How Google ignores social media’s consequences for children

Ch I N E S E President Xi Jinping and his top officials have a choice to make this weekend It will show more clearly what kind of global economic role China intends to play: dealmaker, or sower of chaos?

at stake is whether China agrees to forgive a portion of loan repayments from the developing world as most other leading government creditors, including the United States and India, are ready to do the correct action both morally and financially is clear If China refuses to participate in debt reduction it shows plainly that Beijing is not willing to accept the economic and moral responsibilities that go with being a global economic leader all eyes will be on China as world financial leaders gather Saturday on the sidelines of the Group of 20 finance meeting in India to discuss debt forgiveness at a moment of fiscal peril for many of the world s poorest nations Sixty percent of low-income countries are at or near distress, according to International Monetary Fund

Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva the crisis has already arrived in some Sri Lanka defaulted for the first time in its history last year and its economy is melting down Protesters ousted the president in July Zambia defaulted in 2020 and has yet to recover Last week Zambian President hakainde hichilema called the debt “suicidal” and a “black mamba kiss of death,” a reference to a deadly snakebite here’s some history In the mid-1990s and early 2000s, the United States and many European nations agreed to lower the valuation of loans they had provided to the poorest nations something that is known in finance as taking a haircut Since then many Group of 7 nations have been reluctant to provide large loans again, so african and southeast asian countries have increasingly turned to China and private lenders for funding China is now the world’s largest government creditor to developing nations accounting for nearly 50 percent of these loans, up from 18 percent in 2010, according to the World Bank these Chinese loans were often at high interest rates It would have been a stretch for poor nations to repay them even in good times, and now it s impossible after a global pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine have decimated low-income economies where people are struggling to afford food the ideal scenario would be for all government and private-sector creditors to agree to significant debt reduction then international organizations such as the IMF and World Bank could step in to provide desperately needed low-cost loans and assistance

But nothing will happen without China, given how large a player it has become For example nearly a third of Zambian and Pakistani external debt and about 12 percent of Sri Lanka s external debt is owed to China, according to an analysis of World Bank data by the Center for Global Development China is demanding that the IMF and World Bank also take losses which would be highly unusual Normally those institutions are lenders of last resort that tend to give very low interest rates essentially taking a haircut at the front end the IMF and World Bank did take losses in the so-called heavily indebted poor countries initiative 25 years ago, but the United States and other G-7 nations provided funding to make those institutions whole again If a similar scenario played out now, many Western nations would be helping subsidize repayments to China the reality is that China made some predatory loans and now, in a surprise to almost no one, many of the 150 nations China lent to can t repay at the current terms So far China has mostly offered to suspend payments for a few years that’s woefully inadequate Nor is China in need of the money given that it is sitting on more than $3 trillion in reserves China has been using developing nations as pawns in its bid for influence against the United States a strategy that critics call “debt-trap diplomacy ” In claiming to aid the world s poor China is exploiting them But now, the bill is coming due, and the question is who is going to have to pay it

IN legal disputes as in life, sometimes what isn’t said reveals more than what is Consider the briefs filed with the Supreme Court in defense of a law granting Google and other tech companies limited immunity from lawsuits Gonzalez vs Google, slated for oral argument before the Supreme Court on tuesday, concerns Section 230 of the Communications Decency act, a law enacted in 1996 to regulate the then-new internet Child advocacy groups that filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the case note that social media platforms are knowingly hurting children by delivering dangerous content in an addictive manner tellingly, none of the scores of briefs filed on the side of the tech companies address those harms

One of Congress primary purposes in enacting Section 230 was to provide as some senators put it, “much-needed protection for children, not just from explicit content but also from abuse Ironically the platforms are now arguing that Congress actually intended to offer them immunity for business decisions that they know will hurt children the Gonzalez case was brought by the family of an american murdered by ISIS in the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks the family alleges that as a foreseeable consequence of efforts to keep as many eyes on Google’s

Youtube as possible, terrorist recruitment videos are delivered to people who are likely to be interested in terrorism In a similar case to be argued Wednesday, twitter vs taamneh the court will weigh whether the platforms’ alleged failure to take “meaningful steps to remove terrorist content violates federal anti-terrorism law the repercussions of social media’s rise go well beyond increased access to terrorist content During the years Instagram exploded from a million to a billion users, the United States saw an astonishing 146% spike in firearm suicides among children ages 10 to 14 the number of suicides overall for young people rose an unprecedented 57% although the correlation between the platforms’ growth and the youth mental illness crisis does not prove causation, Facebook’s leaked internal research noted that 6% of teen american Instagram users “trace their desire to kill themselves” to the platform

Researchers and clinicians have likewise repeatedly documented widespread social media-related mental health and physical harms to children Last Monday the U S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that teen girls are suffering from record levels of sadness and suicide risk which some experts attribute partly to the rise of social media and on tuesday, a U S Senate committee heard gut-wrenching stories about the dangers of, as one grieving parent described it, the “unchecked power of the social media industry Social media platforms make money by selling advertising More time spent on a platform means more eyes on its ads, which means it can charge more for those ads Plus, the more time a user spends on the platform, the more data the platform develops on the user, which it can in turn use to keep the user on the platform longer humans aren t personally sorting who sees what is on these platforms Rather, humans give artificial intelligence technologies the instruction to maximize what platforms call “user engagement ” aI does this at fantastic speeds by testing what recommendations work best across billions of users then it delivers content based on not just what a child says she wants but also what is statistically most likely to keep children like her glued to the screen too often the answer is whatever exploits her fears and anxieties this means that with disturbing frequency, depressed teens are offered suicide tips, body image-anxious girls get content promoting eating disorders and drug-curious youths get opportunities to buy pills laced with lethal fentanyl Moreover, platforms use neuroscientifically tailored gimmicks such as auto-scrolling, constant reminders to return to the platform and dopamine-firing likes that can be addictive to children

Often, children who earnestly want to turn off the platform can’t; their brains just aren’t old enough to resist addictions to the same degree as adults’ to maintain growth every quarter, platforms have to find ways to attract and keep more users longer If platforms are allowed to continue profiting from technology they know will harm great numbers of children without fear of financial consequences, they will continue to perfect their techniques and more children will be hurt the child suicide and mental health crisis we are experiencing now will get worse with no end in sight

It doesn’t have to be this way the Google search engine’s method of prioritizing content for viewers designed to be based on websites’ expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, shows there are ways of deciding who sees what that are far less risky to children and everyone else the court’s decision won’t end the debate over Section 230, but it could begin to restore the law to the original purpose of protecting young people But it should not be a matter of debate that it should be illegal to knowingly weaponize children’s vulnerabilities against them and if we can t agree on that, anyone who believes the unprecedented harm children are enduring is the price society has to pay for freedom on the internet should at least acknowledge that harm

Ed Howard is senior counsel at the Children s Advocacy Institute of the University of San Diego School of Law