from “experimenting on children,” cutting kids off from their communities online is, itself, an experiment on the mental health and psyche of children without any understanding of what it might do.

It’s especially notable that this skepticism is coming from Brazil’s online safety commissioner, because, as we discussed recently on Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Brazil has been going through yet another social media moral panic, one that has forced Discord to disable livestreaming, after a horrific case in which a 13-year-old girl was allegedly coerced by other users into taking her own life (Discord disputes that the death itself was broadcast live). Everything about that story is horrifying. But blaming it on the existence of livestreaming on one particular platform — when the exact same tech exists on nearly every other platform — mostly guarantees that the next tragedy happens somewhere the regulators aren’t looking.

But whatever you make of that particular mess, the pushback isn’t limited to Brazil. It’s showing up more or less everywhere these bans have been tried.

In the United States, protecting children from social media is a priority among politicians of all partisan stripes — from Texas Senator Ted Cruz to California Governor Gavin Newsom. But no legislative ban for teen users has moved forward at either the state or federal level.

There are broad concerns that bans could violate children’s free speech rights by restricting their ability to engage with lawful speech online, as well as pushback from activists, like those in the LGBTQ+ community, who say that social media can also be a place where otherwise isolated youth can stay informed and connect with peers.

Surprisingly, even the activist groups responsible for some of the worst anti-internet bills of the last half decade — like 5Rights, whose founder has been drafting California’s censorship laws — are now calling out the dangers of blanket bans:

A report by a group of youth behavioral experts, delivered ahead of an expected EU-wide proposal this fall, appeared doubtful that age restrictions alone are the solution. One pointed to “circumvention” around Australia’s solution. The experts make a point of anticipating changing user habits: They recommend that solutions are aimed at all the online places where young people will be spending their time, which increasingly includes AI chatbots.

Several experts who consulted the European Commission on the proposed measures, including Leanda Barrington-Leach of the 5Rights Foundation and the London School of Economics’ Sonia Livingstone, wrote a letter to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to warn against blanket measures. Total bans are not in line with protecting children’s fundamental rights because they cut off their access to information, which may lead them to more dangerous, unregulated online spaces, the letter says.

This might be the one and only thing I’ve ever agreed with 5Rights on, even if the global rush to ban social media is the entirely predictable end result of years of their own misleading advocacy.

Right now the activists who pushed these bans look a lot like the dog who caught the car. They got the laws they wanted and now the evidence suggests that these laws don’t actually benefit kids and may, in fact, harm them. There’s a real cost to putting in place these superficial “something must be done, this is something, we will do this” kinds of solutions, rather than dealing with the actual underlying root causes. So instead of funding real mental health support, or building better tools that let people protect themselves, we got a pile of headline-grabbing laws that make politicians look busy while leaving every underlying problem exactly where it was.

Filed Under: australia, kids, moral panic, social media bans
Companies: 5rights