Help reduce social media’s harm to our mental health 🤗
What politicians are doing, and the next steps we activists can take.
I want to share a quick…
Thank you!
You blew me away by how you and a thousand others showed enthusiasm to support this mission. Let's bring regulation to reduce social media’s harm to our mental health.
Two of the many responses:
“Very excited to hear about this project!! If you ever need help with something, let me know! This cause is absolutely my passion. We have an uphill battle ahead of us, but I believe we can do it!”
“Instead of being along for the journey I’d like to contribute in any way I can. Social media has my (our) generation in quite the pickle.”
Overview in case you want to skip ahead.
(5-minute read)
A root cause of the mental health crisis.
Strategies to regulate social media companies.
The next steps we are taking and how you can help.
1. A Root Cause of the Mental Health Crisis
In the book The Depression Cure, author Dr. Stephen Ilardi highlights part of the problem:
“There’s a profound mismatch between the genes we carry, the bodies and brains that they are building, and the world that we find ourselves in. […] We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, socially isolated, fast-food-laden, sleep-deprived frenzied pace of modern life.”
Stephen discusses how a tribe in Papua New Guinea has a 500x lower rate of mental health issues per capita than America, and they spend nearly nothing on mental health care. Engrained in their culture, they spend time outside, exercise, sleep well, have a strong sense of connection, and play.
The average life of an American looks different. Teens now consume 7.7 hours of daily non-school-related screen time. If kids spend 8 hours on school and sleep for 7, that leaves them around an hour for everything else.
The most used apps include Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter.
These social media platforms want us to spend as much time with them, but they don’t have sufficient incentives to reduce harm to our mental health.
Social media platforms harm our mental health.
Facebook created a well-being team to research their impact on our mental health. The team discovered that the number of Facebook visits strongly positively correlated with poor mental health. Shortly after, Facebook shut the team down. The team’s finding stood in direct contrast to the company-wide goal Facebook later set to optimize for the number of visits.
This is why regulators need to step in.
2. Regulatory Strategies
Regulators have proposed regulations to reduce these platforms’ harm towards our mental health. These include:
forcing the platforms to set a daily 30-minute usage time limit. If a user disables this limit, the platform needs to re-disable it at the beginning of each month; and
a 0.5% tax on the platforms’ profits to go towards more research for regulations.
These regulations would be helpful to a degree. They are like putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound. For Facebook, a 0.5% tax on profits cost them less than $100 million a year. A drop in the ocean compared to the $5 billion fine Facebook received for violating our privacy. That fine drove them to dramatically shift how they cared for our privacy.
Measurements and accountability.
To regulate adequately, we need:
to measure the impact these companies have on our mental health;
strictly define what constitutes harm; and
hold them accountable with sufficient fines.
This is similar to privacy regulations, and environmental regulations that force companies to measure and limit their CO2 emissions.
Addiction is easy to measure.
One possibility is to measure the number of people addicted to each platform and the severity of the addictions. One addiction criteria accounts for anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges. It does this by evaluating if new or existing psychological issues were exacerbated by or started by the addiction.
Like a carbon credits scheme, governments could limit social media’s harm to our mental landscape. A limit so that each platform can only have a small percentage of their users severely addicted. If they go above that, they’d have to pay. Or governments could say that they won’t allow any constituents to have a social media addiction — if found otherwise, they would fine the company.
Enforce a better impact on our mental health.
It could look something like this for Facebook: Regulators set the acceptable limit of people severely addicted to Facebook to 3%, and anything above Facebook pays $1000 per user per year. Regulators or a third party would survey Americans to estimate the number of people addicted to Facebook. If the results found that 5% of American Facebook users were addicted, they’d have to pay for $1000 for each of the 2% of American Facebook users. Looking at social media addiction studies today, it seems the fine could be in the billions if the platforms don’t change. The measurements and penalties would happen every year — holding these companies to a new standard for our mental health.
If these companies have billions of dollars at stake, they will optimize their product to be less addictive, and by proxy, less harmful to our mental health.
For many years, I've felt excited by the idea of social media companies—with some of the best engineers, designers, and product makers—creating products great for our mental health. I also have many unanswered questions.
How would social media change if they focused on improving our mental health?
How would it shape our friendships, our existing communities, or new ones? How would it shape our self-care routines around sleep, mindfulness, and exercise? How would it impact our perception of our body image?
How would the newsfeeds—where billions of hours are currently spent daily—change when optimized to reduce harm to our mental health? How would this impact online bullying? How would the newsfeed algorithm changes affect content creators and journalists? Would these shifts impact other problems like fake news and political polarization? What are the risks of this regulation?
I’ll explore all the questions above with experts and share the findings in future newsletters.
If Facebook, Tiktok, Twitter, and Instagram shifted focus to reduce their harm to your mental health, what changes do you think would happen? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the comments below.
3. The next steps and how you can help
We have started to make a political map. It highlights politicians and influential organizations with similar goals behind the regulation.
For relevant countries, we will research the legislative options to bring this legislation in place.
We are connecting with aligned professors. To better understand this regulation's effects on our mental health, social media, and on the media.
We will connect with political strategists and lobbyists to learn about potential blindspots and roadblocks we may face to bring this legislation in place.
We will connect with politicians from step 1 to interview them to get their perspective on this proposed policy, learn where it currently sits in their list of priorities, learn about roadblocks they currently or think they may face.
As I work on the above, I’ll write a book to help bring the legislation to reduce social media’s harm to our mental health.
Would love your help to get in contact with:
professors studying technology’s impact on mental health, addiction, and social media and traditional media’s impact on society; and
lobbyists, political strategists, and legislators (i.e., members of the FTC).
If you can help out with either of those or want to help map the politicians who’ve shown interest in regulating social media’s harm on our mental health — shoot me an email at seider.daniel@gmail.com.
Thank you for reading this far. Informing yourself has an impact on this movement. Spreading the word helps too — in conversations with friends and family or sharing what we produce.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Let’s start a dialog in the comments section below.
Until next time,
Dan
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I'm very appreciative of this project and the work that you are doing. As someone who lives with depression, I'm here to help you and this cause in any way that I can.
i’m so excited to hear about the development of this project!! sending you and all those involved all the love i have ❤️