When I was a kid in the 1970s and my father was a principal in an ad agency, they had the Ameritone paint account, and I remember him explaining that they were not allowed to show paint and food together in a commercial lest a child viewer be confused into thinking that paint might be edible. By contrast, a social media platform today is free to conflate child-focused material with illegal drug offers and numerous other conduits leading to serious harm or death. And it’s all swept under the rug of innovation and commerce.
Algorithms kill kids. Let’s just call it like it is at this point and stop pussyfooting around the rhetoric that social media platforms are neutral platforms for “information.” Never mind that information itself is almost a lost cause on social media, but the effects of algorithmic manipulation—even simple recommendations—can have disastrous effects for children and teens, including depression, anxiety, suicide, and accidental death. And that was before AI.
As reported last September, the accidental suicide of Nylah Anderson, age 10, was the result of TikTok’s algorithm prompting her to try the “blackout challenge,” which entails making a “game” of self-asphyxiation. In the case against TikTok for its role in leading Anderson toward the “blackout challenge,” the Third Circuit Court of Appeals articulated one of the few rational reads of the Section 230 liability shield. The court stated:
TikTok reads § 230…to permit casual indifference to the death of a ten-year-old girl. It is a position that has become popular among a host of purveyors of pornography, self-mutilation, and exploitation, one that smuggles constitutional conceptions of a “free trade in ideas” into a digital “cauldron of illicit loves” that leap and boil with no oversight, no accountability, no remedy.
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Add to that cauldron the major brands whose advertising dollars unconditionally support social platforms, and that was the focus of this morning’s event held at the National Press Club. “We saw a great turnout,” says cyber-analyst Eric Feinberg, who has been engaged on ad-supported toxic social media content since 2013. More than 40 attendees filled the 40-seat room for the kick-off event designed to focus the attention of major brands on the fact that their ad dollars finance platform operations that cause serious harm and death to children and teens.
The event was organized and hosted by parents who have been working to turn personal tragedy into social change through both public policy and private action. For instance, one mother who spoke was Debra Schmill, who started the Becca Schmill Foundation after losing her daughter Rebecca to fentanyl poisoning from pills obtained with the “help” of social media. Becca’s death was the culmination in a cascade of terrible events intersecting social platforms—beginning with a rape at the age of 15 that was followed by cyber-bullying and the consequent battle with depression that led to the fatal pills obtained online. Deb Schmill is one of many parents determined to prevent other children and families from suffering similar fates.
“Women make 70% to 80% of all purchasing decisions,” Feinberg explained to me by phone after the event, “and these mothers who spoke today recognize that mothers just like them are funding social media harm to their own children.” Posting his daily mantra that “Brands are buying while kids are dying,” Feinberg has recently taken swings at McDonalds for its crossover promotion with Snapchat…
He makes a solid point. If a major brand overtly promoted the opportunity for kids to get closer to the local drug dealer, pimp, or sexual predator, parents would be outraged. But because social media is an insidious free-for-all, inhabited by good and bad actors, the worst vices are either overlooked or accepted as the cost of obtaining the virtues. But this is a false choice. Multiple defectors from these companies have made clear that the platforms bend their own rules and tweak their algorithms to promote anything that drives “engagement,” without regard to the consequences. And they assume the mainstream advertisers will keep paying without condition because they own all that engagement.
But as Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams describes in her book Careless People, that company made an affirmative decision to target known teenage psychological vulnerabilities (e.g., body image) to promote certain products. This abuse of the technology is already unethical—a far cry from not showing paint and food on the same screen—and advertisers who knowingly exploit the “opportunity” should be held accountable by consumers. Meanwhile, as the organizers of today’s event strive to emphasize, that same algorithm exploiting the teen’s vulnerabilities will just as readily push dangerous drugs toward the child as promote a makeup product or gym membership.
By my lights, asking the advertisers to partner with their own consumers—the parents who buy their products—to pressure the platforms to adopt better practices is the very least they can do. In just a couple of months, it will be time for the ~$40 billion Back-to-School season, and as brands vie for the K-12 parents who make those purchases, they owe it to those families to pressure the digital-age media companies to stop killing kids.
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