Should Idaho restrict social media for kids? Don’t expect miracles | Opinion
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Bill requires 90%+ confidence a user is 16+ or deny/close unless parental consent.
- Measure would ban targeted ads, addictive features and require default maximum privacy.
- Editorial warns law alone won’t solve youth mental health without education and services.
A new bill sponsored by Rep. Jaron Crane, R-Nampa, was printed by the House State Affairs Committee on Tuesday with the goal of introducing strict regulations on kids’ use of social media.
Crane indicated that he was inspired to introduce the bill through conversations with local clergy, who are increasingly worried about the mental health of young people.
The bill, which has some imaginative touches, would require social media companies to use their own intrusive algorithms to arrive at a 90% or better confidence that a user is over 16 years of age. If they can’t, the companies would be required to deny or close a kid’s account unless they can obtain verified parental consent.
If children are granted accounts, maximum privacy settings would have to be enabled by default. Parents would have to be given the ability to control how much time their children spend on a social platform and the ability to monitor their use. Platforms would be disallowed from presenting profiled advertisements to kids or from using “addictive interface features” including infinite scrolling, automatic playing video or visible reactions to posts.
If a platform allows a child to have an account without parental consent, it would invalidate liability waivers and open the company to being sued for emotional distress by parents or potential consumer enforcement action by the Idaho attorney general.
As Crane argued, social media is engineered to be an addictive surveillance system, and he hopes his bill will combat that problem directly.
Social media companies monitor all kinds of things about users, and constantly tweak their algorithms with the goal of keeping people on the platform. It’s not unlike the set of processes casinos use to keep people mindlessly pushing a button on a slot machine, or the set of processes cigarette companies use to make sure smokers continue to light up.
“What you’re going to find is over 35% of the kids are constantly scrolling on their phones,” Crane said.
“We have a whole generation of kids that came of age social media-wise, and I don’t think we understood the harm,” said Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen, R-Idaho Falls, who moved to introduce the bill while increasing the minimum age from 15 to 16.
Mickelsen is echoing a body of research brought to prominence by Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor and author of “The Anxious Generation,” which documents that large increases in youth depression, anxiety and self-harm roughly coincided with the rise in use of social media, especially through cell phones equipped with selfie cameras. Haidt also points to some causal evidence, showing, for example, that people who stop using Facebook experience a decrease in depression.
It should be said that the evidence is not as unequivocal as Haidt tends to claim. For example, a longitudinal study in the U.K. tracked what happened as kids changed their levels of social media and video game use, and did not find any relationship with mental health.
But, on balance, I think there’s reason to believe social media is more harmful than helpful for kids. And though he’s not a lawmaker I often agree with, I think Crane’s bill could be a step forward.
It seems clear that constant, obsessive thinking about one’s self-presentation is a bad, unhappy way of living. So is living your life constantly seeking external validation. That is the kind of life that social media encourages.
The main purported benefits of social media for youth are that it provides a means of self-expression and a way to connect with their peers. Large majorities of teens in a poll last year agree with both sentiments.
But the same poll shows about half of teens say social media has a negative effect on them and their peers, compared to only about 10% who say it’s beneficial. It seems kids see pretty clearly that there’s a problem.
So Crane’s bill might be worth a try, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves: It will not serve as a blanket solution to the significant rise in youth depression and anxiety.
“It’s important to look at the broader context of a young person’s life, including the factors that may lead to both increased digital technology use and internalising symptoms. If a teenager is struggling, technology use is rarely the sole culprit,” the authors of the U.K. study urge.
Idaho lawmakers should take a moment to realize that some of these harms attributed to social media — loneliness, anxiety, disconnection and depression, for example — are a result of a lack of alternatives. Idaho continues to have a horribly underfunded education system, and because of years of massive tax giveaways, more cuts are likely coming in a time of economic plenty (when a recession comes, and it will someday, strap in).
Underfunding has sent some schools to four days a week, but it also results in fewer opportunities for physical activity, recreation, play and in-person social relationship building, for example, by slashing after-school programs.
In other words, if the reason we think social media harms kids is the fact that it substitutes an addictive, algorithmically mediated social environment for real, in-person connection, simply removing social media may be ineffective. If there aren’t more real-world opportunities to fill the digital void, it might just mean less connection of any kind.
If lawmakers are going to concern themselves with the public good, they can’t just ban things. They’re going to have to make investments, too.
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.