More streaming video is bad

If you’re streaming video, you’re not doing homework, reading, socializing, or sleeping.

He’s had too much screen time. (Photo by Irina Romanova)

A new study came out in JAMA last week tracking preteen social-media use. The paper found that cohorts that increase their social-media use from ages nine through 13 not only have lower literacy levels, but also show weaker cognitive function across a range of tests.

I’m gonna be honest. When I first read coverage of this study, I thought to myself, “sounds about right,” and didn’t scrutinize the results at all. If you actually dig in, though, I think the research methods are pretty bad.

The study is observational with no causal research design, and it’s completely possible that we’re just seeing a correlate of some underlying genetic or socioeconomic factor. If I were deeply skeptical of the idea that social-media use has downstream negative consequences, I would not be at all persuaded by the mere presence of the association that this study finds.

That said, I am actually not at all skeptical of this, and I’m happy to add the paper to the growing pile of indicators that the proliferation and ubiquity of short-form, algorithmically distributed digital video is eating away at the foundations of our society.

And I do think it’s important to be clear that this is actually what we are talking about.

“Social media” is a term that’s stuck with us, but it’s very outdated. Back in the days when Facebook competed with Friendster and Myspace, the idea of a “social network” was that people would follow content posted by their friends.

Skeletal versions of that still exist in the bowels of Facebook and Instagram. LinkedIn kind of has that structure. And Twitter and Bluesky, which were always less “social,” have in some ways hewed more rigorously to the concept of a network. But most of what people consume on TikTok or YouTube or any of Meta’s properties is not social at all. It’s just media. The companies agglomerate huge amounts of video, and then feed you videos based on what they think will keep you clicking and scrolling. These companies invest a lot of effort and expertise in fine-tuning this process so that users find it enjoyable on a moment-to-moment basis and spend a lot of time watching these videos.

Derek Thompson last week pointed out that the upshot of this is that “social media” is in practice really just TV — TV that is more ubiquitous than ever because it’s in our pockets, TV that is programmed by an algorithm that is better than any network executive ever could have been at knowing what you want to watch. But imagine going back to 1995 and asking people whether it would be good or bad if kids aged nine through 13 spent way more time watching television. I don’t think anyone would have found that to be a particularly challenging question. It’s of course great to have some entertainment at hand during downtime; I’m not an insane snob or an ascetic. But the net impact of a huge increase in TV watching is bad.

What’s wrong with “the algorithm”?

Francis Fukuyama recently made the very strong claim that internet media is the primary cause of the big surge in right-wing populist authoritarian movements around the world, noting that:

… large tech platforms pursuing their own commercial self-interest created an ecosystem that rewarded sensationalism and disruptive content, and their recommendation algorithms, again acting in the interest of profit-maximization, guided people to sources that never would have been taken seriously in earlier times.

Dan Williams wrote a piece — partially in response to Fukuyama and partially in response to other, vague criticisms of algorithmic programming — in which he says we can’t blame algorithms, we have to blame the audience.

He quotes H.L. Mencken’s quip that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard” and says that social media has essentially democratized content, and that’s just bad.

I think the wise path is to steer a middle ground here.

I find that media professionals and academics sometimes talk about the algorithms as if they’re some kind of alien presence that is brainwashing people against their will.