Arro urges regulation of social media platforms, not just age bans

Restricting young people’s access to social media will not be enough to address its harmful effects, Tallinn University senior researcher in educational psychology Grete Arro told ERR. She said platforms should instead be regulated as products, with addictive features such as manipulative recommendation algorithms and endless scrolling removed or restricted.

Prime Minister Kristen Michal has convened a council tasked with reducing social media’s negative impact on young people. Arro is a member of the council.

Arro said there was extensive evidence of social media’s negative effects, and that the issue went beyond addiction. The effects may be seen in learning, relationships, and mental and physical health.

“The body of evidence showing why we need to do something is very large,” Arro said.

She said policymakers should think more broadly than simply banning social media use below a certain age. Instead, they should change the features of the platforms themselves. Manipulative recommendation algorithms and endless scrolling, for example, should be excluded or prohibited, she said.

Arro stressed that the problem was not social media as a whole, since it also has features that can benefit people. These include communicating with one’s community, maintaining contact, developing an identity, creating content of personal interest and seeing friends’ content.

“When we talk about communicating with one another, connecting with our community, creating our identity, producing content that interests us and seeing our friends’ content, all of that is fine,” she said.

According to Arro, the brain responds to environmental influences, and the novelty offered by social media is particularly important. Platforms provide large amounts of new information that people perceive as enjoyable, especially when accessing it requires little effort.

She said the problem could be particularly serious when this experience of novelty develops at a very early age. It may then become more difficult to find the same enjoyment elsewhere later, for example through learning.

Arro said researchers had also studied the long-term relationship between social media use and mental health. They have found that heavier social media use may lead to symptoms of mood disorders, rather than the relationship working only in the opposite direction, with people who already have mood problems using social media more as a result.

Researchers have also found links between social media use and characteristics that affect learning, including attention, impulsiveness and the ability to concentrate.

Arro compared regulating social media with ensuring the safety of other products. She pointed to cases in which products had been modified over time after it became clear that their features could harm people. She said the same principle could be applied to social media.