Technology is about to get a little safer.
Tuesday in the US Senate Pass a pair of bills — Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) — designed to protect children online. It was surprisingly bipartisan: the vote to approve the bill’s package was 91 to 3. That widespread support is a big deal, but it’s far from a done deal.
Act, which Still to clear the House of Representatives, will create a clear set of necessary rules for the platform to reduce harm related to mental health and sexual exploitation, among other things. KOSA calls on platforms to reduce features that lead to compulsive use, including notifications and auto-play. Kosa’s critics, however, say so Opens the door to censorshipAs certain types of speech can be blocked in the name of protecting children.
Figuring out the best way to balance First Amendment rights and protecting children online will take more time. The House has already gone home for the August recess, and this November’s presidential election will be on everyone’s mind when they return to consider their version of the case, which is somewhat different But it also includes a duty of care to protect young people.
Everyone can agree that keeping kids safe online is important, but one simple element of the law can help children and adults alike: preventing compulsive use.
Smartphone Can almost feel addictive Or at least like a bad habit. So how can we avoid spending hours staring mindlessly at a screen?
A way to understand how and why you are forced to spend so much time on your smartphone. Another is to put your phone away. Seriously, like, put it in another room where you can’t see or touch it until you really need it.
Slot machine in your pocket
You’ve probably struggled with Scrolling while awake Instead of sleeping at night or Feel triggered by the ding of a new notification. This is mainly because many apps, including games and social media platforms, are designed to grab your attention and keep you coming back
An explanation of such behavior can be found in the work of psychologist BF Skinner. While a graduate student at Harvard in the 1930s, Skinner invented a type of puzzle box — what psychologists and technologists now call a Skinner box — equipped to study the behavior of rats and pigeons.
In one famous experiment, when animals pulled a lever or tapped a piece of glass, they were given positive reinforcement, like a piece of food. Skinner realized that once they figured out cause and effect, animals would pull the lever only when they were hungry. But if Skinner introduced randomness into the equation, and the animals did not know whether they would receive a reward, they would pull the lever repeatedly, sometimes obsessively. a pigeon Tap the glass 2.5 times per second for 16 hours In search of rewards.
A decade ago, Natasha ShulA cultural anthropologist and associate professor at NYU, has written a book called Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. And he’s surprised that so many people are using his research to describe how social media traps people in the same way that glowing boxes on the casino floor do. In an interview, he compared some apps to Skinner’s Box and compared the experience of mindlessly browsing photos on Facebook to a slot machine.
“You keep clicking as if you’re going to hit some little jackpot, where you know someone or it gives you some interest,” Shull told me. “So you just keep going.”
He added, “There’s something about it that really puzzles the mammalian brain and it hooks you.”
Our phones are full of Skinner’s boxes designed to entice us and compel us to do simple tasks in search of random rewards. For slot machines, positive reinforcement is money. But with social media apps, as Shull says, it’s less clear what we’re looking for, which may explain why we open TikTok while we sleep, blink a few times, and two hours have passed. It’s pretty obvious why platforms want us to do this. The more time we spend using and engaging with the app — tapping notifications, scrolling through videos, and more — the more data the platform gets about our behavior, and the more money they can make. Selling this data or targeting your attention to advertisers.
to understand how As these machines were designed to trap us, we need to look to the work of BJ Fogg, who pioneered persuasive technology, or captology, in the late 90s in computing. He now simply calls it behavior design. In Fogg’s own words, “A persuasive computer is an interactive technology that can change a person’s attitude or behavior,” and Silicon Valley loves the idea. Founded by Fogg Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab, which has become a breeding ground for startup founders. One of its most famous alumni is Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger. According to the Economist“Fogg took unequivocal satisfaction from the Instagram example, since he felt remotely responsible for it and perhaps remotely guilty.”
But academics didn’t make skinner boxes in our pockets. At the end of the day, software engineers probably paid less attention to psychology textbooks than to how we actually used these apps.
Traits that hold us back and how to avoid them
In the latest version of the bill, KOSA included a provision for tech companies to change the way they design their platforms so that kids don’t spend so much time using their apps. The law specifically mentions “automatic play of media, rewards for time spent on the platform, notifications and other features that result from the minor’s compulsory use of the covered platform.” If the bill becomes law, the features that result in mandatory use will still exist for the rest of us, and that seems to be a problem.
If you know the features that cause compulsive use, you can prevent yourself from getting sucked in.
Autoplay and notifications are obviously things you can — and should — turn off on your phone (Here A simple guide That covers how to turn off autoplay in a wide range of apps and is here Some tips for managing notifications.) Endless scrolling is a similar feature that is not so easy to turn off. Some apps, Like Instagram, has a feature that prompts you to take a break or set a daily limit Both Apple and Google offer suites of features to limit how much you use certain apps. (On iOS, it’s called Screen timeand his Digital Wellbeing on Android.)
3 simple tasks
No one should feel helpless in our app-saturated world. But even without new laws on specific platforms, you can update your settings to make your phone less habit-forming. Tristan Harris, former student of BJ Fogg and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, offered three tips in a 2018 Vox video that still make sense today:
- Turn off all non-human notifications
- Grayscale your screen
- Limit your home screen to essential, everyday tools
Even if you’re able to minimize some of the features that make you want to keep using an app, others are practically unavoidable: algorithmic feeds and personalized content, for example. Algorithmic feed Designed to keep you scrollingSeeking an unspecified reward — not unlike one of Skinner’s rats pulling a lever in search of a treat.
While KOSA will give kids the option to turn it off easily, It currently takes some work To do this in apps like Facebook, Instagram, and X. Personalized content, however, is virtually impossible to avoid, since most social media apps are designed to learn what you like and suggest more content like it. This is what powers the algorithms that serve you not only content but also personalized notifications, recommendations and of course ads.
Inevitably, social media apps aren’t the only software features that cause compelling use They are everywhere from your banking apps to your favorite mobile games Those red dots indicating you have unread notifications? This is a signal So you might miss out on an award. Pull-to-refresh gesture that you can use to load new content? There is no technical reason for its existence; This forces you to engage with the app more directly (the gesture even mimics the pull of a slot machine handle). Like buttons and favorite things? Well, first of all, Research shows they cause anxiety. But they also provide algorithmic feedback so they can deliver more personalized content and keep you in the app.
So all these tricks and features are really not Make these apps addictive? Calling an algorithm “addiction” makes social media sound like a drug you can’t quit, and it calls to mind US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s recent call for caution on social media platforms that harkens back to similar warnings about cigarette packs. The concept of social media addiction also assumes that there is nothing we can do to stop ourselves from using it.
It is more fruitful to think about the overuse of social media As a bad habit that you can breakAccording to Wendy Wood, provost professor emerita of psychology and business at the USC Dornsife College. According to Wood, features like notifications and algorithmic feeds full of personalized content are designed to be habit-forming, and when you’re stressed or tired, people lose the ability to ignore certain emotions and control their habits.
“Using this label addiction makes people feel more out of control, makes people feel less capable of changing their own behavior,” Wood told me. “It pathologizes something that has positive as well as negative effects … and it really depends on how people are using it.”
Of course, he’s talking about adults here. Children are different. There is research that links certain changes in brain function With extensive social media use among some teenagersAnd the American Psychological Association is on record talking about young people Face a high risk of harm from using social media Because their prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed, that means they can’t regulate emotions the way adults do. And those are just a couple of examples A growing body of research Social media has strong negative effects on children and adolescents.
Another simple tip for keeping yourself or your teenagers trapped in a vortex of notifications, endless streaming content and algorithmic hypnosis? Put your phone in another room. University of Texas researchers found That the presence of a smartphone can reduce cognitive ability. It’s just a distraction, a reminder that there’s a virtual world of limitless, unexpected rewards within your reach
But you can’t pull the lever if you can’t see or touch it.
A version of this story also appeared in the Vox Technology Newsletter.Register hereSo you don’t miss the next one!
