Children’s excessive screen time

Parliamentary Secretary for Equality and Reforms, Rebecca Buttigieg, writing in a local daily, stated that social media’s impact on our lives should be studied, discussed and followed by the necessary regulatory changes to protect our citizens.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen mandated our Commissioner Glenn Micallef with the task of studying the impact of social media and excessive screen time on young people and on the broader impacts of social media.

Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and other popular digital platforms knowingly use manipulative design features and algorithms to keep users hooked. Children and young people are particularly susceptible to this, staring at their screens for countless hours, becoming addicted, depressed and plagued by anxiety. Losing control over their own behaviour, they neglect other activities. A problem so serious that politicians need to intervene.

At least that is the assumption of our government, an approach that ostensibly is being taken on board by the Opposition and other NGOs.

Cyberbullied children are on the increase as they face harassment and emotional distress online due to the anonymity and ease of communication on social media platforms. This follows right on the heels of disrupted sleep that negatively affects both their physical and mental health.

Constant exposure to unrealistic images and standards on social media can cause anxiety, depression and low self-esteem in teens. Moreover, they may not fully understand the risks of sharing personal information online, leading to potential exploitation or data breaches.

Any future legislation should prohibit underage teens from using social media or make it contingent on parents’ consent. Additionally, when opening an account, social media companies should be obliged to verify the age of the user, for example, by using an ID or AI-based facial recognition. Ideally, existing accounts of under 16-year-olds should be deleted.

Alternatively, legislation could take the approach of granting parents or legal guardians access to their children’s accounts.

Either way, in an effort to curb minors’ screen time, social media companies should be forced to create a default curfew for minors’ accounts between, say, 10:30 PM and 6:30 AM. Taken together, one or the other type of legislative framework mentioned above would intervene in the platform architecture by prohibiting a whole range of presumably addictive practices, designs or features.

As things stand, European legislators seem to be taking the US crusade against social media as an inspiration.

In a vague resolution, the EU Parliament called on the EU Commission to examine if and how the EU should regulate presumably addictive designs of digital services. The Parliament cast the net wide and listed a variety of practices that are suggested to be addictive or manipulative: infinite scrolling, autoplay of videos, personalised recommendations, push notifications, like buttons and more.

Prior to that resolution, an amended EU Regulation on a Single Market for Digital Services imposed new obligations, particularly on large digital platforms, but has only been in full force since February last and is turning out to be insufficient to protect minors.

The common trend seems to be a belief that the use of social media inherently has negative effects and consequently, that intense use must in and of itself be problematic and classified as an “addiction”.

France has already passed a decree requiring social media platforms to verify ages and obtain parental consent for minors under 15. The UK and the Netherlands are close to banning smartphones from schools.

This pitfall of technological determinism obscures the numerous advantages and the importance of social media in the personal, social and cultural experiences of children and teenagers. They do not merely consume humorous videos or hateful remarks on social media. For many young individuals, social media is a key resource for global events and political updates. For example, daily social media usage for this purpose is seen in half of 14- to 29-year-olds in Germany, with a third using Instagram exclusively.

In addition, social media serves as an important social environment for children, allowing them to connect with their peers, explore new viewpoints, experiment with various identities, something that constitutes a significant developmental challenge during adolescence, and provide mutual support, especially vital for marginalised groups.

Indeed, for a great majority of children, the amount of social media use does not affect their well-being at all.

Still, important critical questions remain unanswered.

What impact do existing mental health conditions have on social media usage? How about the content? To what extent do the short-term impacts of social media usage on well-being build up as time passes? Researchers mostly concur that screen time does not predict well-being results and that a poor habit differs from a clinical addiction.

Any drastic laws run the risk of becoming too unstable to be deemed essential, not only from a legal and constitutional perspective but also from an empirical standpoint. A law that employs a uniform strategy and characterises children’s social media use as “addiction” may prove to be ineffective.

TikTok, for instance, is not a digital drug or comparable to cigarettes, despite occasional sensational claims to the contrary.

This does not imply that digital platforms ought to escape accountability for numerous serious issues and for their role in addressing them. Instead, the aim should focus on safeguarding minorities who might be more vulnerable to adverse mental health effects from digital media compared to others while encouraging freedom of choice and user independence for every individual.

Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.