TikTok went dark in the United States for a little while, but is now back online here thanks to a stay of execution from Donald Trump. The newly inaugurated president seems to be working toward some sort of a deal to help TikTok comply with federal rules prohibiting foreign agents from owning and controlling social media platforms in the U.S. Trump ordered the bipartisan 2024 ban signed by President Joe Biden and reinforced by the U.S. Supreme Court not be enforced for 75 days after its Jan. 19 effective date so he can “determine the appropriate course of action.”
Yes, we need to determine the appropriate course of action, but not just as it relates to legal compliance.
Remember: Just seven months ago the former U.S. surgeon general called for a warning label on social media platforms due to their role in accelerating the mental health crisis among young people.
That surgeon general, Vivek H. Murthy, flagged an alarming statistic: Teenagers are spending an average of 4.8 hours a day on social media. That number in itself is shocking — where are teens finding this much time to scroll? But it’s made even worse once you learn that a team of researchers found that when adolescents spend more than three hours a day on social media, they’re at a heightened risk for mental health issues. Half of teens say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies, and a third say it affects their grades, according to a 2022 survey from Boston Children’s Hospital.
Back to TikTok. There’s a lot not to like about what’s going on with the platform.
First off, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is compelled to “assist or cooperate” with the Chinese government‘s “intelligence work” and to ensure it has “the power to access and control private data.” The platform is being used to surveil journalists and others, and report back to Beijing. Each of these transgressions merits deeper discussion. The Supreme Court justices in their 9-0 ruling to uphold the TikTok ban said they weren’t focused on the content on TikTok.
But we should be. TikTok and the like are poisoning American kids.
A team of Wall Street Journal reporters launched TikTok accounts registered as 13-year-old users for a 2023 investigation and were fed a “highly personalized, never-ending stream of content curated by the algorithm,” including extreme videos on the Israel- Palestine conflict. All of this content is leading to depression and anxiety among our youth, a phenomenon that led 14 attorneys general to sue TikTok over its negative effects on childhood mental health. Jonathan Haidt, a writer and social psychologist who has risen to household recognition thanks to his intense focus on the intersection of young minds and social media, pored over the legal briefs from the aforementioned TikTok lawsuit, and what he found is disturbing.
First, TikTok leadership knows how bad its product is for American kids. One internal report noted that “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety …”
And as The Wall Street Journal’s investigation shows, TikTok also fails to gatekeep sensitive content, with significant percentages of explicit and suggestive “violative content” that is not moderated or removed.
Haidt summarizes the problem with our willingness to hand over smartphones and social media to kids this way: “We have overprotected our children in the real world while underprotecting them online.”
We agree. TikTok is one of the biggest dangers to which kids are exposed today, and it’s addictive, especially for kids who have limited impulse control. Pew Research Center investigated how big the problem was among 13- to 17-year-olds, and found that “most teens use social media and have a smartphone, and nearly half say they’re online almost constantly.”
Haidt, a leading champion for limiting the harm phones and social media have on kids, also notes that the Chinese being able to game TikTok’s algorithm to feed America’s youth targeted video content is “a huge geopolitical asset for the communist country, whose goal is to subvert democracy around the world.”
So what to do?
When Murthy visited us in May 2023, he laid out a series of commonsense remedies that we wholeheartedly endorsed. First, the people who run Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and other social media platforms must step up and take responsibility for the impact that their products and services have on teens and children, and must enable independent assessments of that impact. He said lawmakers should establish and enforce age-appropriate health and safety standards that protect children from harmful content and limit the use of features aimed mostly at maximizing screen time and engagement. And he encouraged parents and kids to create a “family media plan” that establishes boundaries for social media use at home.
When it comes to TikTok and any other social media platform, we agree that grown-ups need to limit our kids’ access to social media platforms, where content of every kind is a tap away, as well as posting culture that fosters bullying and harms self-confidence and healthy emotional development. These same harms are present on Instagram and Facebook. Powerful algorithms are getting kids hooked on doom scrolling as they search for validation and fall into the never-ending loop of content that social media uses as bait. It’s stealing — and wasting — their time.
While politicians and tech giants sort out platform ownership and national security concerns, we call on leaders at every level of government to protect our kids. And most importantly, we encourage parents to think twice before giving their teens unfettered access to these confidence-killing distractions.
— Chicago Tribune via TNS
