Legacy Media Gaslights about Big Tech
Enter another piece in The Guardian, this time about social media, with many holes and a veritable Hobson's Choice, pushing regulation by Big Gov't or Big Tech as the only binary choices
Prelim: this post, according to Substack, is ‘too long for email’. Act accordingly.
Reference is made to yesterday’s piece, linking to a Guardian (of all places) article on smart phone bans in a private boarding school in Massachusetts:
Today, I’ve got even more from—still (!)—The Guardian (of all places), and this time, I shall endeavour to cite more fully from it because its topic—Social Media and Addiction—is pertinent.
Emphases and bottom lines mine.
‘Fundamentally against their safety’: the social media insiders fearing for their kids
By Johana Bhuiyan, The Guardian, 18 Jan. 2024 [source]
Parents working for tech companies have a first-hand look at how the industry works—and the threats it poses to child safety.
Arturo Bejar would not have let his daughter use Instagram at the age of 14 if he’d known then what he knows now.
Bejar left Facebook in 2015, where he spent six years making it easier for users to report when they had problems on the platform. But it wasn’t until his departure that he witnessed what he described in recent congressional testimony as the “true level of harm” the products his former employer built are inflicting on children and teens—his own included.
Bejar discovered his then 14-year-old daughter and her friends were routinely subjected to unwanted sexual advances, harassment and misogyny on Instagram, according to his testimony:
I really can’t imagine a world where, as things stand today, these [social media] things are safe for a 13-year-old to use. At that age, you’re still developing in so many ways, and you experience the world so intensely. And then you have an environment that really doesn’t provide the right safeguards on time spent [this is a bit odd, for if, say, your 13yo reads ‘inaapropriate’ books, e.g., Marquis de Sade, one would probably be happy that the kid loves reading, right?] or what happens when someone makes a comment that makes you uncomfortable [same about printed/written content, to say nothing about children watching TV news with their parents] or what happens if you get bullied [different pair of shoes].
But it wasn’t his daughter’s experience on Instagram alone that convinced Bejar that the social network is unsafe for kids younger than 16; it was the company’s meager response to his concerns. Ultimately, he concluded, companies like Meta will need to be “compelled by regulators and policymakers to be transparent about these harms and what they are doing to address them” [and this is where Bejar and his ilk, although I share their sympathies and worries, loose support: by making what is, essentially, an issue of personal freedom/responsibility something that ‘the state’ has to take off—more on the pernicious role of the ‘the state’ below]
‘Sympathy but no concrete action’
After seeing his daughter’s experience on the platform, Bejar returned to Facebook’s parent company Meta as a consultant for two years. That’s when he said he discovered that much of the work he and his team once did was no longer in place, including support tools for teens who said they were being bullied or harassed.
Initial data he examined from the research team showed that 21.8% of 13- to 15-year-olds said they were bullied, and just more than 13% said they received unwanted advances in the previous seven days [what a whopper; what’s the corresponding number in, say, the school system?]
He wrote to the executives Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Mosseri with his findings. Their response was “not constructive”, he testified. “Sheryl Sandberg expressed empathy for my daughter but offered no concrete ideas or action. Adam Mosseri responded with an request for a follow-up meeting, Mark Zuckerberg never replied,” he said.
It’s been two years since Bejar left Instagram, and he has little hope that the company will voluntarily make its social network safer for teens. He’s certainly not alone in thinking so. Several parents working at large tech companies said they did not trust that their employers and their industry would prioritize child safety without public and legal pressure [why would they? I mean, it’s about their profits, which derive from screen time…the question to be asked, in my view, would be: who ‘helped’ form these tech companies in the beginning—which quickly leads to answers about the futility of expecting ‘the state’ to rein in the ‘monsters’ he created]. By contrast, their opinions on screen time and on whether their children are allowed to use social media varied widely. Some permit limited use of screens; some ban them entirely.
“The foundation of what drives this industry is fundamentally against the safety of our children,” said one now former TikTok employee and parent of a four-year-old. The worker, who left the company in the months after this interview, asked not to be named for fear of retaliation from his employer. “When it comes to child safety, it’s always an afterthought. It’s always after a million mistakes happen and a ton of pressure gets put on you by regulators and parent groups. So you have to come up with solutions to keep children ‘safe’, but it’s never foolproof.” [should it be ‘foolproof’? Could it ever be? I mean, you ride a bike, there’s a risk; same with climbing trees, by the way…]
How tech workers supervise their kids’ screen use
The battle over teenagers’ use of social media and screens is currently raging at the highest levels of government in the US and UK. In the US, federal children’s online safety bills are being hotly debated, efforts to ban TikTok [note: for very different reasons, i.e., Chinese spying] have picked up steam and waned over the last year, and dozens of states have sued Meta for allegedly deliberately designing its platforms to be addictive to kids.
But long before those battles turned into bills on desks in Congress, parents in tech had been grappling with whether to let their own kids use the very products their industry has unleashed. Even those parents, many of whom may be equipped with a bit more awareness of the inner workings of technology and the companies building it, are still figuring it out.
Beyond bullying and harassment, parents in tech have the same concerns any other parent might over their kids’ use of social media and screens. They wrestle with questions of whether their children are becoming addicted to the use of screens, what type of content algorithms are pushing to them and whether the use of technology might be harming their children’s development [this is why I wrote in that above-linked other piece that one best reads that article and this one combined]. And while they may get a first-hand look at how the tech industry works and the forces that drive many of the decisions company executives might make – the way they approach their concerns varies just as widely as most other groups of parents.
The ex-TikTok employee said his four-year-old was too young [I think so, doh, I mean, he’s probably unable to use knife and fork properly, but social media, sure, why not] to be using TikTok. The father is not sure yet whether he’ll let his son use the platform in the future either [I wouldn’t]. He has yet to explore what parental controls TikTok has in place because he doesn’t think there’s enough content on it that would be suitable for his child at four [I’m sure if TikTok released a statement with boilerplate verbiage to that effect, it might put his mind at ease, right? Right!]. But he is generally aware of how kids behave on various platforms, he said. His 12-year-old nephew, for instance, uses Discord – a platform that has gotten the teenager in a bit of trouble. “When all these middle-schoolers get together on an online platform and there’s no faces involved, they can say whatever they want,” he said. “So I’m definitely wary of what kids can do when parents aren’t really around.” [ah, the age-old problem, isn’t it? Let’s not call this derisively ‘first world problems’ (although they are), but instead ponder the question: are our Western kids spoiled and pampered, as well as ‘we’ parents way to much into helicopter-style surveillance for…what reasons, exactly? I’ll say something about this in the bottom lines]
Today, he allows his child to use YouTube with some supervision during meals [idiot, if I may say so, for, essentially, procreating and eating are the most important things for human reproduction; this guy, though, is numbing his child via youtube during meals]. He pays for the Premium service [gotcha] to avoid any ads disrupting the content and has auto-play shut off – so a random video he didn’t choose for his child doesn’t start playing. But that’s as far as his planning around his kid’s use of social platforms has gone [other than, say, uttering incoherent things to The Guardian].
Another parent of three, who works at a major payments company, said he didn’t let his kids use tech at all. His children, who are three, six and 11 years old, are home-schooled, and he worries tech will get in the way of their learning and development [I hear you]:
“We don’t see any benefit of screen time right now. Even in our social circle, you see adults who are hooked to their phones and laptops. Then there are other factors like how social platforms are developing all these algorithms, which can expose kids to negative things.” [I work in academia, it’s worse there, esp. among faculty during meetings; also, not the absence of ‘addiction’ here]
But, as a tech worker, he understands the importance of his kids learning about data. He realized doing that without screens was a challenge and found few books to help him teach his children, so after a bit of experimentation he wrote and published his own book on data literacy for kids. “We do data visualization or data analysis of board games that we play or other things that we see in our daily lives,” he said. “And it’s been a good success with my kids, so that’s why I decided to write a book and share it.”
Parents in tech struggle to trust their own employers [pro tip: don’t, anywhere]
While both parents have vastly different approaches to how their kids use tech, they said the irony of working in an industry that produces products they have various safety concerns about was not lost on them [remember, this is The Guardian after all]. But their ultimate hope is to try to make some sort of a difference from the inside [worked wonders for, say, the non-Nazis in Hitler’s 1933 gov’t, because they shared this ‘hope’; I’m not equivocating here, for my point is—it kinda depends on the ruthlessness of ‘the other’]. “It’s something I think about often as someone who’s working in tech and I’m like, ‘oh, I might be a sellout,’” said the ex-TikTok worker. “But at the same time, I’m learning about it and getting familiar with it so that maybe one day I can make an impact and change and be an advocate for what’s right or what’s wrong.” [see what I mean?]
However, Bejar’s experience at Meta shows the potential limits parents in tech might face when trying to affect change from inside the company. When he was working at the company as a consultant, Bejar recalled trying to get his team to prioritize reducing the number of unwanted sexual advances for teens on Meta-owned platforms. “We could not get that goal adopted by the team,” he said.
“That’s why I reached out to [Zuckerberg] and [the Meta chief product officer, Chris Cox] and [the Instagram CEO, Mosseri]. I genuinely thought they don’t know how bad it is. But it’s been two years and they didn’t do anything.”
Meta spokesperson Liza Crenshaw said it was “absurd” to suggest the company only started conducting user perception surveys in 2019 [note the spin, for Bejar specifically noted ‘unwanted sexual advances’ towards teens, which is a felony crime, by the way, which Meta is, if not condoning, aiding and abetting] when Bejar returned to the company as a consultant. Crenshaw said the company conducts qualitative surveys on users’ experience on the platform in addition to collecting quantitative data.
“Prevalence metrics and user perception surveys measure two different things,” Crenshaw said in a statement. “We take actions based on both and work on both continues to this day.” [I’m sure you do /sarcasm]
Bejar knows many well-meaning Meta employees who are working hard to make a difference from the inside. “But the company does not listen to them,” he said. [oh, ‘if the Führer only knew’, is another popular trope from times past]
“I cannot tell you how many parents I’ve met who are working in these places because they believe in their hearts that they make it better, and they work on integrity or trust and safety. And there’s just so many wonderful, committed people willing to do the hardest work in those areas.” [it doesn’
Just last week, months after Bejar’s congressional testimony, Meta announced a slate of new safety features for users under 18 that included hiding “age inappropriate content” [sure, a bit of censorship here and there…] even when shared by someone the user follows. The company said it will also prompt teenagers to update their privacy settings […supported, to to say, by rendering ‘users’ into ‘snitches’]. Bejar said he was not convinced these new features were as restrictive as Meta is making them out to be and, he pointed out, there was still no way “for a teen to easily flag an unwanted advance in the product. It is as simple as a button.” [and the end result might actually be to ‘condition’ teens to do so in real life, too].
Meta pointed to several Instagram features including one that restricts users over 19 from contacting teens who don’t follow them [what does Meta do about users lying about their age? Oh, sure, digital ID is ‘the solution’]. The company also said they only allow users to message a person who doesn’t follow them one time until that person accepts the message.
Ultimately, Bejar’s congressional testimony served as his retirement from the tech industry. Now he said his goals were “to help regulators, policymakers, academics, journalists and the public better understand how companies think about these problems and what it would take to address them”.
Is screen time bad for kids? [yes, and also for adults, more here]
Complicating matters for parents attempting to navigate how much their kids should use social media or screens generally, is that the jury is still out on how harmful screen time actually is for them [nope, not really, as all Scandinavian countries are reducing screen time in school].
The surgeon general of the US issued an oft-cited warning in May 2023 that “there is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people’s mental health.” But the warning came with a qualifier: there is not enough evidence to say definitively whether social media is safe. A recent study of 2 million people that came out of Oxford University concluded that, without tech companies providing more detailed data, there was not enough evidence to prove popular claims that social media and internet use can harm mental health. And in 2020, researchers combed through 40 studies on the relationship between social media and depression and anxiety and found the link was small and inconsistent [see below].
Parents’ fears are not unfounded, however. In terms of screen time, research published in the journal Jama Pediatrics found that one-year-olds who had two or more hours of screen time a day were 61% more likely to have development delays [because your child is hyper-stimulated and has little, if any, affect control]. Whistleblowers such as Frances Haugen and Bejar have shared internal data from companies like Meta that point to a harmful relationship between teenage girls’ use of Instagram and their mental health [hi, Jonathan Haidt who’s been saying this for years—see below].
Whether the use of screens and tech will ultimately be proven to be inherently good or bad, parents in tech who spoke to the Guardian said they felt companies needed to provide better controls.
“I will certainly lean away from technology platforms that don’t have enough controls that parents can at least have access to,” Frank Padikkala, a tech worker and parent of two, said. “I’m not saying that it just needs to be completely locked down or restricted but at least give us the choice to make those decisions.” [why are we still debating whether gov’t or big business shall govern us? Remember ‘just say no’ (to social media and smart phones for your kids until at least they’re able to vote)]
Bottom Lines
Yes, this is a surprisingly long piece, and I’d encourage everyone to read the rest over at The Guardian (of all places).
I’ve already highlighted the many shortcomings of the article, but, hey, at least legacy media noticed what entirely mainstream scholarship has been saying for years on end:
Note that Prof. Haidt’s lecture dates from 2018 (and I highly recommend it).
‘Even’ papers like The Wall Street Journal were reporting (quite accurately) about it in 2018 (e.g., here) and 2021 (see here), and they did so in no uncertain terms:
Given all this evidence, reported by legacy media years ago and well after scholarship was more or less done evaluating this, we’re still discussing things and hosting hearings.
In effect, both pieces in The Guardian look like a cover up, or limited hangout, for the editors either don’t know about the above evidence (and therefore shouldn’t commission such faulty pieces) or they knowingly omit them.
Thus, the end of the above piece is telling, too:
“You don’t have to be the judge and jury on everything in the world,” [Bejar] said. “You have to create a human mechanism that helps people have the content that they want and not get the content that they don’t want.”
If Instagram did implement that sort of a feature, Bejar continued, “I would be so happy for my daughter to be on Instagram.”
Who should be that ‘you’, if I may ask? Should it be the federal government via yet another enormous regulatory agency that will, in all likelihood, be beholden to ‘special interests’ from the get-go?
Or, alternatively, should we, the people, wait for big tech to devise yet another ‘technical solution’ (to an ultimately human problem, that is) that will be, either ‘inadvertently’ or by design, fleece users once more.
Coda: Parental Experiences
Here’s my two cents as a father: 100% freedom to surf the web is a stupid idea, as is the opposite (think: forbidding junk food altogether, or literally everything else).
We permit our girls 20 minutes of Roblox (w/o connecting to anyone else) each after they’re done with their homework; that’s it.
Occasionally, they watch streamed content on Eviltube, but only with permission and after we offered ‘curated’ content that we buy or rent.
We do keep an old DVD player and have a bunch of ‘old’ animated movies from before the ‘woke’ mind virus made it to Hollywood.
For everything else, there’ll come a time.
As regards cell phones in general, well, that’s a different issue and we’ll address it in due time.
There is a concerted push for «online safety» type legalislation (online harms Bill in the UK for example) and recent EU legislation placing the responsibility of content on social media on the owner of the platform. Of course, all of this is actually a thinly veiled push for more censorship, and a push for that censorship to be done by PRIVATE actors, so that the state can claim “nope, no state sensorship here!”. It has nothing to do with “online safety for kids” or whatever crocodile-tear reasons and propaganda pieces that are being used to front this push.
Expect to see in the near future digital ID as a requirement to be online, and “free speech” heavily moderated by “big tech” on behalf of the state. They are eager to take back control over what people think. Former Norwegian prime minister and WHO stooge Gro Harlem Brundtland summarized the elite sentiment well when she said: “we’re losing control over what people are being told”. Indeed you are, Gro and co….
My parents never let my brother and me have a television or telephone (landline, back in the day) in our room.
I suppose any parent who wants the state to get involved should look in the mirror, strike a confident pose, and recite, "L'état, c'est moi" until he is convinced of it.