Gambling, Rats, and your Children: What Parents Should Know About Social Media

In 2017, TechCrunch profiled a venture capital backed startup called Dopamine Labs.  The company “aims to give any app the same addictive power that Facebook, Zynga and others have spent millions to perfect.”

But how addictive are social media apps?  And if Facebook is intentionally addictive, what about newer “short video” platforms, like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Video?

Some suspect that the Facebook “like” button is engineered to produce dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter that gives our brains a reward when we are doing something that is beneficial, such as eating or exercising.  It inspires us to meet our needs and realize our wants.  Also, to eat cupcakes and to smoke cigarettes and, well, to make our parents into grandparents.

B.F. Skinner famously experimented on rats, and one of his most prescient ideas was the discovery that when rewards are delivered randomly, the rats find themselves in a “compulsion loop” which is understood to be a precursor to addiction.  

Natasha Schull, a professor at NYU and the author of Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas explains that “when a gambler feels favored by luck, dopamine is released.” So it seems that part of the formula for addicting a population is to space out the rewards, and to make them both rare and compelling.  In other words, the possibility of reward is more addictive than actual reward.

Several former Facebook executives including Sean Parker, Justin Rosenstein, and Chamath Palihapitiya have gone on the record to state that they wouldn’t allow their own children to use the platform they helped to create because it is intentionally addictive, because it exploits this paradigm and delivers random rewards.  

If likes on social media give people temporary satisfaction and pleasure, what is the harm?  A Stanford University study on the welfare effects of social media cites higher rates of depression, social isolation, and even suicidal ideation among heavy users of social media apps and websites.  Conversely, they paid a group of subjects to temporarily deactivate their social media accounts for a period of two months, and determined that “Facebook deactivation increased subjective well-being, and 80 percent of the Treatment group reported that deactivation was good for them.”

Another recent survey recently produced a detailed assessment of the impact of social media use on children, and found that use of screen media is increasing across every demographic, but particularly among teenagers.  Among teenagers, children from low income households and children that identify with an ethnic minority consume social media at higher rates than their peers, which is even more striking when you realize that children from high income households generally would be expected to have more access to technology than their peers, but they statistically consume social media at far lower rates.

Perhaps children, like adults, instinctively seek a dopamine boost when they are having a rough day.  Or perhaps children who have high dopamine levels already are less susceptible to social media addiction.  In any event, there is some anecdotal evidence that this is being exploited by software companies, and most parents are just beginning to understand how and why.

TikTok, which began as a music sharing platform, is owned by ByteDance, which is based in Beijing and subject to the anti-privacy laws of its host country.  According to Wired Magazine, TikTok “knows the device you are using, your location, IP address, search history, the content of your messages, what you’re viewing and for how long.” It also collects device identifiers to track your interactions with advertisers. TikTok infers factors such as your age range, gender and interests based on the information it has about your viewing history. 

Their privacy policy seems to go out of its way to be terrifying.  A case study in how to write policy that provides a framework for future exploitation.  Anything you upload to TikTok is either owned by them or licensed in perpetuity at no cost.  Even your “faceprint” and “voiceprint” become their property if you use the service.  As the adage goes, “if you can’t figure out what the product is, or how the company makes money, you are probably the product.”

If social media is something children need protection from, what do we need to do to protect our kids?  

I don’t know.  That’s the most honest answer I can give you.  I understand the danger to some degree, but my spouse and I wrestle with how quickly we should give these technologies to our own children, who are on the verge of adolescence and fervently hoping to connect with their friends online.  Maybe if we all wrestle with these issues together, we can work to identify solutions.  

I do know that these companies are not very interested in privacy.  Kids need to be taught that social media is very public, and you can’t always walk back or delete something that has been posted.  Staying engaged with them and paying attention to what they consume and post online is probably a good place to start.

Aldous Huxley, who penned the dystopian novel Brave New World asserted that technology leads to passivity – that people will consume and be distracted by mind numbing entertainment while democracy rots.  I hope he was wrong.

If we as adults trade our privacy for innovation, we understand what we are doing on some level.  The creators of this software will buy and sell our personal data in order to drive us to consume.  My kids don’t seem to grasp this yet, which is why I lean towards limiting their access to these apps.  When they grow up, they can trade away their privacy for better email service and some cat videos, but I’m not going to make that decision for them before they learn algebra.

On a hopeful note, Jonathan Taplin wrote a great book about all of this called Move Fast And Break Things (which was once Facebook’s official motto) and in that book he suggests “treating those around you with kindness… breaking bread with friends… taking one day a week to turn away from daily cares (and screens) and appreciating the natural beauty around us.”  If we can manage to teach our children just that much, perhaps they will someday forgive us for the technology that our generation has left them with.