TikTok Limiting Users Under 18 to One Hour Per Day
Plus: An Actual Bipartisan Thing Happened
TikTok Limiting Users Under to One Hour Per Day
Yesterday, TikTok announced that it would be limiting use of its app for those under 18 to just one hour per day following the White House banning the app from phones of federal employees. TikTok’s head of trust and safety said in a statement, “We believe digital experiences should bring joy and play a positive role in how people express themselves, discover ideas, and connect. We’re improving our screen time tool with more custom options, introducing new default settings for teen accounts, and expanding Family Pairing with more parental controls.”
Users under 18 will need to enter a passcode in order to continue on the app after an hour. For users under 13, the limit will also be an hour, but will need to enter a passcode after 30 minutes.
The AP reported that Martin Cooper, father of the cell phone, lamented his work to some extent saying, “We don’t have any privacy anymore.” While he was talking about those intent on getting our data, a recent study shows that the phone’s biggest harm might be to mental health, especially for young girls.
John Haidt makes the case following numbers released last week that focused on teenagers’ mental health following the COVID pandemic. Rather than COVID-era lockdowns being the cause, it might have just been the accelerant. From Haidt:
As I showed in my Feb. 16 Substack post, the big surprise in the CDC data is that COVID didn’t have much effect on the overall trends, which just kept marching on as they have since around 2012. Teens were already socially distanced by 2019, which might explain why COVID restrictions added little to their rates of mental illness, on average. (Of course, many individuals suffered greatly).
Most of the news coverage last week noted that the trends pre-dated covid, and many of them mentioned social media as a potential cause. A few of them then did the standard thing that journalists have been doing for years, saying essentially “gosh, we just don’t know if it’s social media, because the evidence is all correlational and the correlations are really small.” For example, Derek Thompson, one of my favorite data-oriented journalists, wrote a widely read essay in The Atlantic on the multiplicity of possible causes. In a section titled Why is it so hard to prove that social media and smartphones are destroying teen mental health? he noted that “the academic literature on social media’s harms is complicated” and he then quoted one of the main academics studying the issue—Jeff Hancock, of Stanford University: “There’s been absolutely hundreds of [social-media and mental-health] studies, almost all showing pretty small effects.”
Read more on why he says skepticism may have been justified in 2019, but more evidence suggests social media is the major cause of mental illness for teenage girls.
RELATED: Why are young liberals so depressed? There's a neglected dimension beyond gender in America's troubled youth (Matthew Yglesias)
An Actual Bipartisan Thing Happened
That’s how real inflation is in 2023. Fox News reported:
Dozens of House Democrats joined with their Republican colleagues on Wednesday in a vote to require the White House to assess the inflationary effect of President Biden’s executive orders before they are issued.
The bill is the latest effort by Republicans to pump the brakes on Biden administration policies that they say are causing the highest inflation levels seen in decades. But the bill was also supported by 59 Democrats, and easily passed in a 272-148 vote.
Under the bill, any executive order that has an annual budgetary effect of $1 billion or more would have to first be studied by the administration for its possible inflationary effects on the economy, which Republicans say would make Biden think twice about imposing costly new rules on the public.
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