Some parents who have already limited their kids’ access to social media say a proposed government ban would make their efforts to protect their children far more effective.
They say their kids face peer pressure to join the platforms, and even have access to computers at school where they can access the sites without their parents knowing.
Demand is mounting for the federal government to act quickly to prevent kids under 16 from using social media, with advocates pointing to a New Mexico court ruling that found Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed information about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms.
And a Canada-wide survey carried out last month by Angus Reid found three-quarters of more than 4,000 respondents were in favour of a ban like the one in Australia, where youth under 16 are prevented from setting up accounts on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and Threads.
Jennifer Gill, who lives in Charlottetown, P.E.I., says she knew from the time her three youngest kids — who range in age from 12 to 14 — were little that she wouldn’t let them use social media until they were adults.
That’s because she saw the negative effect it had on her now-28-year-old eldest daughter’s mental health as a teenager.
She says she worries about what kind of content her younger kids might see online, for instance sexual images and violent videos that aren’t age appropriate.
“The government’s not doing a very good job of letting parents know the harm. It’s just being normalized, honestly. The RCMP called sextortion, I think the wording was a ‘public safety emergency for youth,’” she said. “So that’s terrifying.”
And while Gill has worked hard to make sure her house is a safe place for her kids, even restricting their access to the internet when she’s not around to supervise, it’s a different story when they’re out of sight.
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“As soon as they get on the school bus, they sit next to somebody with a smartphone who can show them anything. They can show them porn, …they can show them viral videos of people being murdered. These are things that kids have access to on the phone,” she said.
Rebecca Snow, who founded the Toronto chapter of Unplugged Canada, a group that encourages parents to hold off on giving their kids smartphones until they’re at least 14, said governments have stepped in to protect kids from doing other things that might be bad for them, like drinking and smoking.
It makes sense to set an age limit for social media, too, she said, given the growing body of evidence that it’s bad for young people.
She said she set a boundary with her 12-year-old daughter Lyra early on, but it’s much harder for parents who only realize the detrimental effects of social media after buying their kids a smartphone.
Lyra said many of her peers have the devices, and some of them question why she doesn’t, telling her she’s “too old” not to have one.
She used to feel that way too, she said.
“I used to not really know about all the harmful things on social media and stuff and the people that could steal your information or do bad things. So I didn’t really know why (I) shouldn’t be on it,” Lyra said.
Though Lyra is more accepting of her parents’ rules now, in the past it led to conflict in her family.
“It sucks as parents that we’re the ones who have to do something,” Snow said. “And that’s why we would love to see legislation around this, because it shouldn’t really all be in our hands.”
Snow is concerned about how accessing social media will affect her kids’ mental health, and how it might lead to so-called “attention fragmentation,” where the brain constantly switches between different stimuli, potentially shrinking kids’ attention spans and leading to cognitive difficulties.
Even Snow, who has gone out of her way to learn about the effects of social media on kids, said her efforts to keep her daughter off of the apps have sometimes been in vain.
Snow said Lyra has access to an iPad, and asked if she could download CapCut, an online video editing tool developed by ByteDance, the company behind TikTok.
Snow thought it sounded fine, until she saw how her daughter was using it: she was scrolling through TikTok-like videos. Each of the video templates on the app has examples of how it’s been employed by other users, and that’s what she’d been looking at, Lyra said.
“I didn’t realize that’s what this was,” Snow said. “And so I looked into it a bit, did some digging online. I was, like, ‘Oh, right. It’s just yet another app that I don’t want my kid to have.’ It’s quite exhausting as a parent.”
Snow deleted the app from Lyra’s iPad.
Calls to take such decisions out of parents’ hands appear to be working.
Federal Liberal party members recently passed a non-binding resolution calling for a ban, and Culture Minister Marc Miller said earlier this month the government was “very seriously” considering it.
On Saturday, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew announced his government would move to ban children from using social media accounts and artificial intelligence chatbots.
Details on the age limit or how the province would implement such a ban have not been revealed.
“These tools have been designed by … people who understand our psychology, who understand our biology. And they have designed these tools and optimized them to hack our children’s reward system in their brain,” Kinew said.
“These are forces that contribute to anxiety and depression. These are forces that lead to young women being trafficked.”