The Company We Keep

When a social media feed that is curated by AI actively shapes a teenager’s beliefs, emotions, and identity, how should responsibility be divided among the user, parents, companies, government or any other developers?

The overwhelming majority of teenagers today use some form of social media in their everyday lives. Among the most-used social media are platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. These platforms are centered around feeding users a constant stream of media, which is curated by an AI algorithm to fit their specific interests. These personalized feeds hold a significant amount of influence upon the state of our generation’s values, beliefs, and mental health. As teens are also the most active users of social media, we are presented with the following question: How should we allot responsibility to different parties involved in the active reshaping of teenage minds?

The most direct argument to make is that teens themselves should be held responsible for their use of social media, following precedent set by previously debated teen addiction problems such as drug abuse and alcohol abuse. They are consenting to entrusting their minds to the mercy of their algorithms. This argument holds up only when the teen in question has been thoroughly educated about the impact of social media on brain development. However, placing responsibility largely on the teenage user seems unfair because teens lack a fully developed prefrontal cortex. This impairs their ability to calculate risk properly and allows them to get addicted more easily. In other words, teens are more likely to try things and then develop an addiction to them. The same counterargument holds true for the aforementioned addictive substances as well.

If the responsibility cannot be placed wholly on the teenage user, then the logical next culpable party is parents. After all, parents are responsible for steering teens away from dangerous or harmful things, which, according to many studies, should include social media. The argument has intuitive appeal, but most teens are reluctant to follow the guidelines set by their parents and often find workarounds to get what they want. While some parents may try to regulate their child’s social media use, their child may still find their way onto social media in some form. For example, a parent can delete an app, and a teenager can reinstall it on a different device.

Where parental rules are easily circumvented, federal or state laws present a more concrete boundary with serious, enforced consequences. The solution is not perfect (illegal drug use and underage drinking are still major problems among teens), but having government regulation is much better than the alternative. This could either be in the form of regulating teen use of social media or regulating the distribution of social media algorithms to teens. The most plausible option would be the latter, as previous attempts to ban social media use for certain age demographics have proven largely ineffective.

However, nobody possesses a greater power to stop algorithms’ influence over teens than the creators of the algorithms themselves. While it might hurt revenue in the short term, it would increase parental and governmental trust in social media platforms if they eliminated personalization algorithms altogether. What makes this solution difficult is that it is not effective unless all platforms decide to commit to it together, otherwise users would simply migrate to new platforms that utilize personalization algorithms. This rebounds the true greatest responsibility to governments, which are able to enforce that social media companies eliminate or at least alter their algorithms. But they must do so with great caution, as complete elimination of things society is already addicted to has historically made the addiction more dangerous (as evidenced during Prohibition or the illegalization of marijuana).

All of these arguments can combine to create a more nuanced (albeit less satisfying) conclusion than just blaming one culprit for any harm social media may inflict on the minds of today’s teens: all parties involved are somewhat responsible, though to admittedly varying degrees. A teen would not be influenced by an algorithm should they simply abstain from using the platform, but they could also avoid such a malady if the platform disposed of its personalization algorithm.

Perhaps we are only able to hold teens responsible for substance abuse because there exist governmental and often parental rules that clearly state its illegality. If that argument is to be agreed with, then teens cannot yet be held responsible for their use of social media until society sets a clear expectation for them. Alternatively, most people would not blame alcohol manufacturers for the struggles of teenage alcohol users, but we do place some responsibility upon the people in charge of selling the alcohol. By this logic, there may be an important distinction to make between the social media companies and the browsers or app stores allowing teens to consume harmful content.

The question of responsibility over algorithms’ influence over teens does not provide an easy, objective answer. Rather, each person must inform themselves well and draw their own conclusion regarding how they believe responsibility should be allocated to different parties. There is not one particular person or entity at fault for any of the harm social media algorithms can inflict on teens, but each group involved bears a different share of the responsibility. Furthermore, each group holds its own power to help fix the problem, although to varying degrees. As this is an important point to recognize, we can derive from it a broader conclusion: we should not point fingers at the responsibility of others for our problems if we have not yet dealt with our own role in them.