A week ago, I read a number of reports that gladdened my heart.
Mt Albert Grammar School headmaster Patrick Drumm told news media that things have changed for the better since a ban on cell phones was introduced last year – lots of talking, movement, and sports games. Now all schools have a legal mandate to follow suit if they wish.
The same day Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced plans to introduce legislation by the end of the year to create a minimum age to access social media, joining South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria in deciding to impose restrictions as evidence mounts of detrimental effects on the young.
Then a couple of days ago a friend drew my attention to a piece in the New York Times commenting on a Harris poll of Gen Z users that indicated many of them wish certain types of social media…and even smartphones…had never been invented.
As a septuagenarian staring at the prospect of death within the next decade (or, with luck, two) and seeing countries beset by conflict and dysfunction, I may be forgiven for having a rather dark view of the world. Yet I don’t: I’m ever the optimist. That optimism is reinforced by the possibility that the social scourge of the digital age may be controllable after all.
However, and in spite of possible evidence to the contrary, I’m not stupid.
School bans on cell phones are not foolproof: Secondary Principals Association president Vaughan Couillault told NewstalkZB that enforcing a ban was challenging. An editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald announced unequivocally that the proposed Australian ban was “a simplistic solution to a problem too complicated to be resolved by good intentions”. And, despite the methodological soundness of the Harris polling organisation, a survey of 1006 Americans aged 18-27 does not capture the full gamut of Gen Z attitudes.
Nonetheless, the stories reflect a changing attitude that moves us away from the resigned acceptance that echoes Doris Day’s Que Sera, Sera but without the sweet, girl-next-door overtone.
They signal a growing belief that transnational social media platforms, operated by fabulously wealthy owners, are not, in fact, beyond regulation and control.
There is ample evidence that in their current uncontrolled – or, charitably, self-regulated – state these platforms are doing significant social harm.
In May, 1News carried a report stating that a study found New Zealand had the highest rate of school bullying in the OECD. Social media plays a prominent part in such behaviour and monitoring agency Netsafe has reported a rising incidence of cyberbullying.
In Australia, the eSafety commissioner has found that 75 per cent of Australian children and 16 to 18 had viewed pornography online. Nearly 40 per cent had accessed it before they were 13 years old. While I have not seen a similar study in New Zealand, it’s a fairly safe bet that patterns of behaviour are similar on both sides of the Tasman.
Around the world, study after study – to say nothing of the censuring words of coroners and judges – has shown the damaging consequences of providing communication conduits that allow unrestrained and often anonymous posting of harmful speech and images.
The European Union has consistently been at the vanguard of digital regulation. From February this year, 19 platforms, including social media and search engines, have been legally responsible if they are aware of illegal content on their sites. Such ‘content’ includes child sexual abuse material, terrorist content, illegal hate speech or illegal goods and services. In addition, its Digital Services Act tackles online harassment and cyber bullying by making sure any non-consensual private images and other abusive content can be quickly flagged by users and removed, and protects children by requiring platforms to ensure a high level of privacy, safety and security of minors.
Some jurisdictions are using the criminal law, rather than content regulation. The most extreme case is in France where the owner of the Telegram messaging service, Pavel Durov, has been charged with being complicit in the distribution of images of child sexual abuse, facilitating the operations of organised criminal groups, and refusing to share information with authorities.
The EU laws are, as yet, untested. The transnationals, however, have displayed a willingness to use their considerable power to thumb their noses at regulation. Facebook has pulled services rather than comply with content payment laws and X circumvented a total ban on its services in Brazil before owner Elon Musk last Friday decided to comply with a Brazilian Supreme Court ruling to remove accounts associated with groups engaging in disinformation campaigns.
The more countries are persuaded to use their sovereign powers to curb online activities that contribute to social harm, the more likely it is that the platform operators will have to comply.
The notion that they are merely common carriers (like the old telephone companies) has always rung hollow with me. They make large sums of money based on the content that they carry. They are not common carriers but publishers. And, like the publishers of newspapers or broadcast services, they should be responsible for what they publish.
Artificial intelligence gives them the means to police the prodigious amount of material that passes through their portals each day. If they say there is too much for them to handle, make them limit their services to a scale where they can meet their responsibilities.
So I applaud the efforts by the Australian government to protect its youngest citizens, and our law here that empowers schools to curb the use of the instruments of bullying and harm. More, of course, needs to be done and that includes resurrecting work here on harmful content. That work, however, needs a clearer brief to prevent it returning to the rabbit holes that emerged in the exercise undertaken during Labour’s term.
I reserve my greatest hope for the common sense of Gen Z, the first to grow up with social media woven into their lives.
Almost two-thirds of 18-22 year olds survey by Harris Poll in the United States believe social media had had a negative effect, almost equally divided between genders. Nearly half said they wished TikTok, Snapchat and X (formerly Twitter) had never been invented. One in five wished the smartphone had never seen the light of day.
Nearly all have taken steps to limit their social media usage at some point. Forty four per cent of women and 31 per cent of men said social media had had a negative effect on their emotional health.
A substantial majority (69 per cent) support a law requiring social media companies to develop a “child safe” account option for users younger than 18, and over a third support a ban on people younger than 16 using social media. More than half support parents restricting their child’s access to smartphones until reaching high school age (16), and this number rises to 60 per cent among 18 to 22-year-olds.
All of this suggests to me that, while the generations that created the Internet cling to some utopian – and quite erroneous – notion of a commons for the betterment of all, the generation that has borne the brunt of its deleterious effects may be ready to cry “enough”.
A guest essay last week in the New York Times (co-authored by Jonathan Haidt and Will Johnson, the former a social psychologist who collaborated on the survey and the latter chief executive of Harris Poll) exhorted the members of the US House of Representatives to take note of the attitudes of Gen Z when considering a bill before it on child online safety. The proposed law has some of the characteristics of the EU legislation.
The essay detailed the findings of the poll and said it shows that many Gen Z-ers see substantial dangers and costs from social media. A majority of them want better and safer platforms, and many don’t think these platforms are suitable for children. They admit, however, that a majority of respondents cited more benefits than harms. Yet they go on to say:
“…that does not justify the unregulated distribution of a consumer product that is hurting — damaging, really — millions of children and young adults. We’re not just talking about sad feelings from FOMO [fear of missing out] or social comparison. We’re talking about a range of documented risks that affect heavy users, including sleep deprivation, body image distortion, depression, anxiety, exposure to content promoting suicide and eating disorders, sexual predation and sextortion, and “problematic use,” which is the term psychologists use to describe compulsive overuse that interferes with success in other areas of life. If any other consumer product was causing serious harm to more than one out of every 10 of its young users, there would be a tidal wave of state and federal legislation to ban or regulate it.”
Legislation may, I admit, have a hard time bringing to heel mega platforms owned by people who act as though they have some sort of global power that transcends sovereign rights.
That power, however, is nothing against a generation that has shown – through its migration from Facebook to newer platforms – that it will vote with its feet. It would be ironic if the rising purchasing power of Gen Zers forced platforms to collectively clean up their act, not to be socially responsible but to stay in business.