Social media moral panic

Facebook and its subsidiary, Instagram, are under a lot of criticism -- some legitimate, and some less so -- for potentially unethical business practices, including adversely affecting “teen mental health.” This seems like a good time to put on our Mad/Neurodiversity and youth rights lenses and look critically at the moral panic around “teen mental health” and the proposed “solutions” to the “problem.” 

First, to get the obvious out of the way: Facebook/Instagram, like other media companies, is a soulless corporation. It does not care about you. It is not your friend. To the extent that it tries to make its users happy, this is only in pursuit of encouraging users to continue using its products. 

However, social media and the internet are powerful communication tools that can provide teenagers (and other people whose lives are tightly controlled) a rare and precious opportunity to communicate with others and consume media without the regulation, censorship, and pathologization of adult authority. Surveys of teens show that they rely on social media not because they are inherently “addicted” to it, but because it is their only outlet for the unsupervised socialization they need (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201402/five-myths-about-young-people-and-social-media). 

Moral panic about “teen mental health” is generally used to promote stricter control and greater oversight over teens’ lives, whether by parents, schools, companies, or governments. The solution to emotional distress in teenagers is always more regulation, more censorship, less freedom, less mobility. Yet teenagers, perhaps even more than any other age group, have a powerful need for independence, autonomy, self-directed socialization, and identity formation. Relentless overscheduling, monitoring, and supervision will naturally result in teenagers’ becoming anxious, despondent, and rebellious -- which is used to justify even greater control. Beatings will continue until morale improves, and micromanagement will continue until mental health improves. Is it any surprise that teenagers living in these conditions will increasingly retreat into the relative freedom of the virtual? 

 One of the allegations being repeated in news coverage is a study that 17% of teenage girls say that Instagram worsens their eating disorders (https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-knows-data-instagram-eating-disorders-suicidal-thoughts-whistleblower-2021-10). I couldn’t find evidence of how many teen girls or other users say that Instagram or other social media content helps them improve, navigate, manage, or reverse their eating disorders -- this is surely a nonzero number, but the articles I’ve read haven’t indicated what it might be. Anyway, “Eating disorder” is a broad umbrella category for a variety of conditions and disabilities that affect people’s ability to nourish themselves. They can have an infinite variety of manifestations and causes. One proximate cause that people with eating disorders often cite as a stress factor is pressure to conform to a specific body type, so, yes, it is unsurprising that for some people, an (often) appearance-focused medium like Instagram can contribute to eating disorder stresses. But another proximate cause that people with eating disorders also often cite as a stress factor is lack of control over one’s life. Such as, for example, being relentlessly monitored and having parents or other authority figures control, monitor, and censor media consumption. (Or, for example, the overwhelming majority of eating disorder “treatments,” especially “family” treatments, which are inherently coercive and abusive.) 

As an elder Millennial, I didn’t have Facebook or Instagram in my teen years. For me, it was blogs, chatrooms, forums, and fanfiction. Some of the online media I consumed and social interactions I had were helpful, some were harmful, and none would have been better with a parent or authority figure monitoring my actions. The internet did not cause me to feel bad about my fat body or my neurodivergent brain, because teachers, family members, doctors, official school curricula, government propaganda, and every other source of information and authority in my life had already done that. If I had learned and communicated only through school-approved, parent-approved, or government-approved sources, I would have continued to believe as I was taught, that fatness was a problem and weight loss was an attainable and desirable goal, that “disorder” and “intelligence” were real objective things with real objective value, and that the United States government has always been on the side of human rights throughout its history. 

We can and should challenge the way corporations monopolize and manipulate the tools of communication. We can do this without feeding into “teen mental health” moral panic that proposes that teenagers need even more monitoring, oversight, and censorship. Instead, we can re-imagine a youth liberatory environment, online or in person, in which teenagers and others are free to communicate, encounter different ideas, or just chat with their friends without intrusive supervision. Be skeptical of panic around “problems” for which the “solution” is proposed as greater governmental or parental censorship.