Marshall McLuhan on Why Content Moderation is a Red Herring

Those senate hearings were conducted within the “numb stance of the technological idiot”

Dear Subscribers:

I’m writing to explain why we have put up only one post in the past month and to offer a powerful idea that is relevant to all efforts to reform social media. 

First the explanation: The Anxious Generation comes out in 5 weeks, on March 26, and there is so much we have to do! Zach and I turned in the final revisions of the book in December and we have been busy since then working with web designers to create a website, raising money to support a guerilla art campaign by the artist who designed the cover of the book (more on that soon), organizing friends and allies, getting me set up on Instagram and TikTok (fight fire with fire), doing interviews that will be released after launch, and otherwise gearing up for a campaign to end the phone-based childhood and reinvent the play-based childhood for the 21st century. In other words, we are getting ready to launch a movement to Free The Anxious Generation.

Quixotic, you say? No. Parents are fed up and ready to rise up. It just happened in the UK last week, where parents are spontaneously organizing behind anyone who will lead, and where the UK government is mandating that all schools in England develop policies to go phone-free. We can make that happen in the United States too.

This Substack will be a major command center of the campaign, and we’ll return to regular posting in the next week or two. We’ll also ask you for help in a variety of ways. (Can you help us now by sending this post to a few friends and asking them to subscribe and/or pre-order the book?). A theme of the book is that we are stuck in a series of collective action traps, and the only way to break out of them is with collective action, such as coordinating with the parents of your kids’ friends to all agree to give smartphones later (not before high school) and independence earlier (starting in elementary school). We must stop overprotecting children in the real world and underprotecting them online.

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Now for that powerful idea:

Many things disturbed me while watching those recent U.S. Senate hearings on whether social media platforms are promoting or at least allowing sexual solicitation of minors, child porn, drug sales, bullying, and content promoting eating disorders and suicide. We saw parents holding up photographs of their dead children, some driven to suicide by mass shaming, or the fear of it when children are sextorted (that is, tricked into sending photographs of themselves fully or partially naked by criminals who then demand money, repeatedly, to not post the photographs online). 

“How can you do this to our children?” the senators asked, in a variety of ways. The response from the social media executives was usually some version of “But Senator, we spend X billion  dollars each year to create industry-leading tools to find and remove such content.” That phrase, “industry-leading,” was used six times during the hearing; five times by Mark Zuckerberg, and once by Shou Chew from TikTok.

Image: Mark Zuckerberg apologizing to parents. Source: AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

But as I watched the hearing, I kept thinking about how content moderation is to some extent a red herring, a distraction from larger issues. Yes, it must be done and done better, but even if these platforms could someday remove 95% of harmful content, the platforms will still be harmful to kids. The discussion of online harms can’t just be about making an adolescent’s time on Instagram safer, not even 95% safer, because so many of the harms I describe in The Anxious Generation are not caused by bad content. They are caused by a change in the nature of childhood when kids begin to spend many hours each day scrolling, posting, and commenting. Even if Instagram could remove 100% of harmful content and leave only photos of happy girls and young women enjoying their beautiful lives, the effect on adolescent girls would still be devastating from the chronic social comparison, loss of sleep, addiction, perfectionism, and decline of time spent with their real friends in the real world. Even if social media companies currently enjoy protection from lawsuits based on the content that other people have posted (Section 230), they absolutely must be held legally responsible for the hundreds of design choices and marketing strategies they have used to hook tens of millions of children. 

And then I came across a quote from the great media theorist Marshall McLuhan which brilliantly captured exactly why it is a red-herring to focus on content. In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan tried to explain the profound transformation of society brought about by electric communication technologies, from the telegraph and telephone through radio and TV. Electric technologies gave us a very different world from the print-based world that began when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1440s. McLuhan tried to explain to his readers the ways that these technologies changed people’s habits, minds, selves, and societies, but all people seemed able to think about was the explicit or implicit messages conveyed in television programs and advertisements. Does that advertisement contain a subliminal message about sex? Can’t we just regulate the content of advertisements and shows better? No, said McLuhan, you’re missing the point, because the medium is the message. 

Image: Marshall McLuhan (Source: Gotfryd, 1967)

When television swept to dominance, everything (including the news and the coverage of elections) became a form of entertainment, to be consumed passively, and this changed American society and democracy in ways that are hard to articulate but surely disruptive. Here is how McLuhan put it:  

The threat of Stalin or Hitler was external. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed. It is, however, no time to suggest strategies when the threat has not even been acknowledged to exist. I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them. Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. 

Yes! This is the difficulty I have when I try to explain how the rapid transition from flip phones to smartphones with social media (and thousands of apps) changed childhood in harmful ways in the early 2010s. I repeatedly encounter some version of the criticism that social media is not intrinsically harmful to children because “it all depends on how kids are using it.” Many of these critics believe that we should not enforce even the current low and unenforced age limit of 13. Rather, we should help our 10-year-olds to manage Instagram, TikTok, and Snap in a better way, reading and posting healthier stuff. No! I mean, ok, that would be better than the current situation, but our kids would still have phone-based childhoods, the mental health crisis would continue to rage, and they’d still have difficulties making the transition to adulthood. The medium is the problem.

The leaders of those tech companies did all they could to keep the discussion within the “numb stance of the technological idiot.”  You can even see McLuhan’s point in Mark Zuckerberg’s famous quasi-apology to the parents of those dead kids: 

I'm sorry. Everything that you all gone through, it's terrible. No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered and this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry-leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have had to suffer.

In other words: We’re already the best in the business at content moderation, so I can’t promise you that we’ll do better in the future, but we’ll continue doing what we’re doing to remove harmful content from the 5 hours that your children now spend each day on social media. 

Let me be clear: there is no way to make social media safe for children by just making the content less toxic. It’s the phone-based childhood that is harming them, regardless of what they watch. Kids need to be freed from the grip of smartphones and social media, especially through early puberty. This is why two of the four norms I propose for solving our collective action problems are about delaying children’s complete immersion in the virtual world. Here are those four norms:

1) No Smartphone Before High School (give only flip phones in middle school)

2) No Social Media Before 16

3) Phone Free Schools (all phones go into phone lockers or Yondr pouches)

4) More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world, at an earlier age

These norms cost almost nothing to implement, and they only seem impossible when each family is acting on its own. If we act together these changes become easier to do, and their combined effect would roll back the phone-based childhood and restore a play-based childhood. Let’s do it.