In a spate of lawsuits across North America, social media companies are being accused of causing significant harm to young people.Rick Rycroft/The Associated Press
Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.
It comes as no surprise that technology companies are objecting to Australia’s recent decision to ban social media for kids under the age of 16. If other countries follow suit, they stand to lose their most captive market: teenagers.
What’s surprising is that it has taken so long for a jurisdiction to draw the line. The negative impacts of social media on adolescent well-being are increasingly apparent, and in a spate of lawsuits across North America, social media companies are being accused of causing significant harm to young people: contributing to anxiety and depression, and compromising their ability to concentrate and learn.
Now add escalating youth violence to the list.
A concerning picture is beginning to form. The Office of the Auditor-General of Ontario’s most recent report, released earlier this month, notes a 114 per cent increase in violent incidents across most school boards in the province over the past five years. Teacher unions nationwide are reporting unprecedented levels of aggression among students. Police-reported youth violent crime has been ticking upward in Canada since 2021, following almost two decades in decline, with 2022 marking a five-decade high in the number of people under 18 charged with homicide.
Many point fingers at the pandemic and the isolation it caused, as kids lost touch with each other in the real world. But it’s the world they were immersed in over the countless hours of lockdowns that is having the most enduring and pernicious effect. Social media is both amplifying teens’ exposure to violence and rewarding them for participating in it; it has created platforms that thrive on violent content and made teens the unwitting minions that produce it.
Take, for instance, the case of the 13-year-old girl who, on a balmy Friday evening in late September, went to a local park in Kelowna, B.C., to meet a friend. There, she was swarmed by a group of her peers and beaten senseless. Video footage of the incident, which circulated widely on social media, shows some 30 kids forming a circle around the girl, egging on her assailants, and filming her as she is hit and kicked in the head until she loses consciousness.
While the Kelowna assault was exceptional in its scale, the general scenario is not. When my son entered high school in Toronto a couple years ago, I started hearing about kids “getting jumped” – an underworld term that seemed at odds with the school’s gothic façade and sterling reputation. But then one of my son’s classmates got jumped: ambushed in a school hallway between classes, beaten to the floor and kicked repeatedly in the head by two students, while others stood around filming. Videos of the attack – both the original footage and an edited version that had been overlaid with a death metal soundtrack – went viral on Snapchat and TikTok.
School fights and teen mobs are nothing new, but Scot Wortley, a criminologist at the University of Toronto who studies youth crime, sees these “virtual performances of humiliation” as a novel and increasingly common feature of adolescent conflict. Teens bait and taunt each other online until the hostility spills over into the real world.
Nearly a quarter of students between Grades 4 and 12 at Canada’s largest school board, the TDSB, reported having been physically bullied in the 2022-23 school year. But cases of extreme violence often fall under a veil of secrecy: families are afraid to speak out for fear of reprisals against their kids, and administrators don’t want to broadcast dysfunction in their own schools. Only when police are involved do these incidents rise to the public’s awareness, as, for instance, last January, when escalating online threats between students at a high school in Woodbridge, Ont., culminated in a hallway brawl in which five kids were charged with assault. Or, in the same week, when 20 staff members at an elementary school in Oshawa refused to work, claiming to feel unsafe in the face of a continuing bullying campaign that had already required police intervention.
These incidents expose the vast generational gulf that social media has created. With limited access to the channels that carry the warning signs, parents and principals can’t intervene. Their impotence reinforces the sense of lawlessness that violence on social media already conveys. Kids learn that this is a realm over which the adults have little control; these are conflicts they must resolve among themselves.
It’s not easy. Whereas in the past, fights were only witnessed by those present, today the potential audience is global, and the injury, resentment and appetite for retribution live on for as long as the videos continue to circulate. Bygones can’t be bygones.
Look up “school fights” on X, and you will find an endless spool of videos showing kids beating each other up, chairs flying across classrooms, bloodied noses and lost teeth. Students host private social media accounts featuring the most spectacular fights at their schools. It’s tempting to say these incidents are not staged, but in a way they are. All participants – those who fight, who film, who post, who share – know that the content is pure gold.
More than any other age group, adolescents are hungry for peer acceptance, and as Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen made clear in her testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2021, social media companies know precisely how to exploit that appetite: by creating a currency of likes and shares that teens will chase at any cost. And nothing garners more attention than shocking, sensational content. It’s a depraved popularity contest.
“The violence becomes secondary,” says Emma Duerden, a professor of child psychology and neuroscience at Western University who studies the impact of social media on youth. “It becomes habituated, everyday.”
The 14 year-old Regina boy who threw coffee at two strangers in the parking lot of a Walmart store in 2019 put a fine point on it. Charged with assault, he tried to explain himself to the youth court judge: “You see other videos on YouTube all the time of coffee getting thrown into someone’s face,” he said, “but I get all this brought onto me?”
Teen violence and delinquency are often read as signs of moral rot, but they can also be seen through a neurological lens. Likening the brain’s reward system to gas, and the frontal lobe centre of cognitive control to brakes, Dr. Duerden says teens tend to go full throttle; the primal quest for dopamine overpowers the less-developed neural machinery that promotes reflection, consideration of consequence and long-term thinking. It’s this “jump first, think second” that makes teens the ultimate thrill-seekers, risk-takers and copycats: ideal candidates for TikTok challenges that invite them to ride the roofs of subway trains, dangle off construction cranes or attack an unsuspecting person from behind. Social media peddles in stunts and assaults, but omits their sobering aftermath. It caters to the adolescent way of thinking – or rather, of not thinking.
In so doing, it turns the logic of parental guidance on its head. The trigger warnings and rating systems used in television and movies to restrict young people’s exposure to harmful content have been replaced by algorithms that send it their way. A recent survey conducted by the Youth Endowment Fund in the U.K. found that while only a small minority of kids go looking for violent content online, one in four have been fed it automatically. The algorithm’s mandate is clear: maximize user engagement. According to the most recent Canadian Internet Use Survey, Canadians aged 15 to 24 are more likely than any other age group to have viewed online content that incites hate or violence.
Research by clinical psychologist Patricia Conrod confirms where this is headed. Over the course of five years, Dr. Conrod tracked 4,000 Montreal high school students, surveying them annually about their digital media habits and off-line lives. The results, published in 2023, suggest that of all digital media (including video games, movies and television), social media has the most enduring negative impact: elevating levels of impulsivity, promoting aggression and worsening conduct disorders.
“Social media makes young people more disinhibited and less able to exercise self-control,” says Dr. Conrod, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Mental Health and Addiction at the Université de Montréal. “It primes them to engage in violence.”
Like many of the impacts of social media, this problem has caught us somewhat unawares. Even Joanna Conrad, who works in the world of youth crime, wasn’t sure how to explain the transformation she began to see in her young clients about a decade ago. In 2009, when she joined the Essex County Youth Diversion Services – an organization that offers programs to young people aged 12-18 who have had brushes with the law – she was seeing textbook cases of petty crime: shoplifting, minor assault and mischief. But in the years that followed, Ms. Conrad noted a shift. The criminal activity became more violent and brazen, and offenders’ attitudes hardened; their empathy for their victims vanished and indifference took the place of contrition.
Ms. Conrad was perplexed. Then she began exploring her clients’ social media universe to find “reels of young people robbing jewellery stores and walking away in broad daylight; hypersexualized stuff they don’t even know is porn; shootings and stabbings.” Reading American psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 best-seller The Anxious Generation, Ms. Conrad was relieved to find words for what she has seen on the ground.
“It’s ‘the great rewiring,’ ” she says, quoting Dr. Haidt’s term for the impact of social media on adolescents. “These kids are completely desensitized to the effects of what they’re doing. They don’t know the difference between online and offline.” Ms. Conrad says that social media played a role – as motivator, broadcaster or both – in almost every one of the 270 cases that were referred to her Windsor, Ont., organization last year. In the past six months, almost half of the cases referred there by police have involved replica guns: kids use them to intimidate or threaten, to rob stores or other kids. When asked why they’re carrying weapons, Ms. Conrad says her clients answer “for protection.” Asked what from, they’re not sure.
Technology companies have been put on notice. Their claims to have kids’ best interests at heart ring hollow; the safety settings, age restrictions and parental controls they crow about continue to prove fallible and insufficient.
It’s a global problem with no ready fix. U.S. Surgeon-General Vivek Murthy has proposed warning labels on social media platforms, indicating that they may cause “significant mental health harms for adolescents.” Legislatures in the European Union and United Kingdom have made some regulatory headway, but Canada remains stuck; the Online Harms Act, designed to compel technology companies to protect young users, has been wallowing in Parliament for three years. Australia may, indeed, have chosen the right path.
In the meantime, Dr. Wortley, the criminologist, worries about kneejerk political responses to youth violence, citing former Ontario premier Mike Harris’s “zero tolerance” policy as a cautionary tale. In 2000, Mr. Harris introduced a provincewide code of conduct for students that mandated automatic suspensions and expulsions for offences as minor – by today’s standards – as vandalism and swearing at a teacher. Dr. Wortley says the policy backfired; not only did violence not decrease, but kids who were kicked out of school became involved in more serious crime. According to Dr. Wortley, the answer to youth violence lies in keeping kids in school and ensuring those schools are adequately resourced to meet their needs.
That’s proving hard enough. And now, an additional challenge. “The question is how to give youth status beyond social media,” Dr. Wortley says. There’s no recipe for that, also no precedent. But for starters, social media needs to be reined in. This is a problem of adults’ making; now adults have to solve it.