This morning, the illustrious Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing in which they got to chew out the heads of all the leading social media companies. I'm sure it was very cathartic. Here is Sen. Tom Cotton questioning the CEO of TikTok:
90/ Cotton: Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party (jesus fucking christ)
Chew: Senator, I AM SINGAPOREAN. NO!
— Ari Cohn (@AriCohn) January 31, 2024
I recommend this entire Tweetstorm even though it's 166 posts long. I don't really know anything about Ari Cohn aside from the fact that he's a First Amendment lawyer, but he strikes me as having the properly cynical attitude toward today's spectacle.
If Cohn's summary is accurate, today's hearing was about three things:
- Generating soundbites for campaign ads.
- Accusing social media CEOs of actively promoting child porn and sex slavery.
- Insisting that social media has ruined America's children.
For what it's worth, I'll echo Cohn's remark that, in fact, research really doesn't support the notion that social media is harmful to teenagers. It seems to have both negative and positive effects, but they're small and the positive effects overwhelm the negative ones.
I admit this is hard to swallow. My own instincts yell at me that of course social media is harmful! And yet, if it's really so obvious it should show up easily in the literature, and it just doesn't.
Social media does produce habits in teenagers that are foreign to Baby Boomers like me, but that says more about me than it does about social media. It's also true that changes in teen depression seem to have started around the same time that social media became widespread. It's hard to accept that as a coincidence. And yet, the timing isn't actually quite right, and research hasn't been able to show any serious causal connection.
We should all keep an open mind about this. It's possible that it will eventually turn out that social media really is bad for teens. It wouldn't surprise me. But we have a long history of thinking that whatever teens are doing these days must be harmful to them. This is why different generations turn out differently. But generally not better or worse.
I'm old enough to remember the time when a Congressional committee was pondering the myriad harms comic books were inflicting on American society.
Now I understand they have courses on comics in college.
History does rhyme.
And when video games (now Internet and phone games) promoted violence. And when teevie violence, rinse and repeat.
Have u seen the braindead fans of comic book movies? This shit was a major danger and we see how it’s playing out across all culture now. Comics are not the same as literature.
I don't read any of it myself, but I do know that some comics are literature. My neice did her master's thesis in english lit on a comic (aka graphic novel) about the author's experiences with sexual assault in an Alberta tar sands mining operation.
I think we can all agree that social media is bad for congress.
Laser focused, and never waste my tax money on the trivia like guns, war, abortions, healthcare, immigration, monopolies, tax cheats etc.
Where do we get such courageous servants?
> This is why different generations turn out differently.
Asserted without evidence.
fox news is worse than any social media company
When I was a youth, television was relatively new and there was great concern that TV was rotting kids' minds. There's always something.
And the vast wasteland, as Minow called it, has only grown "vaster" with cable & streaming options.
Well, whatever happenedf to "This medium can TEACH"? I guess only PBS took it to heart.
Well, PBS aside, TV (now a broad spectrum of streaming video) teaches many lessons, both good and bad. It also wastes a vast amount of time that might better be devoted to home maintenance, yardwork, hobbies, family, volunteering, reading, listening to good music, etc.
Yes yes, the leisure activities you prefer are better/morally superior/classier than the leisure activities other people prefer.
If only people would spend more time doing non-pointless things like "yardwork" (to say nothing of "hobbies"), the world would certainly be a better place.
Are you going to argue that television and social media haven’t made the general public dumber?
It’s pretty obvious tbh.
Not obvious to me.
Yeah… so it’s ironic that YouTube managed to host a livestream murderer displaying the head of his father while ranting about MAGA nonsense. Hilarious.
“Justin Mohn is a Levittown, Pennsylvania, man accused of beheading his father on January 30, police said, and then holding up the severed head in an extremely graphic YouTube video.”
So glad we have the internet to entertain the lunatic fringe! 😂
Is this a confession??
Social media harmful to kids? Gimme a break!
Go to a meeting of your local Democratic Party. Then go to a meeting of your local Republican Party. Then go to a meeting of your local School Board. Then go to a meeting of your local representative government (City Council, County Commissioners, etc.)
You will learn for sure, beyond any possible doubt, who social media is bad for. IT'S THE ADULTS!
>>It's also true that changes in teen depression seem to have started around the same time that social media became widespread.
No, the increase in teen depression started when *smartphones* became widespread. Social media predated smartphones by several years.
Agreed. It's not access to social media sites that's problematic. It's access to them 24/7 with a phone. Some school districts are banning phones entirely, which will give us some new data.
Ok. I'm a boomer, the "Kids these days! Why, I used to walk 4 miles to school every day" sort of grump you find hanging out at McDonalds nursing a coffee all morning. So take my contribution to this discussion with a grain of glutton. But I do in fact worry about this whole internet thingy and its effect on the young. Yeah, we oldsters are pretty messed up by it, too - maybe even more so. Only not in the same way. What I've observed from my mountaintop perch is that between social media and gaming, a lot of young folks - especially males - are de-socializing over time, in any physical, tangible sense. Now victual socialization may prove to be a benign new reality, making my judgment archaic, not insightful. But it sure strikes me as a precursor to a host of pathologies and miseries. But what do I know?
"victual socialization"?
Is that like communal meals?
I too am too old
"We" used to be told by my parents that if we spend too much time in front of the TV on a Saturday morning we'd wake up with square eyeballs on Sunday!!
I don't regale my grand children with stories about walking 4 miles to go to school, as I actually lived right across the street from the school!! Or how becoming a crossing guard was "the thing" to do.
How about having a nun teaching you who on day one of school asked my name and I told her. She then rapped me across the knuckles with a wooden ruler and said "I had your father in one of my classes when I was a new nun. He was a hellion. I hit your knuckles to make sure you don't turn out like him."
That type of stuff left a lasting impression on my psyche........
Where's Tipper Gore when you need her?
This isn’t only about teenagers; kids much younger are internet users, too. I live in a multigenerational household with elementary-age grandchildren. There is certainly material on the WWW that can wait until they are older.
I am fine with having librarians choose the books to be available in libraries. But nobody curates the Web, and parental controls are maddeningly scattershot, difficult to use, and too easy to circumvent. Users are tracked relentlessly to target advertising; certainly, if there was a will, a single, clear, configurable setting could enable parental restrictions across sites and apps.
Congressional hearings are a lousy way to get to a better situation, but it doesn’t appear that the tech bros will do anything unless they are forced to.
The Chinese Communist Party's worst period came when it went after intellectuals -- like English teachers being punished for reading decadent western books -- and punished them for their "incorrect thoughts." It extended into every area of life, where experts in farming, for example, were arrested for knowing how to grow more crops than party hacks. The modern Republican Party basically IS the Maoist CCP.
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Has Hawley apologized to the families of the folks killed or injured on J6? Of course not!