A teacher's question: Social media hurts my students, but do tech executives even care?

One afternoon when I was 12, I lurked around a newsstand operated by an old blind man. Before I could muster the courage to step to the counter and lower my voice to ask for the latest issue of Playboy, another customer snatched my arm and accused me of robbing the blind man. I surrendered the dollar bill poking out of my fist rather than confess the truth.

It's a quaint memory now in the age of limitless internet porn.

Not quite as quaint was my first puff on a cigarette at age 13. Or the ease with which I purchased my first pack of them – or my hundredth.

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You could get a carton for around $5, and no one ever asked for ID. My school had a smoking area for faculty and students. Sometimes a teacher would ask you for a light.

I’m thinking about all this after a recent class discussion veered onto the subject of internet sex and violence and the extent to which my students have been exposed.

One student said that in the fifth grade, she had been sent pornographic images by another fifth grader. Others recounted similar exposures, including targeting on social media by pedophiles and other adult predators.

When I mentioned the school’s internet filters, they laughed.

I grew up 'under a rock': My parents banned social media until I was 17. I'm glad they did.

Bravado, perhaps. Or perhaps the bravado is more aptly attributed to a school system believing it can dam all the dark forces trying to prey on young minds.

Actually, according to these students, the most shocking and disturbing things to which they’ve been exposed have been on social media – also the place where many had been bullied and harassed or just depressed by the illusion of everyone else’s better, happier, more beautiful life.

Platforms provide escape – and peril

For many of my students, the perils of the internet are the least of their problems. They have seen and experienced violence in the streets and in their homes. They have lost loved ones to murder, COVID-19 and drugs, and to deportation and mass incarceration. Some of them and their families have experienced food and housing insecurity.

And I don’t doubt that social media can be a refuge from those stark realities, a place to vent or get support. It would be great if they could have that without all the peril.

I told my students that as we were speaking, Congress was holding hearings regarding the risks to young people on social media. To that, they responded with skepticism and irony.

That is hardly surprising, and I find it difficult to offer my students much hope about our collective ability to protect them or their younger siblings from any of the digital toxins – other than my wishful thinking (which I do hope is true) that their generation, having grown up online, will figure out how to extricate from the toxicity, and even overcome the addictive relationship so many of us (of all ages) now have with our digital devices, and that they will figure out how to protect their children in ways we couldn’t protect them.

What a cop-out!

So, by the way, is foisting responsibility onto parents. Values and discipline can go a long way toward the responsible behavior of kids, but they don't keep children safe from the depraved indifference of an industry that converts our fears and resentments and our dependencies and desires into their wealth.

I asked my students what they thought it would take to protect kids from exposure to hate and violence and pornography, and they pretty much unanimously didn't think there was anything.

That is an understandable hypothesis and another cop-out.

Tobacco regulation provides a model

We have collaborated with tech billionaires on a seemingly bottomless volcano of smut and rage, self-loathing and violence, but I can’t help thinking that if we can make tobacco less accessible and less desirable to kids, perhaps somehow we can protect children from digital distraction, depression and depravity.

It’s a flawed analogy. Cigarettes have no meaningful value to anyone; the internet and social media really can offer human connection and, at the least, an escape from the tedium. Which is why it is worth salvaging this pixilated pariah.

Seems like a turning point in the struggle to get cigarettes out of the mouths of most young people was the discovery that tobacco companies knew their products were deadly, had intended to market them to kids and made cigarettes as addictive as possible to maximize profit.

Those revelations tipped the political balance against Big Tobacco and inspired the public and political leaders to put human life above those corporate interests.

We now know that social media companies understand the harm their products cause and have chosen to exploit that knowledge to promote their addictiveness.

We can only hope such revelations will compel us to impose some order on digital mayhem. Imposing order is what humanity has always tried to do – with nature and our collective existence and our art and ourselves. Imperfectly, to say the least, but overall, usually, resulting in human progress.

There have surely been benefits to having a barely regulated internet, and many people fear that any added regulation would be catastrophic. Remember when internet retailers had to start charging us tax? Somehow, we seem to have survived – and those retailers have gotten exponentially richer.

Perhaps we could start the much-needed regulatory reckoning with this question: If social media and adult content distributors actually did care about children (other than, perhaps, their own), what might they do to protect them?

Sad to say, we have to ask that question as a hypothetical –a fantasy.

But it's better than not asking at all.

Larry Strauss (@LarryStrauss) is a high school English teacher and retired basketball coach in South Los Angeles. A member of Paste BN's Board of Contributors, he is the author of more than a dozen books. His novel, "Light Man," is due out in November.