Morning Wire XX
[0] A growing body of research shows that social media is likely harming the mental health of adolescents, especially girls.
[1] Early and prolonged use seems to be a significant factor in rising rates of anxiety, depression, and gender dysphoria in this age group.
[2] All of these issues have led lawmakers at both the state and federal level to look to new regulations on the platforms.
[3] But free speech advocates say that's the wrong solution.
[4] For this episode of Morning Wire, Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham examines.
[5] the new social media laws, what the arguments are for and against them, and whether they pass constitutional muster.
[6] I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor -in -Chief John Bickley.
[7] It's June 11th, and this is your Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
[8] So, Megan, thanks for joining us.
[9] Social media has been a ubiquitous part of our lives for nearly 20 years now, which is hard to believe.
[10] Twitter and Facebook both became available to the public in 2006 and gained wide popularity very quickly.
[11] Instagram soon followed.
[12] That was in 2010.
[13] And there's been plenty of discussion during that time about how this probably isn't good for kids development.
[14] So why are we just now seeing serious proposals to regulate social media?
[15] Well, you know, I think for one thing, it can take some time to study the impact of these really seismic technological changes and then isolate how they're impacting different demographics.
[16] But now we are starting to see a growing consensus of research showing that this really is an issue.
[17] And that's a big problem because up to 95 % of kids between ages 13 and 17, say they use at least one social media platform.
[18] Nearly 40 % of kids 8 to 12 do.
[19] Many of them, in fact, use it daily.
[20] So this led U .S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to issue a pretty unusual public warning a couple of weeks ago about the profound risk these apps pose to the mental health of kids.
[21] And he urged tech companies to enforce minimum age limits.
[22] Now, this came right after the American Psychological Association issued its first ever guidance on kids in social media that was similarly dire.
[23] Well, I spoke to University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox about the kind of studies that are sparking these warnings.
[24] He said that the research shows a sharp change in teen mental health right when social media became common.
[25] For girls, right when Instagram became common.
[26] And they've also been in able to trace how introducing increased internet access to various geographical areas impacts the local teen population.
[27] We've seen kind of a tremendous increase in adolescent problems since 2010.
[28] So dramatic increases in anxiety and depression, suicide.
[29] One of the most striking things for me in looking at the sort of research more recently is seeing that the rate of teenage girls being admitted to emergency rooms for self -harm doubled since 2010.
[30] So there's clearly kind of a problem out there.
[31] And, of course, there's certainly some scientists saying that correlation does not equal causation here.
[32] But we've seen kind of also more recent evidence, too, that suggests that when there's, you know, broadband, internet rolling out in different countries and communities, that that's in turn then I can make to emotional problems, particularly for younger women.
[33] Now, I have my own theories about this, but why do researchers think these platforms seem to have a greater impact on girls than boys?
[34] Well, a lot of it seems to be that the psychological development of girls is different than boys, and the way girls develop seems to make them uniquely vulnerable to the addictive nature of social media.
[35] Well, Dr. Gene Twangy is a San Diego State psychologist, and she's been studying generational differences.
[36] In fact, she has a new book out on that, titled Generations.
[37] And she was one of the first researchers who really started to raise the alarm about the issue starting back in 2017.
[38] She says the latest research now shows that 22 % of 10th grade girls spend seven or more hours a day on social media.
[39] And that directly correlates to poor mental health.
[40] So we know that the more hours a day a team spends on social media, the more likely it is that he or she will be depressed.
[41] And we also have more experimental data now showing that social media use can cause depression.
[42] Those links between social media use and depression are stronger for girls than they are for boys.
[43] And that's probably due to a number of reasons.
[44] One is just that girls face more pressure around their appearance and body image, and that's heightened by social media.
[45] And also just cyberbullying tends to affect girls more just because socialized and verbal communication tends to be more important.
[46] I can tell you that a lot of the mental health statistics have also gotten worse for boys.
[47] Teen depression is also way up for boys as well.
[48] And, you know, their lives have changed too.
[49] They also, you know, spend more time online and less time with each other face -to -face.
[50] just they don't face quite as many pressures around body image and appearance on social media as girls do.
[51] Now, when I asked several moms of teens, they told me that their experience absolutely dovetails with this data.
[52] Marjorie Salvatara is the mother of a teenage daughter who is an elite ballerina.
[53] And due to the competitiveness within that ballet world to maintain a certain body type, she developed an eating disorder.
[54] Well, Marjorie says the treatment center where her daughter sought help, was treating a number of girls who had developed negative body images from social media use.
[55] I met a lot of parents in the hospital and in treatment.
[56] Even this past time when she was in the hospital, I would talk to other parents because you can't sit in the room when they eat.
[57] And nine -year -olds, the nurse said to me, we've had so many nine -year -olds in here lately.
[58] And a few of the moms said TikTok, that their kids got it from TikTok because it tells them what to eat, how to look, how to behave, and it gives them this ideal.
[59] And then you have these celebrities going on in saying, this is what I eat for breakfast and this is what I eat for lunch and I don't eat dinner.
[60] And it's just they're killing this group of kids.
[61] I also blame politics on both sides of these extremists.
[62] It gets into the high school.
[63] When my son was in high school here, there was such a huge divide in his class about politics and mask wearing and the pandemic.
[64] And it became so political.
[65] Now, what Marjorie said there that perhaps the problem isn't necessarily social media, but are especially polarized political culture in the U .S., has actually been suggested by some pundits.
[66] Others have pointed to anxiety over school shootings.
[67] But Dr. Twenge says the fact that research shows that teens in other countries are experiencing these same issues, undercuts those arguments.
[68] One thing I always want to point out is that those statistics on depression and self -harm going up among teens, well, two things.
[69] First, that they show off for behaviors, not just reports of symptoms, so we can't write them off as just being, you know, about being more willing to report because emergency room admissions for South Parm have quadrupled among 10 to 14 -year -old girls, and that's something we're objectively measuring.
[70] and also that those stats replicate internationally.
[71] So one of the things that Twangy mentioned there, loneliness, was something a number of moms that I spoke to also brought up.
[72] Even as their kids are seemingly forming large online social networks, they report feeling disconnected.
[73] Now, one of these moms, Melissa Harding, doesn't just have three teenagers.
[74] She's also a high school teacher at a private Christian school that tends to have pretty involved parents.
[75] And yet she said this is also absolutely, a problem that she's noticed in her students.
[76] I've noticed that all of teenage girls that I teach will tell me that they just don't have good friends, that they can't find good friends, or I have moms telling me, like, yeah, we might be changing schools, like my daughter, she just can't connect with anybody.
[77] Everybody's same.
[78] And you look at these girls and you're like, but you have friends.
[79] I see you.
[80] You guys hang out on the weekends.
[81] you're doing stuff with each other.
[82] I've been on a retreat with you.
[83] Like, you talk about deep things.
[84] But there's something I'm convinced about social media that has created a disconnection in their minds, and they don't know what a real connection feels like.
[85] Twangy told me that the research does back this up.
[86] She says that between 1976 and 2004, the amount of time that teens spent with their friends pretty much held steady.
[87] And then between 2004 and 2010, it started to decrease.
[88] Since 2012, it has basically just fallen off a cliff.
[89] So you hear this and you really start to feel for these kids.
[90] And it makes sense that lawmakers want to do something about it.
[91] All right.
[92] So let's talk about that.
[93] I know Utah has already enacted a new law restricting kids access to social media.
[94] And I know there's a bill to do something similar at a federal level.
[95] But I think the obvious question people are going to have is how would laws like that actually be enforced?
[96] Yeah.
[97] So the Utah law, which was passed back in March, could prove to be something of a model that we see other states follow.
[98] The first thing it does is require social media users to verify their age.
[99] If they're under 18, they have to have a parent's consent.
[100] And even with the parents consent, they can't use those apps between 10 .30 p .m. and 6 .30 a .m. Professor Wilcox actually had a hand in crafting that legislation.
[101] And he says the technology has developed in such a way that he believes in forcing the restrictions is very feasible.
[102] We do have pretty good third -party platforms that are designed to do everything from like, you know, gets you.
[103] I mean, you can get a car loan, right?
[104] I mean, I could jump on the internet right now and get a car loan within probably five minutes approved or a major personal loan of some sort approved.
[105] And obviously, they're not going to kiss some random person on the internet alone unless it can really determine that person is, you know, who he or she says they are.
[106] So there are these third -party platforms that Utah is going to be looking at as kind of vehicles.
[107] So that's one, I think, potential avenue.
[108] There's also potentially, you know, the state's kind of DMV or the equivalent could also kind of use people's licenses to or black thereafter to help determine kind of who is an adult.
[109] But the point of making is it's not hard for these more sophisticated companies now on the Internet to figure out people's identity and their age.
[110] And then once they determine you're an adult, you're free to kind of use the apps as you deem fit.
[111] And if they figure out that you're a kid, then you need to get your parents' permission to use these social media apps.
[112] Now, he said he recognizes that some kids are going to find workarounds, but that's been the case with other age restrictions as well.
[113] There's always kids who figure out how to get their hands on alcohol, for example.
[114] But his argument is that this law will put up a barrier that significantly decreases teen use.
[115] And then the other thing this law does is it bans the social media companies from using addictive algorithms with minor users.
[116] and the law makes it easier for parents to sue the big tech companies from harming their children.
[117] Other states like Arkansas, Texas, Ohio, Louisiana, they're all looking at passing similar laws.
[118] And the bipartisan bill that's just been introduced in the Senate is also very similar.
[119] It would bar kids under age 13 from accessing social media and parents have to give consent for kids between ages 13 and 17.
[120] Now, I imagine, though, that a lot of people would say this is a parent's job.
[121] It's not necessarily the government's job to step in.
[122] Yeah, that is absolutely an argument that I heard from a lot of people.
[123] Gabe Wrench is co -host of Cross -Politic, and that's a popular podcast that covers the intersection of faith and politics.
[124] Now, he's a conservative Christian and doesn't advocate letting kids use social media, but he also doesn't believe government regulations are the right answer to the problem.
[125] Right now, the government can tell you how far apart your drywall screws have to be in your house, how far apart your studs have to be.
[126] in your house.
[127] I mean, we can go down a list of all the ways the government micromanages your situation, and it always comes back to, at some level, in the name of your safety and your health.
[128] And the government's job is not to manage our help.
[129] So I think that the government can actually encourage good in this situation by telling the parents, this is actually not our job to regulate age limits on social media.
[130] It's your job to regulate your own children's age limit on social media.
[131] Now, I'll say here that it did surprise me a little bit that the moms I spoke to were all a little hesitant of the idea of instituting new laws to address the issue as well, even though they all agreed that it is a problem.
[132] Harding offered a pretty representative comment on that.
[133] If the government starts controlling that aspect of our phones, what else will it start controlling?
[134] What is it that we're handing over when it's, like I said before, it's very easy.
[135] for parents to just simply do it themselves.
[136] But Wilcox says that his research has shown that not putting age restrictions in place will mean penalizing kids who are further down the socioeconomic ladder.
[137] Their parents tend to provide less oversight than wealthier parents.
[138] So right now, they are less likely to have someone in their life guarding them from harmful material.
[139] What we also see in our research is that kids who are lower down the social ladder, working class and poor kids have the least parental oversight.
[140] And so for thinking about trying to protect them from the most egregious excesses of social media and big tech, we also think about ways that the government in pursuit of the common good can step in and protect them.
[141] So I'm going to know that I make obviously is just the tobacco.
[142] I mean, we have set up pretty stringent laws and regulations around teenagers in tobacco because tobacco has a pretty big negative effect on health, physical health care, our kids and our teens.
[143] And I think when it comes to the emotional health of our teenagers, it's much the same story.
[144] And I'll note that Dr. Twangy shares Dr. Wilcox's view.
[145] In fact, she said she'd like to see the laws go a little bit further.
[146] I think it would be amazing and fantastic if the minimum age for social media was raised to 16.
[147] But that has to be enforced to actual age verification for it to work.
[148] But tech industry lobbyists say she's unlikely to get way.
[149] They say these laws are unconstitutional because they infringe on people's First Amendment right to free speech.
[150] One of the lobby groups, NetChoice, represents Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
[151] They put out a statement that also called Utah's laws an invasion of privacy.
[152] They say that requiring users to provide things like government -issued IDs and birth certificates to use these apps puts the users, quote, private data at risk of breach.
[153] And then another group, Tech Freedom has said that these laws could put LGBTQ kids who live in unsupportive homes at risk because they find support in online communities.
[154] The group also put out a letter warning that the Supreme Court has struck down less sweeping laws, so they don't expect these to survive judicial review.
[155] And a lot of legal scholars are saying that review is imminent.
[156] Now, just to clarify, Tech Freedom thinks that LGBTQ kids will be in harm's way because they won't be able to access age -restricted content?
[157] What kind of online communities would be restricted with these laws?
[158] I don't think it's that online communities would be restricted, and they haven't been very clear about what they meant by that.
[159] But another advocacy group put out a statement that said, and I'll just quote from it, by requiring parental consent before a teen can use a social media platform, vulnerable minors, including LGBTQ plus kids and kids who live in unsupportive households, may be cut off from access to needed resources and community.
[160] So it sounds like they believe that oversight may make it more difficult for kids to access content and communities privately, stuff they don't necessarily want their parents to know that they're engaging with.
[161] Right.
[162] Although it does seem like that's kind of the point.
[163] Yeah.
[164] All right, well, Megan, thanks for reporting.
[165] Anytime.
[166] That was Daily Wire.
[167] to reporter Megan Basham, and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.