It's Time to Ban Social Media on Smartphones for Children and Adolescents

 

In the May issue of National Review, San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge presents smoking-gun data that shows the manifold harms to children and teenagers caused by smartphones, specifically social-media use on them.  She claims, and I agree, that we have to do more to alleviate these harms, by government intervention if necessary. 

 

First, the harms.  Twenge has collected data on a wide number of measures of wellbeing including sleep patterns, socializing, indicators of loneliness and depression, and participation in adult activities.  Significant shifts in all these data have occurred over the last five decades. 

 

In-person socializing, measured as the percentage of U. S. teens going out with friends twice a week or more, was reasonably steady until about 2008, when it began to decline, and fell off a cliff around 2012, falling from 80% in 1976 to around 55% in 2021 for 12th-graders.

 

The percentage of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders sleeping less than seven hours a night was about 35% from 2003 to 2013, when it abruptly took off and rose steadily to 50% by 2022. 

 

The percentage of U. S. 12- to 17-year-old girls suffering major depression in the past 12 months was steady at 12% until 2011, and then went through a similar rise to almost 30% by 2021.

 

And the percentage of 15-year-olds measuring "high" in loneliness in regions as disparate as Asia, Latin America, Europe, and English-speaking countries all show a sharp uptick when?  Three guesses and the first two don't count:  2012.

 

What happened in 2012?  It was the year that the number of smartphone users in the U. S. crossed 130 million on its eventual way to the current number of 316 million, out of a population of about 330 million.  Also, the number of active Facebook users crossed the 1 billion mark worldwide that same year. 

 

Twenge, wearing her good-scientist hat, proposes other possible causes for these dismal statistics about teen wellbeing:  anxiety over college debt, the opioid crisis, even global warming.  None of them pass muster.  Her close study of the detailed behavior patterns of teens regarding smartphones reveals that the average U. S. adolescent spends nearly five hours a day on social media.  That's more than a half-time job, seven days a week. 

 

Anyone observing teens in the wild can confirm that their faces are stuck to their phones at every possible moment—in an elevator, walking down the street, at mealtimes with or without other family members, and evidently late at night too.  As for the other possible causes Twenge diligently considers and rejects, there is no such thing as mathematical proof in psychology, but she has come as close as anybody can to proving that social media use on smartphones has had a huge, and largely negative, influence on the daily lives of teenagers. 

 

Granting the validity of her case, what is to be done about it? 

 

Leaving teenagers in the gentle hands of the social-media companies is like leaving the hens in the gentle paws of the fox.  Some of the world's most sophisticated and effective AI software drives teens to keep clicking and scrolling on infinite websites, because the firms' profits depend on their doing so. 

 

Asking parents to control their teens' use of smartphones is nice in theory, but one would have to be a literal helicopter parent to do that effectively, hovering over each child's shoulder every waking minute of the day.  Yes, there is software to block certain sites, but teens know ways to evade such restrictions, and it's simply impossible for even highly conscientious parents to monitor and censor every last thing a child does with his or her phone. 

 

Twenge proposes a straightforward ban on social media use for everyone under 16.  While the brain of a sixteen-year-old has still got a lot of maturing to do, this age represents a compromise between exposing highly vulnerable young people to the harmful effects of social-media use and keeping them from using it when they are mature enough not to be significantly harmed by it.  While an outright ban is still in the future, a number of states (Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, an Utah) have passed laws requiring that firms obtain parental permission before allowing people under 16 to get social media accounts. 

 

In many ways, this issue has parallels with the way attitudes and laws concerning smoking changed during the last part of the twentieth century.  Once a near-universal social habit, smoking was first revealed to be a leading cause of lung cancer.  Then when we found that cigarette companies had engaged in a concerted effort to deceive the public, their reputation suffered further.  The banning of cigarette ads from TV and radio in 1971 began a general social trend that gradually changed smoking from a normal activity to one engaged in by a decided minority of people, but only after years of adverse publicity, revelations of corporate wrongdoing, and contested legislation.

 

Largely because of the profits involved, we can expect a similar battle over an all-out ban on social media for teens.  In this case, however, the people most affected can't directly influence legislators, not being old enough to vote.  It is up to parents and others concerned about the wellbeing of the next generation to organize opposition to powerful entrenched interests backed by billions of dollars.  And even if our small-r republican system of government was in proper working order, this would be a hard fight. 

 

Fortunately, protecting children and adolescents from psychological harm has not become a partisan issue—yet.  Both Democrats and Republicans can understand the need to keep social-media firms from exploiting populations who suffer harm all out of proportion to their numbers.  Twenge and her fellow social-science colleagues have given us all the proof we need to take action.  Now all that is needed is the courage and diligence to see it through.

 

Sources:  Jean M. Twenge's article "Ending the Tyranny of Smartphones" appeared on pp. 34-38 of the May 2024 issue of National Review, and relies on data presented more fully in her latest book Generations (Atria Books, 2023).  I also referred to data from the following websites:  https://www.statista.com/statistics/201182/forecast-of-smartphone-users-in-the-us/,

https://www.statista.com/chart/10047/facebooks-monthly-active-users/, and https://apnews.com/article/georgia-social-media-children-age-porn-pornography-007fae0a3b3f80393b4a7d7a7a8b430a. 

 

Social Media: For Adults Only?

 Writing in National Review, cultural critic Christine Rosen recently proposed a total ban on social media for everyone under the age of 16.  One can imagine all sorts of problems with this idea, ranging from enforcement issues to what it would be like living in a country where nearly all the teenagers start screaming at the same time.  But let's step back from the immediate issues and effects, and ask what the ethics of such a ban would be. 

Rosen cites a number of other things that we don't let teenagers and younger kids do:  driving, voting, drinking and smoking (at least in public), and enlisting in the military.  There are various specific reasons for each of these bans, but at bottom, they all amount to the same thing:  lack of judgmental maturity, specifically a virtue called prudence. 

This is not to say that there are no prudent 10-year-olds.  But the classical virtue of prudence involves a mature measure of reasoned self-discipline.  Our intuitive sense that younger people, especially teenagers, are on average less able to impose discipline on their powerful desires is confirmed by neurological studies of the brains of teenagers and adults that were observed in the lab while the subjects made decisions.  In teenagers, the part of the brain called the amygdala, which governs "fight-or-flight" impulsive behavior, tends to take precedence over the frontal cortex, which is where deliberation and conscious decision-making tend to occur.  If teenagers tend to be physically incapable of making certain decisions in a way that doesn't harm themselves or others, it is a good thing to remove the choice from them until they are older. 

Rosen cites an internal study by Instagram that showed fully one-third of teenage girls found using the platform made them feel worse, but they were unable to stop it.  She points out that the 18-year-old who killed 21 people, most of them children, in a Uvalde elementary school last month had the habit of bullying others on social media. These examples highlight the fact that a mixture of hormonally stimulated teenagers and electronic media expressly designed to promote "engagement" by pressing mental hot buttons exquisitely ferreted out and customized to the user, leads to behavior that exploits teenagers, displaces time that could be used for in-person interaction, working, or sleeping, and at the extremes, encourages callousness, bullying, cruelty, and abuse.  

And there doesn't seem to be any way to design out the bad features while leaving in the good features.  If only angels used social media, there would be no downsides to it, but as angels communicate by what amounts to telepathy, there would also be no point in it.  (Angels also don't have any money.)  As much as the social-media giants don't like to admit it, they are basically in the same business as gambling casinos are:  to encourage something that at best is an amusing pastime, but at worst can be an enslaving and life-destroying habit. 

Gambling is another thing that we generally don't let teenagers do, for the same reasons as for driving or drinking.  When Rosen points out that the average teen spends five hours a day on social media, that is a mind-boggling number of person-hours that has been commandeered by firms who take huge amounts of time from young people, make huge amounts of money from them, and deliver very little that benefits them—especially considering the other things that the teens could be doing.  

Similar debates took place back in the 1950s about the time people spent watching TV, which has been largely displaced among the young by social media.  TV was an almost completely passive medium, however, and it wasn't possible to insult your neighbor or bully your girlfriend through the tube.  Mass-market TV had its own problems, but they were demonstrably milder than the worst pathologies we are seeing today that social media contribute to.

How would a ban on use of social media by those under 16 be enforced?  I can daydream about some measures that might be impractical, but also might be worth trying. 

One would be to have a social-media license, comparable to a driver license.  I can't imagine what kind of test we could make up to qualify a person to be able to use social media responsibly.  Maybe a highly-monitored "test drive" in which the prospective licensee's every text and comment would be vetted for meanness or bullying?  Of course, even hypocrites can behave nicely if they have to, and we might just let everyone have a license once they reached their sixteenth birthday.   

 

But I kind of like the idea of making people work for it, and teaching them some ground rules about social-media behavior before turning them loose on the Internet.The license idea would also help to deal with the problem of enforcement.  The banks have worked out ways of knowing exactly who is at the keyboard in the vast majority of cases.  True, there are always identity thieves to be fought, but thieves go where the money is.  There's not much money in faking a social-media account identity, so I would think that enforcement policies as robust as those banks use would keep fake identity problems down to a minimum.

 

Whatever the enforcement mechanism would be, it would have to come with severe penalties to the social-media companies for violations as well.  Shutting down half their servers, for example, might be a much more meaningful penalty than a fine, which is usually chump change to these giants.

 

I will close with an anecdote about a car salesman, about twenty-five years old, who I fell into conversation with one day as we were taking a new car for a test drive.  He was obviously aiming to please, but the remark he made as my wife and I reminisced about cars we had twenty and thirty years ago wasn't calculated to please me.

 

Apropos of nothing, he said, "Well, there's some things you folks enjoyed back then that I wish I could have experienced.  It's life without those," he said, pointing to my wife's mobile phone. Of all the changes from our generation to his that he could have mentioned, he saw the personal phone as something he wished he could have lived without.

 

The obstacles are many, but I hope Rosen's idea to ban social media for those under 16 gets serious consideration.  Evidence has been accumulating for decades that it is probably a net harm to young people, and what we lack now is only the will to make the change.

 

Sources: Christine Rosen's article "Ban Kids from Social Media" was published on June 9, 2022 at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/27/ban-kids-from-social-media/.  I also referred to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology's website at https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/FFF-Guide/The-Teen-Brain-Behavior-Problem-Solving-and-Decision-Making-095.aspx.