Every night before she goes to bed, she opens TikTok. The 16-year-old from Tucson has a complicated relationship with the social media app Most of the things on her screen make her smile, like funny videos about puberty. She can't put the app down. She says that there are millions of videos that pop up on the #ForYou page. It's difficult to get off. I promise to stop, but I don't.
Over the past months, the scrutiny of kids and screens has increased. The company's own research showed that some teens reported negative, addiction-like experiences on its photo-sharing service. Most of the damage was done to teenage girls. She said that we need to protect the children.
Social media's habit-forming appeal to its youngest users has led to the creation of proposals to protect the kids. There is a bill in Minnesota that prevents platforms from using recommendations for children. A proposal in California would allow parents to file lawsuits against social media companies. The Kids Online Safety Act would require social media companies to create tools that allow parents to monitor screen time or turn off attention-suck features.
Parents, researchers, and lawmakers have been concerned about the impact of social media on children and teens for a long time. Parents who were able to shelter at home watched as their children's social lives and school lives became completely dominated by technology, raising concerns about time spent on screens. The fear and isolation of the past two years has made teens more vulnerable to mental health issues.
Kids have been through a lot. The internet could be a better place for them if they were to crack down on social media.
The safety net.
The supporters of the new legislation compared Big Tech's mental health harms to the harms of cigarettes. When it came to tobacco companies, they were marketing products to kids and not being straightforward with the public. The bill would allow parents to file a lawsuit if their child is hurt by a social media addiction. Cunningham says that social media companies aren't financially incentivized to slow kids' scroll.
The relationship between social media use and children's mental health is disputed. A high-profile study that tracked increases in rates of teenage depression, self- harm, and suicide in the US since 2012 proposed heavy digital media use as a contributing factor. Social media use is not a strong risk factor for depression, according to other research. The internal documents reveal that the sample size of Facebook's study was only 40 teens, and that over half of them reported that social media helped counter their loneliness. It's difficult to untangle the mental health harms of social media from other psychological harms in a child's life, like health fears during an ongoing Pandemic or the threat of school shootings.
People who are trying to protect kids are a bit paternalistic.
Jenny is a student at the University of Michigan.
There isn't a consensus on what a social media addiction is. Jenny is worried that the medical and psychological communities are still figuring out what defines a digital behavioral addiction versus problematic media use. The American Academy of Pediatrics has a policy on kids and technology. Designed With Kids in Mind is a campaign that raises awareness of how design techniques shape children's online experiences.
The relationship between social media and young people's mental health needs to be understood in a more nuanced way. She says that people who are trying to protect kids in digital spaces are sometimes a bit paternalistic. Children are viewed as objects to be protected, not subject to their own experience. She suggests that instead of focusing on how long kids spend on screens, it would be better to ask how kids build their tech savvy. What are they doing to integrate it with their lives? How can they take that into account?
Not all parents have the ability to engage in a real dialog with their children about screen time. Those who work multiple jobs, for example, may not be able to provide guardrails on screen time, and their children may be more prone to use than children of affluent parents.
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