Let’s assume we had a product with a provably detrimental impact on the health of its users. It emphasised their insecurities, triggered body image issues, caused depressive and anxious thought patterns and, in some extreme cases, it may even be linked to suicidal ideation.
And let’s assume we possessed knowledge of at least some of this. What might our reaction be?
We could appeal to the regulatory powers that be. Or we could seek concrete top-down governmental intervention. We might weigh up the item’s pros and cons, trying to tease out its benefits from its harms. There is at least a molecule of merit behind any of these approaches.
But amid all of this there is one thing that should be screamingly obvious. No sane person would assess the situation and say: “Why don’t we trial a version of this product tailor-made for kids?”
Exactly what social media is doing to the shape and direction of the world is one of those epochal questions that will take us a long time to answer
Except that is precisely what Facebook has been considering for many months. In March Buzzfeed broke the story that Facebook’s photo-sharing app, Instagram, was mulling over plans to design a version of its site for children aged 10-12 (current company policy bans under-13s from the app).
But in the wake of a report by the Wall Street Journal, a public relations fracas, and some wailing and gnashing of teeth of many concerned law makers, Facebook has put the project on ice. Earlier in September the Journal reported on Facebook’s internal research, showing the company was aware as far back as 2019 of the damaging impact Instagram was having on the mental health of teenage girls.
“Thirty-two per cent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” a slide posted to Facebook’s internal message board in March read. “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” read another.
It certainly seems strange, in light of this, that Instagram for kids would ever be tabled as an option. But Facebook is entitled to a defence: more and more young people want to use the app anyway, but verifying the age of users is tricky, and perhaps the barriers are too porous. If that’s the case, why not make a version of the app suitable for their purposes, with more safeguards, transparency for parents, and even no advertisements?
Except it takes only a cursory second’s thought to realise this is dressing up a deeply cynical endeavour under the guise of possessing a social conscience (something Facebook forfeited claim to a long time ago).
The macro picture is nightmarish. And the micro picture is pretty troubling too
Because at its core the basic concept of Instagram Kids seems nothing more than an exercise in habit forming: capture the market as pre-teens in a safer, highly regulated environment and watch them naturally migrate over to Instagram proper when old enough. Cultivate the behaviours early on and the task of profiting off it later is made all the easier, making social media seem not so much an option but rather a necessity for 11-year-olds.
What we are seeing is social media giants duping us into believing it is normal, perhaps even good, for them to monetise our social lives at every level and at every age. This is a problem no matter how beneficial or harmful Instagram might be to our mental health. It shouldn’t be controversial to suggest that we should resist the migration of every microcosm of human connection to cyberspace.
Social media has made us hostages to our own worst impulses: vanity; attention-seeking; envy. And it reduces us to dopamine monkeys, endlessly unsatisfied in the pursuit of likes, messages, retweets and shares. But the real genius of the model lies in its encroaching and evolutionary nature. Its overweening presence did not arrive overnight.
We did not choose to go all-in with a snap of our fingers. But it has become an inextricable facet of life, its impact impossible to elude even for those who choose not to directly participate.
But no one wants to be a stick-in-the-mud. Social media has facilitated some of our best impulses too: curiosity, desire for connectivity, creativity. And adults are capable of making our own choices. There is no civil dictate that tells us we have to engage with whatever Facebook is waving in our faces. And surely it is a rather illiberal impulse to intervene with a private company flogging a product millions want to use. Maybe that is all true. But we needn’t parse the evidence too closely to realise that Instagram is probably bad enough to force us to give pause.
Exactly what social media is doing to the shape and direction of the world is one of those epochal questions that will take us a long time to answer. What we do know is the giants wield extra-governmental power with the same heft as many actual states. And they exert huge editorial influence without any of the professional structures, arbitration, checks and balances, and ethical concerns of traditional media.
The macro picture is nightmarish. And the micro picture is pretty troubling too. How is anyone going to mount meaningful resistance if they’re made complicit in the whole insidious and insipid project from just 10 years old?