Social media makes children sad – and that’s bad news for democracy | From Badham

No, the kids are NOT doing well. And because our future depends on them, we have to do something about it.

This week, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy did democracy a huge favor by stating what must have been obvious to literally everyone for a while: social media is negatively impacting the mental health of teens.

Murthy’s comments echo the fears expressed in the Atlantic’s blockbuster 2017 report, which asks:Have smartphones destroyed a generation?‘ have come true. Western teens spend an average of almost five hours a day on social media and a third stay on their devices until midnight on weekday evenings, Murthy said. Is it a coincidence, then, that the recent World Happiness Report shows that young people in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are now the unhappiest age group in their communities? Take a look at the nearest teenager’s phone and consider the relentless barrage of precisely targeted consumer manipulation, platform bullying, crude sensationalism and naked propaganda they are exposed to and form your own opinion.

Adults can barely handle this stuff; the existence of the word ‘doomscrolling’ proves the magnitude of the problem. You don’t have to write a book about QAnon to see how this madness can affect and radicalize the educated, mature, and experienced. Just take a look at your own personal social media feeds and you will undoubtedly say “GLORY TO THE MARTYRS!” to see. statements or anti-vax conspiracies. Wasn’t the lesson of Australia’s failed indigenous vote in the parliamentary referendum the true extent of the homegrown online whackadoo?

Murthy’s concern is that allowing children to use social media is like giving them medications that have not been proven to be safe. He also said the failure of governments to better regulate social media in recent years was “insane.” You can read all his insights here.

Or you can read similar concerns about this here, from me, in 2018, about discovering that Instagram was making girls hate themselves and their bodies. Or from me a few weeks ago about children being scammed by TikTok influencers in a consumer obsession with products that are not safe for them. Or when I begged to smash all the smartphones here. Carla Wilshire’s booklet Time to Reboot places the decades of research in a terrifyingly gendered context. Nina Jankowicz’s How to Lose the Information War, about the scope of disinformation operations, should be on the bookshelf of every democracy lover. And Talia Lavin’s Culture Warlords makes it clear how extreme online extremism really is.

There are hundreds of books, thousands of articles and a rising mountain of scientific consensus. Now the US Surgeon General is sounding the alarm and still – still – governments act powerless in the face of the corporate power of overcapitalized platform giants. Ruthless platform regulation is absolutely necessary. Not in piecemeal ‘anti-doxx’ legislation, but in in-depth reforms. Firstly, because our children are unhappy and fixated on screens that make them so unhappy. Combined with the social devastation the pandemic has caused, a generation has become terrified of an outside world that is a much safer and more beautiful place than the one they are told about online.

The more time people spend in the illusion, the more it becomes their reality. Young people were deprived of learning social traditions and customs as they were cut off from their peers and elders by lockdowns that not only reduced the confidence of the domestic generation to engage with society, but also reduced society to screens – a place where the reality can easily be manipulated and the unreal can convince too quickly.

All this has serious political implications.

Trump wizard Steve Bannon’s key insight as he built his far-right media machine was that “politics flows downstream from culture.” Too many people on the left are analyzing what the speakers at Trump rallies are saying, when what they should be looking at is the accessible socialization and festivities that attendees have to offer. They don’t go for the conversation. They go for the party.

While we follow Murthy’s admonition to regulate the online world, in the real world we also need to facilitate youth with cultural experiences that are more engaging than what happens online.

Democracy must organize parties that young people can go to – otherwise the democracy party is over. For us all.