Germany is debating a social media ban for young people. However, the debate is woefully under-informed.
Recently, German chancellor Friedrich Merz proclaimed (translated):
“If kids today at the age of 14 have five hours and more screen time per day, if their whole socialization happens only over this medium, we should not be surprised about personality deficits and problems with the social behavior of young people.”
This is a chancellor in true BoomerGPT mode, not weighed down by facts or nuance. Social media and screen time are two distinct things. Collating them prevents any real analysis. And jumping straight to “kids these day” and their “personality deficits” rather than considering the harms done to those kids is a big part of the problem. We should be protecting kids, not condemning them. So:
- Long hours of screen time are a related but separate phenomenon from social media: Watching YouTube streams is a different form of engagement, with different implications, than TikTok or Instagram.
- Long hours of screen time are not a law of nature. I’d wager, in many cases they’re a potentially problematic byproduct of parents needing to work while childcare services work far less well and reliably than they should.
- I’ve argued for a long time that Social Media is dead. What we refer to today as “Social Media” is basically short form video streaming content powered by algorithmic recommendation systems. We use the same terminology but describe a very different phenomenon, which necessarily leads to wrong analyses.
To me, this leads to two big takeaways:
- If we think this thing called Social Media is dangerous to users’ mental health (at the individual level) and to democracy (at the societal level) — and I think both might very well be the case, all things considered — the obvious thing is not to ban Social Media not just for kids but for everyone. They bring the full weight of a highly advanced system to bear on the individual, no matter the age. No individual is equipped to deal with such a system.
- It is not Social Media we need to ban but the dual attack vector of algorithmic recommendation systems based on behavioral tracking. As long as our behavior is tracked, it’ll be weaponized to optimize for engagement. No human brain can withstand the constant battering of algorithms that track your attention and optimize our content feeds to maximally exploit our attention.
If we ended up banning behavioral tracking (beyond the individual site or app) and algorithmic feeds, we can solve for bigger issues than just social media. The whole internet will become better. This isn’t enough to solve all problems, but it’s an important step. Not sufficient, but necessary. And something I firmly believe to be necessary if we want to create a healthy internet and digital media sphere.
