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Big Tech is in the hot seat, with Mark Zuckerberg forced to testify last week about the dangers of Instagram in a landmark lawsuit brought by a young California woman, known only as KGM, who says growing up on social media ruined her childhood.
KGM’s story is terrible: Claims of sextortion, self-harm and suicidal ideation. Outside the courthouse are even more tragic stories, as families hold vigils for children who they claim died as a result of being online.
But parents should know this: Even if your child doesn’t end up in a hospital — or worse — it doesn’t mean they haven’t been hurt by social media.
Childhood has been completely rewritten by Big Tech behemoths who simply don’t have children’s best interest in mind.
I first signed up for Facebook at age 10, Instagram at 11, and Tumblr around 12 — all standard for Gen Z.
At first, Instagram was just a place to see what my friends were doing and post pictures of my dogs. But it quickly became a portal to a world I wasn’t adequately prepared for.
By the time I was 12, strange men, often from other countries, were commenting on innocent photos of me with friends at school dances or at the beach and sending me lewd messages. Though I learned to ignore them, it made me feel overwhelmed and too aware of my own sexuality at too young an age.
Meanwhile, female influencers were inadvertently “teaching” me how I should look.
Because of Instagram, I came to believe that the Photoshopped and augmented waists, breasts and hips of Kardashians were ideal.
I saw self-harm and eating disorder content that I did not seek out, and I was exposed to porn before I knew what sex was.
I was a good kid who kept out of trouble. And yet, like most all of my peers, I was radicalized by online influencers.
My burgeoning political views were also shaped by YouTube. In middle school, the socialist channel Young Turks took over my algorithm, filling it — and my mind — with anti-capitalist ideas. Then came a 180 to conservative political influencers like Stephen Crowder, with contrarian right-wing takes, as I tried to make sense of the real world amidst all the online noise.
Stop any Zoomer on the street and they’ll tell you a similar story. There’s a reason why 60% of my generation say that the internet is more negative than positive.
Alannah, a 27-year-old copywriter who grew up in Chicago, went online at a similar age: Facebook at 10, Instagram 11, Twitter and Tumblr at 12. The latter, she told me, was “definitely the worst.”
“At first it was like, ‘Oh, OK, I feel understood [by Tumblr],’” she recalled. “But then you go down a rabbit hole and there’s tons of eating disorder content, there’s poetry about self harm. This sad-girl persona is really romanticized, and it just sort of pulls you in.
“It just reinforced all the negative feelings I had about myself. Being sad is … almost, like, aspirational.”
As a tween, Alannah was dealing with what she calls “typical” self-confidence and body-image issues. Tumblr made it all darker.
“I was getting ideas that I wouldn’t necessarily have had otherwise,” she explained. “Like the way that I learned how to get a blade out of a razor that you shave your legs with was because somebody posted it on Tumblr. I wouldn’t have had that information otherwise.”
Though her parents monitored her text messages, Alannah had free reign on Tumblr because they didn’t yet know what it was, but it’s also where we were being exposed to the nastiest content: crash diets, cutting scars, porn GIFs.
Keeping kids safe online has always been a moving target.
More recently, parents have been blindsided by Roblox, a seemingly innocuous video gaming platform that is allegedly teeming with predators looking to contact children. Recent lawsuits around the country claim that predators sent sex toys to children’s homes and coerced them into cutting themselves on video.
Legislators have recently proposed an all-out social media ban for anyone under 16. But when Australia implemented a social media age restriction, kids migrated to niche apps like Lemon8 and Coverstar — apps parents and lawmakers had never even heard of — to stay plugged in.
Thank goodness organic change is underway. Many parents are starting to dole out devices later, while schools have started banning phones. Because, for many of us, even classrooms weren’t a safe space.
Gary, a 26-year-old PhD student from Dallas, says having access to the internet in middle and high school turned out to be a disastrous experiment.
His school district was one of the first in Texas to integrate tech into the classroom, encouraging parents to buy their kids devices and allowing laptops in class.
“At the time, it was super exciting. It felt like I was almost a pioneer of a new world,” he told me. “But I think we see now in the data just how much of a disaster it was.”
His parents bought him a phone at age 10 at the behest of the school, and he started spending an average of three to four hours a day — and, sometimes, “basically the entire day” — online.
It turned out to be a lasting disaster, as, he said, some teachers had no problem with kids being absorbed in their phones.
“I would just be on my phone all day every day, and [they] didn’t care,” he said.
In college, he needed intensive remedial work to make up for the learning losses.
“I 100% support getting technology out of schools,” Gary said. “I won’t be satisfied until the children are etching cuneiform tablets.”
