The social media trap

We need a moratorium on children’s use of social media

On 2 September 2021, French children born in 2010 started secondary school (or “collège” as it is known here). What is already a relatively intimidating experience was made even more daunting due to an online bullying phenomenon targeting first year secondary school children. I won't relay the hashtag here — and the specifics of the harassment are not really important, because bullies will always find some way to torment their victims — but this was another case of online harassment starting at a worryingly young age.

In this case, to their credit, the French Ministry for Education and many headteachers reacted very quickly to raise awareness of the issue, and the fact that a whole cohort of students was targeted rather than an individual somewhat minimised or at least diffused the harm, but it's easy to imagine how this type of mass, targeted harassment could have had dire consequences, especially in light of other similar incidents with tragic consequences. It is also a reminder of the potential danger that social media represents for young children.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt draws a straight line between the rapid adoption of social media between 2009 and 2011 — a network effect made possible by the ubiquitous nature of smartphones — and the sudden surge in depression among teenage girls around 2012. Recent research has given empirical weight to these claims, and although the authors admit that the risks of “screen time” more generically are largely overblown – maybe a vestige of the moral panic around videos games and other (legitimate but separate) concerns that children don’t get enough physical exercise – there is a direct correlation between higher use of social media and higher levels of depressive symptoms, particularly in young girls.

Recently leaked internal documents show that Facebook has known for years that their services are harmful for its users, with Instagram in particular having a deleterious impact on girls’ body image, and yet company executives failed to share their findings and repeatedly downplayed the risk. We clearly can’t wait for social media companies to grow a conscience, and governments are also notoriously slow to understand (never mind legislate on) this sort of thing, so parents must get ahead of the problem.

This is easier said than done however. It’s all very well saying that parents and educators should warn children of the dangers of the internet and social media, but peer pressure is certainly a more potent force than parental guidance, and the old adage about “sticks and stones” is simply too little too late; the pain of psychological harassment feels very real and the way that social media games our evolved psychology can cause real damage.

Many schools ban phones in the classroom, but most harassment goes on outside of class, so this doesn’t really solve the problem. There is an argument that children shouldn’t have smartphones at all (“I didn’t have one until I was 21, and I turned out OK… etc.”) and there are plenty of “low-tech” phones on the market that only allow you to make calls (and take photos at a pinch), but we need to deal with the reality we live in. It seems unrealistic to expect all parents to voluntarily forgo smartphones for their children; many parents are justifiably interested in ensuring their children are technologically literate while also giving them access to all the services that smartphones provide (geolocalization, online payments, connectivity more generally, etc.). It is not obviously a net benefit to deprive people of smartphone technology altogether.

Moreover, there is a collective action problem; there is no incentive for any individual child to stay off social media if all their friends are on it. Social media leverages social exclusion as part of its business model; as a parent, you may choose to prevent your child from having access to social media, but if everyone else at your child’s school is using Facebook or Instagram — legally or otherwise — you are effectively choosing to exclude them from that area of social life, which can also lead to ostracization or even encourage the child to use social media covertly. It’s not news that children occasionally go behind their parent’s back, but it is potentially even more dangerous because then any kind of parental oversight becomes impossible.

This is why I advocate for a pact among parents to not allow their children on social media until they are at least 16. This can only be done effectively at the level of the class, so parent-teacher associations can be the vehicle for this message, but ultimately parents themselves need to educate their children on the subject and, above all, put the relevant parental controls on the telephone, have a level of oversight, and coordinate with other parents. Social media loses its appeal to children if their friends are not on the network, but this strategy can only work if every parent of every child (or the vast majority) in the class is aware of the issue and on board.

Who knows, if the 2010 generation can develop a healthier relationship with social media than previous generations, maybe Facebook can also eventually return to being an actual social network, as opposed to the hotbed of fake news and polarization it has become.