00:00Social media has been completely disastrous for Gen Z, but some of our dialogue about it
00:05also is really disempowering. Yes, it's true that algorithms are sticky, that getting off of your
00:11phone and reducing your screen time is really difficult, but recently we've been starting to
00:15tell young people that they simply can't do that. If you tell a teenager that they're helpless and
00:20they're just at the whim of big tech, then they might actually believe you and just surrender
00:25themselves to the algorithms. I spoke to a 17 year old who surveyed a thousand other young girls and
00:31found some really scary results including the fact that almost half of them had considered self-harm
00:36in just the past couple months. The thing that really stuck with me from that though is the
00:40fact that she deleted Instagram and TikTok from her phone as a response because she wanted to take
00:45back control and she told me basically this is something that more and more young people can and
00:50should be doing. The problem is if we keep telling teens that they're not able to do simple things
00:55like this, that big tech is this scary monster that completely has control over their minds and
01:00psyches, they're never going to learn to develop the skills necessary to move in a technological world
01:07that is obviously our future. More of our rhetoric about social media and teens should be about empowering
01:13young people to make smart decisions and teaching them that they're not actually powerless even if it feels
01:19that way sometimes. And hopefully pushing back against big tech and deleting apps or taking a break
01:24becomes contagious and no longer so socially necessary in order to be a young person in this world.
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