Reading the newspaper one recent morning, I was struck by a headline: “Meta sued over 11-year-old’s suicide”. The report from the U.S. left me feeling sorry for the child’s mother, who has chosen to call out the “culprits” who caused her little ones’ death.
She alleged that her daughter suffered from depression and sleep deprivation due to severe addiction to Instagram and Snapchat. The report reminded me of a similar case in the U.K. where a man partly blamed Instagram for his 14-year-old son’s suicide.
It sent shivers down my spine as I recalled a similar case of alleged suicide by a teenager whose family I know personally. She was probably upset over her Instagram photos and for being reprimanded for them. It’s indeed scary that our children like to spend more time on these social media platforms than with us parents.
Being a mother of a 13-year-old girl, I instantly slipped into deep introspection. She recently introduced me to a word called “ghosting” — friends suddenly choosing to disappear from your life. A sudden feeling of being ignored and neglected by friends had hurt her self-esteem badly. It sent me on a guilt trip.
Schism in homes
In today’s times, when a majority of us have only a child or two, are we proving to be even more incapable of taking care of them and ensuring their happiness? Most of my colleagues and friends blame it on social media. Much of the problem comes from precisely that, with COVID-19 aggravating it as even education had moved online. This has created a schism within homes, cutting down family time to almost zero. With both parents in a nuclear family going to work, things get worse.
Numerous instances of online addiction, bullying and abuse have caught our attention of late, pointing to the possibility of a mental health epidemic among youth soon.
A Class 6 student committing suicide in Madhya Pradesh for having lost money on an online gaming site, and a 17-year-old in Gurugram ending his life over a girl’s comment against him on Instagram point to the dark side of the Internet. Recent cases of Bulli Bai and Sulli Deals apps, along with the abuse of women in the Clubhouse app, make me nervous.
Are the social media companies ready to hold public welfare more important than their profits? In the U.S. Congress, a former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen said these photo-sharing and messaging apps do have deliberately designed algorithms that keep teens hooked onto their platforms.
The “engagement-based ranking”, she said, is Facebook’s system of algorithms that chooses the post at the top of a user’s feed. Meta is proving to be extremely harmful to the youth who are getting more and more addicted to its sites such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
In an interview with Time, Ms. Haugen says the most dangerous thing about engagement-based ranking is that it is much easier to inspire someone to hate than to teach someone empathy. She expressed concern over first-time Internet users in countries such as Ethiopia and India who are not mentally equipped to judge the authenticity of data.
During the inauguration of the first India Internet Governance Forum from November 25 to 27 last year, Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said, “The responsibility for content put on social media platforms and websites need to be clearly defined. Since the way content is being created, consumed and accessed has changed, there is certainly a need to rethink the governance structure of the Internet.”
The Information Technology Rules, 2021 do address growing concerns about the safety of children and recognises the need for social media platforms to be held accountable for content.
As a parent, I can only hope for speedy action by our lawmakers towards putting in place a mechanism that will hold the companies responsible for the content put through their medium.
pooja.kashyap
78@gmail.com
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