Children and Social Media (the letter I wrote to my MP)

Smartphone Free Childhood are running a campaign to write to your MP.

I hand-wrote the following letter to mine.

Dear [name of my MP],

I’m writing to you mostly as a Dad of a curious five year old, but also as a technologist and concerned citizen. I believe that some forms of social media (algorithmically curated and in particular short-form video) are harmful to children and adults alike. I urge you to support parliamentary action to limit access to these forms of social media for under 16s.

I don’t urge this lightly as a generally pro freedom of speech and anti-censorship kind of person, so let me explain my position and specific concern.

In the early days of social media, platforms like Facebook and Twitter were not algorithmically curated: they were genuinely social in that you chose who to follow and you saw updates from those people’s activity, nothing else.

Soon, the platforms realised this would be limited in how long people would use the platform for, as there’s only so much activity your friends could create. This was bad for profits as time-on-platform meant longer to show ads, and more revenue.

At this point they created the monster.

They built models/algorithms with the specific singular goal of maximising time on platform. These algorithms discovered - without human intervention - that content which provokes anger, frustration and outrage was the most compelling. The algorithms literally picked the most triggering things to show you and keep you on the platform.

Social media was no longer social at all, simply ads and outrage. When people of any age spend four hours per day watching content selected to provoke anger, it changes their mind in exactly the same way CBT changes our thinking through repetition of positive thoughts.

The algorithms have hacked our basic vulnerability that we’re attuned to risk, danger and outrage.

Then came TikTok, an ‘innovation’ that discovered that short-form videos were even more addictive than simple outrage. New algorithms but a similar end result: minds that grew accustomed to very fast paced, high-dopamine content. Minds that can no longer focus for two minutes to read a book.

I am not anti technology. Applied by communities, with community interests and values, I believe it can be extremely positive.

But big tech has a single focus to maximise profits. Consistently they have shown that profits outweigh any concerns about mental health, polarisation, misinformation, attention deficit, etc.

As a parent, I need your help. I can’t make my daughter the only one who doesn’t have X, Y or Z. I would be preventing harm in one way while exposing her to ridicule and bullying at the same time. I need the law to help.

There is actual harm being done to the minds of our society at an industrial scale and we need the Government to step in.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Fawkesley