Safety of children prompts FTC to weigh up psychological impact of social media

MLex Market Insight

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4.9 • 9 Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

US President Joe Biden has sounded a warning to social-media companies: Put child safety ahead of profits. Meanwhile, some lawmakers and policy officials are arguing that the best way to keep children out of harm’s way is to ensure they stay off social-media platforms altogether. For its part, the FTC says that to address the problem, it needs to get a better understanding of the kind of harm children may be suffering when logging on to digital platforms — an understanding that may require the agency to hire staff psychologists.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to another Emlex podcast.
0:14.2	I'm Laurel Henning, a Sydney-based senior reporter for Emlex, and it's great to have your company.
0:20.0	Today, in the second of a group of three podcasts
0:22.7	looking into the US Federal Trade Commission, we look at TikTok and Instagram, just two social
0:29.3	media companies that can expect more calls to put child safety over profit after US President
0:35.2	Joe Biden recently cast them as pied pipers, luring and keeping
0:40.0	kids online despite the risks to their mental health. Biden, for the second year in a row,
0:45.9	urged Congress to ban targeted advertising to children at his State of the Union address.
0:51.4	But this year, he went further and told social media companies to stop using
0:56.5	children as a social experiment for profit, citing growing mental health concerns. Here to discuss
1:03.8	Biden's State of the Union address and doubling down on his growing concerns around social
1:08.7	media companies is Emlack's senior correspondent Amy Miller,
1:12.9	who joins me now from San Francisco.
1:15.7	So, Amy, you note in your analysis of Biden's address a change in tone.
1:20.9	What's driving that?
1:22.7	Well, there are a growing number of studies linking addiction to social media to real harms for kids,
1:27.4	like depression,
1:28.6	eating disorder, suicidal ideation. There's still a lot of uncertainty such as what's the
1:34.8	definition of addiction, what is social media, but there's a general consensus building that
1:40.6	the potential harms to kids from spending too much time on social media are real.
1:45.2	I mean, so to overstate the obvious, this is a pressing issue, but are other policymakers in D.C.
1:50.0	also chiming in, and if so, what are they saying?
	...

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