<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/10/the-social-media-moral-panic-is-all-about-confusing-risks-harms/>
"What if the reason we’re so worried about teens on Instagram, TikTok, or
Snapchat is because we’ve fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the digital
world? What if we’re confusing the everyday risks of growing up online with the
specter of unavoidable harm?
No one is better at covering the moral panic about “the kids these days and
their social media” than danah boyd. She literally wrote the book on this a
decade ago (a decade ago!) and every time she weighs in, it’s with something
deeply insightful and enlightening.
Her latest is a must-read. It makes a very clear point on something that had
been bothering me, but which I was unable to put into words: there’s a
difference between risk and harm, and the people pushing the moral panic about
social media harms are deliberately blurring the lines between those two
things:
In short, “Does social media harm teenagers?” is not the same question as
“Can social media be risky for teenagers?”
The language of “harm” in this question is causal in nature. It is also
legalistic. Lawyers look for “harms” to place blame on or otherwise regulate
actants. By and large, in legal contexts, we talk about PersonA harming
PersonB. As such, PersonA is to be held accountable. But when we get into
product safety discussions, we also talk about how faulty design creates the
conditions for people to be harmed due to intentional, malfeasant actions by
the product designer. Making a product liability claim is much harder
because it requires proving the link of harm and the intentionality to harm.
Risk is a different matter. Getting out of bed introduces risks into your
life. Risk is something to identify and manage. Some environments introduce
more potential risks and some actions reduce the risks. Risk management is a
skill to develop. And while regulation can be used to reduce certain risks,
it cannot eliminate them. And it can also backfire and create more risks.
(This is the problem that María Angel and I have with techno-legal
solutionism.)
This is a point I’ve tried (and failed) to get across for a while, so I greatly
appreciate the way she put it here. No one is saying that social media is a
riskless environment. But nothing is truly a riskless environment."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
