The Social Media Moral Panic Is All About Confusing Risks & Harms

What if the reason we’re so worried about teens on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat is because we’ve fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the digital world? What if we’re confusing the everyday risks of growing up online with the specter of unavoidable harm?

No one is better at covering the moral panic about “the kids these days and their social media” than danah boyd. She literally wrote the book on this a decade ago (a decade ago!) and every time she weighs in, it’s with something deeply insightful and enlightening.

Her latest is a must-read. It makes a very clear point on something that had been bothering me, but which I was unable to put into words: there’s a difference between risk and harm, and the people pushing the moral panic about social media harms are deliberately blurring the lines between those two things:

In short, “Does social media harm teenagers?” is not the same question as “Can social media be risky for teenagers?”

The language of “harm” in this question is causal in nature. It is also legalistic. Lawyers look for “harms” to place blame on or otherwise regulate actants. By and large, in legal contexts, we talk about PersonA harming PersonB. As such, PersonA is to be held accountable. But when we get into product safety discussions, we also talk about how faulty design creates the conditions for people to be harmed due to intentional, malfeasant actions by the product designer. Making a product liability claim is much harder because it requires proving the link of harm and the intentionality to harm.

Risk is a different matter. Getting out of bed introduces risks into your life. Risk is something to identify and manage. Some environments introduce more potential risks and some actions reduce the risks. Risk management is a skill to develop. And while regulation can be used to reduce certain risks, it cannot eliminate them. And it can also backfire and create more risks. (This is the problem that María Angel and I have with techno-legal solutionism.)

This is a point I’ve tried (and failed) to get across for a while, so I greatly appreciate the way she put it here. No one is saying that social media is a riskless environment. But nothing is truly a riskless environment.

In the past, I’ve sometimes described this as one of the lessons I learned growing up. In the neighborhood where I grew up, there was a deli four blocks from my house. But to get there, you had to cross a pretty busy street. When I was little, I wasn’t allowed to go there alone. As I got older, my parents taught me how to cross that street safely, and later I was allowed to go with friends, and eventually, by myself.

There was still some risk involved, but we managed the risk by teaching me about it, and teaching me how to minimize the risk and to walk to the deli safely. There was always still the possibility that I wouldn’t be careful enough. Or that a car would be speeding much faster than it should have gone. Or a car could have gone out of control.

There’s still risk. That risk could lead to harm. But walking to the deli is not an inherently harmful activity.

I think about this a lot in relation to Jonathan Haidt and his books. In his earlier books (and even, to some extent, in The Anxious Generation), he’s a huge proponent of the “free range kids” movement, which is all about teaching kids how to move about in the world freely, without supervision. As with my parents and the deli, it’s about allowing kids to go into risky situations, but doing so in a way that gives them the tools to minimize those risks.

Yet, now, in the virtual world, he acts as if risks can’t be managed must be harms, rather than risks (even if the data completely disagrees with that).

danah’s piece (you really should read the whole thing) talks about risky activities, including crossing busy streets, but also activities like going skiing. Skiing is risky. I still do it (well, snowboarding), and I know there’s some risk in it, but I try to manage that risk as well. Still, every year, I see plenty of people (of all ages) end up hurting themselves on the mountain. There are risks. We know that. Yet many of us still get enjoyment out of it, and try our best to manage the risks.

This is the nature of living.

So why are we treating social media so differently?

As danah notes:

Can social media be risky for youth? Of course. So can school. So can friendship. So can the kitchen. So can navigating parents. Can social media be designed better? Absolutely. So can school. So can the kitchen. (So can parents?) Do we always know the best design interventions? No. Might those design interventions backfire? Yes.

Does that mean that we should give up trying to improve social media or other digital environments? Absolutely not. But we must also recognize that trying to cement design into law might backfire. And that, more generally, technologies’ risks cannot be managed by design alone.

Fixating on better urban design is pointless if we’re not doing the work to socialize and educate people into crossing digital streets responsibly. And when we age-gate and think that people can magically wake up on their 13th or 18th birthday and be suddenly able to navigate digital streets just because of how many cycles they took around the sun, we’re fools. Socialization and education are still essential, regardless of how old you are. (Psst to the old people: the September that never ended…)

This essay contains so much important information to understand, and it is (as usual) so clearly stated.

This paragraph, though, represents so much of what I feel and what all of the actual research seems to support:

Better design is warranted, but it is not enough if the goal is risk reduction. Risk reduction requires socialization, education, and enough agency to build experience. Moreover, if we think that people will still get hurt, we should be creating digital patrols who are there to pick people up when they are hurt. (This is why I’ve always argued that “digital street outreach” would be very valuable.)

Also, this:

Returning to our earlier note on product liability, it is reasonable to ask if specific design choices of social media create the conditions for certain kinds of harms to be more likely — and for certain risks to be increased. Researchers have consistently found that bullying is more frequent and more egregious at school than on social media, even if it is more visible on the latter. This makes me wary of a product liability claim regarding social media and bullying. Moreover, it’s important to notice what schools have done in response to this problem. They’ve invested in social-emotional learning programs to strengthen resilience, improve bystander approaches, and build empathy. These interventions are making a huge difference, far more than building design. (If someone wants to tax social media companies to scale these interventions, have a field day.)

There’s so much more in the essay, and I feel like it’s something I’m going to keep pointing people to for a long, long time. But if I keep quoting it, I’m just going to end up reposting the whole thing here. So I’ll just say go read the whole thing, as there’s plenty more in there that’s worth reading, thinking about, and understanding.