The Kids Are (Mostly) Alright: New Pew Study Deflates The Social Media Panic

This is a really weird article about social media. I’m sure there’s some panic, and I definitely don’t want regulation to jump to unnecessary conclusions where there are problems, but it’s also worth noting that TechDirt’s editor-in-chief is on the board of a huge social media company.

With that in mind, take this section:

Separately, Pew also asked parents how much time their teens spend on these platforms — and the disconnect between what parents believe and what their kids report is massive:

28% of teen TikTok users report spending too much time on the site, and that jumps to 44% when parents were asked about their teen’s use of the platform.

Parents think their teens are spending too much time on TikTok at a rate nearly 60% higher than the teens themselves report. That gap is the entire moral panic, distilled to a single data point: worried adults constructing a portrait of a crisis that the people supposedly living it mostly don’t appear to recognize.

If somebody has an addiction, like an addiction to drugs or social media, people around them may be more able or willing to point it out than the person with the addiction themselves. But for some reason, TechDirt takes this as a smoking gun of moral panic, that children are inherently the reasonable ones self-reporting correctly, while adults are unreasonable and over-involved.