Social media takes a lot of heat for spreading disinformation, but Francesca Tripodi thinks we should look more closely at another fixture of our browsers: search engines. On this episode of "Civic Genius" we learn more about how the same forces that shape our social media diets also drive the information we find when we search online, and how we can boost our own media literacy.
Patel is an executive producer/director, the creator of “ConnectEffect” and a Builders movement partner.
Doesn’t it feel like summer break just began? Yet here we are again. Fall’s arrival means kids have settled into a new school year with new teachers, new clothes and a new “attitude” for parents and kids alike, to start on the right foot.
Yet it’s hard for any of us to find footing in an increasingly polarized and isolated world. The entire nation is grappling with a rising tide of mental health concerns — including the continually increasing alienation and loneliness in children — and parents are struggling to foster real human connection for their kids in the real world. The battle to minimize screen time is certainly one approach. But in a world that is based on screens, apps and social media, is it a battle that realistically can be won?
If we want to reduce screens’ negative impact on our children’s mental health, what we need is a “hard reset” of their relationships with their devices by ensuring they are deeply aware of the difference between the real world and the screen world.
I’ve spent the last eight years focused on showing people the difference between these worlds, helping bring them back together, in person, to bridge divides and foster authentic human connection, conversation and community. Like the people I work with, parents can help their children understand the difference between the two worlds through a two-part plan: first, by hard-resetting their misguided relationships with their screen and, second, by intentionally connecting them to others in real life.
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Remember when the end of “The Wizard of Oz” revealed that the wizard was just a man behind a curtain? To break a child’s toxic relationship with their screen, parents need to pull back another curtain to show their kids exactly how all media works, from social media and news companies to search engines and apps. Almost everything kids see on their screens is an edit, and behind almost every edit is a similar intention: more likes, followers and users that can be monetized. Through the attention extraction model, most everything that appears on our screen is designed to maximize our attention for profit, feeding us more content, regardless of the impact it may have on us individually and as a society. If, as a family, you haven’t yet watched the documentary “The Social Dilemma,” the start of the year is a perfect time.
Helping kids realize that the structure of social media is not made with their well-being in mind — in fact, it has a very different motive — can help them recognize that they are not alone in their feelings and reactions to the screen. According to Pew Research, 31 percent of teens say social media makes them feel like their friends are leaving them out and 23 percent say what they see on social media makes them feel worse about their own life. Talking with their peers less about what is on their screen, but rather how their screen makes them feel, is a point of connection they may not realize.
Having spent nearly a decade connecting people, it is clear that one of the secrets to connection in the real world is the introduction. In other words, how people are introduced to one another often sets up the way they will see one another. Based on the primary-recency effect, when people first connect through the two-dimensional edits in the screen world, they make assumptions that lean into pre-conceived notions of how the “other” should be. In a country growing increasingly polarized and dehumanized by social media echo chambers and a profound lack of human connection, this reality impacts our children, who have less real world experiences under their belts.
The beginning of a school year offers a timely opportunity to allow children the space to paint a more complete picture of their new classmates before screens intervene. A simple initialism, EPIC, can provide parents with four techniques for making sure interactions are maximized for connection and trust.
If we use this time at the start of every year to teach children the realities of the screens they use and how to intentionally foster deeper, real world introductions, they will create a future for themselves and others empowered and enriched by social connections, not fearful of them.
Our stock market pivots on the performance of a handful of AI-focused companies like Nvidia.
Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University and a Tarbell fellow.
In the span of two or so years, OpenAI, Nvidia and a handful of other companies essential to the development of artificial intelligence have become economic behemoths. Their valuations and stock prices have soared. Their products have become essential to Fortune 500 companies. Their business plans are the focus of the national security industry. Their collapse would be, well, unacceptable. They are too big to fail.
The good news is we’ve been in similar situations before. The bad news is we’ve yet to really learn our lesson.
In the mid-1970s, a bank known for its conservative growth strategy decided to more aggressively pursue profits. The strategy worked. In just a few years the bank became the largest commercial and industrial lender in the nation. The impressive growth caught the attention of others — competitors looked on with envy, shareholders with appreciation and analysts with bullish optimism. As the balance sheet grew, however, so did the broader economic importance of the bank. It became too big to fail.
Regulators missed the signs of systemic risk. A kick of the bank’s tires gave no reason to panic. But a look under the hood — specifically, at the bank’s loan-to-assets ratio and average return on loans — would have revealed a simple truth: The bank had been far too risky. The tactics that fueled its go-go years rendered the bank over exposed to sectors suffering tough economic times. Rumors soon spread that the bank was in a financially sketchy spot. It was the Titanic, without the band, to paraphrase an employee.
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When the inevitable run on the bank started, regulators had no choice but to spend billions to keep the bank afloat — staving it from sinking and bringing the rest of the economy with it. Of course, a similar situation played out during the Great Recession — risky behavior by a few bad companies imposed bailout payments on the rest of us.
AI labs are similarly taking gambles that have good odds of making many of us losers. As major labs rush to release their latest models, they are not stopping to ask if we have the social safety nets ready if things backfire. Nor are they meaningfully contributing to building those necessary safeguards.
Instead, we find ourselves in a highly volatile situation. Our stock market seemingly pivots on earnings of just a few companies — the world came to a near standstill last month as everyone awaited Nvidia’s financial outlook. Our leading businesses and essential government services are quick to adopt the latest AI models despite real uncertainty as to whether they will operate as intended. If any of these labs took a financial tumble or any of the models were significantly flawed, the public would likely again be asked to find a way to save the risk takers.
This outcome may be likely but it’s not inevitable. The Dodd-Frank Act passed in response to the Great Recession and intended to prevent another Too Big to Fail situation in the financial sector has been roundly criticized for its inadequacy. We should learn from its faults in thinking through how to make sure AI goliaths don’t crush all of us Davids.
Some sample steps include mandating and enforcing more rigorous testing of AI models before deployment. It would also behoove us to prevent excessive reliance on any one model by the government — this could be accomplished by requiring public service providers to maintain analog processes in the event of emergencies. Finally, we can reduce the economic sway of a few labs by fostering more competition in the space.
Too Big to Fail scenarios have happened on too many occasions. There’s no excuse for allowing AI labs to become so large and so essential that we collectively end up paying for their mistakes.
A new set of complementary tools designed to support accurate reporting of contested elections will be unveiled by the Election Reformers Network and other election law experts on Wednesday.
The Election Overtime project will provide journalists covering Pennsylvania’s 2024 general election with media briefings by election specialists; guides for reporting on election transparency, verification processes and judicial procedures; and an extensive speakers bureau. The briefing is designed for journalists but is open to the public. Register now.
The Pennsylvania press briefing, taking place at 2:30 pm Eastern, is the second in a series of events in seven key swing states running through mid October. The first event, held Sept. 30, covered Arizona. The schedule of future events and links to videos of prior events can be accessed here.
Election Overtime is an initiative of the Election Reformers Network developed in partnership with the Bridge Alliance, which publishes The Fulcrum. The Fulcrum has launched a parallel Election Overtime series with news and commentary on key issues addressed by the Overtime project, as well as updates on project events.
Materials for the Election Overtime program have been produced with the generous support of The Carter Center, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation and the Bridge Alliance. The contents are the responsibility of the ERN and do not necessarily reflect the views of its funders.
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Participants in the Pennsylvania event include:
Guillermo is the CEO of Ignite, a political leadership program for young women.
It’s good news that Instagram has launched stricter controls for teen accounts, strengthening privacy settings for those under 18. Underage users’ accounts are now automatically set to private mode. The platform is also implementing tighter restrictions on the type of content teens can browse and blocking material deemed sensitive, such as posts related to cosmetic procedures or eating disorders.
This all follows calls by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy for social media companies to use safety warning labelsamidst rising evidence that social media could be negatively impacting youth mental health. As the leader of a national organization that works to empower members of Gen Z to get more involved in their communities, I've seen first-hand how youth mental health challenges — exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and its accompanying challenges — have risen over recent years.
That said, we can't lay the blame for the youth mental health crisis solely at the door of social media companies. American society is facing significant challenges such as climate change, inequality, racism and mass shootings, and young people are frustrated with the lack of action from leaders around the issues they care about. These issues are causing young people to feel appropriate anxiety, and another important way to lessen it is for us to listen deeply and incorporate them into the leadership and future of this country.
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Murthy's call for warning labels follows growing concern over the mental health and wellbeing of teens. A study published Feb. 13. by his office shows that American teenage girls are increasingly depressed, saddened and considering suicide. More recently,Miss USA resigned citing her mental health. A new study shows that Covid lockdowns may have accelerated brain aging, especially in girls.
There are too many alarm bells ringing to ignore. And young people are living in a world that would make anybody anxious. My organization found that more than half of young people get their news from social media. While they may be dependent upon social media for other things, which I agree could be a separate factor in their depression and anxiety, there is also a lot to be anxious about in the news, when you consider the state of the world.
For example,living in states with abortion trigger laws is associated with higher rates of depression and anxiety after the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade. Online racism isalso linked to post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in Black youth. Climate change isaffecting mental health everywhere. I do know that these are issue areas, along with mental health itself, that are emerging as critically important for young people themselves. They even place them amongst theirtop reasons for voting.
This spring and summer, I sat down with young people of college age in swing states across the country as part of a series offocus groups. My goal was to listen deeply to young people to try to figure out why they're so disillusioned with politics. We found that they feel unheard, and that they're also particularly anxious about getting involved when the political landscape is so polarized.
There is pressure to “pick a side,” and the impact trickles into Gen Z’s friendships and lives. They don't want to be ostracized from their friends if they speak up about issues they care about. Meanwhile, they feel the political parties do not adequately encapsulate their priorities or personal values. The resulting question for me goes beyond warning labels — which I do think are important. It's about how America meets this moment.
How do we have a conversation that engages young people, that acknowledges their anxiety and struggles, and that leads to their deeper engagement in reshaping our society as we move ahead together? I was pleased to see that the producers of Disney's “Inside Out 2” brought in teens to workshop anxiety as part of the teenage character's emotional life. We need to see hundreds more such efforts across the gamut of America’s civic, cultural, political and social life if we're to reverse the current trend of young people's disillusionment and alienation.
Amidst all this, I've found that social media has its benefits. One young woman I work with, who helps organize her peers around voting and democracy,found TikTok a great place to connect with other young people with similar interests. She even got a job working on redistricting issues after connecting with an organization through the app. TikTok is continuing to fight a battle over a possible ban related to national security issues. Those concerns may be legitimate, and the courts certainly seem to be leaning in that direction. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that young people are forming genuine democratic connections on the platform.
Social media use is not all good or all bad. We need to address its impact on all of us, and while a warning label is one step to creating awareness, we have to pair this with more listening and a collective willingness to create a safer way for young people to engage digitally. After all, if any of us were a teenage girl in 2024, we might be struggling as well, both online and in the real world.
