Some links for you regarding children and the internet – both their use of it and their images.
I’ve written this before, and it bears repeating, particularly with the rise of AI. Back when social media first became a thing, there was a short time in which parents became aware of the risk of putting their children’s images online. There were stories of pedophiles scraping images from the internet and repurposing them. There was, maybe for a year or less, great concern.
And then everyone…forgot?
I’m not sure how or why that happened, especially since the risk has only increased.
Unless you have a private, limited account, I don’t understand why you’d put images of your kids online at this point.
Taking a slightly different angle, I don’t think centering children on your social media – even if you’re not a repulsive vlogger or person who outright profits from your child or family’s images and antics online – is beyond reconsideration or continual discernment. Lots of reasons, but two stand out to me: First, children can’t consent. They just can’t. You can say to a 5-year old, “Is it okay for Mommy to put the video of you playing online?” and the child will probably say yes, but in no way is that fully informed, consent. No way,
Secondly, it’s a path of formation that teaches a child that he or she can or even should live life as performance. Even the well-intentioned “we’re just trying to help” “we’re just trying to share images of happy family life” “this is a homeschooling account, for pete’s sake! What else are we going to do?” communicate this way of being in the world.
I also think it’s just weird to invite strangers into your child’s life in this way, and yes if your account is public, that is exactly what you are doing. It’s like taking down the walls on the front of your house and inviting everyone who walks by to peer in. I don’t get it.
Of course, there’s a history to mothers repurposing family life in creative ways. Before Instagram, even before the Mommyblogs were the Writers – the most well known being Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck. Bombeck, in particular, wrote very popular syndicated columns that were regularly collected into best-selling books, all about motherhood, parenting and family life.
What’s the difference? Plenty. There’s a big difference between filtering your experiences, gently disguising identities – using pseudonyms or no names at all – and putting these experiences into print weeks, months or years after they’ve occurred – and plastering your kids’ and family’s images online for thousands or even millions to see instantly, with no secret about their names, interests, quirks or locations.
Big difference.
Anyway, rant over, time for links:
Sarah Adams, of Mom Uncharted, puts it well:
Children cannot give informed consent to have their image and existence used as content on the internet in perpetuity.
Parents need to wake-up and realize that what they are doing will have real-life ramifications and consequences for their children. It’s time parents prioritize their children’s right to privacy, informed consent and digital safety over their personal desire for online fame.
It’s also time for “followers” to click unfollow and stop supporting parents who exploit their children (think family vloggers and influencers who have turned their children into content, monetized their existence and commercialized their childhood).
Oversharing has become so normal that many parents have stopped thinking critically about it. Children are fully autonomous human beings and parents are creating a digital footprint for them that they did not consent to and cannot change. It’s not fair.
Kids are not content. Parents- pause before you post ❤️
Sarah is on Instagram and TikTok. Her Linktree has many useful resources. She’s doing great work.
One of the issues she regularly highlights is the exploitation of girls online, sometimes of their own volition, most of the time by their mothers. (One of the many reasons I am so wary of the current, Mama, trust yourself! mantra. Sorry, but mama can be problematic, to say the least. ) Let’s put it this way – if a mom-run account of a little girl who’s a dancer, a gymnast, or just a cute model-wanna-be takes “subscribers”…..you can be pretty sure what’s going on.
Here’s the WSJ piece on Instagram and pedophile networks. Paywall-free, so read and be horrified.
As many have pointed out Meta wastes no time in disappearing and suppressing accounts it deems problematic. Why so much hand-wringing here?
The main point of this investigation, though, is how Instagram’s processes actually help build pedophile networks – through suggesting accounts and allowing certain hashtags to continue to be used.
The company tried to disable those hashtags amid its response to the queries by the Journal. But within a few days Instagram was again recommending new variations of the service’s name that also led to accounts selling purported underage-sex content.
Following the company’s initial sweep of accounts brought to its attention by Stanford and the Journal, UMass’s Levine checked in on some of the remaining underage seller accounts on Instagram. As before, viewing even one of them led Instagram to recommend new ones. Instagram’s suggestions were helping to rebuild the network that the platform’s own safety staff was in the middle of trying to dismantle.
A Meta spokesman said its systems to prevent such recommendations are currently being built. Levine called Instagram’s role in promoting pedophilic content and accounts unacceptable.
“Pull the emergency brake,” he said. “Are the economic benefits worth the harms to these children?”
As I said at the beginning, AI is just going to make this more challenging. AI scoops everything it can find and repurposes it, including images.
Do you really want your kids’ images to be part of that raw material?
Now, to usage. In the Atlantic, Jonathan Haidt puts it bluntly – get the phones out of schools. Now.
You might be thinking that these findings are merely correlational; maybe the smarter students are just better able to resist temptation? Perhaps, but experiments using random assignment likewise show that using or just seeing a phone or receiving an alert causes students to underperform.
For example, consider this study, aptly titled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” The students involved in the study came into a lab and took tests that are commonly used to measure memory capacity and intelligence. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups, given the following instructions: (1) Put your phone on your desk, (2) leave it in your pocket or bag, or (3) leave it out in another room. None of these conditions involve active phone use––just the potential distraction of knowing your phone is there, with texts and social-media posts waiting. The results were clear: The closer the phone was to students’ awareness, the worse they performed on the tests. Even just having a phone in their pocket sapped students’ abilities.
The problem is not just transient distraction, though any distraction in the classroom will impede learning. Heavy phone or social-media use may also have a cumulative, enduring, and deleterious effect on adolescents’ abilities to focus and apply themselves. Nearly half of American teens say that they are online “almost constantly,” and such continuous administration of small pleasures can produce sustained changes in the brain’s reward system, including a reduction of dopamine receptors. This shifts users’ general mood toward irritability and anxiety when separated from their phones, and it reduces their ability to focus. That may be one reason why heavy phone users have lower GPAs. As the neuroscientists Jaan Aru and Dmitri Rozgonjuk recently argued: “Smartphone use can be disruptively habitual, with the main detrimental consequence being an inability to exert prolonged mental effort.”
But smartphones don’t just pull students away from schoolwork; they pull them away from one another too.
One of the helpful aspects of this piece is that Haidt doesn’t just rant – he offers practical solutions.
The one thing he doesn’t mention that I think is important is that it while it would be possible to get phones out of schools without challenging the way in which education has become internet-reliant, engaging with the bigger problem is also important.
In other words, it’s one thing to say, “get off your phones” – but then the kids (and parents) will not unreasonably respond – well, then stop making every aspect of school life dependent on internet access.
Haidt’s Substack, where he explores the impact of social media on young people.
I’ll pivot a little here to the whole issue of tech and education, for it’s blindingly obvious to me that students shouldn’t be allowed to have phones in school. Not even a question. So let’s move on:
I hope the romance with tech in classrooms is at the beginning of the end, although I’m not hopeful. Perhaps educators are starting to see what a bill of goods they’ve been sold by tech companies. Perhaps parents are beginning to see that it’s all too much and it’s made the K-12 journey more complicated, rather than simpler.
But I keep coming back to this, in trying to figure out my discomfort and objections with the current push. I think it’s about the difference between presentation and process. I’m all for getting as much information as we can to students. I just have deep doubts about the value of using this kind of tech as learning tools: as tools in helping students absorb, process, write and compute. They obviously have their place, and what defines the modern workplace but screens for everyone from physicians to attorneys to architects to cashiers to the utility workers I see standing in the road, head tilted looking to the guy up in the air, tablet balanced in one hand.
It all comes down to what we think formal education is for. I think it’s for helping students learn to read, write, compute, reason and engage with the world outside their own personal bubble of individual experience. I am simply not convinced that a tech-heavy classroom experience helps in that regard, am definitely sure that it’s not necessary, and am deeply suspicious of profit-making entities that are trying to convince me otherwise.
I’ve said this before in the context of discussions about Common Core: No one is making money when teachers are using ten-year old textbooks.
The Haidt article is great; it’s nice that this issue is finally getting some (much belated) traction. I agree that getting the internet out of education entirely is also needed. Another point he misses, I think, is that phones should be banned for teachers too. From what I’ve seen, teachers are as distracted by them as kids, and kids can see the hypocrisy.
Schools, both Prek-12 and higher Ed Re still rolling the giant snowball of technology downhill faster and faster, without any thought that it can be stopped.
College homework assignments at every state university, community college, and most of the privates all their way up the the highly rejective schools are turned in via computer. Most are completed on the computer. Most no longer have any written bound book at all. Students don’t read and teachers don’t expect them to. It’s th Learning Management System (LMS) über alles.The Cengage key expires are the end of the term end with it all of your work and the ability to look up something. Pearson/Savaas and the institutions you thought were publishers no longer print books; why bother, they’re just a liability.
But even more, you can’t even log into your blackboard account or the cengage assignment without your two factor authentication sent your phone. You’re expected to reply on ms teams or your GroupMe chat at any time by your prof now. Many in person college lecture classes *require* you to use your phone during class to respond to the teacher’s multiply choice questions –thid increase engagement, they say! Leave your phone and you’re docked–becayee then the tracking software doesn’t work. (To say nothing of their tracking of you and your friends during covid insanity.)
So high school prepares for college by doing all the same thing colleges do with phone and then middle school argues they must, too. Pushing electrons around and onto devices is cheaper than sending home the Friday folder filled with paper.
We’re a long way from revolt.
Adding to the dangers of putting your kids online, please go have a quick look at josemonkey on TikTok. He challenges people to ask him where they are (usually by a quick video or else he’ll look at your recent insta vids). He tracks them down and then he shows you how he did it. And it’s not that hard.