Richard Hogan: Is social media exploiting your child? Here's what you need to know

The federal lawsuit of Meta alleges they knowingly harm the mental health of platform users

These tech companies have direct access to our children and are providing them with apps that allow them to be secretive, such as Snapchat, where messages immediately disappear.

The recent federal lawsuit of Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, is the result of a bipartisan investigation by nearly every Attorney General across America.

They allege that Meta knowingly harm the mental health of their social media users by intentionally designing platforms to be addictive. They argue that Meta purposely designed and deployed features to keep young users online longer.

I have always said that these platforms are designed by very clever psychologists, and that parents need to upskill themselves to protect their children from the insidiously greedy hands of these tech giants.

Now, we have the proof.

And parents must listen to what this complaint is alleging. Features such as infinite scroll, push notifications, and the ‘like’ button are far from benign when you analyse their application. They are there to keep children trafficking the platform. To keep us all trafficking the platform. 

The more time spent on the app, the more revenue made.

Put simply, they want our children endlessly scrolling their platforms, regardless of the impact on their health. Now, that should send a shiver down the spine of all parents reading this!

When I was young if a company wanted to reach me as their target audience, they would have to go through my parents. Therefore, the company would make the product parent-friendly. But times have changed.

These tech companies have direct access to our children and are providing them with apps that allow them to be secretive, such as Snapchat, where messages immediately disappear.

Anyone working in schools or with a teenager in the house will know how problematic that is, and the suffering it causes its users. Why would any company develop a product that allows messaging between children to be more surreptitious and deceptive? Because they know that’s what teenagers want.

The increase of bullying on these platforms is frightening, and very difficult to deal with as a teacher or clinician.

The complaint also argues that the tech giant violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by routinely collecting data on children under the age of 13 without parents’ permission. The fact that they are collecting data on underage users illuminates just how unscrupulous these tech companies are, and how motivated they are to indoctrinate the next generation of children, the next generation of revenue.

Richard Hogan: "We all should have a tech policy in the family. Our children need help to manage thier usage of these devices." Picture: Moya Nolan

Meta received more than 1.1m reports of users under the age of 13 on its Instagram platform since early 2019 and yet ‘disabled only a fraction’ of those accounts, according to the complaint. Now, as parents, what must we do with this information?

For many years, in my clinic, I have watched parents grapple with whether or not they should check their children’s device usage. They felt it was an invasion of their privacy, or they questioned were they were being overly zealous in their child’s life.

The truth about social media and the damage it is doing to our children is slowly coming to consciousness. Meta have tried to block this information from going into the public domain. I think they know parents would be more actively involved in their children’s device usage if they learned the truth about how they are being exploited.

This would mean less time on their apps, and therefore less revenue for these companies. We must never give away our parental agency to these tech companies, because they do not have our children’s best interest at heart. In fact, the terrible truth is emerging, they know they are harming our children.

We all should have a tech policy in the family. Our children need help to manage their usage of these devices. We now know they are designed to be addictive, so they need help to have free time from them during the day.

Children may initially fight against this, but once it is in place in the family, they will start to accept it and start to connect with things they once loved.

I see it with my own children. How quickly they fall into play, when forced off tv or a device. We should have moments during the day free from technology. Dinner time should be a sacred space where we all get to be together, and share our day.

I meet so many families where dinner has transmuted into separate spaces to consume technology.

Our children are only living with us for such a short space of time, we should not let technology steal precious moments from us. Moments we will never be able to get back, once they are gone.

It is obvious that we need clear and robust legislation to protect our children from these tech giants. But we must also parent it. The recent report from the new media regulator, Jeremy Godfrey on limiting children’s access to hardcore extreme material is welcomed and much overdue. However, the fact that he said legislation wouldn’t be absolutely prescriptive, to me, makes it all a bit futile. Like these companies genuinely don’t want children trafficking their platforms. We need strong legislation that puts responsibility back on these companies to be better and safer, after making such exorbitant amounts of revenue from our children.

That’s it! And finally, we might put money second, and the health of our children first.