🔞 The Kids Are Alright: Teens and Social Media

I joined my first online community at 13 years old. We built a role-playing game based on professional wrestling. I was the "general manager", writing out storylines for my friends. I marketed my website on Quebec's biggest discussion forum and ended up getting a column on the site a few months after. I reviewed Monday Night Raw every week on the platform and gained a certain following thanks to, and I kid you not, my puns.

I spent my whole high school years meeting people online that I had never seen in real life. Looking back, I am certain online communities were positive for my teenage self.

That was before Facebook and smartphones; before Amanda Todd died by suicide following cyber-bullying; before Rehtaeh Parsons died by suicide following cyber-bullying.

We know from the Facebook papers that Meta knows about Instagram's negative influence on teenage girls' self-perception.

So when the Pew Research Center publishes a large survey about teen life on social media in 2022, we should be expecting stress and anguish, right?

Not at all. Even the opposite. Are we succumbing to a moral panic? Let's dig into it.

😘 Teens Value Online Connections and Relationships

The majority of teens say that in general, social media allows them to feel connected to what happens in their friends' lives (80%), to show their creative side (71%), to feel supported in tough times (67%), and to feel accepted (58%). Think about how you would respond. Probably the same, right?

Ok, we would add puppy pics.

This brings me back to this post from Mark Zuckerberg during Facebook's first "Community Summit":

Doesn't sound like some virtual reality headset bullshit, right?

Social media at its best makes us feel connected, and that's exactly what Teens are getting out of it. I have criticized Meta for its unethical business tactics and privacy flubs and will keep doing it every chance I have. Yet I recognize the platform's power. I wish Meta went back to its roots more often.

🌬Social Media is Like the Weather

The most shocking result of the study was the teens' opinions about social media's impacts on their lives. 32% evaluate social media's impact as positive, 9% say they have been mostly negative and a whopping 59% claim it's neither.

Just like the weather. It's there. It's part of life. Sometimes it rains, and sometimes it pours. How to recognize the impact of social media when you are a digital native? My Algerian neighbour feels winter has a negative impact on him because he was born in a hot climate. Winter for me is snowmen and 20 minutes to dress up my kids every morning. Just another day at the office.

Of course, the subtext here is content moderation. Trying to contain speech on social media is as vain as containing the wind. Yes, we need safeguards from shit-storms. But we have got to let the breeze... breeze by. Put on a fur coat and arctic boots. In the metaphor, these are basic online protection and awareness practices.

👩 We Can't Ignore the Dangers to Girls

The main reason why Teens feel bad about social media is "feeling overwhelmed because of all the drama". The second one is "feeling left out of things". I'm in my thirties, and I can confirm those feelings pre-date Facebook.

A close third is the "pressure to post content to get likes", which is indeed a new phenomenon. "Likes" offer a quantifiable popularity contest metric and there is no doubt these generate anxiety. Numbers approve.

Does that mean we should pressure Meta and TikTok to remove "Like" buttons for teens, based on 29% saying they feel pressured to post content? I am no psychologist, but I see such a solution as a way to increase anxiety through avoidance. Plus, once again, only 9% of teens claim social media is negative!

What's striking is the girls' answers. Girls, especially 15 to 17, are more likely to suffer from negative emotions.  Up to half of them self-censor out of fear of being exposed or bullied, for example. They rate 10% to 12% higher than boys in all "negative emotions" answers.

Based on the survey's data, I am convinced we should invest our limited resources in educating teenage girls on the pressure these platforms create on their social capital and appearance. Meta is making strides to protect teens from sexual predators and sextortion. But it's not enough. If you are a parent, an educator, or just your community's main "techie", the best investment of your time and influence is raising awareness about the feedback loops the algorithms can create and how they generate anxious thoughts.

🔊 Politics is a Marginal Phenomenon for Teens and 😯 Privacy As Well

One of the reasons why I quit Facebook in 2014 during my twenties was witnessing how some people I otherwise liked in real life turned into trash-talking political freaks online.

That's got to be similar for teens, doesn't it? According to the data, less than 10% say social media matters to get involved in political issues. Only 6% say they use social media to express their political opinions! Let that sink in. It should be noted that the survey defines "political speech" broadly. Posting a "Black Lives Matter" image, for example, constitutes political activity.  

Privacy does not stand out either. Only 20% of teens feel concerned about their personal information. This shouldn't shock you. The portrait we have is one where teenagers forge a personal online presence. Their concerns gravitate toward themselves, their peers, and their communities. Politics, privacy, and data remain abstract constructions.

Yet online privacy matters. But you can't speak to a teenager about the Meta Pixel or third-party cookies. Any privacy discussion must connect with relationships in a more tangible way: did you know based on your search queries Instagram can predict whether you are pregnant? Did you know advertisers can target you based on whether you are single or not? Did you know everything you like will forever be associated with you, even that old, stupid song?

Who let the dogs out?

🥊 Quick Hits

• 🤵Tech Layoffs might be a sign of Big Tech becoming just like any other industry. Hypergrowth based on untapped markets will fade. Tech companies will switch to a traditional business model of incremental profitability. Look at how Netflix had the world at their feet when it killed Blockbuster. Now there are more streaming services than people can afford. They're exploring ads, jacking prices, and scraping the bottom of the barrel to squeeze revenue out of shared accounts. We're far from the revolutionary company we've grown to love. They've become cable back again.  (Full story)
• 🪖 Cyberwar is real. Russian spyware disguised as dev tooling was injected into CDC and US Army apps. If you work in cybersecurity expect humongous market pressure on supply-chain risk (Story). Meanwhile, FBI Director is "very concerned" about China's backdoors into TikTok. In related news, Meta deleted US propaganda accounts ("influence operations") from Middle Eastern and Central Asia countries. I guess the FBI director is the pot calling the kettle black here.

🤖 AI Has Mastered Text-Based Communications: How Will This Impact Your Work

Many AI landmarks show the technology might have hit a tipping point. Riot Games and Ubisoft are partnering to deploy new machine-learning models which detect harmful conversations. Tencent music is flooding Chinese streaming services with AI-generated vocals. Google is working on AI that writes and fixes code.

Most notably, Meta created a bot that masters the board game Diplomacy. Cicero, the AI, was trained on general internet text and over 40,000 human games. Not only does the AI beat human players, but it passes the now-obsolete "Turing test" on detecting whether the AI can pass as human.

The breakthrough shows how generative AI can master any game based on a finite set of rules. What does that mean in plain language? Many jobs, while they require communication, act as sorts of "games". Think of how most of these tasks run on "playbooks": product support, price negotiation, job postings, applicant review, vendor selection, etc.

Will Cicero steal your job in the next five years? Measure the amount of empathy you need to succeed. Computers will never pull off the real connection we've evolved to crave for the past 200,000 years. When you identify tasks that require empathy, maximize them. They are the ones you will keep doing for five years, while you train your "AI app" to do the heavy lifting. If your day-to-day involves a finite set of situations, regardless of the number (the leap from 10 to 10,000 to 100 million is not a stretch for bots anymore), prepare to either use AI apps in your field or to get disrupted. Embrace complex and chaotic problems that deal with emotions and politics. Bots can't think outside the box... yet.

It can!

🎧 Quote of the Week