from the correlation-and-causation dept
We’ve been covering, at great length, the moral panic around the claims that social media is what’s making kids depressed. The problem with this narrative is that there’s basically no real evidence to support it. As the American Psychological Association found when it reviewed all the literature, despite many, many dozens of studies done on the impact of social media on kids, no one was able to establish a causal relationship.
As that report noted, the research seemed to show no inherent benefit or harm for most kids. For some, it showed a real benefit (often around kids being able to find like-minded people online to communicate with). For a very small percentage, it appeared to potentially exacerbate existing issues. And those are really the cases that we should be focused on.
But, instead, the narrative that continues to make the rounds is that social media is inherently bad for kids. That leads to various bills around age verification and age gating to keep kids off of social media.
Supporters of these bills will point to charts like this one, regarding teen suicide rates, noting the uptick correlates with the rise of social media.
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Of course, they seem to cherry pick the start date of that chart, because if you go back further, you realize that while the uptick is a concern, it’s still way below what it had been in the 1990s (pre-social media).
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In case that embed isn’t working, here’s an image of it:
Obviously, the increase in suicides is a concern. But, considering that every single study that tries to link it to social media ends up failing to do so, that suggests that there might be some other factor at play here.
A recent study in the Journal of Pediatrics suggests a compelling alternative. It’s not social media, but the rise of helicopter parenting, in which kids no longer have spaces to just hang out with each other and be kids. It’s titled: Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-being: Summary of the Evidence. If you can’t see the full version, there’s a preprint version here.
The research summarizes the decline in “independent mobility” for kids over the last few decades:
Considerable research, mostly in Europe, has focused on children’s independent mobility (CIM), defined as children’s freedom to travel in their neighborhood or city without adult accompaniment. That research has revealed significant declines in CIM, especially between 1970 and 1990, but also some large national differences. For example, surveys regarding the “licenses” (permissions) parents grant to their elementary school children revealed that in England, license to walk home alone from school dropped from 86% in 1971 to 35% in 1990 and 25% in 2010; and license to use public buses alone dropped from 48% in 1971 to 15% in 1990 to 12% in 2010.11 In another study, comparing CIM in 16 different countries (US not included), conducted from 2010 to 2012, Finland stood out as allowing children the greatest freedom of movement. The authors wrote: “At age 7, a majority of Finnish children can already travel to places within walking distance or cycle to places alone; by age 8 a majority can cross main roads, travel home from school and go out after dark alone, by age 9 a majority can cycle on main roads alone, and by age 10 a majority can travel on local buses alone.” Although we have found no similar studies of parental permissions for US children, other data indicate that the US is more like the UK concerning children’s independent mobility than like Finland. For example, National Personal Transportation Surveys revealed that only 12.7% walked or biked to school in 2009 compared with 47.7% in 1969.
And then it notes the general decline in mental health as well, which they highlight started long before social media existed:
Perhaps the most compelling and disturbing evidence comes from studies of suicide and suicidal thoughts. Data compiled by the CDC indicate that the rate of suicide among children under age 15 rose 3.5-fold between 1950 and 2005 and by another 2.4-fold between 2005 and 2020. No other age group showed increases nearly this large. By 2019, suicide was the second leading cause of death for children from age 10 through 15, behind only unintentional injury. Moreover, the 2019 YRBS survey revealed that during the previous year 18.8% of US high school students seriously considered attempting suicide, 15.7% made a suicide plan, 8.9% attempted suicide one or more times, and 2.5% made a suicide attempt requiring medical treatment. We are clearly experiencing an epidemic of psychopathology among young people.
But, unlike those who assume correlation is causation with regards to social media, the researchers here admit there needs to be more. And they bring the goods, pointing to multiple studies that suggest a pretty clear causal relationship, rather than just correlation.
Several studies have examined relationships between the amount of time young children have for self-directed activities at home and psychological characteristics predictive of future wellbeing. These have revealed significant positive correlations between amount of self-structured time (largely involving free play) and (a) scores on two different measures of executive functioning; (b) indices of emotional control and social ability; and (c) scores, two years later, on a measure of self-regulation. There is also evidence that risky play, where children deliberately put themselves in moderately frightening situations (such as climbing high into a tree) helps protect against the development of phobias and reduces future anxiety by increasing the person’s confidence that they can deal effectively with emergencies.
Studies with adults involving retrospections about their childhood experiences provide another avenue of support for the idea that early independent activity promotes later wellbeing. In one such study, those who reported much free and adventurous play in their elementary school years were assessed as having more social success, higher self-esteem, and better overall psychological and physical health in adulthood than those who reported less such play. In another very similar study, amount of reported free play in childhood correlated positively with measures of social success and goal flexibility (ability to adapt successfully to changes in life conditions) in adulthood. Also relevant here are studies in which adults (usually college students) rated the degree to which their parents were overprotective and overcontrolling (a style that would reduce opportunity for independent activity) and were also assessed for their current levels of anxiety and depression. A systematic review of such studies revealed, overall, positive correlations between the controlling, overprotective parenting style and the measures of anxiety and depression.
They also note that they are not claiming (of course) that this is the sole reason for the declines in mental health. Just that there is strong evidence that it is a key component. They explore a few other options that may contribute, including increased pressure at schools and societal changes. They also consider the impact of social media and digital technologies and note (as we have many times) that there just is no real evidence to support the claims:
Much recent discussion of young people’s mental health has focused on the role of increased use of digital technologies, especially involvement with social media. However, systematic reviews of research into this have provided little support for the contention that either total screen time or time involved with social media is a major cause of, or even correlate of, declining mental health. One systematic review concluded that research on links between digital technology use and teens’ mental health “has generated a mix of often conflicting small positive, negative and null associations” (Odgers & Jensen, 2020). Another, a “review of reviews” concluded that “the association between digital technology use, or social media use in particular, and psychological well-being is, on average, negative but very small” and noted some evidence, from longitudinal research, that negative correlations may result from declining mental health leading to more social media use rather than the reverse (Orben, 2020)
Indeed, if this theory is true, that the lack of spaces for kids to explore and play and experiment without adult supervision is a leading cause of mental health decline, you could easily see how those who are depressed are more likely to seek out those private spaces, and turn to social media, given the lack of any such spaces they can go to physically.
And, if that’s the case, then all of these efforts to ban social media for kids, or to make social media more like Disneyland, could likely end up doing a lot more harm than good by cutting off one of the last remaining places where kids can communicate with their peers without adults watching over their every move. Indeed, the various proposals to give parents more access to what their kids are doing online could worsen the problem as well, taking away yet another independent space for kids.
Over the last few years, there’s been a push to bring back more “dangerous” play for kids, as people have begun to realize that things may have gone too far in the other direction. Perhaps it’s time we realize that social media fits into that category as well.
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
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from the well,-if-you-can't-win-fairly.... dept
The EU Commission has been pushing client-side scanning for well over a year. This new intrusion into private communications has been pitched as perhaps the only way to prevent the sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Mandates proposed by the EU government would have forced communication services to engage in client-side scanning of content. This would apply to every communication or service provider. But it would only negatively affect providers incapable of snooping on private communications because their services are encrypted.
Encryption — especially end-to-end encryption — protects the privacy and security of users. The EU’s pitch said protecting more than the children was paramount, even if it meant sacrificing the privacy and security of millions of EU residents.
Encrypted services would have been unable to comply with the mandate without stripping the client-side end from their end-to-end encryption. So, while it may have been referred to with the legislative euphemism “chat control” by EU lawmakers, the reality of the situation was that this bill — if passed intact — basically would have outlawed E2EE.
Fortunately, there was a lot of pushback. Some of it came from service providers who informed the EU they would no longer offer their services in EU member countries if they were required to undermine the security they provided for their users.
The more unexpected resistance came from EU member countries who similarly saw the gaping security hole this law would create and wanted nothing to do with it. On top of that, the EU government’s own lawyers told the Commission passing this law would mean violating other laws passed by this same governing body.
This pushback was greeted by increasingly nonsensical assertions by the bill’s supporters. In op-eds and public statements, backers insisted everyone else was wrong and/or didn’t care enough about the well-being of children to subject every user of any communication service to additional government surveillance.
That’s what happened on the front end of this push to create a client-side scanning mandate. On the back end, however, the EU government was trying to dupe people into supporting their own surveillance with misleading ads that targeted people most likely to believe any sacrifice of their own was worth making when children were on the (proverbial) line.
That’s the unsettling news being delivered to us by Vas Panagiotopoulos for Wired. A security researcher based in Amsterdam took a long look at apparently misleading ads that began appearing on Twitter as the EU government amped up its push to outlaw encryption.
Danny Mekić was digging into the EU’s “chat control” law when he began seeing disturbing ads on Twitter. These ads featured young women being (apparently) menaced by sinister men, backed by a similarly dark background and soundtrack. The ads displayed some supposed “facts” about the sexual abuse of children and ended with the notice that the ads had been paid for by the EU Commission.
The ads also cited survey results that supposedly said most European citizens supported client-side scanning of content and communications, apparently willing to sacrifice their own privacy and security for the common good.
But Mekić dug deeper and discovered the cited survey wasn’t on the level.
Following closer inspection, he discovered that these findings appeared biased and otherwise flawed. The survey results were gathered by misleading the participants, he claims, which in turn may have misled the recipients of the ads; the conclusion that EU citizens were fine with greater surveillance couldn’t be drawn from the survey, and the findings clashed with those of independent polls.
This discovery prompted Mekić to dig even deeper. What Mekić found was that the ads were very tightly targeted — so tightly targeted, in fact, that they could not have been deployed in this manner without violating European laws that are aimed to prevent exactly this sort of targeting, i.e. by using “sensitive data” like religious beliefs and political affiliations.
The ads were extremely targeted, meant to find people most likely to be swayed towards the EU Commission’s side, either because the targets never appeared to distrust their respective governments or because their governments had yet to tell the EU Commission to drop its proposed anti-encryption proposal.
Mekić found that the ads were meant to be seen by select targets, such as top ministry officials, while they were concealed from people interested in Julian Assange, Brexit, EU corruption, Eurosceptic politicians (Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Viktor Orban, Giorgia Meloni), the German right-wing populist party AfD, and “anti-Christians.”
Mekić then found out that the ads, which have garnered at least 4 million views, were only displayed in seven EU countries: the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Finland, Slovenia, Portugal, and the Czech Republic.
A document leaked earlier this year exposed which EU members were in favor of client-side scanning and its attendant encryption backdoors, as well as those who thought the proposed mandate was completely untenable.
The countries targeted by the EU Commission ad campaign are, for the most part, supportive of/indifferent to broken encryption, client-side scanning, and expanded surveillance powers. Slovenia (along with Spain, Cyprus, Lithuania, Croatia, and Hungary) were all firmly in favor of bringing an end to end-to-end encryption.
The Netherlands fell somewhere in the middle, saying simply that it’s not necessary to outlaw encryption because it can find other ways around it. Seems like a “no” vote, but it was more a shrug. That government apparently didn’t care whether or not the proposal was passed, but never stated any direct opposition to basically outlawing E2EE. So does Belgium, which stated no direct opposition to encryption-breaking, and simply stated it was fine with whatever but pointed out that encryption does not work the way the EU Commission seems to think it does.
The others on this list either weren’t detailed in the leaked document (Sweden, Portugal) or offered some defense of encryption (Finland) while suggesting maybe all the culpability should lay at the feet of service providers (also Finland). The Czech Republic came down on the side of encryption, but tempered it a bit by suggesting that with “general boundaries,” perhaps some encryption backdoors would be okay.
While we’re accustomed to politicians airing misleading ads during election runs, this is something different. This is the representative government of several nations deliberately targeting countries and residents it apparently thinks might be receptive to its skewed version of the facts, which comes in the form of the presentation of misleading survey results against a backdrop of heavily-implied menace. And that’s on top of seeming violations of privacy laws regarding targeted ads that this same government body created and ratified.
It’s a tacit admission EU proposal backers think they can’t win this thing on its merits. And they can’t. The EU Commission has finally ditched its anti-encryption mandates after months of backlash. For the moment, E2EE survives in Europe. But it’s definitely still under fire. The next exploitable tragedy will bring with it calls to reinstate this part of the “chat control” proposal. It will never go away because far too many governments believe their citizens are obligated to let these governments shoulder-surf whenever they deem it necessary. And about the only thing standing between citizens and that unceasing government desire is end-to-end encryption.