By hook or by crook, we need to find a way to keep social media away from the under-16s.
This week, the Australian government proposed banning social media for children under 16. This has ignited many debates online, with some accusing the government of overreaching.
The debate spilled over to the issue of Digital ID, with some privacy advocates believing that this social media ban is a backdoor to implementing a Big Brother agenda. I have some opinions on Digital ID which you can read here. But now, I want to focus on social media.
Brain plasticity
My conviction against social media developed more than a decade ago when I came across the concept of brain plasticity by Baroness Susan Greenfield. Back then, she was already warning about the negative impacts of technology on children and young people. Her warnings were controversial because the idea that the human brain can be plastic was relatively new in the field of neuroscience.
What is this idea of brain plasticity?
The conventional wisdom in neuroscience was that the human brain is fixed and cannot ‘re-wire’ itself. A good analogy is this: after you build a car, it cannot modify itself. It will remain a car forever. That was how neuroscience saw the human brain.
However, later scientific research showed that the human brain is ‘plastic’. That means it is adaptable. It can modify itself based on inputs you provide to the brain. Therefore, what you see, hear, read and experience can ‘re-wire’ your brain, for better or worse. This breakthrough discovery in neuroscience opened up new doors to healing brain-related diseases. This is a good book that talks about healing (which was thought to be impossible) based on the concept of brain plasticity.
Susan Greenfield’s thesis
Her scientific viewpoint was that using technology would rewire the brains of children and young people for the worse. This ABC news article, which was published 10 years ago, had her warnings about the harms of technology to children and young people. Six months ago, this ABC radio program vindicated her decade-long warning.
Kids doing poorly suddenly in the 2010s
I came across this eye-opening podcast sometime this year. The salient point of this podcast is that children’s academic performance (and by extension, intelligence) dropped suddenly from 2010s onwards. Not only is Generation Z doing poorly academically, but they are also getting worse off in terms of mental health. I will repeat the key point: the deterioration in intelligence (e.g. learning disability, academic performance) and mental health (e.g. anxiety, ADHD, depression, psychological disorder) happened suddenly from the 2010s onwards. There was a marked difference between the millennials and Generation Z across many countries.
What is the culprit?
Social media.
We know that social media took off from the 2010s onwards. Not only that, smartphones also took off during that time too. When I heard that podcast, I remembered Susan Greenfield’s warning about a decade ago. That clicked for me.
My conviction is that social media, in conjunction with smartphones, make a dangerous combination to harm Generation Z. The smartphone has features (e.g. notification badges, pinging) that can be abused by social media platforms to make them extremely addictive. Social media, if it is confined only to desktop or laptop computers, would have been a lot less addictive. Smartphones turbocharge the addictiveness of social media.
Worse still, addiction to social media will serve as inputs for ‘re-wiring’ their brains for the worse. It will result in a lifetime of disadvantage.
Rise of addiction
Make no mistake, social media apps are deliberately designed to be addictive. They utilise the latest findings in neuroscience to enhance their addictiveness. In fact, entire books are written for entrepreneurs to teach them how to create addictive products. This book is an example.
Furthermore, as I wrote in my book 10 years ago, social media are specially designed to monopolise all your attention. There is a positive feedback loop in their products’ algorithm that gets you hooked on endless doom-scrolling. Their business interest requires that you spend ever increasing amount of your time on their products. The side effect is that users of social media are seeing more and more misinformation, disinformation, outrage, clickbaitings, and so on. That is because these type of content works in terms of monopolising your attention. Now, these types of content are destabilising societies.
Would education solve the problem?
Some argue that teaching kids how to use social media responsibly is a better solution instead of an outright ban. My argument is that education will not work.
Usually, I’m not in favour of government fiat in banning things. But for social media, I think the problem has grown to such a monster that the only way forward is to ban it for kids.
A good analogy to explain why is this:
Ideally, you educate kids to avoid drugs BEFORE they even try it. But once they are addicted to drugs, no amount of education can persuade them to quit. The drugs have such a stranglehold on their brain chemistry that education wouldn’t work. The only option is external intervention.
This is where we are at regarding social media.
I have another interesting observation: Even the kids themselves admit that social media is not good for them. They want to reduce their own usage of social media. But they cannot because they are addicted to it.
Shouldn’t this be the parents’ problem?
Now, the question is, why legislate it instead of leaving it to the parents?
Ask a parent what will happen if they try to take away social media from their teenagers.
All hell will break lose. Their addiction is extremely strong.
Furthermore, if you are the only parent who succeeds but your teenager’s friends still have access to social media, it will create a situation where your teenager feels ‘disadvantaged’. Very soon, there will be peer pressure on your teenager to return to social media. That in turn will increase pressure on you to allow your teenager back into social media. If you relent, you may grant limited access to social media at first. But gradually, this limited access will increase and eventually, your teenager will be back to square one.
So, if the government bans it effectively, it will take the decision away from parents. Parents can now avoid having fights with their teenagers over this issue because it is not them who bans but the government. Also, a ban will level the playing field for all parents. There will no longer be any peer pressure on their kids to be on social media because none of them are on it.
How do we define social media?
Someone asked me: how should we define social media so that we can know which apps to ban.
I think a better approach would be to ban apps in terms of how they are engineered to produce addictive behaviour in their users. Any apps that seek to addict their users should be banned from kids. This will potentially also include addictive video games.
Devil in the details
So, there is a need to somehow keep our kids away from social media. Countries that figure out a way to do that will reap long-term societal-wide benefits. Countries that fail to do that will continue to see their young people harmed and academic performance decline. This will have long-term economic and social ramifications for these countries.
But banning social media for kids legislatively is difficult to execute and enforce. It will have side-effects that privacy advocates will be concerned about.
How will social media companies enforce the under-16s ban?
This is the biggest problem.
Currently, Facebook enforces an under-13s ‘ban’ by using a tick box for the user to declare he/she is above 13. Do you want social media companies to require us to supply them with ID documents to prove that we are above 16?
Also, according to a Australian Financial Review article, there is NO ‘grandfathering’ of current under-16s already in the social media platforms. This means social media companies will have to find a way to root out every Australian under-16s on their platforms. How will they do that? Will the social media companies require that every user show them their IDs to work out who’s under 16 in Australia and boot them out?
Next, how will social media define who is an Australian user?
Is it based on the IP address of the user when they sign up for a social media account? Or the region of the device’s operating system?
Role of Digital ID
If we do not trust social media companies with our IDs, the only solution is to use a digital ID solution like myGovID (soon to be renamed to myID), which will allow us to prove that we are above 16 without showing them our ID.
But then, as I explained how Digital ID works, that will result in the end of anonymity on social media. It will be possible to work out the identity of every Australian social media users. This is something every privacy advocate will be nervous about.
Possible solution: double-blind system
One solution is to re-engineer the Digital ID system into such a way that it becomes a double-blind system. Currently, the privacy issue with the Digital ID system is that the government will have visibility on who you verify your identity with. It will require a significant amount of re-engineering to be a cryptographically secure double blind system.
How does a double-blind system work?
A double-blind system requires an intermediary. In such a system,
- The government knows your identity but does not know who the third party who wants to verify your identity.
- The intermediary does not know your identity, but it knows who the third party is.
- The third party does not know your identity, but it knows that your identity is verified.
It is possible to engineer this system so that it is technically impossible for the government or the intermediary to know both your identity and the third party, even if they compare notes.
I know it is possible because there already exists a form of double-blind system: Apple’s iCloud Privacy Relay. TOR is another example of a multiple-blind system.
Another possible solution: operating system
iPhones has a feature where you can add your ID documents to your Apple Wallet. In the process of doing that, you are required to confirm who you are by using your iPhone’s camera to record a selfie of you. Then your selfie will be sent to the government authority for confirmation.
Once your iPhone has your ID document and confirms who you are, it can then be used by apps to verify your identity. The apps will not have access to your ID documents. It will only know that you have a valid ID and that you are at the right age to access their services.
In a way, this is a double-blind system. The government knows that you have verified your identity with Apple through your iPhone’s Apple Wallet. But it does not know which apps verify your identity through your iPhone’s Apple Wallet. The apps know that you are using an iPhone with a verified identity, but it does not know your identity.
On the Android platform, Google has a similar feature called Google Wallet.
What about legitimate use of social media?
One common question that often gets asked is this: without social media, how can kids communicate with one another, access information that they need and schools disseminate information to them?
Well, there are plenty of non-addictive apps and old-school platforms to do all these things. For example, kids can communicate with one another through plain vanilla messaging apps. There is no need to communicate through social media apps. Information can be accessed through websites. Discussions can be conducted through website forums. Information dissemination can be done through email.
Basically, there is no reason why social media is needed to do all these things.
Absolute anonymity
Of course, there can be no solution that can provide absolute anonymity. For privacy advocates who want nothing short of absolute anonymity, it is best not to be on social media in the first place.
To be absolutely anonymous on social media, your operational security has to be pristinely perfect. For example, once you accidentally expose your real IP address in Australia, your anonymity is blown.
Ideal solution and reality
In a perfect world, parents band together to keep social media away from their kids and use parental control software to enforce the ban. And ideally, kids understand the reason why they should not be on social media and appreciate the long-term benefits of not being in there.
And ideally, Big Tech like Apple and Google provide the level of access required by parental control software to do its job properly. This in itself is a big topic.
But unfortunately, the reality is far from ideal:
- Parents are not banding together. They are not using parental control software, which requires a financial subscription. Also, they do not have the inclination to work out the complicated configurations to set up their kids’ devices with the existing parental control features of their kids’ devices.
- Big Tech companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google, on the other hand, hobble parental control software with restrictions that prevent them from doing their job of helping parents.
- Social media companies, on the other hand, do not have the business incentives to block kids from social media.
- Privacy advocates and civil libertarians have competing interests from parents.
All these means that the Australian government’s legislative proposal is only the first step of a long journey. There is a high chance that it will never happen.
If you are a parent, it is best that your kids do not have access ot social media in the first place. Once they acquire the taste of social media and becomes addicted to it, it is difficult to pry it out of their hands. But you must try, as best as you can, for their long-term benefit.