O’Neil is not the only serious thinker to raise concerns regarding the responsible use of Big Data. Emmanuel (Manu) Letouze is the Director and co-Founder of Data-Pop Alliance, a coalition on Big Data development co-created in 2013 by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, MIT Media Lab, and Overseas Development Institute. Letouze’ research and work focuses on Big Data’s application and implications in areas including poverty and inequality, crime, climate change, human rights, and economic and ecological fragility. His mission in launching Data-Pop has been to help foster what he refers to as a “People-Centered Big Data Revolution.”
Letouze believes that we are living through an “industrial revolution of data” with implications for displacement and change in our social institutions. His focus is on the social impact of data. In its statement of purpose, Data-Pop envisions a future where “the potential of ‘Big Data’ for human development and humanitarian action has stirred a great deal of both excitement and skepticism.” They pose a question for the future of Big Data and its impact on social institutions — “looking a generation ahead, observing the persistent prevalence of absolute poverty, the rise of global inequality, and the many walls and ceilings impeding well-being, we wondered: what will it take for Big Data to have by then served the cause of human progress to the best of its ability and ours?”
Letouze colleague in Data-Pop Alliance is Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland, who helped create and direct MIT’s Media Lab and now directs MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and co-leads the World Economic Forum Big Data and Personal Data initiatives. Pentland has written extensively on the social implications of Big Data, in his book Social Physics and in articles such as Saving Big Data from Itself. Pentland asks “who should we trust to manage our data to avoid autocratic control?”
Cameron (Cam) Kerry, an attorney with the Boston law firm of Sidley Austin LLP, and former acting secretary and general counsel for the U.S. Department of Commerce, is now working as a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab on issues related to privacy and personal data ownership. He is also supporting Professor Sandy Pentland’s Big Data for Public Good research initiative. Upon joining the Media Lab, Professor Pentland commented, “Cam will be working closely with the Media Lab to better understand and create solutions around critical issues of Internet privacy and big data.” Kerry has served as the U.S.’s chief international negotiator for privacy and data regulation and is passionate in his commitment to the ethical uses of Big Data.[/entity]
Kerry, Shrier, and Letouze share a common viewpoint that Big Data can be harnessed to help address social problems of hunger, disease, poverty, and social inequity. And, when asked why anyone not directly impacted by these issues should care, they respond in unison and with great eloquence that these issues have an economic and social impact on every citizen. They envision a future where Big Data can be applied to a range of societal issues to help forge a more prosperous, safer, and healthier planet for future generations.
Big Data has fueled an interest in the power of data and analytics to drive innovation, learning, and insight. It has raised awareness of the application of data and analytics to understand complex issues. It has brought quantitative analysis to bear to support qualitative thinking and judgement. The frontiers of discovery are vast. Big Data has a role to play not only in faster learning and business insight, but if used responsibly, Big Data can be applied to help address a range of complex global challenges. This is what a few committed individuals are betting on.
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“A profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” This was the verdict of the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in his recent Advisory on social media and youth mental health.
As a former senior member of the independent Meta/Facebook Oversight Board staff, I find this Advisory, which draws on years of research, a welcome elevation of the use of social media by youth to a national public health issue. It’s also an important call to action for companies and investors in shaping the responsible future of the internet. As I’ll explain, its findings reflect the difficulty for governments in taking effective action, the technical challenges in balancing age-appropriate content with privacy rights, and the uncharted ethical and regulatory territory of virtual environments. It also points to the huge opportunities in developing online trust and safety as a core business function.
The report is an antidote to both the unrepentant defense of social media platforms and the exaggerated critiques that attribute myriad social ills to its influence. Murthy takes a “safety-first” approach because of the widespread use of social media; it’s also a sensible approach, given the lack of clarity in the literature on harm.
Murthy is at pains to assert that social media — used by 95% of teens — has positive impacts on a meaningful percentage of youth. These include social connection or support, and validation for marginalized groups, including ethnic and gender minorities. This is an absolutely critical point that doesn’t receive enough attention, especially given the increasing violence and vitriol directed against these communities in recent years.
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However, it also provides some sobering statistics on social media use and the “ample indicators” of its harmful effects on many young users. For example, “nearly 40% of children ages 8–12 … a highly sensitive period of brain development” use social media, and frequent use may be associated with changes in the brain related to emotional regulation and impulse control. Cyberbullying is also a major problem, with nearly 20% of teens reporting that they have been cyberbullied. And teens who use social media for more than three hours per day are more likely to experience depression and anxiety. The Advisory also references “a nationally representative survey of girls aged 11–15” in which “one-third or more say they feel ‘addicted’ to a social media platform.”
The report is understandably focused on the U.S. It’s worth stating that research tells a different story in Europe, which finds a more negative association overall between social media use and well-being, and research finds an overall positive impact in Asia. This is an important distinction to note, as the public policy debate in the digital age sometimes paints with broad brushstrokes while policies are being conceived at multiple scales; in corporate boardrooms, in states, nations, and supranational organizations, such as the EU.
Easier said than done
So while the Advisory’s analysis is even-handed, implementing some of its recommendations, such as limiting access to social media and harmful content on social media, is a tall order. I’ve seen how difficult it is to find practical solutions for parents, policymakers and companies, across geographies, cultures and different ages.
This is where a national U.S. Data privacy framework would be helpful, both to add legal weight to valid arguments about the national security implications of data sharing on social media platforms and to encourage a more coordinated approach, especially for social media companies and new platforms hoping to scale globally. In the absence of a privacy framework, state legislatures are taking the lead in developing a patchwork of privacy and social media laws, which are widely variable and sometimes heavy-handed.
Consider the laws in Montana preventing children under 18 from using social networks without parental consent, or the blanket ban of TikTok in Montana. To put it bluntly, there’s a big difference between an eight-year-old and a 15-year-old. The latter has far greater agency and can legally learn to drive a car in most states.
We need to find a way to bring children at that stage of adolescence into the conversation and respect their views, both in family settings when defining shared rules and in public discourse.
A recent Pew Poll bears this out, finding that 54% of Americans aged 50–64 favor banning TikTok, compared with 29% of those under 50. If we don’t get serious about bringing young people into the conversation, any social media ban will backfire just like the explicit shock tactics of early smoking, drinking and anti-drug campaigns did.
Getting the data
To avoid the spread of ineffective and divisive legislation, which promotes the perception of overt censorship by paternalistic elites, empirical evidence for each policy intervention must be more robust. Murthy admits knowledge gaps on the relationship between social media and youth mental health. As such, the key questions he offers — “What type of content, and at what frequency and intensity, generates the most harm?” — should be an open invitation for further research from academia, philanthropic groups and relevant public health agencies.
But the quality of the evidence to inform this research depends on greater transparency from social media companies.
Data transparency mandates, such as the EU’s Digital Services Act, are a step in the right direction. On U.S. Soil, the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act would, in the words of Stanford Professor Nate Persily, who informed its creation, allow researchers “to get access to the data that will shed light on the most pressing questions related to the effects of social media on society.” Mandating data access for researchers is a critical priority, especially on the heels of Twitter not only making its data feed prohibitively expensive for academic researchers moving forward but also threatening legal action if they do not delete all data lawfully gathered to date.
Even with nuanced public policy, we need to overcome technical challenges for effective regulation of social media. A key dilemma facing trust and safety efforts for children and adolescents using social media is the limited ability of current tools to detect and act on harmful online behavior in real time, especially in live video, audio and other non-text dominant constructs. In the U.S., regulating online speech is extremely challenging without infringing current conceptions of First Amendment rights.
Add to this the challenge of evaluating not just content but the behavior of actors in immersive or augmented reality virtual environments. For instance, how will Apple ensure the beneficial use of the new Apple Vision Pro “mixed reality” headset? Hopefully, Apple will find innovative ways to moderate harmful behavior and conduct, a task that’s much more context-intensive and technically complicated than detecting and blocking harmful content.
Holding social media platforms accountable
Ultimately, we should ask more of the companies building these platforms. We should insist on safety by design, not as a retroactive adjustment. We should expect age-appropriate health and safety standards, stricter data privacy for children, and algorithmic transparency and oversight.
One recommendation I would add is to add a chief trust officer to the C-suites of every online company, or otherwise truly empower the executive responsible for trust and safety. This role would be responsible for minimizing the risk of harm to youth; working closely with academic researchers to provide relevant data; and providing a counterpoint to the dominant internal motivators of maximizing engagement, virality and scale. Professionalization of the trust and safety field is a key step in this regard. Right now, there’s very little formal training or accreditation in this area at universities or otherwise. That needs to change if we are to educate a future generation of C-suite trust officers.
An eagerly awaited report from the Atlantic Council’s Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web provides even more concrete recommendations to help ensure a more positive online and offline future for youth. Not least is the need to cultivate a more robust and diverse talent pipeline to support the expansion of trust and safety practices.
New legal standards and systems-level, risk-based governance of social media are nascent but are also a major opportunity. In terms of societal significance and investment prospects, online trust and safety will be the new cybersecurity. Youth, parents, policymakers, companies and philanthropies should all have a seat at the table to share the responsibility for shaping this future.
Eli Sugarman is a Senior Fellow at Schmidt Futures and serves as Interim Director of the Hewlett Foundation Cyber Initiative. Previously, he was Vice President of Content (Moderation) at the Meta/Facebook Oversight Board.
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Social media inflames tribalism and makes democracy more difficult and unstable in many ways. To name just a few: It accelerates the movement of citizens into informational bubbles and then poisons those bubbles with inflammatory stories and videos; it undermines trust in institutions and in fellow citizens; it allows violent ideologies to ferment and recruit; it opens a door for easy manipulation by America’s foreign enemies.
But there’s another route by which social media may soon begin imposing a heavy new cost on American democracy: It appears to have contributed to the rapid rise in depression and anxiety among Gen Z (born in 1996 and later). The rise began around 2012, not just in the United States but also in the UK and Canada. The evidence is not just correlational; five experiments have randomly assigned people to cut back on social media use; all found at least some beneficial outcomes.
This rapid increase in mood disorders is a tragedy in and of itself, but it has implications for democracy, too.
If we want to reverse these trends, we need to change the way we think about social media.
As a second step, to address the teen mental health crisis, I would suggest raising that minimum age to 16.
The effects of social media are complex and not fully understood.
