If
political science really was a science, and the people in
lab coats tried to create the perfect political issue in the
lab, the end result would look a lot like the R16 social
media ban. Checklist: such a ban enables politicians to hold
hands with worried parents; it allows governments to look
like they care about social problems without needing to
change their economic settings one iota; the inevitable
failure to keep most kids off social media won’t count as
failure; and finally, the only people who think an R16
social media ban is complete crap are people who can’t
vote. And as an issue it is politically
fool-proof.
National is all for it. So is Labour,
provided a few of its concerns around privacy and the
monitoring progress on harm reduction are ticked off. Not
because this will make the ban consistent with general
principles of free speech and the Human Rights Act – it
won’t – but because this issue scores really well in
Labour’s focus groups, and in polling data. I’ve written
at
length here about why an R16 social media ban should be
opposed:
(a) it is wrong in principle
(b) it is
be more of a test of kids’ technical competence at
avoiding the ban, rather than a shield for their
vulnerability
Advertisement – scroll to continue reading
(c) it requires the state to assume
powers that belong with parents
(d) it commits serious
privacy violations, since the ban requires children’s
personal and biometric data to be handed over to third party
companies for age verification purposes
(b) it will
fail because most kids can get around the ban e.g. with a
VPN – and those who can’t are the kids most reliant on
online services for their sense of community
(c) it
will do more harm than good
(d) it will restrict
access to positive material and valuable communication
experiences online
(f) it will undermine positive ways
to teach kids how to safely navigate social media etc
etc
These comments by Mike Masnick on the Techdirt
site seem relevant:
One of the biggest benefits of
the Internet is the ability to talk to people outside your
personal sphere. It’s similar to the exposure to diversity
that a lot of people get when they leave home for college.
You can see how a bunch of conservatives who are dismayed by
their inability to control what the youth access and talk
about would want to lock them out so they can be limited to
the indoctrination of their immediate
vicinity.
Internet access helps LGBTQ kids when
their parents are unsupportive hateful bigots. Internet
access helps kids on the spectrum find other people who
share their interests and won’t think they’re weird.
Internet access helps kids who are being abused finds
strategies to report and escape from those
situations.
Social media age bans, as
the developmental psychologist Candice Odgers recently
explained, are also a form of victim
blaming:
We’re kicking them out of the spaces
they go to be with friends, to consume youth culture, and
yes, sadly, many times to escape people that are harming
them offline...So a social media ban might feel good
for the adults in the room, but teens tell me, and I believe
them — it’s not going to work. It’ll push them
into less safe and less regulated spaces, and it will
prevent us from doing what we really need to help them be
well.
You’d think Labour would have given these
matters more weight before angling to find ways to reap the
political gains of signing onto this issue, alongside h
National. To repeat: the R16 ban creates hair-raising
privacy issues by handing over children’s personal and
biometric information – ostensibly for age verification
purposes – to third party companies and (potentially) to
the same media platforms that are allegedly poisoning the
minds of our kids with toxic content and addictive
technologies.
Usually, conservatives will rail against
the state intruding in areas of parental responsibility. Not
this time. The French Constitutional Council, in its ruling
on the R15 law in France, made the telling point that such
bans commonly limit
the scope that parents have to decide what’s appropriate
for their kids. As the French court also pointed
out:
[… Neither the contested provisions nor any
other provision sets out the conditions under which the
holders of parental authority or the legal representative of
the minor, duly informed of the potential risks and
safeguards presented by the services concerned, may, in the
child’s best interests and in the exercise of their duties
under the law, decide to lift the prohibition, limit its
scope or authorise access to certain services.
If
only we cared as much about children living in poverty as we
seem to care about the time they’re spending on Tiktok.
BTW, most adults are pretty poor at modelling how to ration
their screen time. Parents routinely binge-watch, and “
binge-worthy” is held to be a very positive adjective to
apply to a new TV series. Yet often its the same adults who
angst about kids being undisciplined about the time they
spend online.
Globalising it
Around the
developed world, politicians are finding that supporting an
R16 ban puts them in a happy place with voters. The New
York Times has
reported on the global popularity of bans and
restrictions on children’s access to “socially
addictive” forms of social media while -almost
simultaneously – conceding that the bans
don’t/won’t/can’t work as intended.
Nine months
after Australia launched the first R16 social media ban, the
global backlash against this is
now well under way, mainly because to repeat (a) such
bans are easily circumvented and (b) there is evidence they
may do more harm than good. A lasting solution to issues
around kids having excessive screen time would require
schools and yes, politicians – to fund ways of better
equipping kids, parents and schoolteachers with techniques
that promote howe to be safe online.
Italian PM
Giorgia Meloni shares
some of the misgivings. While not personally against an
R16 social media ban she has said that this measure alone
was not enough to solve the problem “because this type of
ban can easily be circumvented.” This can be either by use
of a VPN, which is not forbidden under the Luxon
administration’s draft bill – or with the help of an older
sibling or friend.
“Stating that a ban [also]
risks “to partially transfer the problem on families,”
Meloni said restrictions can also be ineffective unless
governments put more pressure on platforms to take action
and to “take their responsibilities.”
In
France as mentioned, while President Emmanuel Macron
endorsed legislation to create an R15 social media ban, France’s
highest court has struck it down.
The
Council ruled
that the legislation banning under-15s from social media
infringed on freedom of expression and communication in a
manner that is not appropriate, necessary, or proportionate,
which is required by Article 34 of the French Constitution.
In particular, it stressed that the ban did not distinguish
between different types of online services, and ignored the
circumstances of individual users, such as their exact age,
level of maturity, and family situation.
The past
decade’s history of age-gating online content in Britain
is
well traversed here.
Zuckerberg’s
initiative
To some extent, the ground is shifting
under the whole idea of a R16 social media ban. Erica
Stanford’s decision to defer the legislation until after
the election and play for more time makes sense in the light
of recent overtures by Meta’s Mark Zuckerbeg. Zuckerberg
is trying to get in front of the issue, at least as far as
his company’s products – Facebook and Instagram- are
concerned.
In essence, Zuckerberg has offered a $US 17
-18 billion package deal to settle a joint lawsuit brought
on child safety grounds by all but two US states and
territories, with respect to Facebook and Instagram. (New
Mexico and Florida did not join the suit.) As part of the
deal, Zuckerberg is offering restrictions that would
significantly beef up the age-related content restrictions
that currently exist on Meta’s platforms. These new
provisions will phase in over the next decade. They include
time limits, notifications, the use of algorithms, the
banning of cosmetic filters etc.
Meta’
Methods
Briefly, Zuckerberg’s proposals include a
number of innovations. Teens will be allowed to spend only
two hours a day on Facebook/Instagram, although consenting
parents can permit extra time. Young subscribers will also
not be allowed to use the apps between midnight and 6am.
Facebook/Instagram notifications will not occur during the
8am to 3pn school hours.
Another innovation: the
“Autoplay” function that delivers content automatically
to kids will be able to be switched off, and young users
will also be able to turn off their personalised algorithmic
feeds. Prompts will appear every 15 minutes, every hour and
every 90 minutes to alert users how long they’ve been
online. The “Like” counts said to have a negative impact
on self-esteem will also be able to be turned off, and young
users will not be able to access “extreme makeup
filters” and other features that mimic cosmetic
surgery.
In future Meta is also promising to provide
(unspecified) extra protections against strangers being able
to contact young users, and extra ways for teens to report
harmful content, with a related promise to respond to 90% of
such reports within six hours. As the New York Times
also added –
Meta agreed to maintain and improve
the tools it offered parents to see how much time their
children spent on the apps, what content they were searching
and the kinds of contact they made with adults. Parents will
be alerted when their children create new accounts or have
interactions with accounts the company deems
suspicious.
At present, Zuckerberg intends to make
these provisions available only in the United States. Yet
since he also wants to set the industry standards, the
potential exists for an international rollout in due course.
The more immediate problem is that Meta is no longer the key
player in teen activities online, and hasn’t been for
years. Facebook and Instagram have been described as virtual
ghost towns. For most kids, YouTube and Tiktok are among the
more popular/important locations.
That’s one reason
why Zuckerberg is making $5 billion of the Meta payout
conditional on TikTok and YouTube implementing these same
safety provisions. At time of writing, TikTok and YouTube
were not commenting. If they do eventually agree, those
platforms would stand to lose some of their competitive
edge, an outcome that would enable Zuckerberg’s musty
platforms to eventually claw back a greater share of the
youth-related advertising revenue stream.
In other
words, Zuckerberg is not being altruistic. No surprise
there. By making concessions to the pressure Meta has
recently come under in the US courts, he is looking for a
business advantage. As Bloomberg News has
reported:
YouTube and TikTok will have more to
lose because teens now use those apps for longer than they
do Instagram and, it hardly needs pointing out, Facebook…
It may well be that an hourly limit on YouTube, an app that
76% of US teens use at least once a day, with 17% saying
they used it ‘almost constantly,’ might be a growth
driver for the stagnant Facebook, where just 20% of US teens
say they visit daily, according to data
from Pew Research. Instagram might experience a
similar boost. In that context, the 1% share-bump Meta
experienced after announcing the settlement makes a bit more
sense.
It makes sense for Erica Stanford to bide
her time, until the dust settles on exactly how the social
media giants may be willing to compromise with respect to
their young users,
globally.
© Scoop Media
