This week: the flexible language of child protection, weak evidence behind social media bans, and Meta’s air traffic control booth.
🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…
“Protecting children” is the most powerful phrase in tech policy right now. It is also, increasingly, the most flexible.
It is the phrase you use to push a bill through when the evidence underneath it is thinner than the rhetoric. It is the phrase a company uses to endorse a law that doesn’t really regulate it, in order to slow down the laws that would. It is the phrase that justifies another parental control feature, the kind that gives parents the work and the platform the headline.
What unites this week’s stories is not that the actors disagree about children. They all claim to be on the same side. The disagreement, when you look at it honestly, is about who carries the cost. Companies want the regulatory moat without the operational change. Governments want the political credit without actually pushing any changes forward. Parents are handed (more) dashboards.
None of the above is new, or even surprising. But it is worth noticing when it happens.
📰 Three things worth your attention
1. The Science is Not Settled: How Weak Evidence is Fueling a National Push to Ban Social Media for Youth — Electronic Frontier Foundation
The EFF is a digital rights organisation that believes young people enjoy “largely the same free speech and privacy rights as adults.” That framing matters and it is worth keeping in mind as you read. It is also an organisation that reads primary research carefully, and what it finds in the current wave of US social media ban legislation is a policy process that has significantly outrun its evidence base.
The argument: the entire legislative push relies almost exclusively on Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, which attributes rising teen anxiety and depression primarily to smartphones and social media. His book is cited in bill analyses, invoked by state governors, mentioned in federal legislation. California’s proposed ban references him 20 times. He is a social psychologist who writes about moral psychology at a business school; he is not a clinical psychologist or a child development researcher. Independent researchers and large-scale meta-analyses across dozens of countries — EFF cites work from UC Irvine and Brown University, among others — have found the evidence for his central claims to be, in their words, “mixed, blurry, and often contradictory.” Studies frequently fail to account for alternative explanations for rising teen mental health challenges: pandemic isolation, the persistent threat of school gun violence, economic and climate stress.
A major study of 100,000 adolescents found that moderate social media use was associated with the best wellbeing outcomes; both no use and the highest use were associated with poorer outcomes. That finding — that complete exclusion is not neutral — rarely surfaces in the banning debate.
For children, the stakes of getting this wrong are specific. Blanket bans risk isolating LGBTQ+ young people and others in marginalised communities for whom online spaces are often the primary source of peer support. They require invasive age verification systems that collect biometric or government ID data from everyone. And they have been observed to push young people into less-monitored spaces. A student-authored alternative bill in California takes a different approach: digital wellness education that teaches algorithm literacy, recognising cyberbullying, and managing one’s own relationship with technology.
2. Can we really keep kids safe online? — Rest of World
An interview with Jules Polonetsky, CEO of the Future of Privacy Forum. His opening: “Banning is the easiest thing to legislate. But it’s the hardest to make work.”
Polonetsky has been watching Australia’s ban carefully. What he sees is children finding alternative spaces, and the possibility that the ban is moving young people “to places where there’s less oversight.” His concern about “digital red lighting” is worth noting: parents with resources and engagement will ensure their children have access regardless. Parents who are not engaged, savvy, or do not have time will not — producing a two-tier outcome in which digital exclusion falls hardest on the children whose parents are least positioned to compensate.
The observation about parental controls feels right. He says: “We can’t expect even the most tech-savvy parents to control [every aspect of their child’s social media use]. It’s like sitting in an air traffic control booth all day.” The solution he recommends is not more controls but simpler ones — tools that are “dummy-proof and for busy parents.” Platforms have failed on this. The gap between what parental oversight tools require and what most parents can realistically do with them is large, and it keeps widening.
The recommendation that I agree with the most, though? Build the relationship with children when they are young. The age of 16 or 17 is when children deserve more privacy and when parents have often retreated — and it is also when they are most at risk from adults online. The window for having those conversations is earlier.
3. Meta will tell parents when their teens add new interests to their Instagram algorithm — The Verge
Meta is adding a(nother) feature to Teen Accounts on Instagram that shows parents the general topics their teenage children engage with — categories like “basketball” or “fashion” — and will notify parents when their teen adds a new interest. These controls are being consolidated into a single Family Center hub across Instagram, Facebook, Horizon, and Messenger, with more tools promised in coming months.
Meta’s framing is predictable: this is a safety feature. The new feature gives parents a window into what their teenager is choosing to engage with algorithmically.
Here is what is worth considering. Teenagers who know their parents can see their algorithmic interests might feel they need to maintain finstas — secondary accounts without teen protections. Arguably, this will hit the most vulnerable kids the hardest.
🔁 ICYMI
Nobody believes the ‘criminals and scumbags’ who hacked Canvas really deleted stolen student data — The Register
A follow-up to last week’s Canvas story. Instructure has now confirmed it reached an “agreement” with ShinyHunters and received “digital confirmation of data destruction (shred logs)”. The Register interviewed a number of ransomware researchers. Not one of them believes the data has actually been destroyed.
Two things worth taking from this beyond the immediate breach. The first is the no-good-options reality of ransomware response. Without the technical capacity to restore service yourself, the choice is to absorb a service outage of unknown length or to pay and hope. The older argument that ransomware operators have a business incentive to honour their agreements, so they retain the trust to be paid next time, is apparently not valid anymore — particularly for groups like ShinyHunters.
The second is structural. The article makes the point that a small number of vendors hold the data for huge proportions of the US education system, and three of the four largest have suffered multi-million-record breaches in the last eighteen months. We have seen this pattern in hospitals. The systems we centralise for efficiency are the systems that get hit, and the users with the least ability to opt out are the ones who pay the price.
🔬 What’s new with CAISE
This week, we are all systems go on the short research project into the government’s consultation on social media. The deadline for response is next week…so this week will be a whirl of data collection and analysis!
→ What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?
Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.