Aussies move to ban underage social media

BONUS: In 'news deserts,' Trump won in a landslide

Children staring blankly at their smartphones in school. -Medium

There is little question that excessive social media use harms children. Over the past several years, evidence has piled up like trash in a landfill after Christmas. As I noted almost a year ago, developing young minds glued to screens and wandering among the minefields of TikTok and Snapchat are increasingly vulnerable to anxiety, depression and sleep deprivation.

The only real question that remains is what to do about it. After all, is there anyone out there who thinks doing nothing is acceptable? Some countries and US states have nibbled around the edges, trying to stem the tide. Per the New York Times (free link):

France last year passed a law requiring parental consent for social media users under 15, and it has been pushing for similar measures across the European Union. Florida this year imposed a ban for users under 14 and required parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds, but that law could face constitutional challenges.

As the CBC also notes, China limits those under age 14 to 40 minutes of daily use on TikTok, while Pakistan has banned Facebook and Instagram altogether. Ministers in the Swedish government are considering imposing age limits if, as reported by Reuters, “tech companies find themselves unable to prevent gangs from recruiting young people online to carry out murders and bombings in the Nordics.”

Photo by Carol Magalhães on Unsplash

But Australia has topped them all. Aussie lawmakers last month enacted an outright ban on social media use by children under 16 (the highest age limit set by any nation). This strikes me as a good idea, though there are parents in Australia who have concerns about it.

One parent of a 14-year-old wrote in Business Insider that banning social media for his teenager would impose a hardship on him because the boy does not make friends easily: “But what I worry about is that the ban will sweep away all the positives of my son’s online life in an attempt to tackle the negatives.” Nevertheless, the ban has broad support among Australians — 77%, according to YouGov.

But the question on everyone else’s minds seemed to be: How on earth could the new law could be enforced? First of all, the ban prohibits children under 16 from creating accounts on social media platforms. So presumably those youngsters who already have accounts could keep them and would be unaffected by the new law.

As characterized by the New York Times (free link), “The law requires social media platforms to take ‘reasonable steps’ to verify the age of users and prohibit those under 16 from opening accounts.” And the legislation does not single-out individual platforms the ban will cover, but the Australian government has named TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) as likely targets.

Here is an explainer created by a source from Down Under:

Australia’s ban does not define what the “reasonable” steps are that social media companies must take in order to prevent those under 16 from using their products, but Reuters reports that one option is age estimation technologies, which “analyze a person’s features, including facial wrinkles or their hands.”

Should we enact a similar ban here in the U.S.? I’m all for it. Indeed this could be one of those rare cases in which Congress, with bipartisan support, passes a law with broadly positive and wide-ranging consequences. The tech sector would resist it, no doubt, but lawmakers would look like heroes if they stood up to the gods of Meta and ByteDance.

In ‘news deserts,’ Trump won in a landslide

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

Donald Trump won a second term as president last month by one of the smallest popular vote margins in history (49.9% to Kamala Harris’ 48.4%), according to the most recent AP tally. But in portions of the country located in news deserts, Trump won in a landslide, according to a new study by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

For the uninitiated, a news desert is a county or municipality that has no reliable, professionally operated news outlets such as a newspaper or radio station covering matters of local importance. In news deserts, residents have no way of knowing what is happening in the city hall they are paying for through their taxes. They know only what the local government is telling them or what they are hearing on social media or over the proverbial back fence.

The problem has accelerated in the last 25 years as the advertising business model for small newspapers (consisting mostly of classified and display advertising, along with coated ad inserts) has collapsed, causing thousands of local newspapers to close their doors or pare down local coverage in favor of more wire copy of national and regional news — a phenomenon known as “ghost newspapers.”

In counties considered to be news deserts, Trump kicked Harris’ ass, winning by an average of 54 percentage points. Most — but not all — news deserts are in sparsely populated rural areas. From the Medill study:

Trump’s dominance of news deserts doesn’t imply a cause and effect. That is, people didn’t necessarily vote for Trump because they lack local news.

I agree with Steve Waldman of the Rebuild Local News Coalition that it would be a mistake to look at this poll and conclude that it tells us that voters in news deserts went for Trump because they’re know-nothings:

Correlation is not causation. Rural America and the Rust Belt are hardly thriving. With the decline of the family farm, companies moving jobs to low-wage countries and fewer children opting to build their lives in America’s breadbasket, Trump’s message is clear and appealing: “Someone is responsible for your plight and I will make them pay.”

Still, recent studies have shown that an absence of media coverage at all levels correlates with higher government spending and rising taxes. Perhaps worst of all, corruption increases through lack of oversight. To wit, look at what happened in Bell, California, where no one was watching until the Los Angeles Times rode in 10 years ago and exposed the crooks in the city council who were paying themselves $700,000 a year and the city manager $1.5 million.

So if you live in a news desert, your town is likely more corrupt than it was even 20 years ago. It probably has a lower bond rating and your taxes are higher because of it. And as Waldman observed, living in a news desert means relying on bad information heard over the counter at the diner or posted on Facebook and, ultimately a greater sense of isolation, and the blaming of “elites” for the status quo. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was precisely Trump’s message.

Another likely cause is that most humans want to know what’s going on nearby and beyond. But when they have no source of local news, they turn to cable or they doomscroll on their devices to see what’s happening in the highly polarized environment of the nations’s capital (BTW “polarization” was Merriam-Webster’s 2024 word of the year).

News deserts could also lead to distrust of the press in general because of lack of local engagement with friends and neighbors who work in journalism. This is consistent with my own experience. Sometimes when I tell people I’m a retired journalist, I can feel them tense up. When I quickly add that I was mostly a community journalist, I can practically feel them relax again. Heck, it’s easy to hate journalists and brand all of them as “elites” when you don’t know anyone in the business.

Finally — and I know this is hard for some folks to fathom, given the infernal noise emanating from Washington — the people who run your town, city, county and state governments have far more influence over your daily life than the man sitting in the Oval Office, or even the Supreme Court justices he nominates.

And there is no better place to keep tabs on your state and local scenes than a newspaper or digital media outlet. If you have one, please support it. That is all for today!