Parents are being tol to set limits, put phones away at dinner, monitor screen time, and help kids unplug.

But what if this is bigger than self-control?

I'm Sheri Jones, and in this episode of Impact: Michigan, we explore a growing debate around teens, mental health and social media, and whether young people are simply struggling to regulate technology or growing up inside systems intentionally designed to help keep them engaged.

Researchers, lawmakers, schools and families are all asking difficult questions about algorithms, social media addiction and what responsibility platform should carry when it comes to children and teens online.

Well, joining us, are clinica social worker Andrea Calabrese, attorney and policy advocate Nancy Costello, behavioral researcher Dar Meshi, and pediatrician and researcher Dr.

Jenny Radesky.

But first, one Michigan Family's story.

There's a button at the base of the mic.

And you may begin.

Chairperson and members of committee.

My name is Charay Gadd, and I am the mother of London Isabella-Ryan Gad.

London was very kind and sweet.

She loved to read and listen to music.

Just always being a jokester and making faces and... She played soccer year round We spent the summers alway spending time together as family She was just a few weeks from starting seventh grade.

There's slime everywhere.

She loved slime.

She's got jars of slime all over the place.

London's Grammy called her sunshine.

Her dad called her Izzy.

Her sister, only sibling, Charlie, called her little.

Her friends called her onion.

Some say it was because she was so beautiful she could make you cry.

When I look back I took her phone at night.

I had timers and I thought I was watching her feeds, and, I would go through her text messages, I thought I was doing, what any parent tries to do is regulate it as much as possible without causing this constant friction between us.

We had rules.

We had boundaries.

I took her phone at night.

I was present.

And still th addictive algorithm found her.

I mean, I was fighting the addiction part as much as I could.

But a lot of this stuff I didn't even know was happening until after, whe forensics went through her phone I found out later that she had me blocked on some of the things she didn't want me to see.

You know, even if yo don't give your child a phone, they still have access to Chromebooks at school, they still have access to their friends phones and, they could buy a burner phone and you don't even know they have it.

What parents cannot see is wha the algorithm chooses to deliver Harmful design features took her down a rabbit hole to darker content, self-harm, suicidal material that holds attention longer.

London was exposed to harmful content through social media.

An AI driven algorithmic feeds in ways I could not see in real time.

I didn't realize that they studied you the way that they do.

And these systems just continue to keep you engaged.

if you just one time wer having a bad day, and were drawn to self-harm or whatever it might be, and it continues to send you that... These designs are harmin our children, and they know it.

They absolutely have known it and they've known it for years.

What do we believe happens to children whose frontal lobes are still developing when algorithms repeat, reinforce and evaluate harmful content directly into their hands?

When I would see things, London would post like, it was after, it was like "Twinkle, twinkle little star.

I hope I don't wake up tomorrow."

That's just devastating to see.

And then to learn that they wer feeding her stuff like this, and Why aren't they notifying people when they see these suicidal ideations?

She actually, the night that this happened posted one last pic.

And she was smiling and being goofy And she- I asked her what she did and sh told me she took some medicine.

And she told me where it was.

And I tried to get to the hospital and I kept telling her we had to go.

And she stood at the end of the hallway screaming she was sorry, she didn't mean it.

She was not a statistic.

She was 12.

But today she is part of one.

We are not statistics.

We are mothers.

We are fathers, we are grandparents.

Our children had teammates, classmates, best friends, cousins, grandparents who adored them.

I will spend the rest of my life fighting, so no other parent has to live this nightmare.

And I will never get to tell her good night, I love you to the Milky Way and back, see you in the morning ever again.

And I pray you never forget the first gift I gave her - her name.

Please lead, please act, and please protect Michigan's children.

Thank you.

Thank you for your testimony.

I'm so sorry about your story.

And I'm so sorr that you have to be here today.

We want to thank Charay for sharing her story.

And, we send our sincere condolences on your loss of London.

And it really brings us to today.

Thank you so much for joining us.

And this is a very difficult conversation to have, but it's an important one to have.

And we appreciate you all being here today.

Dar this is the research that you're doing right now.

We heard some of the words tha Charay talked about with London and what you worry about it being an addictive behavior, when it comes to that or just impulsive behavior.

Can you speak to that at all?

Yeah.

Great question.

I think there's, it's a really challenging, topic.

Right.

And I think there's a little bit of a confusion about the harms of, like, content versus the harms of an addiction.

And, one thing I could say is like, if someone has alcohol use disorder, which is alcoholism, like addiction to alcohol, right?

There's the harms of actually consuming the alcohol, which would be like, potentially like cancer.

You can get cancer from alcohol.

Or there's also the harms of the addiction itself, where you're, getting fired, you're losing your relationships and things like that.

And I think these harms, especiall when it comes to social media, they get mixed up together.

And instead of, separated and understanding, like there's harmful content that you could absolutely see on social media.

But there's also the harms from, a very strong, use that could also be, yeah, very strongly, powerfully, dependent and making someone come back and use the platform more and more.

Right.

We talked about going down the rabbit hole.

Right.

Yeah.

So being fed that content.

Andrea, I see you, shaking your head.

Talk to me about that.

Yeah.

So when you mentioned addiction, it's absolutely an addiction because of the dopamine, dopamine receptors that are being hit with when kids log on to social media, they're looking for connection and a lot of that connectio comes through likes and posts.

And that's what they're looking for, that reinforcement, but als what's being delivered to them is what you're talking about to the content of what's being delivered.

And it's addictive in a sense o they are looking for acceptance.

And sometimes that acceptance is comes from dark places.

And that's what happens with our kids.

Jenny, I know that you were a pediatrician and you're looking into this.

You hear and speak with families.

Please give us your perspective on this.

As a clinician, I hear from families experiencing really sever ends of compulsive use of media.

It could be video games, it could be social media or AI.

But I also hear about milder forms of just still problems, difficultie in getting a good night's sleep or getting kids to transition off of their video games to come do homework or come to the dinner table.

So it's importan to think that these designs that engage us grab our attention and hold onto us.

They're making family life hard for almost every family I talk to.

And there are these really extreme and really sad cases of it going, both a content related harm as well as a compulsive, an addictive like use of harm that we could do a lot about through legislation, through fixing feeds and fixing the design features of these products.

Well, we heard Charay say she did everything right.

She monitored, she read her texts, she made her put her phone away at dinner.

And yet still we know that London blocked some things from her mother.

So parents out ther trying to do the best they can.

And I'm, I'm wondering what your advic would be to them at this point.

I think that a lot of the advice that we give parents is education.

Understanding that there are people that infiltrate, some of these platform that the kids use, like Roblox for instance, there are adul predators that infiltrate these, and masquerade as other children and our children are connected to them.

So a lot of it is education.

There recently, if I can share, there is a, podcast that I listen to called Left to Their Own Devices.

It's a great series that really puts into perspective what we're talking about today, and I think would be really helpful for parents and for you that are doing work along the legislation.

They talk a lot about that.

They mentioned Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation and his thoughts around the limitation of technology for children and when they should have access to it.

It's interesting that you say that because we're asking kid to regulate when we, as parents find it very difficul sometimes to regulate ourselves.

And being a behaviorist researcher, I'm sure you can let me know your perspective on that.

Sure.

Yeah.

Well, we, we have a, system in the brain called the brain's reward system, in which we, we use to evaluate, like, decision making, like if we want to, like, let's say, drink a glass of water o go to sleep or go out for a run.

We evaluate the we predict the value that these things can provide to us.

And then we, make a choice that tries to maximize the value.

We do the thing that we think will be most valuable.

And, due to evolution, we find social connection and social interactions rewarding.

You just nodded your head at me.

That activates the reward system in my brain.

Under imaging research has demonstrated that.

And so, also likes on social media, social connections through technology also activate this reward system.

We find it valuable, and therefore we're driven to get on these device and interact with other people.

And self-regulation to any right you're trying to when you counsel families, you talk about that.

And it's becomes very difficult for some kids who are just wire to be a little bit more intense.

They have stronger feelings and emotions.

I follow a lot of kids in developmental behavioral clinic who are, you know, just, you know, have more self-regulation problems.

And I really coach families to have really intentional boundaries, especially around have habit forming sorts of media, the media that makes more mone off of our time and attention.

I tell families, especially if you're dealing with a fussy toddler o preschooler, focus on like PBS Kids and really old school, types of, media.

That's not trying to make money off your kids time and is going to let them go when that episode is done when they get older.

A lot of my patients, I say, really take your time before getting that phone or getting social media because your kid is going to be more susceptible to a lot of those likes and those reward mechanisms that are going to make them feel like I belong somewhere, like I'm good at this and I want them to find other activities offline in their community and school that give them that same natural reward that they they matter.

I, I absolutely agree.

I think we're up against a technology that promotes influencers where our kids see that that is a valid form of work, but it's very exploitive.

And I think that's where education also comes in for the parents as well.

To understand like the connection to this technology and seeing other kids online, you know, getting rewarded for what they're doing and they're not, you know, how do we get the our kids connected to activities, like you're saying, you know, being outdoors, doing other things with friends live not through a screen, but then they're also sort of culturally distant from their peers.

And that's a problem, right?

In my day, it was if you didn't watch television, you didn't know what, like the current styles were, who were the characters, you know?

And that was always sort of a conversation loop at school.

And so kids ofte will resent the idea of, well, my parents are not going to be letting me do this.

And then they feel like they're missing out on the conversations, the different things that are coming up, all the cultural trends.

So it's a problem.

So putting all the onus on parents to do something about their kids social media habit.

We're asking too much.

We're asking too much of the parents.

It's got to go to the product design of what the social media companies are doing to keep those kids online.

There was recently a New Mexico trial that just ended about six weeks ago and it was where the New Mexico Attorney General's office, they had several people posing as kids, as kid who were 14 years old and under.

And then the interaction that they had online, and they eventually they sue meta, Facebook, Instagram, etc.. In, in this action, and one of the things they discovered by looking at internal memos is that they were actually looking at kids psychologically below the age of nine to see ho they interacted with technology and to then take that knowledge and figure out how to market social media better to them to get them online.

This is no accident.

You know what we're hearing from the experts here?

They know exactly this information and they're using it.

They're using it to get those kids online.

And that's one of the big words, you know, the algorithms we talk about that feeding the content based on what you look at, how you watch, giving them the content, in that leads to addictive behavior.

I would like to ask each one of you, do you believe or do you feel that social media and interacting this way is addictive, can be addictive?

Jenny.

You know, as a researcher, I was always trying to use really precise language like engagement prolonging design or navigation constraints.

But when I talked to my labs community advisory board, they were like, yeah, that doesn't resonate with us as parents.

You can use the word addictive design.

It doesn't make us feel bad.

It actually puts mor of the blame on the tech company and helps us understand some of the mechanics that are at work when it's so har to draw boundaries around media.

So I think, whil I don't use the word addiction as much to describe what kids are experiencing because I don't want them to feel like the problem is located inside them, I want families to see the problem as more located in the digital environment, that it really has these designs that are meant to engage with our psycholog in ways that keep us on longer.

Dar.

Yeah.

I don't use the word addictive.

In my research, we call it, problematic social media use, which is the academic term.

Typically we reserve, the word addiction for something that's been, categorized as a disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.

In their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, their DSM, which is like the Bible for psychiatry in the United States.

And, yeah.

So, I think that there' also a lot of confusion, like, because like like I eat a lot of ice cream.

So I'll tell someone I'm addicted to ice cream because I have a I have difficulty with regulation like you talked about, like trying to stop myself from eating ice cream.

And there's, so I do think that the, a lot of people say, oh, I'm addicted to social media because they're spending a lot of time and they're driven to use it.

I don't want to, but then there are people all the way on the other side who are having serious problems, regulating themselves.

And, the effects are, really, really bad.

I know someone that, I mean, I don't know about, any cases of suicide, like, we just watched.

But I do know of people, it was someone who lost their jo because they couldn't get off, social media.

And there are there are also case reports of people who have lost their job or, failed out of classes, out of school or things like that.

So, there are very serious, effects.

I just, think that there's a lot of confusion, because a lot of people are casually using the word addiction, whereas there, there are people in the research world, in the clinical world like me, that are trying to use a more, established, criteria that have been published and accepted by, the clinical world.

So yeah.

Nancy, I us the word addiction all the time because I think it relates to the broader public, and they get a sense of what this is about.

The problem legally is that is the social media.

Is it correlated with kids, increased anxiety, suicidality, eating disorder problem or does social media cause that.

And in law, you can't really do anything about a correlation.

So what we've seen was sinc Instagram was introduced in 2010 and then TikTok in 2016, we saw a correlation of increased rates of suicidality anxiety, eating disorders, etc.

going up in teenagers, and younger than teenagers.

But it's a correlation.

So what the social media companies have done in these lawsuits is say, well, let' go back to her name was Kaylie.

In the California case, there was another trial tha just ended about six weeks ago.

And they said, but Kaylie suffered from neglect from her parents.

There was turmoil at home.

She might have had other genetic factors.

So she was predisposed to have depression.

So you can't say tha the social media use caused it.

And that's where the legal problem comes in.

We are and I know that we're working through that in in government and legislation.

And bigger picture, Andrea?

Language matters.

So I do understand how we present it.

I, I have a background in working with addictions.

So if you do look at the DSM, it is a disorder.

So if you look at addictions, addictions are a disorder from mild to severe.

And so we have to look at what's the presentation that's happening.

There's process addiction and then there's drug addictions and alcohol addictions.

This I would think would fall more under a process addiction like pornography or eating disorder or other issues, because it is changing the brain chemistry.

Okay, just to clarify though, it's not in the DSM, right?

I understand that.

Because of what you talked about guardrails.

Right.

And we saw with Charay and London's story the "Kids over Clicks."

So the legislation so do we need guardrails for this and do they go far enough right now?

What you're seein we absolutely need guardrails.

We absolutely need some type of government regulation of social media companies.

And, the difficulty with it is and I was just listening to the words used on the panel, if it's not in the DSM, we need these guardrails.

Yes, but there's all this talk about the content of social media.

What are they seeing and is it harmful?

But as soon as you use that word content, you're talking about speech.

And when you talk about speech, speech and social media is largely protected under the First Amendment.

Or there's also something called section 230 the Communications Decency Act.

And what that says is that the social media companies any internet service provider, is not liable for thir party content that gets posted on social media.

So the social media companies have been protected all these years by either saying, we're not, you can't sue us, it's the First Amendment violation, or we're not responsible for this third party content, because under section 230 that protects us.

So it's not really about content.

It's about the design of the platform.

And that's the language we should be using.

It's about the design of the algorithmic feeds.

This that is a relentless feed of bad of of escalation of content that can get very extreme.

And as humans, we have a hard time looking away from that.

It's like it's like when you rubberneck, an auto accident as you drive by it on the highway.

That doesn' help us at all to look at this.

It slows us down in the traffic, but we can't help as humans to look at it.

And that's what's happening on social media too.

The kids can't hel but look at escalating content that's coming at them that can usually get worse and worse and worse, and therefore result in these terrible anxiety, as using eating disorders, etc.. So it's it is really about the design of the platform, and that's where we should be focusing.

And even in our languag as experts, we should be talking about design, platform design and sort of take that word content and put it aside.

But that's where the emphasis has to be in order for government to be abl to step in and pass regulation that will stick.

And I think, yes, a really important mechanism of harm that, the, you know, Safer Feeds Act, would address is engagement ranked algorithms.

So when you have an algorithm that is just using a computer to say what is trending, what is getting people' eyeballs, that's not necessarily I know I'm not a lawyer, but that's not someone at the company makin a specific decision of like, oh, this teenager should see this eating disorder content.

You know, it's not based o that kind of corporate speech.

It's more based on a computer's automated decision of following what is trending.

What would this person probably engage with?

They're using statistics and AI to try to predic what you can't look away from.

So that is one place where hopefully, there won't be as much concern about restriction of speech, because it's really about the design of that algorithm and how it is interacting with young people.

What I hear from teens, on a youth advisory board that I have run of the American Academ of Pediatrics is we hear teens don't want the mass of the world showing up in their feed.

They don't want all this drama that arouses their emotions or makes them feel terrible.

They want to follow who they care about their friends inspirational accounts.

And if they had more control over just following the accounts that they care about, it would probably be a much healthier experience.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Thank you all for being here today.

Well, the conversation around teens and social media is evolving, as you're hearing today.

And what was once framed mostly as a question of screen time and parental limits is now becoming a larger discussion about mental health, platform design, accountability and how young people experience their life online.

And while experts may disagree on terminology or where responsibility ultimately belongs, there is growing agreement that families are navigating digital systems far more sophisticated and persuasive than many people actually realize.

I'm Sheri Jones and thank you for joining us for Impact: Michigan.