AI will solve social media addiction

September 3, 2024

Excuse the clickbait headline, but I finished reading the Anxious Generation. As in the case for self-help and productivity books, the same can be said for books about social media: there is only a sliver of relevant information to absorb. Unless your in-person friends are also internet nerds, you won’t find much excuse to bring it up in person. Random people don’t care or think too much about the subject. Thankfully this is the internet where you need not worry for being a weirdo for talking about boring topics no one wants to hear about.

I first heard about Jonathan Haidt from a heated and spicy Conversations with Tyler episode. The interview podcast has always been around, but it feels as if with the rise of Zoom or for those with more sophisticated production (Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, Dwarkesh Patel, etc) have enabled anyone with a laptop and a video camera to become Charlie Rose (who has made a slow comeback from being cancelled, his first interview being with Warren Buffett). I myself don’t have the time to listen to them due to my rather low attention span but I also don’t think they convey information in the density I prefer.

I wanted to understand his position better. I decided to read his book. It’s a rather quick and light read and he provides a summary of each chapter’s main point. His main proposals are because social media is so harmful for young people, we should raise the minimum registration age and enable some form of age verification.

I do not agree legislating these changes is really in anyone’s best interest. I am not a parent but I experimented with the most basic of available parental controls with Google Family Link. You can do things like put time limits on apps, make your child receive approval before installing any apps, or even restrict their internet so much they will need to request permission for each and every site they want to visit. Are these not effective enough? If your child or preteen can disable them that is still a much better option than legislating change. Another idea from Haidt is children should first be given a “basic phone” before allowing them to use a smartphone (just call it a dumb phone). This denies them the ability to acquire a certain degree of digital literacy. And in some sense Haidt’s book is already out of date as Gen Z sees using a dumbphone as a trend. It’s better to teach them to use the internet responsibly than to assume trying to keep them away from the internet will somehow keep them safer.

Plenty of people already are leaving social media platforms because they don’t add value. Tyler Cowen in the interview with Haidt brings up over and over again the idea AI will solve this problem of social media addiction because it will be able to provide a daily summary for us to skim through instead of having to slog through it ourselves. It sounds plausible because even I don’t really want to read r/Seattle every day. The problem with this solution is social media companies aren’t interested in making it easy for you to spend less time scrolling and viewing their site.

Part of what interested me about reading Haidt’s book is not so much the book itself, but how often it is mentioned in the online discourse surrounding technology / social media addiction. My Month Without a Smartphone by Ted Lamade mentions Haidt’s book and essays as he describes how even his own children pointed out the disconnect between saying you should spend less time on your phone, and his inability to do so.

“Dad, why do you have to look at your phone SO much?”

“Does it seem like I am ALWAYS on my phone?”

“Well, not ALL the time, but a lot of the time. Why do you have to look at it so much?”

Like Haidt, Lamade makes comparisons about the correlation between daily social media users and rise in teen mental health. Lamade decides to set the example and use a flip phone for a month. The issue with all of it is correlation does not equal causation. The rise in mental health could be attributed to decreased stigma and increased awareness. The problem is it doesn’t matter whether or not social media causes mental illness, but rather that people believe it does.