Recently, New Matilda announced it had suspended use of its Facebook and Twitter accounts, on the basis of the harm social media was causing in society. Dr David Shearman, a renowned physician and member of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change weighs in.
Childhood Protection Week has just passed and Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman writes, “Our research shows that almost two-thirds of 14 – 17-year-olds have viewed harmful content (on social media) in the past year including drug use, self-harm, disordered eating and violent pornography and extremist imagery.”
In my mind this requires drastic action. South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas has said, “The government is now going to step in, we’re going to ban kids (under 14) from getting access to these accounts. The proposal was fuelled by concerns social media was harming young people and affecting their mental health, leaving parents “almost powerless”.
I departed from Facebook in its early life, however this article describes my journey as a doctor and scientist in observing social media.
One episode in my life illustrated childhood addiction built into social media. In the South Australian hills I was walking around a stunningly beautiful lake, swans sailed serenely on its still waters and cormorants perched in surrounding trees. A school bus disgorged a gaggle of schoolchildren and a teacher. They proceeded to walk around the lake quietly and in order, but within one minute all had their phones switched on.
I was aghast when a family of bandicoots ran between their feet and continued to do so. The teacher called out, one child glanced down for a moment but that was the total attention the bandicoots received. It wasn’t bandicoots they were watching on social media!
In January 2021 I was moved to write in the Sydney Morning Herald:
“The insurrection against democracy in the US Capitol may have one positive outcome. It may bring home to all remaining democracies that Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms cannot continue to be allowed to peddle lies on COVID-19 that are detrimental to human health.
“Their belated action to ban Trump, after he spent four years disseminating disinformation on public health, illustrates the crass irresponsibility of these media behemoths. We need independent regulation of social media platforms to better protect the health and security of humanity”.
My submission to the Online Safety Act 2021 made the necessary points on vaccination to give security to all and pointed out the need for public health input. In retrospect, information delivered by social media contributed to many deaths during the Covid epidemic.
Today the situation is much worse, with nations and organisations beholden to powerful, rich men spawned by the excesses of neoliberalism. All users are to some extent their slaves, made so by addiction.
We know that just a few hours use a day of social media irrevocably changes the formative brains of children. A sub-race of humanity is being created with a different understanding of truth. In addition social media is responsible for a surge in deterioration in children’s mental health with loneliness and crises in body image, as well as the delivery of mis- and disinformation.
By 2016 the operations of Facebook and its companions had wreaked such destruction on society that Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief of The Guardian, wrote a clarion call to all who still had the attentive ability to read a long article, entitled “How technology disrupted the truth”.
A social media frenzy had followed a Daily Mail report that British Prime Minister David Cameron had committed an “obscene act with a dead pig’s head”, by inserting a private part of his anatomy. This untrue statement was then repeated in millions of tweets and Facebook updates, which many people presumably still believe to be true today. This was at the time of Brexit when social media untruths carried the day.
The words of Katharine Viner summarised the revolution that had occurred in society.
“Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumor, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.
What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth. This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows”.
The damage to children’s heath is but a small part of the global horrors emerging from the failures to control social media. These can impact entire nations with widespread violence generated by false information as illustrated by the Southport UK rioting.
Revision of the 2021 eSafety law is now underway and submissions are closed. Parliamentarians must take heed of Frances Haugen’s Facebook whistleblower statement that Australia is at risk of fumbling a “once-in-a-decade opportunity” to regulate social media.
The views on social media of the AMA and Public Health Association are available but proposals from many other medical organisations are scarce. Perhaps that’s because of overwhelming workload, but surely professional organisations distributing their own information should at least assess the many social media options and then select just one to use, and explain why in relation to safety of their patients.
New Matilda should be congratulated for its courage in commencing its own assessment.
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