The Real Risk Online Life Poses to Kids: Part 1, Social Media

Yes, I think there is good reason to be concerned — not because social media causes ‘brain damage’ that you’d see on an MRI or PET scan, but because it can powerfully shape attention, mood, sleep, self-esteem, and motivation.

In a recent high-profile civil suit against Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, the jury found that the company built its platforms to be addictive for children and teens, despite knowing they could harm their mental health, and awarded plaintiffs $6 million in damages. NPR covered the story. Another suit in Federal court that seeks 1.4 trillion dollars (!!) alleging essentially the same thing (that suit was settled shortly after this was posted for just under 18 billion (with a “b”) dollars).

In this regard, it’s not unlike a gambling addiction, where one is always on the verge of the next dopamine hit and doesn’t want to give up until they get it. And when they do finally get it, they want the next one and the next. Social media is nothing, if not dopamine saturated. A recent episode of The Middle on NPR compared social media to tobacco as “the new addiction” and I’d say that’s spot on.

Realizing this, NPR’s Morning Edition, recently reported that the United Kingdom is following Australia in banning social media under 16:  They see it as difficult to make safe for kids so they’re leaning toward a ban. We’ll see how practical that proves to be.

I am about the oldest digital native you’ll meet. I used a computer in 1979 in high school and in early-1983 became the only person in my college to turn in my (really ugly) term papers generated on an early word processor. I thought it was a miracle. In early 1994, I met the World Wide Web at the University of Kansas when the only terminal bank was locked in a dark room that only my wife and a few others had keys to. I am the IT guy at my business. I’m no Luddite. 

However, from that perspective and as one who’s studied how digital media intersects with the lives of young people over my entire 34-year career, I’ve come to see social media as pretty dangerous, to the point I find myself wishing it would go away and leave us all in peace.

A lot has been written about teens using social media to compare themselves online to others, and in a recent survey I did of our teen clients, that clearly showed up as a concern for every single respondent. Larger sample research supports this. It reflects the social psychology of “downward social comparison,” meaning one’s self-esteem is reduced by seeing how others purportedly live their lives — even when we know it’s mostly a show. After nearly two decades of commentary on this topic, it remains a big problem, and kids know it better than anyone. Social media likely does lead to anxiety and depression, particularly as content these days is, shall we say, dismal. They don’t call it doom scrolling for nothing.

But the problem is much more serious than that.

While engaged online, users get an almost endless stream of “micro-discoveries” that make any learning in real life boring by comparison. To be fair, there is some valuable knowledge to be gained on social media. I love my subscription to YouTube for home and auto repair, recent reruns of news, and some of the well-done accounts of history. The problem is that even good information gleaned online from people you do or don’t know comes packaged up and handed over with almost no deeper engagement on the part of the consumer. And that’s radically more pronounced now that AI is encroaching on content creation. This is referred to as “AI slop,” often for good reason. So a user can feel pretty accomplished in their single-serving micro-discoveries, or pretty awful; deeply understood or horribly judged; heard in a community of others or isolated and alone. Regardless of the positives or negatives, all those computer-amplified feelings are so intense and cost-free that any other learning — you know, that stuff one does in school — pales in comparison. Few teachers can compete in the entertainment-rich world teens inhabit daily.

So, even if we cleaned up all the fake, objectionable, or disturbing content on Instagram, TikTok, and X, we’d be left with this real underlying problem, illustrated well in the Meta lawsuit: social media creates a fantasy world of intense experience that makes the real one seem like a big yawn. So, we indulge in it obsessively and supposedly without cost. In this regard, it is the ultimate distraction.

Worse, getting kids out of online overuse has proven both difficult and fraught with dilemmas. The solution may well be, as many parents are slowly learning, to never let them get deeply into it in the first place. But that’s easier said than done. The world of work requires young adults to be pretty tech-savvy, and parents fear that keeping kids off screens may leave them at a disadvantage compared to peers. Just applying now has become a game of “My AI versus Yours.” While recognizing that, I would propose that, unlike my 1983 word processor or 1994 secret internet closet, the vast majority of gaming and social media use could disappear without harming the future tech-using worker. After nearly a decade of integrating technology into classrooms, schools are waking up to this same truth: the future of education is not high tech. Learning may instead require an avoidance of screens and a return to being a teacher and a student, face to face, in real life.

Another serious dilemma is the way limiting social media quite literally deprives teens of a social life. As my survey respondents pointed out, Snapchat is a far different animal than, say, TikTok or Instagram. Snapchat is the social engagement tool for teens; a glorified way of texting. They use it to develop their real-life relationships, as those of my generation used phones, on which we talked every moment we were allowed. Back in the seventies, some parents even got “teen extension” phones, a second line to facilitate calling without disrupting the rest of the family. Today, to facilitate relationships, parents might do well to allow Snapchat into their child’s life while limiting the use of others. Or if this lawsuit is successful, Meta may have to do that for us. We’ll wait and see.

Social media may seem like the imminent threat today, but in reality, it’s just the latest version of a technology problem that’s been developing across my entire 34 year career. In Part 2, I’ll discuss the elephant in the room of online life that nobody seems to want to talk about — video gaming.