Recently, a story posted by the BBC talks about the most recent case against Meta, which has been sued by “Kaley G.M” about the mental issues she gained previously as a teen due to her addiction to social media. Kaley is suing so these companies can put better regulations on their apps, and won her case in a Los Angeles courtroom.
Besides her, there are other individuals who are also suing social media apps like Instagram, including Ellen Roome, who is suing TikTok for the death of her son.
When I first found out about these cases, I thought for a while about it until I came up with the conclusion that the social media apps are not the only entities to blame for child and teen addiction to social media.
I asked one of Big Sky’s school counselors, Molly Wilson, about her opinions on the current situation of kids and teens using social media as well, and she said that, “It’s really complex and can’t narrow it down to one thing.”
Wilson believes that while tech companies purposely design their apps to be more addicting, she also thinks that lots of parents are laid back when it comes to technology, so they are also to blame.
When it comes to what she believes and what I believe, I would say that how we see the social media addiction dilemma is pretty similar, though it does seem Wilson leans more towards the companies being at fault because of the way they advertise their platforms specifically for kids. But I see it more as parents’ fault because I think parents could have total control over that problem, but most choose not to.
Anna Gronewold, who is a reporter for Morning Consult, wrote a story on who’s really to blame for tech addiction in kids and teens. Gronewold made a poll on who do adults blame for child’s addiction to tech, and of the 2,201 adults who answered the poll, 77% said that it’s definitely a problem for children. Of those who responded, 60% blamed parents and 10% blamed the tech companies. And of those 2,201 respondents, 642 of them were parents, and even then 56% still blamed parents.
From all this, my opinion on a way to deal with social media addiction among teens and children is to focus more on parents and what they could do to be more responsible with their kids and tech instead of putting most of the blame on the companies. Hypothetically, if I was an adult, I would definitely limit what my kids can watch and for how long. I would keep them away from social media until I properly educated them on the risks of being on it.
