Did Social Media Destroy The Kids?

There is a not-so-secret war being waged for control of your kid’s mind.

Who owns your child’s mind? Social media companies? The government?

Or is it you?

A landmark lawsuit that just sent a gigantic shockwave through Silicon Valley. Meta (Facebook) and YouTube (Google) were found negligent in facilitating social media addiction.

Let’s break down the case that could upend Big Tech, reshape AI regulation, and force a national reckoning over parenting power and responsibility.

The legal case found both companies were negligent in facilitating social media addiction. According to The New York Times:

The bellwether case, which was brought by a now 20-year-old woman identified as K.G.M., had accused social media companies of creating products as addictive as cigarettes or digital casinos. Citing features like infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations, K.G.M. sued Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, and Google’s YouTube, claiming they led to anxiety and depression. … 

K.G.M., whose first name is Kaley, filed her lawsuit in 2023 against Meta, Snap, YouTube and TikTok. Kaley, who lives in Chico, Calif., said she had begun using social media at age 6 and claimed the sites caused personal injury, including body dysmorphia and thoughts of self harm. 

Variety said that the verdict was rooted in an argument around cigarette addiction. Back in the 1990s, there were settlements with the big tobacco companies where it was found that the tobacco companies fraudulently marketed products they knew were addictive as non-addictive, and that drew millions of people into serious health risks like lung cancer.

That doesn’t seem like a crazy take. We were told originally that social media would be a gigantic benefit for all of us. It would open “new vistas.” We’d all experience “new worlds.” We’d have “so many friends.” (Yeah, they’d be Facebook friends, but they were still friends.) We’d never have to go outside again. We’d all live in the metaverse, etc.

All of that was untrue. All of these social media companies are clickbait machines. That is what they are designed to do, in Pavlovian style.

Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, who wrote a book called “Dopamine Nation,” speaks about this. She writes:

We’re wired to connect. It’s kept us alive for millions of years in a world of scarcity and ever-present danger. Moving in tribes safeguards against predators optimizes scarce resources and facilitates pair bonding.

Our brains release dopamine when we make human connections, and that incentivizes us to do it again. Social connection has now become drugified by social media apps, making us vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption. These apps can cause the release of large amounts of dopamine into our brains’ reward pathway all at once, like heroin. meth or alcohol. They do that by amplifying the feel-good properties that attract humans to each other in the first place.

It’s not just the social connection. It’s also because when you scroll on X, it’s literally designed to provide a brief dopamine rush. That’s why there’s that little sound effect. It’s almost a literal Pavlovian response. A Pavlovian response was established when you rang a bell in front of a dog and fed it a piece of meat at the same time. Eventually, when you rang the bell, the dog would start to salivate even if the meat wasn’t there because the brain had now been trained: Bell means meat, so bell causes salivation.

Social media companies do that too. This is why when you scroll, there’s a little sound effect. You’re going to get a dopamine hit, even if nothing new appears, just because you hear that little sound effect. 

Social media companies are arguing that they’re not the ones who are actually causing the addiction to really serious stuff. They say, “Sure, our algorithms are designed to make you click, but it’s the videos themselves that are responsible for the harm, not the design of the product.” 

In other words, if you were watching lots of cooking videos on social media and it fed you an infinite loop of cooking videos and not skinny influencers, you’d be totally fine. You’re the one who decides whether you are clicking on skinny influencers or whether you’re clicking on cooking videos. And what’s more, it turns out, these social media companies aren’t the ones who are actually making the content. The social media companies say, “We’re a platform, like a phone line.”

Yes, they make money by featuring viral content, but the consumer picks which content to actually watch. The person posting the content is actually responsible for the content, unless it’s an AI or a bot these days.

Until now, social media companies have been avoiding legal culpability by citing Section 230. Section 230 says that if you’re a platform and your website has a comment section, you’re not responsible for what’s in the comments.

If you’re YouTube, you’re not responsible for the content of the videos that are on YouTube because you’re just providing the platform on which others can post.

Section 230 says that all of these platforms ought not be held liable for content produced by others.

But that’s not on point.

The actual argument here is that these social media sites are, by their very nature, addictive, and that almost no matter what the content is, the medium is damaging to kids.

This raises a broader question for parents. Are you responsible for your children and their social media use?

The answer here should be yes.

My kids aren’t on social media because they are banned from using social media. Kids who are addicted to TV also don’t have great lives, but we don’t actually hold TV companies responsible for that fact. Nobody’s suing Apple because your kid is watching Apple TV all day.

That’s a point made yesterday by Meta’s president, Dina Powell McCormick, who said, “You know, as a mom, this is really important to me and very personal. I see firsthand just how hard the company is trying to ensure that there’s not harmful content, to ensure that we are empowering parents to the best of our ability. And it’s something that I watch being focused on every single day. We respectfully disagree with that decision, and we’re appealing.”

She’s not totally wrong here. The fact is that as a parent of four kids, going on five, I’m all over what my kids are consuming. I decide what movies they watch. I decide what TV shows they watch. They’re not allowed on social media. They do not have interactive capability on social media, anything like that.

This issue is kind of a sticky wicket, as social media companies are responsible for part of the problem because of the dopamine response. And yes, parents are also responsible for the problem.

Here’s the actual solution: not gigantic lawsuits. The answer is governmental legislation banning social media for kids under 18. Period.

That is what we should be doing. It’s what a lot of countries are doing right now — and they are correct to do so.

Users should have to register as over 18. Companies that don’t do it should be held legally accountable.

If we’re going to actually carry this analogy all the way through, if we’re going to treat social media like tobacco or alcohol, then the answer historically wasn’t to sue tobacco companies for kids smoking, it was to ban kids from smoking. The same is true for alcohol.

The reason I’m a little bit averse to lawsuits like these is because I think it will be extended to adults. I think what’s going to happen is that this will be used as a broader argument, not just against social media, where I’m relatively indifferent, but to actual useful technologies like AI, because this is a big societal question: Should we blame technology for our own failures as adults?

Kids are a different story. The reason that this particular lawsuit is emotionally appealing is because it’s about a kid who got addicted. And kids do get addicted. And honestly, I blame the parents as the primary source.

I don’t let my kids get addicted to things. It’s my job to prevent that. I don’t give my kids candy bars even though they want candy bars every single day, all the time. And if I decide to feed that to them, and they get Type 2 diabetes. I don’t think that’s on the candy company. I think it’s on me.

My biggest problem here is that we start blaming technologies for our failures as adults.

We have to look to ourselves to solve some of these problems.