Why parents should be worried about Facebook
It’s not because of privacy. It’s not even because of Facebook.
Baby #1: An optimistic open letter
When Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan had their first child in 2015, they published an open letter to her on Facebook.
In the letter, they praised the progress that the internet has brought to the world, and promised to keep pushing so that all children born in her generation would have access to online media.
It’s a long, effusive, optimistic outlook on the ability of technology to, in Zuckerberg and Chan’s phrasing, “advance human potential”:
Our generation grew up in classrooms where we all learned the same things at the same pace regardless of our interests or needs… Your generation [will] have technology that understands how you learn best and where you need to focus…
Even better, students around the world will be able to use personalized learning tools over the internet, even if they don’t live near good schools.
…
Yet still more than half of the world’s population — more than 4 billion people — don’t have access to the internet.
If our generation connects them, we can lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. We can also help hundreds of millions of children get an education and save millions of lives by helping people avoid disease.
Baby #2: A very different open letter
Last year, the Chan-Zuckerbergs had their second child. Once again, they wrote an open letter to her. But this time, it was very different, and not just because it was written more hastily by parents now juggling a newborn and a toddler (boy, can I relate).
The contrast is in Zuckerberg and Chan’s changed tone about technology. They’re still excited about their daughter’s future use of tech. But this time, the technologies they emphasize aren’t the internet, digital media, and screens. Instead it’s books, gardens, buckets, carousels and backyards:
The world can be a serious place. That’s why it’s important to make time to go outside and play.
You will be busy when you’re older, so I hope you take time to smell all the flowers and put all the leaves you want in your bucket now. I hope you read your favorite Dr. Seuss books so many times you start inventing your own stories about the Vipper of Vipp. I hope you ride the carousel with Max until you’ve tamed every color horse. I hope you run as many laps around our living room and yard as you want.
We all know where they’re coming from. The years following their first letter in 2015 have not been kind to the reputation of Facebook and social media in general. We’ve seen a steady stream of alarming news about how social media enables the spreading of hateful and false stories; about the ways social media multiplies the effects of bullying, exclusion, depression, and body image issues; and media that gets so good at corralling our attention that it reaches the level of addiction.
The sort of techno-utopianism that only a few years ago seemed nearly universal in Silicon Valley has come to seem naïve, irresponsible, and even corrupt.
Zuckerberg and Chan, then, are in the same boat as all of us: realizing suddenly that a huge part of their job as parents and teachers (Chan is a schoolteacher) is to keep the Internet and digital devices away from their kids.
And then there’s the privacy thing
Alarming stories about Facebook have been in the headlines plenty lately. And yet, the stories are seldom about any of the dangers I discussed above.
You’ve probably been seeing lots of headlines like this:
87 million Facebook users to find out their personal data was breached (ABC)
Facebook tracks a scary number of details about you (Business Insider)
On the one hand, this privacy stuff is scary. On the other, it’s hard to understand exactly what info has been shared with whom, and what the consequences have been. How bad is it? Nobody really seems to know. The details are a moving target, and the most disturbing related stories I’ve seen are about the consequences of anonymous targeting — for instance, showing ads to people of color in swing states intended to discourage them from voting.
As a parent of Internet users and a member of the Internet generation myself, there’s part of me that wants to shrug of the privacy concerns. Of course I’m not crazy about Cambridge Analytica and other bad actors building profiles of me from the history of what I’ve liked online. And I’m even less crazy about the idea that my children’s pictures, names and birthdays may be being collected in murky databases and sold.
I do know that powerful people, including Mark Zuckerberg, are themselves extremely private. His lawyer has said Zuck “goes to great lengths to protect the privacy of his personal life”. It can seem sometimes like privacy is becoming something only for the wealthy.
But here’s the thing: I’m so much more worried about the effects of a screen-focused and social media-focused life that the privacy worries seem insignificant.
Where privacy matters
There certainly are worrying consequences of the erosion of privacy, that you hear about in extreme cases.
There are people who have become the target of threats, online and off, when aspects of their personal or social media history have come to light. In our age of viral media and data that can never be fully deleted, one irresponsible post or joke in bad taste can now ruin someone’s reputation to the point that they sometimes literally change their name. And any information about you might one day be used for identity theft — not just to access your accounts or open credit cards in your name, but to impersonate you in attempting to scam your friends and family.
I don’t mean to diminish the importance of these concerns. They’re very real, and they go far beyond Facebook; as several journalists have recently noted, if you think Facebook has frighteningly precise data about you, you should see what Google knows.
It’s important to talk to children about what they should and shouldn’t reveal online, especially as they get older and more independent. My general advice is:
- Don’t post information that you wouldn’t want a thief to know: your address, your phone number, photos of the front of your house.
- Expect that everyone in the world will be able to see anything you do online forever, if they want to. So don’t gossip about other people. Don’t say anything about someone that you wouldn’t say to their face.
- Never post in the heat of anger. If you get in an online argument, say you can’t talk now, you’ll think about it, and walk away.
- Know that anything that claims it’s secure or temporary — such as Snapchat or Telegram — can still be screenshotted, saved or filmed using another phone.
- If you ever need an excuse not to send something — god forbid, a significant other asks for a racy picture and says “you can trust me” — you can always say that you trust them, but not the other people (parents, friends, siblings) who might poke around in their phone.
But these are concerns about unusual consequences that happen on occasion to a subset of kids online. I’m much more concerned about what happens to nearly everyone caught in the thrall of the screen and the infinite social audience.
So when privacy-related headlines hit, I think is important to keep one thing in mind: social media may be eroding our families’ privacy, but the far, far more important problem is that social media is destroying our families’ freedom.
Yeah, I said “destroy our families’ freedom”
I’m no anti-screen extremist. My kids play Minecraft. They play Mario Kart. They dress up and make YouTube videos. Somehow they also watch an interminable Netflix show called “Just Add Magic”, which seems to me barely more entertaining than watching paint dry.
So I want you to know that “freedom” isn’t a word I use lightly. I like to think I know my kids very well, and the way they see it, part of “freedom” for them is their ability to be creative using Minecraft, their ability to master of a tricky Mario level, even their posting a YouTube video of them showing off gymnastics moves they’re especially proud of.
As for parents’ technological freedom: sometimes, parents just need a break. For one friend of mine, letting her sons watch a show in the morning is a crucial part of her sanity — for some reason (and we all have our “for some reason”) they wake up at 6am every morning, and she really, really needs to sleep for another hour. So yes, “freedom” for a family can even mean the practical use of screens to occupy kids’ attention.
The ultimate freedom is a free mind
As Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist, puts it, “The ultimate freedom is a free mind, and we need technology that’s on our team to help us live, feel, think and act freely.” Harris is usually talked about as a foe of social media and digital devices. But I think his phrasing leaves room for a balanced approach to technology in the home.
Harris calls himself an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. From what he’s seen, smartphones, tablets and social media are destroying our freedom — and our children’s freedom — by hooking us with their delightful interfaces, attractive photos, and neverending comments, notifications, pings and chirps.
In his words, Silicon Valley has “put a slot machine in a billion pockets” by making smartphones into devices that provide just the right frequency of reward to keep us coming back.
That’s the enemy: the army of manipulators, at Facebook and elsewhere, who earn their bonuses by finding ways to turn five minutes online into two lost hours; who find new ways to interrupt my kids’ daydreaming with pings.
It’s not easy to compete with so sophisticated a foe, and believe me, I’ve been embarrassingly outflanked by digital media’s appeal to my kids on many occasions. But my job as a parent and a teacher is to keep getting back up and guiding my kids away from the flashy slot machine and towards ways to use technology intentionally and creatively.
It’s about your particular kids
As with all parenting and teaching, the most important thing overall is to be making your decisions with your kids in mind.
I don’t mean “your kids” in the abstract, I’m in your particular kids with their particular needs and particular talents and interests and idiosyncrasies.
In my family, we sometimes let our kids use our phones to shoot videos and upload them to YouTube because they’re just so incredibly enthusiastic about it and we can’t deny that they stage their shots with care.
Also, we often say no.
We do wince a bit when they congratulate each other on the number of likes a video has gotten; when we hear that we pull back, and if that dominated their thinking around YouTube, we wouldn’t let them use it at all. We don’t have a perfect policy — there is none — but we’re trying to pay attention and respond to what they are showing us.
Empty time
I do think that nearly all of our kids need more empty time that isn’t planned out and where their attention is entirely their own. And while I don’t have evidence to back this up, I firmly believe that the ability to occupy yourself when there’s nothing competing to entertain you is a crucial skill to our humanity.
I expect my kids to have to keep relearning this skill through their lives; I certainly have to keep relearning it, as my wife reminds me when she catches me watching a video while I brush my teeth. I actually want my kids to have the experience of struggling to pull themselves away from a screen; I want them to have that struggle on my watch, so I can make sure they learn how to notice it and become confident that they can assert control and take indefinite breaks at any time.
The kids are alright
I also believe that entertaining modern technologies enrich our lives. I’ll defend the artistic validity and social value of great video games to anyone. It’s just that with past entertaining technologies, it wasn’t so easy to fall down a hole and enter a zombie-like state. There were only so many movies in the theater at once, and a page-turner of a book still had to let you do most of the imagining. Even the early video games of my youth had such limitations of graphics and complexity that they couldn’t help engage plenty of off-screen imagination; we literally made our own maps with pencil and paper.
Children have more to teach us then we have to teach them.
But I try to resist looking at the technologies of the past with rose-colored glasses. If I’m defending the original 1980s Legend of Zelda now, will my kids’ generation one day similarly celebrate Subway Surfer? In all of this I try to keep in mind the maxim that children have more to teach us then we have to teach them. We need to get them through this minefield to adulthood safely, and we shouldn’t mislead ourselves by being too confident in advance that one strategy is superior to another.
If we know our kids and we lovingly keep our eye on them, then I think that whichever way we navigate these issues, they’ll be okay.
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Ben Wheeler is a software developer and teacher in Brooklyn. He’s taught hundreds of people ages 4–84 to program, helped foment an actual revolution (ask him sometime!), and makes a mean gumbo. His work has been published in The Best of Make Magazine.
