Then the governor of California Gavin Newsom an ambitious, if vague, plan was drawn up The removal of smartphones from public classrooms in the interest of children’s safety marked a reversal Tuesday that would have shocked any hyper-ambitious Democratic politician of a generation ago.
‘Connecting kids’ was once a clear political winner. In a photo from the 1990s, President Bill Clinton And Vice President Al Gore physically unwound the wires that would connect children to the Internet at a California high school. Initiatives like ‘One Laptop per Child’, the brainchild of the founder of MIT Media Lab Nicholas Negropontepopularized the idea that teaching children digital skills was intended to prepare them for the global economy of tomorrow.
The hallmark of political ambition now is to pry those little computers out of the hands of children.
General surgeon Vivek Murthy wants to slap tobacco-style “warning labels” on social media platforms. It’s also surprisingly bipartisan: Florida’s governor. Ron DeSantis he recently banned children under the age of 14 from social media in his state.
For people who take the policy seriously, the new measures raise big questions about what the government can do at all. There’s no way to post a surgeon general’s warning label on social media without Congress passing a law, and Congress doesn’t seem interested. In schools, meanwhile, it’s all about enforcement. A recent survey from the National Center for Education Statistics found that 76 percent of schools already ban smartphone use for non-academic reasons during school hours — but the rules are largely missing, something Newsom has yet to address.
For anyone who watches the ebb and flow of American politics, the picture is a little clearer. It’s not as easy as Big Tech to go from economic hero to useful, bipartisan punching bag—although that’s certainly true.
The story now is much less about the connections than about what comes through.
When Clinton and Gore were laying those wires, there was widespread consensus that what was coming over them and onto children’s computers was (mostly) good: information about science, history, geopolitics and technology that would enlighten them than the capacity of their local schools. .
Now online content is a consumer product and designed to be addictive. Politicians love the past Vice President Mike Pence social media platforms are calling “digital fentanyl.” The future of education, and even parenting itself, could depend on how Americans respond to this changing understanding of what comes into their children’s lives through the Internet.
The specific backlash against technology for children has been going on for some time, whether due to unsatisfactory experiments with distance learning in the Covid era, the growing body of evidence on the harms of a ‘digital-first’ social life for young people, or the fear of outright exploitation.
“How is it that we have failed to respond to the harms of social media, when they are no less urgent or widespread than the harms caused by unsafe cars, planes or food?” Murthy asked in his New York Times op-ed calling for the warning labels. “This damage is not the result of a lack of willpower and parenting; they result from unleashing powerful technology without adequate security measures, transparency or accountability.”
The consensus among experts is not as strong as you might think; Researchers continue to debate the extent to which social media is to blame for increasingly poor mental health and social outcomes for young people. But almost everyone agrees that something needs to change.
There is much less consensus on what that change would actually look like.
First, there’s the strange political dynamic between figures like Newsom and DeSantis. The bipartisan “techlash” is a familiar theme in Congress, but one that has resulted in little actual legislation to rein in Big Tech. POLITICO’s Ruth Reader and Rebecca Kern reported on Murthy’s push for warning labels and the future of similar legislation in Congress, quoting an industry veteran: “I don’t think they’re going to be able to get bipartisan support.”
Executive agencies and state governments appear, for now, to be the locus of real action around shaping children’s digital futures: see not just Newsom and DeSantis’ bans, but also the Biden administration’s extremely busy antitrust enforcers.
But there’s only so much executives can do if they’re not writing actual legislation: Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos compared Murthy’s efforts to the 1980s push to introduce parental advisory labels on explicit music, writing, “A general surgeon’s warning label that appears when you open Instagram is likely it will be annoying, but it can’t really hurt… I’m skeptical about how effective it will actually be, and how much political capital could be wasted on this instead from the hard, unpleasant work of coming up with regulations on social platforms that are actually effective.”
That framework also suggests another possible future for children and computers, reminiscent of a much more down-to-earth policy front: food.
As evidence of the childhood obesity epidemic became clear in the 1990s and early 2000s, a slew of initiatives emerged to combat it, such as the calorie counts posted by former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg (and they failed soda ban) and former First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program, much loathed and derided on the right, which promotes fitness in public schools.
To some extent, nutrition became a top-down policy issue, but it also became a cultural issue, with a person’s preferences and choices for their family and children being a direct reflection of their values. This has already started with computers, especially the endless discussions between parents about the right amount of “screen time” for a child.
In a recent New Yorker story about the runaway success of the blankly hypnotic toddler show “CocoMelon,” Jia Tolentino wrote, “I often feel like the anxiety I have about my kids’ screen time stems mostly from sublimated disappointment in myself… . comes to the shows we let our kids watch, that we fear – what exactly? That our children’s ability to think deeply will be blunted by compulsive screen use? That they will lose their ability to dwell on the simple fact of existence, to pay attention to the world as it is, to imagine new possibilities? That they will become just like us, but worse?’
Lawmakers, technology critics and parents cannot predict that future any more than their parents, in a pre-Internet age, could have foreseen a future in which you are most likely reading this with your neck craned toward your phone on the way home from a long day at work. But given that child safety is one of the few fading issues that still allows lawmakers to reliably work across the political divide, efforts like Newsom’s and DeSantis’ will likely be a recurring feature of what comes next.
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