Children are spending more time on screens than ever before, but what is all that screen time actually doing to them? In a recent hearing, Congress heard testimony from experts who argue that social media, educational technology, and AI are reshaping childhood in ways many parents don’t fully understand. This episode explores the evidence and the growing concern that we’re raising a generation of screen zombies.
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Background Sources
Recommended Congressional Dish Episodes
CD318: AI Regulation Moratorium
Influencers
“California influencer disclosures offer a glimpse at how secret money distorts American politics.” Max Tani. May 25, 2026. Semafor.
Time on Screens
“The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Zero to Eight.” Supreet Mann et al. 2025. Common Sense Media.
“The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens.” Victoria Rideout et al. 2021. Common Sense Media.
Surgeon General’s Reports
“Surgeon General’s Warning on the Harms of Screen Use.” May 2026. Office of the U.S. Surgeon General.
“Social Media and Youth Mental Health.” 2023. Office of the U.S. Surgeon General.
Connection to Gambling Addiction
“The surprising origin of 4 features that superglue kids — and adults — to screens.” Michaeleen Doucleff. April 21, 2026. NPR.
Screens’ Effect on Education
“Twelfth-Grade Math and Reading Scores in U.S. Hit New Low.” Matt Barnum. September 9, 2025. The Wall Street Journal.
AI Companion Chatbots
“Her daughter was unraveling, and she didn’t know why. Then she found the AI chat logs.” Caitlin Gibson. December 23, 2025. The Washington Post.
“Teens, Social Media and AI Chatbots 2025.” Michelle Faverio
and Olivia Sidoti. December 9, 2025. Pew Research Center.
“‘Darling, Please Come Back Soon’: Sexual Exploitation, Manipulation, and Violence on Character AI Kids’ Accounts.” HEAT Initiative. September 28, 2025. Parents Together Action.
“A teen contemplating suicide turned to a chatbot. Is it liable for her death?” Nitasha Tiku. September 16, 2025.The Washington Post.
“Why AI companions and young people can make for a dangerous mix.” John Sanford. August 27, 2025. Standford Report.
“Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions.” Michael B. Robb et al. 2025. Common Sense Media.
Kids Off Social Media Act
S.278 – Kids Off Social Media Act
“Congress Wants To Hand Your Parenting to Big Tech.” Joe Mullin. January 16, 2026. Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Kids of Social Media Act: Report of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on S. 278 [S. Rept. 119-33]. June 30, 2025. U.S. Government Publishing Office.
“EFF to Congress: Here’s What A Strong Privacy Law Looks Like.” Maddie Daly and India McKinney. April 21, 2025. Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Letter from American Civil Liberties Union et al. to Senators Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell Re: Concerns with S. 278’s Threats to Minors’ Privacy and Safety Online” February 4, 2025. American Civil Liberties Union.
Australia Ban
“Fifteen-year-old Noah hasn’t been kicked off any social media platforms – he’s still fighting Australia’s under-16 ban in court.” Josh Taylor. April 10, 2026. The Guardian.
“Australia has banned social media for kids under 16. How does it work?” Helen Livingstone. January 22, 2026. BBC.
Further Reading
“The Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools Is Much Worse Than You Thought.” Matt Burgess. April 15, 2026. Wired.
“Jury finds Meta and Google negligent in social media harms trial.” Bobby Allyn. March 25, 2026. NPR.
“New Mexico jury says Meta harms children’s mental health and safety, violating state law.” AP. March 24, 2026. NPR.
Audio Sources
Examining the Impact of Technology on America’s Youth
Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation
January 15, 2026
Witnesses:
- Dr. Jean Twenge, Professor of Psychology, San Diego State University
- Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, Director, LME Global
- Emily Cherkin, Author and Founder of The Screentime Consultant
- Dr. Jenny Radesky, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, University of Michigan Medical School
Clips
17:00 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX):
Children ages 8-12 now use screens an average of five and a half hours each and every day. For teens, it’s even higher at eight hours and 39 minutes each and every single day.
21:10 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX):
KOSMA says we’re going to hold big tech accountable to their terms of service. Big tech says no one under 13 can set up an account; KOSMA makes that the law. No more social media for children and no more addictive algorithms for teenagers. KOSMA also gets cell phones out of the classroom. No school getting federal taxpayer dollars would allow kids to access social media in the classroom.
25:05 Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA):
Ultimately, protecting children also requires, I believe, comprehensive federal privacy legislation that fully safeguards children in the system and allows everyone’s data to be protected.
29:20 Dr. Jean Twenge:
I research generational differences. I’ve been doing that for three decades. I got used to seeing changes that were big, but they would take a decade or two to get there. Then, around 2012, in some of the large national surveys of adolescence, I started to see changes that were bigger and more sudden. I had really never seen anything like it. So for example, more and more teens said that they felt left out. More said that they felt lonely. Moore said they felt like they couldn’t do anything right, that their life wasn’t useful, that they didn’t enjoy life. And these are classic symptoms of depression. Major depressive episodes, so clinical level depression that really requires treatment, doubled among both adolescents and young adults before the covid pandemic, between 2011 and 2019. And it’s not just symptoms, it’s also behaviors. Emergency room admissions for self harm behaviors which are linked to depression doubled among 15 to 19 year old girls and young women and quadrupled among 10 to 14 year old girls. The suicide rate in these adolescent age groups doubled over that time period, which begs the question, what happened around 2012 that might explain that?
30:55 Dr. Jean Twenge:
One thing that happened at the end of 2012 was that is the first time that the majority of Americans owned smartphones. It’s also when social media use moved from optional to virtually mandatory among middle and high school students.
31:25 Dr. Jean Twenge:
Teens also started sleeping less. The number who sleep less than seven hours a night, which is a significant amount of sleep deprivation in this group, started to skyrocket right around that same time.
31:40 Dr. Jean Twenge:
Teens who spend more time using social media are much more likely to be depressed, particularly among girls. A study in the UK found that heavy users of social media among girls were three times more likely to be depressed.
31:55 Dr. Jean Twenge:
This is not just correlation, it is causation. At this point, there are a number of studies where people are asked to cut back or give up social media. There was one with families, so children and adolescents, done in Denmark. They severely restricted children’s screen time, and at the end of that time, the parents reported that the children were less likely to have anger issues, less anxiety and depression, and fewer total difficulties.
32:25 Dr. Jean Twenge:
It’s not just mental health. Academic performance among US 8th and 12th graders also began to decline around 2012 and the same pattern is seen worldwide in the PISA data set. So one reason for that [is] the use of phones and tablets and laptops for leisure purposes during the school day.
33:25 Dr. Jean Twenge:
I think this leads to at least four policy avenues. One, follow Australia, raise the minimum age for social media to 16, and actually verify age. Set a minimum age 16, or probably 18, for AI companion apps, so the AI boyfriends and girlfriends, the AI sexy chat apps, so we don’t have 12 year olds having their first romantic relationship with a chat bot. And then for ChatGPT and AI that is used for research, have guardrails so those types of conversations that have already led to some tragic suicides do not happen. Third, no phones during the school day, bell-to-bell, for students. And fourth, that school issued devices are used for school are used for educational purposes, that they block social media, that they block streaming services like Netflix and Disney plus, and that they block pornography sites.
34:45 Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath:
Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age. Since we’ve been standardizing and measuring cognitive development, since the late 1800s, every generation has outperformed their parents, and that’s exactly what we want, we want sharper kids, and the reason for this largely has been school. Each generation spends more time in school. We use school to develop our cognition, congratulations, you see your correlation. Until Gen Z. Gen Z is the first generation of modern history to underperform us on basically every cognitive measure we have, from basic attention to memory to literacy to numeracy to executive functioning to even general IQ, even though they go to more school than we do.
35:40 Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath:
Across 80 countries, as Jean was just saying, if you look at the data, once countries adopt digital technology widely in schools, performance goes down significantly to the point where kids who use computers about five hours per day in school for learning purposes will score over two thirds of a standard deviation less than kids who rarely or never touch tech at school, and that’s across 80 countries. Bring it home to the US. Let’s go to the US. We have our NAEP that’s our big data. Take any state, and here’s a fun experiment you can try, take any state NAEP data, compare that to when that state adopted one-to-one technology widely, and watch what happens. The NAEP data will plateau and then start to drop.
37:05 Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath:
We now have the clear understanding of why tech does not work for learning and it is all biological. It’s not that the tech isn’t being used well enough, we haven’t been trained enough, we need better programs. It’s we have evolved biologically to learn from other human beings, not from screens, and screens circumvent that process.
37:45 Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath:
Look back to your childhood, to your schooling. I guarantee all of us at one point took a test on reading comprehension, and the way it looked is this. Here’s a passage of about 750 words. Here are 10 to 12 questions about that passage. Most of them are inferential, not factual. They’re asking you to go beyond what you just read to see what you understood. Cool. Last year, the SATs had a reading comprehension section. Here’s what it looked like. Here is a single sentence of 75 words. Here is one fact based question about that that sentence. Next, here is another sentence of 75 words. Here is one question about that sentence. Last year, they redefined reading comprehension to mean 54 short sentences with one question about each. That is skimming, that’s not reading. Why would we ever do that? Because what do kids do on computers? They skim. So rather than determining what do we want our children to do and gearing education towards that, we are redefining education to better suit the tool. That’s not progress, that is surrender.
42:45 Emily Cherkin:
Clearly, the enmeshment of technology in childhood is creating a crisis for our democracy. Thomas Jefferson said an informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy. When children spend hours being fed algorithmically driven rage bait content designed to increase engagement, they lose the ability to form their own opinions, detect bias, and think think critically. Informed citizens? Hardly.
43:55 Emily Cherkin:
Senators, I invite you to think about your own childhoods, the teachers who inspired you, the awkward social moments, triumphing over a difficult high school essay, making or not making the basketball team. We remember these moments because in the discomfort we learned something. Friction is the learning process. When we seek benefits from the convenience of technology, we forget the benefits of struggle.
47:25 Dr. Jenny Radesky:
We find manipulative designs. 99% of apps that we studied had at least one design that tried to engage kids for longer or monetize their time through ads or purchase pressure, often from characters that they trusted. This contributes to compulsive use and more conflict and difficulty transitioning away from that device when time is up.
47:45 Dr. Jenny Radesky:
We also found a lot of collection and sharing of private identifiers in a 2020 study, and they were sending this data to marketing databases, which kids cannot understand or consent to.
48:45 Dr. Jenny Radesky:
So we know that better, more child centered design exists, but it can’t often compete in the marketplace where products are rewarded for their addictiveness and not whether they support youth well being.
51:00 Dr. Jean Twenge:
Delay giving that smartphone as long as you possibly can. If you feel like they need a phone, give them a flip phone, give them a phone designed for kids that doesn’t have internet or social media or those AI companion apps. Delay them getting social media for as long as possible.
51:15 Dr. Jean Twenge:
What I hear really often is, then my kid will be the only one, and they tell me they have to be on social media to have friends at all. That’s a complete myth.
52:45 Emily Cherkin:
Parents have an opportunity to be the role models for their children as well. We talk a lot about how this is children’s use, the way it’s impacting children, but adults are terrible users as well. It doesn’t take much to look around and see people on their phones totally distracted ourselves. So how we behave is how our children will behave.
54:10 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX):
Australia enacted a ban on social media for those under age 16. This is a yes or no question for everyone. Should the United States consider a similar policy of restricting children from using social media until a certain age?
Dr. Jean Twenge:
Yes, 100%.
Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath:
Yes.
Emily Cherkin:
Yes.
55:00 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX):
Each of the witnesses, do you agree that KOSMA lays the groundwork to protect children from excessive screen use?
Dr. Jean Twenge:
I think it does. I think it’s meaningful progress. I would want to raise that minimum age for social media to 16, but it is a great, great start.
Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath:
Absolutely, step one.
Emily Cherkin:
I agree it’s a start, and I would raise the minimum age to 18.
Dr. Jenny Radesky:
I think the pros are that it enforces under-13 and addresses the feed, which I think is a critical mechanism. I’m worried that it doesn’t cover video games or other platforms, and it doesn’t have duty of care measures.
57:10 Dr. Jean Twenge:
As a parent and and as a researcher, I’m even more concerned about the AI companion apps than I am about social media. It is terrifying to think that our kids are having their first relationships with these sycophantic chat bots. How is that going to translate to real human relationships?
58:00 Dr. Jenny Radesky:
My biggest concern is attachment and relationships. Kids are wired to want to attach to other humans. It’s how they learn their sense of self, what a healthy relationship feels like, and the AI companions are exploiting this.
59:40 Dr. Jenny Radesky:
Michigan just introduced a companion chat bot bill that is restricting the use of companion chat bots that have the potential to encourage self harm, suicidality, violence, drugs, alcohol or eating disorders. They’re restricting AI chat bots from providing mental health therapy, suggesting illegal activities, producing CSAM (child sexual abuse material), engaging in erotic or sexual interactions with youth, which is a big engagement way that chatbots have been trying to get more users, and limits on optimizing for engagement. And I think it’s important that states be able to pass AI bills.
1:00:50 Dr. Jenny Radesky:
Some social media companies are embedding AI chat bots into their user interfaces, which is one way that kids are discovering them. So we need rules about being able to inactivate them without having to pay to inactivate them, and we need to make sure that families also can opt out of things like an algorithmic feed or having the presence of AI chat bots in products their kids are using.
1:01:40 Dr. Jenny Radesky:
Use news reports as conversation starters, because when you hear about a case like that, you can say with your kids, are you hearing about this? Are you seeing this in your feed? What are you doing about it? What do you think tech companies should do better? That’s a much better way to kind of open the conversation and hear kids solutions and then motivate them to perhaps take a break from Tiktok or whatever platform is, which they think is using unfair practices.
1:06:20 Dr. Jean Twenge:
And there are several studies as well looking at young adults who, for example, give up or cut back on social media versus those who continue their normal use and then what happens after two weeks or three weeks, and most of those studies show better outcomes, see less depression, more happiness among those who give up or cut back on social media.
1:10:50 Dr. Jenny Radesky:
In early childhood, especially, kids have so much animism. They have a lot of trust and a huge imagination for their stuffed animals, for other characters, and they can become very attached to media characters. And there is research showing that when you interview four and five year olds about things like an AI assistant, like Alexa, they say, I think it has feelings. I think it could be my friend. It would be fun to spend time with if I was lonely. And so that there’s both philosophical concerns that you’re building a relationship with AI that’s basically stored in a company’s servers, there’s also practical concerns that play is much more supportive of your imagination, of your cognitive flexibility, your self regulation when it’s open ended, not led by the programmers’ ideas.
1:14:50 Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO):
You found that early childhood YouTube videos had the highest advertising load, and in some cases, the ads were longer than the videos themselves. Why does YouTube intentionally overload children with ads?
Dr. Jenny Radesky:
There’s a huge market for young children’s content on YouTube. There’s a couple of reasons for this. One, it’s very successful. Two, parents of young children are exhausted, and so they use YouTube to to occupy kids. And so there’s tons of ad space to be filled. There are even ,I’ve seen YouTubers who are now instructing other youtubers on how to create AI generated content for young children, like little nursery rhymes, because they know it’s a huge source of ad sales.
1:16:45 Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath:
Everything you watch will be geared towards you, which means the ads you see will be geared towards you, and it shoves you into a very small path, which really narrows your identity.
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO):
And what all of you are saying is that study after study shows you that the further down that path you go is really destructive to a kid’s mental health.
Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath:
Bingo. It isolates you and it leads to loneliness.
1:17:35 Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO):
Do you believe social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok knowingly design addictive features targeting kids?
Dr. Jean Twenge:
I do. That’s their business model. The more time people spend on it, the more money they make. So they have poured millions, if not billions, of dollars into those algorithms to make sure people use the app as much as possible. And Tiktok in particular, their internal research, they know that that is especially effective with children and young teens because of brain development and impulse control. They have the biggest problem with spending an excessive amount of time.
1:18:40 Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO):
It’s much harder to deal with adults and what algorithms do and First Amendment issues and terms of service, but with kids, we have the ability to do something about that, and it’s my hope that we will.
1:24:50 Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath:
Technology is a tool for experts to offload their skills. I know how to do stats. I don’t feel like doing it. This tool helps me do it. They are not tools for novices to learn how to become experts. When they offload before learning the initial process, they have no clue, and now they’re at the whim of whatever the machine tells them.
1:25:10 Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath:
The only time we’ve measured digital literacy, it’s called the ICILS, it’s the only international test on this, 2013, 2018, 2023. Between those years, the percentage of kids who are digitally literate has dropped 22%, yet the amount of money we have spent has increased by $6 billion and the percentage of kids who spend time every day on computer at school has gone up 550%. So clearly, the secret to learning how to use tech is to not use tech. It’s to learn analog, learn how we normally learn, and then use tech once you already know how to think, to make that thinking easier.
1:26:25 Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH):
Is there a greater threat to the children of the United States of America than a topic we’re discussing today?
Dr. Jenny Radesky:
It is in the top threats, I would say poverty, trauma…
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH):
But all those things are related, right? Because if you don’t have a childhood that allows you to learn and develop, you probably aren’t going to be in a good situation to be set up for the future either, right?
Dr. Jenny Radesky:
Yes, and all of these interact too. So if you have highly stressed families who don’t have enough resources, they often over rely on technology, both for managing kids as well as for learning. And so there’s often more privileged families are able to have more boundaries and find more high quality tech products.
1:27:45 Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH):
Why would we allow social media for minors? And we have a very strict definition in this country what it means to be a minor. You have to be 18 years old. So could you even remotely make the case, Mr. Cherkin, for anybody under the age of 18 to allow to be allowed to access social media?
Emily Cherkin:
I mean, no, I don’t believe it’s needed. I think it’s becomes a social pressure, especially if you pick 16, it’s the middle of high school, so you’re saying no to the pre-16, but yes to the over, and how confusing that will be and difficult in a multi age setting.
1:32:00 Dr. Jean Twenge:
When you sign up for a social media account, you have to consent to give away your data. What other contract do we allow 17 and unders to sign?
1:34:50 Dr. Jenny Radesky:
Well, what worries me about all of the cases that have come out since generative AI has come to market is that there’s case after case which in the medical field we would consider those sentinel events where you need to suddenly stop using what you’re doing, do a morbidity and mortality review, go to a root cause and figure out what went wrong. You don’t just keep releasing the same product.
1:38:10 Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath:
Yes, Sweden has banned most ed tech for primary years and almost all ed tech for secondary as well. They start to bring it in high school years. Norway just followed suit, and Finland is now, give them about two months they’re going to go on the way. They just looked at the data and they said, this ain’t working. Let’s go back to learning. Whereas the rest of us look at that and say, How can we make it work better? Man, I could ask you, how do I make anthrax better? Maybe the answer is, you don’t, you go back to not using it.
1:46:15 Sen. Ben Ray Luján:
Well, can you provide a couple examples of design features that would mitigate harm to children? And then I’d ask you and maybe submit others to the record as well.
Dr. Jenny Radesky:
Yes. So one would be more stoppage cues, more friction within a digital product. And what I mean by friction is that right now, most designs are often frictionless or low friction. So it’s just easy to keep swiping, keep engaging with with content, and then kids kind of go on autopilot, and they aren’t even self monitoring to know how much time has passed. Should I stop and do something else? So there are different design approaches that can slow down the feed, not have as much kind of intermittent rewards showing up, or there could be reminders, like our youth advisory panel at the Center of Excellence has said, If I set a timer for 30 minutes on a social media feed, I want to be reminded what I’d rather go and do at that moment. I just I don’t want to have something that says time’s up and then you can swipe away, they want something that actually supports their agency in meeting their goals.
1:49:30 Sen. Ben Ray Luján:
My colleagues and I recently sent a letter calling out the horrendous safety record of Grok, including the recent controversy that is creating non-consensual images of individuals, some of whom are minors.
1:50:00 Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM):
Is not just with Grok, but there’s others that are encouraging suicide as well, character.ai. So I’m hopeful, Mr. Chairman, that, while I appreciate the hearing the expertise of the panel here today, that these execs get hauled in here. If they don’t want to show up, let’s use subpoena power. If we’re concerned about kids, then put their asses in those chairs and have them answer questions and face the families. So I’m hopeful that one way or another, in one of these committees, one of us has the courage not just to bring them in, but use the subpoena power and ask them when they’re going to fix it. Not how. Not if they know about it. When are they going to fix the damaging behavior of just lining their their pockets with dollars at the expense of the health of kids all across America? Thank you for the time today.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX):
Thank you, Senator Lujan, and I will say on that latter point, you are very much preaching to the choir.
1:55:05 Dr. Jean Twenge:
Whether you’re talking about toys or the AI companion apps, all of those things increase what they call engagement, what other people would call addiction, so they have the rewards, the gems, all of those things push toward spending more time with the toy, and thus often less time with friends, in person, less time talking to family, the things that are so developmentally essential.
1:59:20 Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA):
So today, social media platforms collect massive amounts of personal information on their young users to serve them the most convincing ads possible, and those targeted ads are big business for big tech. In 2022, the major big tech platforms earned nearly $11 billion from US users under the age of 18. By 2026, that number is exponentially bigger.
2:03:55 Sen. Todd Young (R-IN):
You have to balance all sorts of competing incentives and disincentives. So among the things we have to deal with in terms of socialization is the fact that their friend groups are on, and these are good kids who are on, who have good families, and if they’re on, and that’s their primary means of communication, which it is, and your kids aren’t on, they lose their friends. Or, if you’re girls, you become subject of – No? That’s not the logical outcome? I’m seeing negative. Well, this is why you’re here. I want to entertain these conversations. If you’re not part of, let’s say, 70% of the conversations that occur in a friend group, is the depth of your friendship as meaningful?
Dr. Jean Twenge:
Absolutely, in fact, more so because it’s held in real time. It is held one on one and in most studies, yeah, the teens who do not use social media at all are the happiest and the least depressed and the most satisfied with their lives.
2:05:50 Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath:
The biological mechanism is when we interact, live and in person your body will release a set of chemicals, one of which is oxytocin, which is a bonding mechanism. When we see surges in those chemicals, we know we’re forming a connection. When we interact via text online, the body does not release oxytocin. It releases a different set of chemicals, primarily tachykinins, which are the precursor to chemical depression. So in a very real sense, we can say biologically, text based communication is not recognized as actual interaction.
2:06:20 Sen. Todd Young (R-IN):
What about FaceTime, for example, or Zoom or other things?
Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath:
Yes, if you can get if you can see somebody’s face and hear their voice, you can get away with it. That’s why, when we were growing up with phones with the long cord and you would run into the pantry to talk to your girlfriend or boyfriend, that worked for oxytocin. But how many of our kids are FaceTiming? The data on the percentage of time they spend on FaceTime versus communicating with each other on –
Sen. Todd Young (R-IN):
Not as much, is my sense.
2:06:50 Emily Cherkin:
I do think it is a parental challenge in the sense that we feel, and we hear from our children that they feel left out. And I also would argue that it’s convenient to blame parents and make them feel like, you know, for the tech industry, let me be clear, to blame parents to say that, you know, look, your kid’s going to be left out if they don’t do it. And so I would see an option here to empower parents to say no, because of this research that says it’s been it’s better for and we need those courageous parents to take that first step.
2:08:15 Dr. Jenny Radesky:
I think one thing Congress could consider is investment in more offline third spaces for youth, where they connect together in person. This could be after school programs, it could be sports and music programs. This is where a lot of those social dynamics and skills are learned. And if kids had those places to go to find their peers, they wouldn’t necessarily be as online as much looking for their peers.
2:09:40 Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI):
You might very well be empowering super sophisticated, super fortunate, super engaged parents, but the rest of us just need a law and in some instances, an excuse. And to the extent that there’s FOMO among kids, adults too, we’re not in the text string or the signal string or the DM or the snap or whatever it is, to the extent that it’s impermissible, then people will find other ways. And my view is, yes, we should have after school programs. They should be subsidized, all the rest of it, but those kids are not going to that thing if they’re stuck on their phone because their frontal lobe has been hijacked.
2:10:40 Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI):
What does the research show about algorithmic feeds that maximize user engagement, and why are kids uniquely impacted by this?
Dr. Jenny Radesky:
So a lot of the research has been done by the platforms, so it is not available for external researchers to look at, but there is, there was an interesting convening. So this was published last year by Cunningham, where there were academics and people who worked for platforms, who got together to think of how to create better feeds. So they were looking, they were reviewing the research on how engagement based feeds compared to, say, a chronologic feed. And so they had all this internal research that they reviewed and cited in the in this publication, which I can share with your staff, about how engagement based ranking leads to more time online, right? Which is one thing we’re talking about with displacement of healthy behaviors, it also leads to more amplification of emotions, and we know that kids brains, brains in the teenage years are so sensitive to emotional arousal. So if you had an engagement based feed, the users of that feed can experience much more intense anger, happiness and stress, and so that can lead to more compulsive use.
2:12:10 Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI):
I think the headline about KOSMA is the 13 year old threshold. Arguably the more powerful aspect of KOSMA is the banning of the algorithmic feed for kids who are permitted to be on social between 13 and 18.
2:16:25 Dr. Jean Twenge:
A lot of these things do work together. So it’s difficult to separate them completely, or to put a number on which or ranking of which is the worst. But certainly, anything that increases the time spent is going to displace time sleeping, time reading a book, exercising, spending time with others in person. So that’s going to be the algorithmic feed, for example, notifications, gamification, any of those features that are going to push time spent are absolutely going to be on that list of harm. But there’s many others too. You mentioned social comparison, of trying to strive to have that perfect body that everybody seems to have on Instagram, that even a lot of adults say, Hey, isn’t it striking that everybody is always on vacation on Facebook, and it just seems like everyone else’s life is so much more glamorous. Then cyber bullying, body image issues, unknown adults contacting minors. I mean, the one of the reasons I became so convinced that smartphones and social media were behind the adolescent mental health crisis is there are so many possible mechanisms.
2:18:40 Dr. Jenny Radesky:
So when you’re eight or 10, you’re still in a pretty logical and rule based part of your development. Sorry, sorry, you can you know some rules you may not follow your parents rules, I see, but you’re more concrete in your thinking. So studies have shown that when eight or nine or 10 year olds start social media accounts, they get over focused on those concrete like counts or friend counts, so they may want to accumulate lots of friends, not knowing that those friends are child predators. So that is why it’s very developmentally inappropriate for kids under 13, a couple of studies show, to be on social media. Then you get into those 11 to 13 years where there’s so much more drive to connect with peers, you get a little bit more of executive functioning coming on, but not all of it yet. So still not great impulse control. Once you reach more into 16 to 18, you get more abstract thought, and kids can reason a little bit more and have a little bit more self control. I want to say, though, there’s a lot of individual variability. I’m a developmental behavioral pediatrician, so my patients with autism and ADHD often are lagging in these skills. It takes a little bit longer. So if we were thinking of child centered design that’s most appropriate around ages eight and 10, it probably still relies a lot on storytelling, learning about the world, great movies, great shows, not short form content that they’re just consuming and going on autopilot and grabbing things in small bites.
Music
Tired of Being Lied To by David Ippolito
