In a widely publicized case last week, a California court ordered Meta and Google to pay $6 million in compensation to a 20-year- old woman who had sued them for her deteriorated mental health as a teenager from addiction to the companies’ social media platforms Instagram and YouTube.
While critics of the tech companies across the political spectrum lauded the verdict, many were also critical of it, such as Michael Burns writing in National Post. I agree with the latter and argue that the tech companies are not legally liable for the anxiety and depression of the users of their social media platforms – but they bear moral responsibility for the harms on children caused by their algorithms.
I argue (without legal expertise) that to establish legal liability, the accused must have used coercion or fraud to make underaged minors engage with their social media platforms, which is not the case. Someone else (parents or schools) had given kids devices to access social media and has responsibility to monitor and restrict their use.
Moreover, youth mental health problems have many causes and pinning them on social media use alone is unjust. And even if the lawsuits and fines were justified, their financial impact would be minimal and unlikely to change the conduct of the tech companies. Also, they don’t even begin to address the root cause of kids’ mental health epidemic of the last ten years.
Moral responsibility of the tech companies for contributing to the mental health problems of children through their social media platforms is a different matter. The evidence for such a contribution is now undeniable, as has been written by Jonathan Haidt and others and is widely known by parents, educators, and even kids themselves.
Michael Burns writes that in the last 10 years, there has been increasing evidence for shortened attention spans and less sleep of children, harder-to-manage classrooms, and social life through “devices that reward compulsion, comparison and constant stimulation” that have led to growing anxiety and depression that is particularly hard on young people’s developing brains.
The primary moral responsibility for children’s safety, online and elsewhere, rests with parents who give children devices to access social media. But monitoring and restricting their use can be overwhelming, given the enormity of the digital media and its penetration of all aspects of life. Also, many kids are smart at circumventing restrictions outside the home (at school and libraries). It is often a losing battle even for the most informed and vigilant parents, not to speak of those not well informed and overwhelmed with all their obligations.
Advocacy organizations for digital media literacy or for limiting their use (such as Media Smart and Canada Unplugged) are doing their best to educate kids about smart and critical use of social media or to help parents curtail their use by children. But even though effective, such organizations only reach a fraction of children and parents.
Clearly, more needs to be done to protect children against the mental health harms of social media.
The tech companies must accept moral responsibility for their social media algorithms that are designed to keep users scrolling as long or as often as possible by providing frequent, addictive dopamine hits from “likes” and other forms of social approval and comparison. By changing these algorithms, the likes of Meta, Google, Snapchat and TikTok, will receive less ad revenue but savings in the mental health costs of young people (future employees and customers of all companies) and the positive impact on the reputation of the tech companies would be significant.
Not one to advocate government intervention in business on principle, I see a clear role for it in this case since it’s about the protection of children that parents cannot (or will not) handle alone. Australia’s ban on the social media use by children under 16 last year, while not completely effective according to critics, led to the deletion of hundreds of thousands social media accounts of youngsters. Other countries are planning to follow this year.
Australia’s ban has provided a clear legal guideline for the tech companies and likely prompted them to pay more attention to their social media algorithms, even to change them and to recognize their contribution to the youth mental health epidemic. The ban of kids’ social media use has been also welcomed by parents, teachers, the general public and kids themselves, many of whom are relieved to get away from their devices and engage with their peers in real life.
Many schools have now experimented with banning smart phones and restricting internet access during school hours, thereby improving student attention spans, academic performance and social engagement. For this, they are to be commended.
However, I blame the education system and its educational philosophy as the root cause for the young people’s mental health problems. Its continual failure to teach students to think for themselves and to depend on their mind’s ability to reason has made children vulnerable to social media influence and to being controlled by their emotions. This has led to unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression.
Solving this is a long-term challenge which tech firms can help address by providing technologies to change how and what children are being taught at school. But educational philosophy must be changed first – and that isn’t easy. In the meantime, the best options for parents who want their children to learn to think for themselves are homeschooling or finding an independent school that is teaching it (although rare, they do exist).
