Why Protecting Kids from Social Media May Make Things Worse
Media Literacy is Everything Literacy
I’m supposed to give a talk next week about kids and social media and the need for more media literacy education, more regulation of platforms, and more substantive discussion about how to keep our kids from media-induced self-harm. The whole event is well-meaning, but is characterized by a sense of worry and protection. And for some reason, after years of making those sorts of arguments in my articles and documentaries, I have a strong impulse to pivot the other way.
I understand that there’s a problem. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among people age 15 to 24, and has increased 30% along with the rise of social media use among this age group. Anecdotally, I can vouch that I have more students arriving to my courses each year with notes from their psychiatrists requesting they be spared from the social stress of class participation. There’s definitely something going on.
Yet there’s also something about these efforts to treat social media as a public health problem that remind me of the way we turned to disinfectants and antibiotics to solve earlier public health challenges. To be sure, the massive influx of immigrants to the tenements of New York City and other urban areas around the turn of the 20th century…
