Young people bid for online agency
Christian Science Monitor · C · trust 57/100
Pending laws and recent legal cases seek increased transparency into social media design features that target youth audiences. Preserving the innocence of childhood is a shared civic motivation across generations.
| Graeme Sloan/SIPA/AP/File Isabel Sunderland, an advocate with the youth-led Design it For Us coalition, spoke at a press conference about the Kids Online Safety Act, in Washington, D.C., July 2024. Loading...
Keeping pace with new developments in the world of social media and artificial intelligence is no easy task. Almost as challenging is keeping up with the slew of regulatory, judicial, and civil society actions seeking greater transparency from Big Tech into the design parameters, data extraction, and internal research behind social media apps used extensively by children and adolescents.
Last Wednesday, a U.S. Senate committee unanimously advanced the Kids Online Safety Act, which would mandate default privacy settings and require “reasonable care” when designing platforms to minimize potential harm to minors. The next day, a New Mexico court fined Meta $567 million to address harms it knowingly caused to young people through design features of its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
The range of recent and pending laws and legal actions is notable for a few key reasons. For one, it’s bringing together lawmakers, legal experts, parents, educators, and shareholders – as well as young adults with firsthand experience of the issue. The generation that has encountered the impact of social media on their own and their friends’ mental and physical wellbeing is speaking up, loud and clear.
“Young people are done waiting,” says an open letter from Design It For Us (DIFU), a youth-led coalition formed in 2023. It calls on social media firms “to stop treating us as data points” and “test subjects,” and to build platforms that include “privacy by default, safety by design, and real user controls that work.”
DIFU has organized input into legislation in California, New York, and Vermont. It also tested controls on Meta’s Teen Accounts and publicized shortcomings through The Washington Post last year. Apps “can’t be relied upon to actually shield kids” the paper reported, adding that the safety gaps in “voluntary efforts speak volumes about … accountability.”
The focus on accountability – similar to campaigns around opioid addiction and the tobacco industry in years past – is expanding the scope of social media advocacy from content to intent. As families and school districts seek to limit young people’s exposure to excessive or harmful content online, they are also probing company decisions about app architecture which, they say, is deliberately designed to prompt compulsive use. Whistleblower complaints as well as internal communications made public in recent cases appear to confirm this practice.
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Young users are also increasingly seeking to assert agency, privacy, and individual authority in social media use. “Most dominant social media platform features” – such as infinite scroll and autoplay – “encourage passivity” and limit decision-making, a student recently wrote on the Logoff Movement, a Substack newsletter, noting that “reclaiming [social media’s] social potential may require intentional choices and real discipline.”
Ultimately, the shared motivation of embracing and protecting the privacy and safety of young people and children supports this desire. And it can help preserve childhood as a time and space to develop skills of communication, discernment, and self-regulation. Such habits eventually enable young adults not only to navigate the online world – but also to interact and flourish in the spheres of higher education, work, and civic participation.
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