Youth-focused social media mandates need teeth, not just training

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds late last month unveiled legislation that would make the state the next in a series of governments seeking to restrict students’ cell phone use in school and set a minimum standard for all school districts.

The proposed bills, which have since been formally introduced in the Iowa House and Senate, would make Iowa one of almost two-dozen states that either have laws or policies to ban or curtail students’ use of cell phones in schools, or recommend that school districts have their own bans or restrictions.

Buried within that legislation is a provision that all sixth through eighth graders in the state must study the “effects of social media,” an effort that would be included within all schools’ health curriculum, per the bills’ text. The Iowa Department of Education would be required to consult with the state Department of Health and Human Services to provide professional development training for teachers so they can provide that instruction.

As of now, it is unclear what that curriculum could entail. Spokespeople from Reynolds’ office and the state Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment. But experts in the field said studying the effects of social media must go much further than simply explaining the bad impacts it can have and be part of a wider conversation about what comes next.

“I would use the smoking parallel: When it finally hit home just how bad smoking was for everyone and how bad second-hand smoke was, there was more collective action around it, and more willingness to tackle it on a society-level basis,” said Matthew Mulvaney, a parenting researcher and associate professor of human development and family science at Syracuse University. “We want to know what we can about the impact of social media, but I don't know if that's the intervention itself.”

Mulvaney also compared various efforts to regulate kids’ social media and smartphone use to the Drug Abuse Resistance Education campaign, which was most prevalent in schools in the 1980s and 1990s and warned students of the dangers of drugs but whose effectiveness was repeatedly questioned by academic studies. Just telling young people how bad something is will not necessarily deter them from using it, he argued.

“These are highly addictive devices,” Mulvaney said. “The main problem is not that people aren't aware of them. It is that their draw so totally overwhelms decision making processes, particularly for young people who have a hard time with impulse control anyway.”

A stronger deterrent could mean preventing people under a certain age from using social media altogether, an effort that has gathered steam in several states as they look to age verification technology, but so far has struggled under legal scrutiny. And it must always be balanced with how useful social media is for forming connections and other aspects of daily life: The Pew Research Center found last year that many teens report being online and on various platforms “almost constantly.”

Not everyone is convinced that an outright ban, as has been approved in Florida, is the right way to go.

In a statement after federal lawmakers unveiled a bill to ban minors under 13 from using the platforms, L’Allegro Smith, government affairs policy advocate at open internet nonprofit Public Knowledge, said minors can be protected online “by creating safer social media channels for minors through better product design, and by enabling parents to limit kids’ screen time to curb any excessive social media use.”

For sixth through eighth graders, that time in their development as human beings is crucial, especially as those developmental milestones come at much the same time they are getting a mobile device of their own. Mulvaney described what kids of that age go through offline as “adolescent egocentrism.”

“Young people at that age think everybody is focused on them,” he said. “Some kid’s got a zit or something on their nose, and they think everybody's staring at it and everybody's looking at it. But in reality, all the other seventh graders are worried that everybody is looking at them and not really that concerned with the zit on some kid’s nose.”

Coupled with growing social media usage at that age, adolescent egocentrism can become a dangerous cocktail.

“When they start to measure themselves by other folks online, not recognizing that these are curated experiences, curated lives, for them, it feels like, ‘My life is nothing compared to theirs,’ or, ‘I'm measuring my life based on friendship and popularity, and I don't have enough people following me, what can I do to get more people to follow me?’” said Merve Lapus, vice president of outreach at Common Sense, a nonprofit focused on digital literacy.

One state that has already established a similar mandate with some teeth is Colorado, which last year passed a law requiring its department of education to collate and provide resources on the mental and physical health impacts of social media on young people. It also requires pop-up notifications to be displayed to young people on the platforms if they spend more than one hour each day on them, and then every 30 minutes after that. Those pop-ups also would appear every 30 minutes between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

As the bill made its way through the legislature, Democratic State Rep. Judy Amabile said in a statement it would help “encourage healthier social media habits among our youth” and “give parents and teens the resources they need to make informed decisions about excessive social media usage, especially the dreaded ‘doom scroll.’”

For states, making policy decisions around social media’s impacts on young people is challenging, but conversations are well underway, Lapus said.

“The challenge is, where do they find the time, and depending on the legislation that's written, what are they accountable to, and how would we fund that if there are specific things written in that particular law that might extend them beyond the resources they actually have access to,” he said.