Starting them young: Is Facebook hooking children on social media?

by ROBERTO J. GONZALEZ

PHOTO/paz.ca/CC by 2.0

Over the past few months, social media companies have come under increasing scrutiny from media critics, watchdog groups, and US congressional committees.

Much of the criticism has focused upon how Facebook and Twitter facilitated the propagation of inflammatory messages created by Russian agents during the 2016 US presidential elections, ostensibly to polarize American voters. Self-serve advertising, “filter bubbles,” and other aspects of social media have made mass targeted manipulation easy and efficient.

Yet some are voicing deeper concerns about the social, psychological, cognitive, and emotional effects of social media–particularly as they impact children.

For example, Facebook has come under attack from an unlikely group of critics: some of its own former executives. Their comments coincide with the debut of “Messenger Kids,” Facebook’s latest product. According to reports its target audience is 6- to 12-year old children. (Like most other social media apps, Facebook does not allow people younger than 13 years old to create accounts.)

Despite Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent resolution to “fix” Facebook in 2018, “Messenger Kids” reveals a different agenda: to scoop up a new generation of users, habituate them to the virtual life, increase market share, and develop brand loyalty in a highly competitive marketplace. Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, acknowledged late last year that its creators intentionally designed the platform to consume as much of users’ time and attention as possible. According to Parker, “likes” and “posts” serve as “a social validation feedback loop” exploiting the psychological need for social acceptance. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he said (quoted in Allen 2017).

Why would the architects of Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, and other social media platforms resort to these techniques? Facebook’s business model is based on revenue generated from advertising. An early Facebook investor, Roger McNamee (2018), recently wrote:

Smartphones changed the advertising game completely. It took only a few years for billions of people to have an all-purpose content delivery system easily accessible sixteen hours or more a day. This turned media into a battle to hold users’ attention as long as possible. . .Why pay a newspaper in the hopes of catching the attention of a certain portion of its audience, when you can pay Facebook to reach exactly those people and no one else?

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