Politicians Are Using Kids As Props To Pass Terrible, Harmful Legislation. Don’t Let Them Get Away With It

Amidst all of the attention paid to last week’s Senate hearing on child safety online, it remains stunning just how little time was actually spent on how to help children online. Instead, we saw pure theatrical nonsense, with Senators insisting (falsely) that these five tech CEOs could magically stop bad things from happening to kids, if only they would just “nerd harder.” And, of course, the accompanying suggestion was that these CEOs simply don’t care about protecting kids.

At no point was there any serious or thoughtful discussion on what actually could be done to improve things for kids online, or to deal with the very real mental health crisis that is facing kids today (which is often blamed on social media, despite no real evidence to support that claim).

When politicians are grandstanding about protecting kids online, the best person to turn to is danah boyd, who has been studying this stuff for decades, and whose 2014 book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens should be required reading for anyone who is serious about understand this stuff.

In a blog post, boyd has explained how KOSA, in particular is not even remotely designed to protect kids, and that it gets basically everything wrong.

To be honest, I am pulling my hair out over “online safety” bills that pretend to be focused on helping young people when they’re really anti-tech bills that are using children for political agendas in ways that will fundamentally hurt the most vulnerable young people out there.

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) continues to march through the halls of Congress as though it’s the best thing since sliced bread, even though one of the co-creators of this bill clearly stated that her intention is to protect children from “the transgender” and to prevent “indoctrination” from the LGBT community. I’m flabbergasted by how many Democrats shrug their shoulders and say that it’s still worth it to align with hateful politicians because it’ll help more kids. The thing is: it won’t.

As boyd notes, the problem is real. There is a teen mental health crisis, but there’s little to no evidence supporting the claim that social media is the cause or (more importantly) that magically limiting social media will help deal with the problem. The problems are society-wide:

The problem is not: “Technology causes harm.” The problem is: “We live in an unhealthy society where our most vulnerable populations are suffering because we don’t invest in resilience or build social safety nets.”

boyd has also just released a pre-print copy of a paper with Maria Angel that gets at all of this, noting that “techno-legal solutionism” isn’t going to fix these kinds of societal problems (and might just make them worse):

In this paper, we argue that KOSA’s duty of care is rooted in a deterministic theory that we label “techno-legal solutionism.” When the law demands technosolutionism, it sets up a configuration that is unrealizable at best and, in some cases, explicitly harmful to the very population that needs protection. In order to unpack our theory of “techno-legal solutionism,” we analyze the “duty of care” provision of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to show how and why this approach will fail to achieve its stated goals. This is not to say that regulating the design of consumer products is not important and cannot play an important role in creating a healthier sociotechnical world. However, to achieve these lofty goals, regulations of design need to adhere closely to causality and be attentive to agency and structural arrangements, something that KOSA’s duty of care fails to do. As technological fixes usually do, KOSA’s duty of care ignores the complexity of the relationship between social media platforms and youth mental health, disregards uncertain effects of technology, naïvely assumes that engineering can rise above politics, and reinforces Big Tech’s technosolutionist orientation while undermining ecological approaches. Efforts to drive design through moral panics and flawed deterministic logics can easily trigger a host of unintended consequences. When it comes to kids’ safety, these consequences tend to be most acutely felt by those who are most vulnerable

Basically, blaming social media, and then regulating it (as KOSA does) by pointing a threatening wagging finger at social media and saying “fix it” will not, and cannot, fix actual societal-wide problems. And, in telling social media companies “fix it or else,” what is more likely to actually happen is that social media companies will close themselves off to kids, or (just as likely) will simply remove any information about any controversial topic, even as that information can be life-saving to many kids.

As boyd highlights in her blog post, if you want to help children with mental health issues, help them with their mental health issues, don’t tell Mark Zuckerberg to make sure they don’t have mental health issues (which is what KOSA attempts to do).

Let’s start at the top of the stack. Most people under the age of 26 years old in the United States do not have access to mental health services without involving their parents. And even if you can find a therapist (good luck these days!), the likelihood of having sustained affordable access to mental health services is minimal. Around the world, seeking mental health support is sometimes more available but it’s often more stigmatized. Young people cannot address mental health struggles alone. They need help. We need to ensure that young people have access to affordable, high quality mental health services. This is a critical safety net.

When young people don’t have access to professional services, they are looking for people around them to help. We know that when young people have access to a wide network of non-custodial adults (think: aunties, coaches, pastors, etc.), said adults are more likely to sense out when things are bad. Young people are also more likely to turn to those folks. Guess what? Our social fabric in the United States has been fraying for a long time for a myriad of reasons. But this all got much more acute during Covid. Just as workers’ weak ties disintegrated during Covid, I suspect young people’s connections to non-custodial adults fell apart. And many of the adults who should be there for young people are themselves struggling. How many teachers out there are unable to support kids in crisis cuz they’ve got too much going on? It scares me how many young people can’t count a single adult that they can turn to in a crisis. Everyone who is on the front line of this crisis is feeling it. Ask any professor what they’re facing with this current crop of incoming college students. Ask those who are providing afterschool care. So many adults are falling apart trying to provide mental health services that they’re not equipped to offer because there’s no alternative and they care so much that they’re continuing to burn out.

And, again, many of the examples of kids on social media revealing mental health issues appear to be cries for help. That is, social media is shining a light on the problem, and what’s exacerbating it is not the existence of social media, but the failure to actually help those crying out.

Spend some time hanging out on TikTok or scanning Instagram or perusing YouTube and you can find numerous young people who aren’t doing well. They’re seeking attention, validation, belonging. And that ranges from normal teen dramas to full throttle mental breakdowns. Who is reaching out to those young people? Who is making sure that they are ok? We need a digital street outreach program, not a law that tries to render them invisible. When I was a teenager trying to grapple with my identity, strangers in chatrooms gave me hope and encouragement. Today, it is toxic people with an ideological agenda who are reaching out to those crying out for help in online communities. This doesn’t get fixed by pushing youth to the darkest corners of the internet or outing them to their parents through surveillance tools. To the contrary, that makes it worse. We need more people who are willing to be there for the next generation, not shun them.

Separately, I will note that boyd mentions (without naming names) in her piece that fifteen years ago, she had been asked to provide a literature review of studies on child safety online, and Connecticut’s Attorney General yelled at her, telling her to “find different data.” And, apparently got reporters to try to ruin boyd’s reputation:

I learned this lesson hardcore fifteen years ago when I naively provided a literature review on the risks young people faced to the then-attorney general of Connecticut. He didn’t like what the summation of hundreds of studies showed; he barked at me to find different data. A few months later, I learned that a Frontline reporter was tasked with “proving” that I was falsifying data. After investigating me, she warned me that I had pissed off a lot of powerful people. Le sigh.

What’s left unsaid in this paragraph is that the Attorney General in question was… Richard Blumenthal. Who is now a Senator from Connecticut and the author and lead sponsor of KOSA. Doing the same shit he always does.

The whole situation is a mess, but the key point: this political gamesmanship by the likes of Blumenthal and other Senators will do real harm to children, often making the problems worse, not better. And they don’t care.

I am frustrated. Bills like KOSA will not help young people. They are rooted in a political agenda to look like they’re holding big tech accountable. But they pretend like they will make a difference and it’s not politically prudent to challenge the failed logic. Still, human rights and LGBT organizations see through this agenda. They are worried because these bills will be weaponized to harm those who are already at risk. And still, politicians are moving forward editing this bill as though something good will come for it. Why on earth do we allow politicians to use children in their agendas?

I’m scared. I’m scared for the vulnerable youth out there who don’t have parents that they can trust. I’m scared for the kids who are struggling and don’t have a safety net. I’m scared for the LGBT kids who are being targeted by politicians. I’m scared for the pregnant teenagers who don’t have the right to control their bodies. I’m scared for those who see no future with a planet that’s heating up. I’m scared for those who are struggling with wars. I’m scared for the children who are being abused. None of these young people will be served by wagging a finger at Meta and telling them to design better. More likely, more and more young people will be shunted from services that are their lifeline while their cries for help go unheeded.

I’m sick and tired of politicians using young people for spectacle. I get why well-meaning people are hoping that this imperfect bill will at least move the needle in the right direction. I get that parents are anxious about their kids’ tech use. But the stark reality is that bills like this will do more harm to vulnerable youth at the very moment when so many young people need help. They need investment, attention, support. What will it take for people to realize that focusing on tech isn’t the path forward to helping youth? Sadly, I know the answer. More dead kids.

This is the real shame. There is a real problem, but it takes real work to help deal with it. It requires real leadership, and (1) a real willingness to understand the actual root causes of these deep-rooted societal problems and (2) hard choices to fix them.

But that’s hard work. And it’s easier to just pompously declare that social media is the problem, pass a bad law, and bask in the stupid simplistic headlines claiming you are helping to save children, when really, you are helping to kill more of them.