Governor Spencer Cox and Attorney General Derek Brown are suing Snapchat on Utah’s behalf. They allege Snapchat was designed to be addictive to children and to facilitate exploitation.
This is not the first lawsuit Utah has brought against a major social media network. The state has also sued TikTok and Meta for child addiction harms. With these moves, Utah joins a growing, bipartisan effort to regulate Big Tech to protect children.
When it comes to social media, there is no debate. The evidence is abundant and strikingly clear: social media does incredible harm to society at large. It is hazardous for young people.
Social media companies are eroding young people’s attention spans, self-esteem and social lives in pursuit of ever-increasing profits. Unless they are stopped, our already fragmented society will become more alienated with time, as an entire generation raised on “almost constant“ social media use comes of age.
Other states should follow Utah’s lead and sue major social media companies for the dire threat they pose to children and society at large. Representatives must push to pass legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require tech giants to put proper safeguards in place to protect minors.
Mental health
Teenagers are uniquely vulnerable to the harms presented by social media. The adolescent brain is wired to be especially sensitive to social rewards and the effects of dopamine. Teens also lack the impulse control of adults and do not have a developed sense of self to fall back on. In a period of crucial development, while their senses of self are rapidly changing, teens are being bombarded with hyper-stimulating content that encourages harsh social comparison.
Social media companies know this. They continue to design their apps to keep users on the app for as long as possible, in order to be able to show users more ads. Ever-increasing profits are consistently chosen over human well-being.
In Snapchat’s case, Utah cites features like streaks, constant notifications and the “infinite scroll” in the app’s video features as designed to keep users on the app for as long as possible, and 13% of teens already report they are on the app almost constantly.
This kind of excessive social media use impacts the physical development of the teenage brain. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle. The more a teen uses social media, the more their brain adapts to become hyper-sensitive to rewards. Thus, the more a teen uses social media.
This is particularly sinister, as children and adolescents who spend more than three hours per day on social media face double the risk of mental health problems, including depression and anxiety. This problem is already here full-force: a 2023 Gallup poll found the average teenager uses social media for 4.8 hours per day.
When confronted with rising rates of depression among teenagers, some say the numbers could be due to increased openness about mental health struggles, leading to a higher rate of diagnosis.
However, decreased stigma around mental health cannot explain the marked increase in ER admissions due to self-harm in teenagers over the last 15 years. These numbers show that depression is not simply being noticed more often. It exists at a higher rate and is leading to an increase in serious self-harm attempts.
The particular upward spike in these rates began in 2012, the same year smartphones began to be used by the majority of Americans.
Societal erosion
Social media’s most pernicious and overlooked danger is its impact on people’s basic ability to socialize.
People are simply not spending time with others the way they used to. I have written about large-scale loneliness before, as it continues to be one of the greatest social problems facing the modern world. The U.S. Surgeon General dubbed the issue an “Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation“ in 2023, stressing that the negative health impacts of loneliness are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
The Atlantic’s “The Anti-Social Century” details how modern technologies are encouraging people to act like agoraphobes, to their detriment. People think they are happier in their solitude, while the data shows they are wrong.
Teens in particular are suffering. Teenagers are less likely than previous generations to have more than one close friend or go on a date, and are spending less time with their friends than ever.
Thus, teens are experiencing a drastic decrease in general happiness.
Psychologist Jean Twenge studied predictors of happiness among high schoolers. Every activity that was spent away from a screen, such as sports or in-person interaction, was associated with increased happiness. All activities that took place on a screen were associated with decreased happiness.
Claims like those of Mark Zuckerberg, who said, “There is no link between social media and negative health outcomes among young people,” are wrong.
The politics
Any sort of political successes from social media are counterbalanced by numerous examples of dire political consequences.
For every teenager who became a liberal due to TikToks about Bernie Sanders, there is another teenager who became a raging misogynist after being fed Andrew Tate and Sneako’s content. For every enlightened article shared, there is also another post about Q-Anon or white nationalism.
The broad-scale societal consequences of social media are simply too severe for any benefits to outweigh.
Patrick J. Kennedy, a Democrat who served Rhode Island, said: “We, as a country, have seen companies and industries take advantage of the addiction-for-profit. Purdue, tobacco. Social media’s the next big one … We have to go after the devastating impact that these companies are having on our kids.”
We already have laws keeping harmful, addictive substances like alcohol and nicotine out of the hands of minors. Technologies this addictive and this pernicious are the logical next step.
Our generation bore the harms of an adolescence spent online. It has led to horrific mental health outcomes, and unconscionable increases in teen suicide.
Without intervention, this will only get worse. Our generation’s children will be subject to worse technological harms than we can currently imagine.
Our government must fight back. In a rare turn of events, wise words out of Gov. Cox: “The well-being of our children must come before corporate profits.”
