If you have lingering doubts about social media’s potential to cause harm, consider this: in the United States, there is a law firm whose sole business is suing social media companies.
The Social Media Victims Law Center’s nine attorneys use principles of product liability to force social media companies to take consumer safety seriously, the firm’s website says.
The law firm is suing the parent companies of Facebook and YouTube, claiming they designed their apps to be addictive and harmful. The trial could unleash a wave of similar litigation. Two of the defendants, Snapchat and TikTok, elected to settle shortly before trial.
The law firm’s website rightly notes that civil lawsuits are just one way to force change; government regulation, it says, also plays an important role in curbing known abuses.
Unfortunately, Canada has been slow to get this message.
Last week, the Globe and Mail reported that the federal government is considering banning children under 14 from using social media.
If true, this would put Canada at the back of the pack of a league of nations that are limiting social media access and/or banning smartphones in schools.
Currently, Canada’s only real limits on social media use are privacy guidelines that notionally require kids under 13 to obtain parental consent to create social media accounts. For smartphone use, all of the provinces have some form of phone-free classroom policy, but academic research has shown teachers often feel ill-equipped to enforce them.
The impetus for Canada’s new plans appears to be Australia’s bold leadership.
In December, Australia became the first country in the world to require social media companies to take “reasonable steps” to prevent those under 16 from “creating or keeping” social media accounts. The platforms face fines of up to about US$30 million for non-compliance. France has already followed suit with a similar proposed ban.
Predictably, Australia’s moves have reignited debate over whether curbs on children’s social media use go too far. The evidence does not show causation, merely correlation, opponents of regulation often say.
But Jonathan Haidt, author of bestselling book The Anxious Generation, who has been at the forefront of research on social media’s harms, says such claims no longer have merit.
“Guess what? There’s tons and tons of evidence of causation, and Meta did some of the best studies to show it,” he said in an interview with the New York Times this January.
“There are so many different kinds of evidence, including what the kids themselves say, what the parents say, what the teachers say — everybody sees it. That’s evidence. And then there are experiments with random assignment that show that when you get off social media for at least a week, depression gets less,” he added.
“So the evidence for causality is now overwhelming. People have to stop saying, “Oh, it’s just correlational.”
For the unconvinced, there is a website, metasinternalresearch.org, created by Haidt and his colleagues at New York University, which lists Meta’s own internal research, lawsuits and whistleblower reports showing evidence of harm. These harms include not only depression, anxiety and suicidality, but also bullying, sexual harassment, exposure to pornography and sextortion.
It is in the face of this robust body of evidence that Canada’s inaction is so galling.
For nearly half a decade, Parliament has been working to pass online harms legislation that would simply require social media companies to address the most egregious content on their platforms. This includes content that incites violence or hatred or sexually victimizes kids.
It is this online harms bill, which is likely to be reintroduced again this parliamentary session, that is reportedly supposed to include new rules preventing kids under 14 from accessing social media. (Heritage Canada declined to comment directly on the Globe’s reporting in a response to Canadian Affairs but said the government “will have more details to share in due course.”)
Even if you are of the camp that the evidence is not conclusive, or that moderate, after-school social media use can benefit youth (as one recent large-scale study shows), the precautionary principle should weigh in favour of government action.
That principle holds that protective action should be taken even without full scientific certainty where the risk of harm is significant.
Here, we are talking about products used ubiquitously by society’s most vulnerable individuals — our children. And we are talking about potential risks of harm that research, common sense and lived experience all show can cause depression, anxiety, suicidality and other afflictions.
And yet, somehow, federal and provincial policymakers have been reluctant to act. They have not demanded that social media giants demonstrate the safety of their products — a standard expectation for many goods and services marketed to children.
Instead, it has come down to civil society actors, such as the Social Media Victims Law Center or Canada’s largest school boards, to take action through lawsuits that will take years to bear fruit.
What should be a national scandal has provoked barely a whisper of consternation in this country. This needs to change. Canada’s children deserve better.
