The Fear of Boys Online
When people are fed a scary story about tech, they will buy that book
Do you know that guy online Paul Fairie who does historical newspaper headlines and shows us that time is actually a flat circle?
Every time I hear something about how social media or computers are causing a mental health crisis, I think of Paul and wonder how many news headlines have there been about how technology is causing (add in current awful thing). I’m sure he has something.
However here we are, again.
This time it’s Jonathan Haidt claiming that the mental health crisis that is affecting young people has been caused by our dependence on social media, the internet, and phones in general in his new book titled “The Anxious Generation.”
Here’s Haidt’s argument in a nutshell. From Nature magazine:
“Haidt asserts that the great rewiring of children’s brains has taken place by “designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears”. And that “by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale”.”
In the article it also argues that Haidt is wrong in his assertion that social media is the cause of our mental health crisis. Mostly because even though we are in the midst of a bad swing for mental health for youth, there’s a lot of possible causes that may be the reason for it. In fact, it could be a combination of a lot of different cultural, economic, social, and dynamic factors. Social media and phones COULD be a part of it, but we cannot in good faith say that this is the key. In fact there have been many studies about the lack of caustion of the rise of social media and poor mental health. Nature said it plainly:
“An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally”
The issue I have is that this idea is pervasive, because you can see youth and young people being absolutely plugged in to their phones.
I have the privilege to talk to parents and caregivers every day, and anecdotaly I have heard from many parents that screen addiction is a real thing. I believe it, I truly do. And I also believe that mental health is a complex thing that cannot be blamed by one thing, like the phone. But since parents see this dynamic every day, it’s very easy to buy in to what Haidt is selling.
In the end this book is going to end up as an episode in “If Books Could Kill".”
However, I do want to mention something this is researched and identifiable in regards to social media. Something that we truly should be aware of. And that is how gender shapes what we see online.
There was a very widely talked about whistleblower report oin 2021 that Facebook knew that Instagram was toxic for young women’s views on their bodies. This report caused changes in how Instagram operated, famously changing the way likes are portrayed (it would not show you how many people liked a post anymore, just names and a + sign). However, crucially, no one talked about banning Facebook or Instagram (only TikTok is getting that policy hammer, a Chinese company, fancy that).
Now we’re getting further evidence that social media algorithms are also affecting how boys see their culture and community as well. And it’s not good.
This month, Dublin City University released a report titled “Recommending Toxicity: The Role of Algorithmic Recommender functions on YouTube Shorts and TikTok in promoting male supremacist influencers”
In the report they found that YouTube Shorts and TikTok were recommending young boys “masculinist” (sexist and misogynist) accounts and content to a brand new user who coded themselves as 16 year old and 18 year old boys. They found that:
“Overall, YouTube Shorts accounts were recommended a larger amount of toxic content (on average 61.5% of the total recommended content) than TikTok accounts (34.7%).”
And that “Manfluencers” accounted for the majority of videos recommended to these teen boys in the dataset.
Once the algorithm noticed the user clicked on those videos the amount rapidly increased to about 75% of recommended content. That’s a LOT. Three out of four videos!
And beyond that, they were also shown conspiratorial and anti-trans content as they clicked through. YouTube Shorts was the biggest culprit (another American company, fancy that).
The interesting thing on this report is the recommendations.
For the University, it not only recommended having more open conversations with boys and young men about how attracted they may be to influencers, but also for tech companies to be stricter in the design principles they have embedded. Again, a more nuanced response to the ban hammer that is current governments favorite tool (and let’s not even BEGIN about how governments would even enforce this).
I also think this aligns to a general fear of men and boys online. Also confirming a prior understanding that boys can get radicalized into sexists and toxic content by social media.
Now we know through this report and others that boys are constantly being fed a stream of toxic content, and I do agree that social media companies should be held accountable for their actions, especially Google and Meta.
We also know that boys and young men find positive social community online (we also know that gender non conforming youth also find community, and most importantly hope, online as well). This cannot be undercut by banning social media full stop.
I personally have heard from parents that they were scared of the app Discord, because that’s where they heard hate speech can prolifirate. I had to explain what Discord was (a chat tool that is used well for gaming), and that Discord itself is not an evil per se, and you can find healthy positive communities within. That Discord was not the problem, it was those communities that was the problem.
If that’s the case then social media is not the culprit, it’s the culture that surrounds it.
One of the books that influenced me on how I talk to parents and caregivers about social media is “Behind Their Screens: What Teens are Facing and Adults are Missing” , and the reason is that it’s one of the few books that actually talked to youth about social media and had a clear-eyed view of how supportive and harmful social media was for teens.
It also didn’t chicken little the situation and made every parent scared about their child accessing social media. The main solution was for parents to talk to their child about what they see online, and create a safe attachment zone where children can ask questions, test things out, fail safely, and learn. They ask parents to think about social media problems in three ways:
Developmentally - How child development is impacting their social skills and how they respond is connected to where they are developmentally
Ecologically - Knowing that offline world is the same as online world. That social skills that happen online are mirrored offline and vice versa. And that right now, culturally, social media is a tool used for communication and it’s not going away any time soon
Technologically - Knowing that companies like Google, Meta, Tiktok etc are businesses that want to keep people engaged, and that studies like the one from Dublin show that their algorithms are not helping people move away from toxcitity. However that algorithm can be changed by the user, and kids need to know how to do it.
Basically it comes from a model of coaching, and not fear. And I worry that’s what’s happening with books like Haidt’s is that it creates a level of fear for parents that is unnecessary, and that fear creates a culture of useless censorship under the guise of health.
And the people that get harmed the most are the people that they supposedly want to help, the children.