The Kids Aren't Alright

The Haps

School holidays are over and so is Parliament’s two-week recess. Parliament will sit for eight more weeks in a year that is flying by. ACT had a busy recess of packed public meetings for its MPs and local body candidates.

The Kids Aren’t Alright

The Earthquake regulations showed ACT can get an issue right and stand on principle. Another issue is brewing where the popular move won’t work. What’s popular is to ‘ban social media for under 16s,’ but in reality a more sophisticated solution is needed to protect children from online harm.

Every generation worries about what the young people are up to. Today’s elderly themselves had dour parents who survived two world wars and a depression; they drove them mad with Rock ‘n’ Roll. Perhaps the repetition makes it boring, but every generation doing something doesn’t make it wrong. Perhaps it’s because each generation worries that we course correct and our civilisation survives.

So, what are we worrying about this time? Mental distress. Young New Zealanders are about four times more likely to report mental distress than they were fifteen years ago, according to the Ministry of Health’s annual survey.

Whether they’re truly stressed or just worse at handling stress, there’s still a problem. Teachers say children won’t sit down and learn for as long. There’s too much distraction and antisocial behaviour. Parents are worried as ever.

Who’s to blame? There’s lots of theories but the mobile phone is the one culprit in frame, with American Psychologist Jonathan Haidt leading the lynch mob. His theory is that mobile phone companies compete for attention like any other advertiser, but their technology is far more insidious. They addict the user so strongly that it changes their brains.

Plus, young users can get exposed to unsavoury people who wouldn’t normally be talking to children, and see grotesque themes and content that children should not see. Altogether, phones pose a big problem that makes it harder for families, schools, and communities to function.

Today the Education and Workforce Select Committee is hearing from a couple of dozen submitters about online digital harm. They include free speech advocates, child psychologists, and social media companies.

The hearing’s in response to political moves mid-year: National proposing a blanket ban on social media for under 16s, and ACT pointing out children are having a hard time online but the internet is not so simple as just banning what you don’t like.

There are at least three problems with ‘banning social media for under 16s.’

One, what is social media? In Australia they’re trying to define it, with a ban scheduled to come in next year. Now, the advocates of a ban are worried about virtual friends, that is chat bots who pretend to be a friend but can be quite inappropriate in their friendship. Is that social media, should it be banned?

The AI chatbots weren’t an issue when the campaign for a ban began. At best the Government will lumber along six months behind banning things after kids discover them.

Two, will it actually work to ban whatever it is that’s being banned? Children in Australia already say they’re getting ready to set up accounts from Poland. Anyone can get a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that makes it look like you are logging on from elsewhere.

Three, what will young people do instead? There are always new sites and inventions on the internet, children forced off mainstream platforms will use the underlying technology in new and unpredictable ways that will probably end up being worse than what they have now. What’s worse, they’ll be less likely to talk to an adult if what they’re doing is ‘illegal.’

Then we don’t even want to talk about the nightmare of pain unleashed in the UK. Over there it’s been suggested people should need a digital ID to prove they’re over 16 and can use the internet at all. Any scheme that bans one group of people has to verify who’s not banned, and that’s hard to do, to say the very least.

There’s a big problem with kids and phones, but for every problem there’s a solution that is simple and wrong. A social media ban is one of those, so what’s the alternative?

One move that would work is criminalising defamatory activity. It’s already illegal to misuse an intimate visual recording, i.e. share a naked photo someone sent you, but ‘deepfake’ images can put someone’s face on a different scene with growing realism.

This kind of deepfake porn imagery that takes a person’s identity and abuses it is a major source of bullying. ACT’s Laura McClure is taking it on with a bill ready to go, she needs other parties to jump on board so it can be debated. Her Bill would make a nude fake image as illegal as a real one, as recently covered by Paddy Gower.

Non-consensual deepfake porn is bad but only part of the problem. The real solution is the one many parents are already using, custom control of their child’s device. Free Press knows parents who monitor their children’s online activity and limit their time online. They know it works from all the begging for more time on specific apps.

In all of this is a classic story about technology and government. Our system of government was set up for a society without electricity. Now we have it and it’s changing the world faster every year. When a problem presents itself, the answer is unlikely to come from the government because it’s too slow for the online world.

What works is the creative powers of a free society, governed by basic rules of the game like ‘don’t take or misuse my property, including my image.’ We can overcome any problem with enough freedom, such as fighting fast moving technology with fast moving technology, but a shackled people will descend into hopelessness and depression. That’s why we must defend human freedom, the only condition that allows us to solve our problems as they arise.