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Even as social media platforms are deliberately designed to be addictive, screen time issues are often still portrayed as a personal lack of self-control, or as parental failure, University of Toronto associate professor and study co-author Jay Shaw said.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
The authors of a new, three-paper series published in The Lancet say it’s time for a major perspective shift that moves beyond fixating on youth screen time, to regulating big tech’s business models and addicting design features, which monetize ever more of people’s data, time and attention at the cost of their well-being.
“Time on screen, social comparison through social media, online bullying – these things are having a major impact on experiences of depression and anxiety, particularly for young people,” said study co-author Jay Shaw, an associate professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine and Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
The series looked at 121 published reviews involving nine million people under-25 and found associations between addiction-like patterns of digital media use and various harms, including sleep disruption through key phases of neurobiological development, as well as decreased physical activity.
Even as social-media platforms are deliberately designed to be addictive, to make people put off sleep and get them riled up, anxious and angry so they keep scrolling, screen time is often still portrayed as a personal lack of self-control, or as parental failure. It’s a position that lets big tech off the hook, Dr. Shaw said.
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“In some ways, we’re battling our own assumptions when it comes to thinking critically about how we engage with digital technology. We think to ourselves, ‘I shouldn’t have stayed up that extra hour last night doomscrolling.’ But the digital environment is set up to make that impossible,” Dr. Shaw said.
“Big technology companies are mobilizing a corporate defence playbook that was popularized by big tobacco, but has been used by other health harming industries facing regulation over the past few decades, where keeping attention on individual willpower prevents stronger regulation.”
Working across numerous disciplines at universities in 10 countries, the 13 co-authors are pushing for robust, international regulation of big tech business models and the design features built to pull people in, from infinite scroll and autoplay to personalized recommendation feeds.
The experts said one-off measures such as age limits aren’t enough. They’re calling for safety standards for platform design, control over how personal data are collected and used, and independent oversight and accountability.
They want to see governments force tech giants to first, assess products for risk before launching them, and second, to release internal data on how features affect users’ health – with that intel then scrutinized by independent experts. The authors are also pushing for a dedicated international body to monitor AI harms to youth.
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Dr. Shaw sees promise in Bill C-34, Canada’s Safe Social Media Act, a proposed federal law focused on making online platforms safer for youth and holding tech companies accountable. In particular, Dr. Shaw appreciates the push to establish a regulator capable of preventing youth from accessing a platform until a tech firm can show it’s safe.
“This logic of incentivizing platforms to demonstrate their safety has been absent from past efforts to ban young people from social media,” Dr. Shaw said.
The Lancet papers reflect a broader shift to thinking about safety by design, said Kaitlynn Mendes, a sociology professor at Western University and project lead at DIY: Digital Safety, who was not involved in the current research.
“It’s crazy that we let tech companies release products that haven’t been proven to be safe by design. We don’t accept that with any other products on the market. You think about food, automobiles, other tech and gadgets where we’ve set standards and regulations.”
Beyond Canada, Dr. Mendes pointed to laws already enacted in the U.K. and European Union, as well as Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, an independent government regulator dedicated to online safety.
“We’re crazy if we expect tech companies to voluntarily make changes that will impact their bottom line,” Dr. Mendes said.
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“There need to be third-party mediators, a place for the public to bring complaints that also sets standards and imposes fines. In the U.K., Ofcom forces tech companies to produce transparency reports every year. They make companies publish how many cases of child sexual abuse material, luring and underage accounts there are on the platform. That can be an incredibly effective mechanism for forcing companies to make changes.”
The Lancet papers also illustrate an evolving approach to age restrictions, according to Candice Odgers, co-director of the Child and Brain Development Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. She was not involved in the Lancet papers.
“Adults really have broken the internet in some pretty brutal ways, and their solution has been to kick kids off to ‘fix it.’ That is not going to fix the broken internet, broken design choices and broken business models. It’s going to do absolutely nothing to help our young people because the bans don’t work, and the blame certainly doesn’t work,” said Dr. Odgers, a chancellor’s professor of psychology and informatics at the University of California, Irvine.
Even as she acknowledges online harassment and exploitation, Dr. Odgers believes the science remains unsettled on screen time causing mental health problems and rewiring people’s brains. Even so, she stands behind regulating tech companies, not only to protect children and teens, but also vulnerable adults.
“There should be safety by design principles in place for all users, as well as the protection of data and privacy, and control over preferences for scrolling and advertising exposure,” Dr. Odgers said.
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The Lancet papers acknowledge that digital media can boost young people’s quality of life, pointing to social connection, access to information, telemedicine and job opportunities.
Like the Lancet authors, Dr. Odgers wants to see a healthier online world that amplifies the good on these platforms.
“Adults often view this as something that can be switched on or off, and it’s not like that. It’s more like a circulatory system,” she said.
“Digital technology runs all through our society, our relationships, for better or for worse. We need a healthy system for society to thrive and for all people to benefit and not get sick. We’re not going to be able to extract this with a scalpel, or just kick a subgroup off. We need to fix the underlying parts of it that are broken.”