AVELLINO: TikTok is not only social media that sucks
Approximately a week and a half ago, the U.S. House of Representatives voted on a bill to force the social media app TikTok to be sold to an American company or be banned from U.S. app stores. The near 300-vote margin of victory was a huge bipartisan show of force against the national security threats posed by the Chinese-controlled social media platform.
There were many arguments made against the bill that I find somewhat persuasive, such as its potential unconstitutionality and the number of jobs at risk. Others, like the conspiracy that the bill was passed due to the Israel lobby or in order to keep the American people from "fighting back" against a vague adversary, I find significantly less so.
But another argument I heard in the last two weeks, especially from the congresspeople who voted against the bill, is one of unequal treatment. Sure, TikTok has privacy issues, but so do all social media companies. Why are they not receiving tougher privacy actions? Why are Republicans bringing up the negative mental health effects of TikTok but not Facebook?
In my eyes, it is true that the same issues TikTok causes are the product of most social media companies. And though I think asking why not all social media platforms are getting the TikTok treatment misses the point of the bill in the first place, it is important to discuss social media broadly and what future legislation should aim to do. A lot of focus is paid to the privacy aspect of social media regulation. Not nearly enough attention is given to the tolls on our mental health.
I am an avid user of the social media platform X — I still call it Twitter, though. My weekly screen time for X is horrendous, and it is easily the app that consumes most of my phone time.
At the same time, I despise X. The platform is currently being run into the ground by an alt-right billionaire who is overseeing an increase in the number of bots, an upswing in censorship at the request of governments and the proliferation of bigoted content.
I also know that, even though I enjoy X in the moment, it is objectively making me less happy. A recent study finds that "Results revealed that Twitter use is related to decreases in well-being, and increases in political polarization (and) outrage." If you are remotely familiar with the overwhelming evidence that social media is bad for our mental health, this is not at all surprising.
And yet, I still use X. A lot. Part of that is the network effects: nobody wants to be the first to leave the party that never ends. That is why research has found that we need to be paid in order to leave social media for a month but are actually willing to pay to deactivate Instagram if we know everybody else is leaving, too.
It is also why I am highly skeptical of the federal government's efforts to break up these companies: people are only on Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook.
Another part of that is addiction, the same way we are all addicted to social media in one way or another.
But a third part of why I still use X despite its harm to my sanity and why people use Instagram despite its harm to their mental health is that we are not always the best judge of what is good for us.
Human beings are notoriously bad at assessing risk, and we constantly overestimate our strengths. We have a tendency to believe we are better built for hardships than everyone else, that the traps and risks that others fell for could never affect us because we are simply better than them.
We would never be a part of the group that faces a greater risk of depression from app usage, we would always turn off the phone if it got too bad. We could definitely beat that lion in a fight.
There are some people who are legitimately not addicted to social media and face no adverse health effects from it. But the data is in and has been for a long time. Those individuals are few and far between, and I certainly am not among them.
If we are going to get serious about regulating the rest of social media, like Congressman Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) has said we should, then we should be honest about our own choices' effects on our mental health and maybe admit that we need a little outside intervention to fix our generation's crisis.
As I said, I do not want to ban Instagram or Facebook. First Amendment issues aside, trying to ban platforms where people connect and talk will be playing digital whack-a-mole. These platforms still have something to offer us as a community. But there have to be some ways to mitigate the risk factors.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced the SMART Act in 2019, a law that would limit "addictive" features of social media apps. Some of these, like infinite scrolling on Instagram and Facebook, are fine things to limit. Some, like Snapchat streaks, seem a bit silly to me.
But we should have the debate. Whatever happens to TikTok, whether it be sold to an American firm or sent back to China, we are still going to live in a world where huge chunks of the American population use social media platforms and suffer the negative consequences. We should be frank about what those consequences are, and how we should fix them.
Noble Avellino is a junior in the School of Arts and Sciences majoring in economics and minoring in political science. Avellino’s column, “Noble’s Advocate” runs on alternate Mondays.
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