Posted on 01/19/2023 10:12:36 AM PST by Heartlander
Imagine if a man in a white panel van pulled up in your neighborhood and began enticing teens to look at pictures and videos featuring drug use, pornography and a range of other antisocial activities. In many neighborhoods, he’d be in handcuffs within the hour.
And yet, strangely enough, Mark Zuckerberg, Shou Zi Chew and Sundar Pichai do almost the same thing online at Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, where they have virtually unimpeded access to the neighborhood teens and manage to make billions of dollars poisoning their hearts and minds.
This is the strange moment we are living in, a moment where we still let Big Tech push products on our teens that, as the Facebook Files suggested, make them anxious, depressed and suicidal, among other pathologies.
We’re at a moment with Big Tech much like we were with Big Tobacco in the 1970s, when the studies were rolling in documenting the medical risks associated with smoking, but the government had not yet stepped in aggressively to limit smoking. In the past decade, anxiety, depression and teen suicide have surged, especially among girls, since the mass adoption of smartphones around 2010. Depression more than doubled, from 12% in 2010 to 26% today for teen girls. Emergency room visits for self-inflicted injuries almost doubled over the same period, again for teen girls. And teen suicide among girls has risen to a 40-year high.
Depression among teenage girls has *doubled* since the mass adoption of the smartphone @ 2010: https://t.co/dbiQs8peEw @jean_twenge @FamStudies pic.twitter.com/T7sUSV6fIq— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) January 18, 2023
A mounting body of evidence indicates that Big Tech is heavily implicated in the skyrocketing psychological problems of our nation’s adolescents. One recent study found that teens who devote more than eight hours a day to screen time were about twice as likely to be depressed as their peers who were on screens less often than that.
The study, sponsored by the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute and co-authored by one of us, also discovered that teens who have high tech use were almost twice as likely to report being lonely and about 30% more likely to be sleep deprived.
Social media appears to be especially problematic for today’s teens. Excessive time on social media has been linked to “fear of missing out,” cyberbullying, emotional insecurity and body-image problems. The time devoted to social media also inhibits in-person socializing, exercise and sleep, all of which are crucial for adolescents’ emotional well-being. Research by psychologist Jean Twenge found, for instance, that the share of teens who went on dates has fallen by almost 30 percentage points in recent years and that the number of times teens hang out with friends fell by about 20% from 2007 to 2015. “As long as teens are scrolling through Instagram more, and hanging in person with their friends less, depression is likely to remain at historically high levels,” noted Twenge.
Of course, just as Big Tobacco had its defenders as debates about the tobacco-cancer link first erupted, Big Tech has its defenders today, as well. For example, Harvard social scientist Mesfin Bekalu argued that routine social media use “could be beneficial,” a sentiment echoed by Zuckerberg in his claim that Instagram is “generally positive” for kids’ mental health. While all social scientists know that “correlation does not equal causation,” there is growing evidence that the negative impact of technology on teens is indeed causal. In fact, new studies of the rollout of broadband internet in Germany and Italy show the penetration of the internet into ordinary communities across these countries fueled emotional problems among the young, especially young women, providing the strongest evidence to date that it really is Big Tech, not something else, making us miserable.
Here in the United States, a new study finds that the expansion of the internet has driven suicide rates higher in counties across America, further evidence that Big Tech’s effects are causal.
Unfortunately, Big Tech has been able to prey on our teens in part because their apps operate under a law that was designed before the age of social media, giving parents very little control over their kids’ tech use. That law, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, was passed in 1998 in the age of dial-up internet service and online message boards. Since then, the internet has gone through significant changes. Today, at the click of a button or the swipe of a phone, our children can find themselves immersed in apps and games that expose them to antisocial images and messages without their parents’ knowledge, consent or protection.
But since Congress has failed to stand up to Big Tech by updating the legislation, it falls on states to take the lead in protecting our kids. Louisiana recently passed legislation requiring pornography sites to verify users’ ages. And Utah, under the leadership of Gov. Spencer Cox, is now poised to take the lead in protecting teens from the worst excesses of Big Tech.
Inspired in part by the report “Protecting Teens from Big Tech: Five Policy Ideas for States,” Utah state legislators like Sen. Mike McKell, R-Spanish Fork, and Rep. Jordan Teuscher, R-South Jordan, are working with Cox to advance legislation that would ensure that all social media platforms operating in the state do five things:
Cox also hopes to launch a public campaign that will educate kids and young adults about the dangers of devoting too much time to the virtual world, and not enough time to the real world.
Some will argue that such reforms are unnecessary or impractical. Regarding necessity, those who are parents today know how hard it can be to police their children’s social media accounts. The law should make it easier — not harder — for parents to protect their children.
As for feasibility, new online technologies make it easy to require age/ID verification for children’s use of apps through third-party services such as Persona. And parental monitoring of such apps can build on the success that companies like Greenlight (which provides debit cards that allow parents to oversee their children’s spending) have already had in implementing this type of technology.
Companies like Alphabet, Meta and TikTok have unparalleled power to shape the hearts, minds and lives of American adolescents. Of course, some of the connections forged by these platforms have been good, helping kids deepen friendships, stay in touch with grandparents or communicate socially redeeming messages.
But much of the time, the power that Big Tech wields over our children’s lives ends up being abused and abusive, and Cox aims to give parents more power to guide and protect their kids online. We hope the Utah state legislature will work with him to pass legislation to rein in Big Tech.
As Cox said at a recent symposium on social media and teen mental health, “I truly believe we are starting to reach this tipping point. I was shocked when I saw some of those charts and graphs. I knew it was worse, but I didn’t realize how much until I saw the data. And when I saw those, it was an awakening for me, and we’re hoping to have that same awakening with policymakers.”
In other words, it’s time for Utah — and the rest of the country — to treat Big Tech much like Big Tobacco.
Lawyers preparing to get rich in an new batch of class action lawsuits?
I do almost nothing with social media, but I feel that I suffer from the effects of second-hand social media.
Once they became corrupt cronies to the government it was all downhill after that. Now they’re the scourge of society
TikTok is a CCP assault on the West.
“We’re at a moment with Big Tech much like we were with Big Tobacco in the 1970s, when the studies were rolling in documenting the medical risks associated with smoking, but the government had not yet stepped in aggressively to limit smoking.”
Problem is, tobacco is a product government can regulate. Social media is speech that the government can’t regulate.
Let’s not forget the effects of Big Government. It’s invasive & intrusive!
“I do almost nothing with social media”
NEWS ALERT!
You ARE in social media. What do you think FR is?
[[Social media is speech that the government can’t regulate.]]
But did regulate in a backdoor manner-
Was the decline in smoking mainly the result of government action? I don’t know the answer to that. As a nonsmoker, I don’t have total insight into all the factors that go into why people want to start/continue/quit smoking. Sure, one would suspect that government action did succeed with such tactics as banning smoking in bars/restaurants/offices as well as taxing cigs up to a price point where they became unaffordable or less affordable for many. However, when I go to countries like France and I notice smoking rates, despite similar taxes and bans, seem to be approximately 4x what I see in California. So is government regulation the primary cause? Or are there cultural factors that play a larger role?
“...where we still let Big Tech push products on our teens...”
Well, it isn’t that they haven’t utilized a new way of training the public, this modus operandi is still effective if you let it.
Computers don’t show bad things to kids, kids turn them on to see it. And the makers of the computers even supply ways to try to stop it if the parents will just do it.
Alinsky:
RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy.
Sound familiar? Guns don’t kill people either, it’s people who kill them. And there are gun safes and trigger locks and the ATF and the local police that “were” in place until the liberals laid them off and put counsellors under employ to stop the flow of trafficking. Makes sense, I guess, to someone.
wy69
That’s why I said “almost nothing”. I didn’t say nothing.
‘Big Tobacco’ used to be huge Republican donors.
If they were huge Democrat donors we would be learning (probably in government schools) about the healthful benefits of “bathing your lungs in cleansing smoke”
Sure, there are rumblings and a few hearings regards breaking these up, as with Meta where Zuckerberg testified... But none of this will go anywhere because today you have a cozy relationship between government and all these monopolies.
All a waste of time, NEVER will the US government take any action today: https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21335706/antitrust-hearing-highlights-facebook-google-amazon-apple-congress-testimony
May it be intelligence and mass data collection, the political alignment and benefit to certain parties, control and ease of censorship, the infrastructure which even the US government runs on (Amazon for example), the ties with law enforcement, foreign intelligence collection... the bottom line is that these big monopolies or oligopolies have strong government ties and there is a symbiotic relationship to where government is no longer a neutral party willing to make the decisions necessary to create a free and competitive market place.
The apparent death of a free market was evident when the CIA/NSA selected the winner in search engines and funded Google. That armed Google with the purse of the US tax payer and they pulled ahead of all their competitors such as Altavista at the time. Why the government would do this is obvious, isn't it?
Big tech is no different than than your MSM where 6 massive conglomerates control ~90% of what the average American sees or hears. There too, government is essentially impotent because you have a cozy relationship between government and the media:
https://i.insider.com/4fd9ee1e6bb3f7af5700000a?width=700&format=jpeg&auto=webp (even radio... For example, Clear owns >1,200 stations and they alone control ~80% of the radio content in the US)
https://i.redd.it/uzurei5atjc91.png
***The real questions we should be asking ourselves are (1) how do we unravel a government that has become intertwined with private business (2) how do we break up these monopolies in part created by a government meddling?***
They just need to ask former AG Mike Moore from Mississippi how to sue using a trumped up jury from Winston County, Mississippi and how to use the money for personal gain.
The same for Big Rat
There was a thread recently on the demise of "Tobacco Smoking Culture" which spawned almost 300 spirited posts.
As I wrote then, you can draw a very bright line from the successful weaponization of anti-tobacco sentiment, and the destruction of rights, specifically those of commercial property owners such as the owners of cafes, restaurants, bars, stores, the knock-on effects on civil liberties during COVID-1984...and the likely quashing of free speech via the Bad Idea in this article.
In 1995, California was the first state to enact a statewide smoking ban for restaurants. I worked in NYC when the idea to ban smoking in bars and clubs gained steam, and ultimately passed in 2002. It sparked a citywide debate, with the pro-ban people gaining the upper hand. I mean, how can you defeat "I won't die of secondhand smoke and my clothes won't smell"?
And there was much rejoicing. Except...what really happened was a sort-of violation of the Takings clause. What all the anti-smokers et al achieved was the sanctioning of the state to tell commercial property owners what can and can't happen on their property.
NY has moved beyond bars, clubs, offices, and public places to outdoors. Other municipalities have enacted similar takings, erm, bans. Nobody fights for commercial property rights anymore. Marx and Engels are laughing in hell.
Second-hand smoke and "second-hand Big Tech" is an externality - an indirect cost or benefit to an uninvolved third party that arises as an effect of another party's (or parties') activity. Air pollution from motor vehicles is one example of an externality, and the whole environmental movement rests on "the need for government to regulate industry to make the air clean." If you want to treat Big Tech like pollution, brace for a Greta Thunberg-like influencer that bans conservative media.
When the shots granted EUAs rolled out, many people refused to take them. We then saw the pro-shot talking heads brandish anti-smoking arguments - remember "The bottom line: We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers." Regarding masks, we got Mandatory masking? What smoking bans can teach us
Despite well-documented health consequences of indoor smoking, efforts to ban the behavior were met with intense political resistance and an all-too-familiar civil liberties debate, just as we see today. But science, combined with social and political initiatives that were responsive to public concerns, eventually spurred a large-scale shift in public opinion around smoking bans. From this experience, three lessons can inform how to improve adherence to universal masking -- a life-saving public health measure: 1. Frame masking as a workers' rights issue, 2. Mandates are necessary because they work, and 3. Don't lose sight of the last mile.
The private sector and M&A took down Twitter with almost no innocent casualties and massive societal benefits. Keep Leviathan away from Big Tech - otherwise the anti-smoking campaign that gave the government an inroad into whittling away rights under the guise of public health will continue unabated.
I always lol at concerns with TokTok.
All Big Tech spies on everyone all the time—and China spying is supposed to worse than the US having twenty one intelligence agencies spying on its citizens?
I don’t care if China spies on me.
I do care if NSA spies on me.
‘Second-hand smoke and “second-hand Big Tech” is an externality - an indirect cost or benefit to an uninvolved third party that arises as an effect of another party’s (or parties’) activity.’
Yes, and let’s not forget, this is exactly the kind of argument that the left is currently using to advocate for “hate speech” laws (really just political censorhip). “You are doing actual harm to trans people with your bigoted hate speech!”, etc.
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