There has been a lot of concern lately that various social media platforms are deliberately targeting children and adolescents with addictive algorithms. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt criticized the significant impact of a “phone-based childhood,” calling for “a dramatic cultural correction” in his new book Anxious Generation.
Ravi Iyer shares Dr. Haidt’s concerns. He is the managing director of the Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision-Making at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and a former research manager at Facebook.
In a recent op-ed piece in The Boston Globe, Iyer praised a new Minnesota law he helped design because it “will force social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat to reveal the results of their user experiments, disclose how their algorithms prioritize what users see on their feeds, explain how they treat abusive actors, and reveal how much time people spend on these platforms, including how often people are receiving notifications.”
“Sharing internal data is particularly valuable,” Iyer wrote, “something I know firsthand from my time working at Facebook (now called Meta). In the four years I worked there, I helped produce dozens of internal reports on the company’s news feed algorithms. Despite finding evidence that optimizing for engagement often increases exposure to harassment, misinformation, and graphic content, Facebook continued to prioritize engagement over content quality as part of an effort to beat rivals like TikTok.”
In May, the Minnesota House voted 103-26 to approve new legal protections for minors featured in social media posts. HF 3488 bars kids under 14 from creating paid social media content. The minimum age for most social media sites is 14 but the bill’s backers said some parents bypassed this requirement by setting up accounts themselves that predominantly feature their children.
“For accounts that feature kids younger than 14 in at least 30 percent of their content, all profits would be designated for the young person,” reported Minnesota Public Radio. “It would also require those influencers to keep records about when the children appear and how much they earn. And influencers ages 14 to 18 who profit from social media would have earnings sent to a trust fund that can be accessed when they become adults.”
A few days later, the bill, which is the second of its kind in the nation, passed the Minnesota Senate with bipartisan support, 37-30. “In a single lifetime, we have seen the birth of social media and its evolution from a casual hobby to an industry that powers careers around the world,” said State Senator Maye Quade. “This burgeoning field has few protections for the children who feature heavily in monetized content—children whose families’ brands rely on sharing their milestone moments, like losing a tooth or the first day of school, with thousands or millions of followers. This legislation is a first step to apply our existing framework of child labor laws to the digital industry.”
“The Minnesota legislation, which will take effect in July 2025, will make social media companies that have more than 10,000 in-state users reveal how their algorithms decide what appears in people’s feeds, as well as how much users’ preferences affect what they see,” Iyer wrote in The Boston Globe. “This new data will allow Minnesota officials to compare how well platforms are doing at protecting young people, and the rest of us, too, from potentially harmful content and interactions online.”
DIGITAL HEROIN
In his 2017 book Glow Kids, Nicholas Kardaras described what excessive screen time does to children, calling it “digital heroin.” In his follow-up Digital Madness, he wrote “We need to address Big Tech and the corrosive social media that is driving our mental health crisis—not just the above-mentioned tech addiction and the empty depression that accompanies it.”
Dr. Kardaras feels that “The constant immersion in polarizing social media platforms has changed the architecture of our brains and the way we process information in a way that’s inherently pathological and unhealthy and undermines any potential for rational thinking.”
“Kids and teens are being harmed by a race to the bottom to grab their attention spans, with toxic content and harassment as the collateral damage of profit,” Iyer wrote. “Minnesota’s new law is an important step to begin holding social media companies accountable and serves as a call to action for other states.”
RELEARNING SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
An important element of the treatment program at Turning Winds is to get our teenage clients reacquainted with life without phones and constant internet use. It is a safe place for teens to unplug and heal. “Kids today are so bombarded with societal expectations, the internet, social media, and so much of the demands that society puts on them,” says Turning Winds therapist Kim Sparks, LCPC. Parents bring their teens to our remote place in Montana “to make them kind of disconnect and have them only focus on themselves.”
“Many of our clients struggle socially when they arrive here,” says Turning Winds therapist Sean Carlin. “We’ve developed into a country where we are hooked to our electronics and we do everything with them. It’s a big piece of why these kids are here.”
The Turning Winds program aims at effecting comprehensive change in our clients. We believe success is most likely achieved through a combination of therapeutic and educational approaches that provide the best outcomes possible for each child we treat. “This program works because we build relationships with these kids. The more of a relationship therapists have, the more of a positive impact they can have on these kids,” says Carlin.
Turning Winds helps young people learn how to correctly perceive and purposefully engage with the world around them. The program’s holistic approach, relational focus, and emphasis on achieving authentic openness make Turning Winds especially effective at facilitating positive outcomes and long-term change.
Turning Winds provides a therapeutic respite from a dysfunctional cultural experience, reconnection with core human values, and the holistic education and therapeutic alliance needed to perceive and practice intentional living. Contact us online for more information, or call us at 800-845-1380.
