This week two different US courts found two monster social media platforms -- Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google (YouTube) -- liable for encouraging social media addictions in young people. This should shake up these companies which have operated with so much impunity for the consequences of their products. About that, we'll see.
John Della Volpe has been polling young Americans for over 20 years about what shapes their lives. He has explored with them what they think about social media.
... According to our polling, 71% of young Americans use Instagram, 64% use TikTok, and 54% use Facebook. ... nearly 1 in 3 young Americans blame platforms directly for spreading false information. And when asked what would rebuild trust, 50% say holding both platforms and individuals accountable — the exact legal theory that just prevailed in court. ...
Platforms have become infrastructure — useful, embedded, but not believed. And the implications extend far beyond tech. ... Gen Z depends on systems they believe are unreliable, run by institutions they believe are unaccountable. That’s not a user problem. That’s a legitimacy problem. ...
The consequences of growing up in, of being natives within, a system they can't believe in are scary and deep They adapt to their environment which is simply the world where they live, but which they cannot trust.
• They cross-check everything.
• They trust peers over institutions.
• They build their own internal filters for what’s real and what isn’t.
That’s rational behavior in a low-trust system. But at scale, it creates a country where there is no shared baseline — only parallel realities, loosely connected, constantly contested. And that’s where democracy starts to strain..
... They don’t leave the platforms. They can’t.
... Trust doesn’t disappear all at once. Platforms still work. People still log on. The business model still holds. But something underneath starts to shift.
When people stop believing what institutions say, they respond to authority differently. They question more. They verify more. They rely on each other instead of the system itself. ...
... Platforms can survive without trust. Democracies can’t.
• • •
Talking with a parent of teens recently, he observed that his young people weren't very interested in social media as far as he knew -- and they vehemently rejected AI-infused content when they encountered it. Maybe we'll see a generation more discerning than their elders about this stuff? That would be the normal human reaction to a novel technological reality.
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