The Wrong Kind of Regulation. Again
Florida has just put into law a bill that says any social media accounts for children under the age of sixteen must be approved by their parents. It is largely moving in a good direction, but as usual, fear of touching the real money behind social media companies makes the bill less useful and more problematic than it should be.
First, a note. If your reaction to the bills like this is that parent should parent harder — go away. If you seriously believe that parents, all by their little lonesomes, are equipped to overcome an entire capitalistic society bent on harvesting their children for fun and profit then you are not a serious person and need to be kept away from any task more important than playing with string. And the string should probably be a very short piece, lest you hurt yourself. You know what? Screw that — give me back that string. You can’t even be trusted with that.
I am conflicted by this bill. On the one hand, the bill does the age verification as well as it can be done — allowing sites to use services that delete the verification and provide it anonymously, minimizing, though not entirely eliminating, privacy concerns. On the other hand, there are teens, especially LGQTQ+ teens, who do derive some benefit from finding community online and some of those teens will find it harder to find those communities if their parents do not approve. On the other other hand (this is a hand shaming free newsletter. We celebrate any number of hand sin all their glory.), LGBTQ+ kids seem to suffer disproportionate harm from social media, and we know that all social media is bad for kids in general. The bill, then, on its own terms, may actually do more good than harm, something that rarely happens in Florida. The problem are its terms.
We keep, as a society, trying to solve the problems of the obvious harms that these companies do without dealing seriously with how they do these harms. We are hurt, as a society and as people, by these companies because of their business model — they track an enormous amount of personal information about us and then use that information to sell us things and push our emotional buttons to keep us coming back to their sites for more. The problem is not that kids have access to these sites, though that is an obvious concern. The problem is that anyone is subjected to that kind of treatment. If we stopped that, everyone, including our kids, would be materially better off.
I know I sound repetitive on this point, but that’s because we keep making the same mistake. We keep nibbling around the edges of the problem without attacking it head on. That is likely because attacking it head on is hard. It means that these companies would make less money than they do today. To some people on the right, a company making less money is akin to the end of times. To the companies themselves, it is an existential threat to their conception of themselves. And their executives’ abilities to buy really big boats. Pushing for these kinds of changes, outlawing that business model, then, is hard. But it is the only way to really protect people. It removes the incentives to bad behavior, increases our privacy, and makes the internet less toxic for everyone. It is the rare relatively simple solution to a serious problem.
Enacting that solution, of course, won’t be simple. To our money overlords, it is slaughtering the golden goose. To the rest of us, it is an unalloyed good. We get a better internet, Zuckerberg and his compatriots have less money to waste on things like a world without legs, and maybe investments could go to things like saving the planet or curing cancer instead of conning people into spending ten more minutes on Twitter. (I am not calling it X and you cannot make me.)
We just have to stop pretending that quarter-measures, that nibbling around the edges like Florida is doing, is the right approach, and go after the systematic issue at the heart of the problem. Do that, and we might have a chance to do some real good. Keep doing the same little tweaks over and over again, and, well, I guess you’ll just have to put up with me writing another one of these rants.
Maybe I’ll have a fourth hand by then.