"It's not Watergate, but it's a story"

Netsafe is against a social media ban for kids. It's also funded by Facebook.

“Hey Guyon Espiner, you’re an investigative journalist,” I blathered to the famously sober broadcaster three hours into an open-bar birthday party for The Spinoff last night. “Can you tell me if this is a story?”

I told him that Australia was debating a ban on social media for under-16s and that, when reporters asked our internet safety watchdog Netsafe if we should do the same thing here, Netsafe said ‘no’. But, I said, I’ve found out that Netsafe is partly funded by Meta, who own Facebook and Instagram.

“That’s a story,” he nodded. “That’s definitely a story.”

“Great!” I said.

“I mean it’s not Watergate,” Guyon said. “But it’s a story.”

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I got several messages from parents yesterday asking if I’d seen the Netsafe headline. They all expressed a mixture of shock and anger. They, like me, have been following the Western world’s gradual awakening to the mental and, eventually, physical harms of social media use among children.

You probably don’t need another person telling you about the Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. It went to number one in the US and seems to have become that rare thing - a scientific book that creates social change. In it Jon painstakingly goes through the overwhelming evidence that social media use is responsible for the mental health cliff dive among teenagers since 2012. He’s been writing in this space for a while and though for a while some put up spirited arguments against his theory, it’s now almost impossible to find a serious thinker who’s read his book and disagrees with him. When the US surgeon general called for warning labels on social media last year, he was speaking to a scientific consensus that the evidence is no longer correlative, but causative.

Haidt reckons teachers, parents and even children want the sort of restrictions he’s calling for (no smartphones til 13, no social media til 16) but that we have a collective action problem: it doesn’t work unless everybody does it (being the only girl in your friend group without Snapchat can be its own sort of mental health disaster).

I watched a debate (not that one) between a Republican and a Democrat last week where restricting teens from smartphones was the only thing they agreed on. A quick temperature check on the Australia ban here found bipartisan support from Chris Luxon, Chris Hipkins and even perennial ointment-fly David Seymour.

So what is Netsafe’s problem?

“Netsafe, as an independent New Zealand charity, can only achieve its mission to prevent and address online harm with the support of public and private funders” says their website.

Along with a list of government ministries are some corporate logos, including Meta. Though that company’s platforms are unpopular with kids in 2024, they’re responsible for most of the damage done over the past decade.

A 2021 investigation found Meta’s “own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public” and that “top Facebook officials were aware that Instagram, the popular photo-based social media platform that it owns, can have a negative impact on mental health, body image and more for teenagers, particularly teenage girls”. For now Instagram has been eclipsed by TikTok and Snapchat, but given kids can legally sign up to Meta products at age 13, that under 16 market has to be a huge target.

Why does Meta’s partnership with Netsafe matter?

What is the right analogy here? Would you ask a health group part-funded by big tobacco whether we should ban cigarettes? An environmental group funded by Shell whether we should phase out oil?

The most generous view is that Netsafe takes Meta’s money but keeps their opinions independent. If that is the case, we should still, I think, demand that the funding is disclosed (by the news organisation if not the interviewee) whenever Netsafe is expressing an opinion on social media.

Does it matter exactly how much money Netsafe has received? I don’t think so. Even if it’s fifty dollars, there’s always the prospect of larger and ongoing amounts in the future. With government funding shrinking or disappearing everywhere, would you want to be the Netsafe CEO heading into your annual check-in with the Meta partnerships team, having just told New Zealand media you want their products banned?

In a way, you would hope Netsafe has chosen their position pragmatically, because the stated reasons for opposing a ban show a terrifying lack of understanding around the extent of social media’s harms. While everybody else in the business is drawing a line between suicide and social media-fuelled despair, supported by New Zealand-specific statistics and a watertight debunking of other explanations, apparently ‘previous Netsafe research - specifically on body image - showed youngsters were "overwhelmingly still positive about online spaces".’

Incredibly, they still believe users and their families have control over the online experience and its effects:

“The real question we should be asking is how can we make social media better for children and young people so they have safe, playful, exploratory, fun, entertaining, positive and educational experiences online.” - Netsafe chief executive Brent Carey

But positive and educational don’t buy nearly as much attention - Meta’s currency - as negativity and insecurity. Even if you could control the flow of self-esteem-destroying images and videos on these platforms, you will never control the behaviour of other users - the exclusion, soft-bullying and ridicule that makes teenage years hellish enough in the playground, but unending and inescapable online.

If in doubt, focus on a group that will hypothetically be made miserable by the ban: “a lot of young people rely on their social media spaces to get support, and if you are from the marginalised or vulnerable community, that is really important - and so access to mental health services they might suffer as well [sic], as a result of the ban."

But the decline of teenage mental health in New Zealand has already been “rapid and unequal” - worse for Maori and Pasifika. The evidence says social media is the problem, not the solution.

Netsafe’s final objection is that a ban would be too hard to enforce, or will “prevent children discussing how they’re using online spaces with the trusted adults in their lives and risks driving any subsequent social media use underground”. They’re on stronger ground here, but in my experience if you asked ten parents how much they knew about what their child was doing on Snapchat, nine of them would have no idea. We’re more than a decade into this experiment now and for all the education, guidelines and tips for parents, things are only getting worse.

Plan A isn’t working. So why is Netsafe getting in the way of Plan B?

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Around the world, people are joining together and fighting big tech’s attempts to rewire and monetise their children’s attention. Here in New Zealand parents now have one more obstacle to overcome - it just happens to be the organisation in charge of keeping our kids safe.