Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm Head of Programming, Conor Boyle. Today's episode is part two of our recent live event in London's Kiln Theatre with academic and expert on the cultural and social impacts of smartphones and social media, Caitlin Regehr. If you haven't yet heard part one of the conversation, just skip back an episode and get up to speed.

Reger was joined in conversation by researcher and host of the hit podcast Kill List, Karl Miller, to discuss solutions to the unregulated world of screens and social media. Let's rejoin our host Karl Miller now with more. So obviously a lot of the problem solving we've been talking about today is very much about the individual, isn't it? Yeah. And that in a way is a kind of failing. Yeah.

Because, you know, what that does is it kind of wrongly suggests that the whole burden for being safe online falls entirely to the individual, which, as you make out at the very beginning, is not the regulatory posture that we have with basically anything else that exists.

So just for context for those that might not be fully immersed in the world of digital regulation, the Online Safety Act was enacted recently, moving us into this whole new kind of world where for the first time platforms had legally instituted responsibilities for the kinds of things that they can do. So Caitlin, you've alluded to this, but let's make the allegations explicit and clear. You don't think the Act is enough, do you? No. I think it is really disappointing.

And I've had conversations with the Molly Russell Foundation about this. The act was written on the back of that inquiry. And they chickened out. I don't know whether it's that they were just worried about the money or it's that politicians require social media in order to get elected.

But I think it is a huge failure. I have asked if it might be ripped up or revised. I don't know if it will be. And so my new thing is whether we as the public need to start looking at advertisers who actually fund this system and start to say, hey, do you know the content that was viewed by the Southport Killer?

We can go back on that and look at what ads ran beside that content. Who funded that content? I don't want to do it, but I think as the public, we need to start questioning this. And we do need to start, you know, we might not be the consumers of tech advertisers are, but we are the consumers of advertisers.

And so while we wait for more robust regulation, which doesn't just assume that kids will see harm, that doesn't continue to classify tech companies as glorified indexers with no responsibility, which is really different from what we have with other forms of media where publishers and broadcasters have a responsibility to the public.

We could classify them as something else. Do you know when Ian Russell went on this morning, he held an envelope full of images that Molly had seen that was fed to her on social media. But of course, he could not show them because they were not permissible to be shown on broadcast television to adults.

but they could be shown to a child. And that is down to the way that we classify these platforms differently, and I think it's time that we change that. But specifically, Caitlin, what is lacking in the regulation, and who is to blame?

Let's identify people. Is it the drafters? Is it the law itself? Is it Ofcom? Was it the tech giants with their kind of overmighty, all too effective lobbying efforts? And what do they manage to do to the Act? Or what happened to the Act? Or what did the Act never do to mean that it's now in your eyes inadequate?

So first, I think it's that the act itself did not have the tooth that it needed to. It did not have the regulatory might that we hoped it would. But secondly, it is about the way that Ofcom has interpreted the act, which is to say social media companies should limit the amount of harm that's fed to young people. There's also a lot of pressure put on age regulation and age verification, but there's very little to say that

age verification will in fact be enforced by social media companies. I mean, when I'm in my master's students class at UCL, if I poll all the students, almost all of them are 10 years older on Instagram than they actually are. And that's because when they opened the account, they lied.

So we also have to deal with that, that there's very little incentive for social media companies to even enforce these things. And not to put too much of a... more of a downer on this, but there's also growing geopolitical headwinds, meaning even the application of the Online Safety Act as it stands is looking increasingly unlikely. But anyway, we are now going to be remorselessly problem-centric, solution-centric for the last 15 minutes. That is what we...

So this is what this is about. And this is what we are now going to focus on. It is all too easy to focus on the problems alone.

And I think there's a lot of media attention around the problems without giving people solutions. I'm going to try and pin you down on the most concrete, specific advice that you can give to people for what they need to do. Because I know there's lots of factors and there's lots of things you need to bear in mind when you're thinking about what exactly the right answer is. But I'm going to try and make you to be as specific as possible. So let's start. Let's go through the ages. Okay. Okay.

When is the earliest age that you would contemplate someone having a device? Okay, what do we mean by a device? What are the differences? So I actually think the fact that we just assume that all devices are personal is problematic.

We didn't used to have personal devices. We had devices that were attached to the home. They were household appliances. I mean, that's part of the reason why older generations tend to look at every ping on their phone. It's because when they grew up, there was a phone attached to a wall. And if you didn't pick it up, you missed the call. So we had household televisions that weren't algorithmically fed. You had to watch what everyone else in the country was watching. And so what we...

I liked the idea of holding on to the idea of a household device for as long as possible. That we don't have to move into personal devices so readily. When you do want to introduce personal devices, it's really important to ask yourself, what do I want this device for?

Most parents end up giving their kids a personal device because they want geolocation. They want to be able to locate their kid or they want their kid to be able to use maps or because they don't have a phone, a landline in their house. And so if the kid is home alone, there's no way for them to be reached.

There's this other thing, of course, that their friends might have devices and there's social pressures around that, which we can get to in a moment. But let's just talk about the logistics of all of this. So there are lots of devices that are coming out now which allow you to have geolocation, which allow for calling capabilities but don't allow for social media, let's say. And I think we should be looking to devices that actually fit the need, right?

What do we need them for? My husband is trying to like source a Blackberry right now because he, you know, he wants that click again. And there's a bit of kind of a bit of nostalgia, I think, that's coming back for people who just actually are starting to think about what do I need the device for and what do I not need it for and really trying to strip that back.

So, I think this idea of getting your kid a smartphone should be queried and there are other options. Okay? What I really, really would caution you against is getting your kid a smartphone without yourself fully understanding this landscape so that you are able to have these discussions as a family.

And so much of this, so much of what's in this book is so that you can understand these processes. Because of course, as parents, we are being asked to parent through something that we ourselves didn't grow up with. So that you can deeply understand these ideas so that in turn, you can start to seed these ideas. So when you do want to introduce that device...

do not do so without quite a background in digital literacy. And so if you're going to go with the smartphone-free childhood route, which is you're going to hold off social media until 16, that's fine. But of course, that day will come. And if you haven't given them sufficient digital literacy, when they turn 16, they will not have the tools to navigate this space.

So we do also need to be seeding these things in age-appropriate ways. There are of course some biggies, like the porn talk. So pornography, the Children's Commissioner's report, which was an incredibly damning report from last year, suggests that by the age of 11, one in four boys will have consumed often violent pornography, and that there is a rise in domestic abuse in youth relationships.

as we're adults of this, because they're using it as an education tool. You do want to get to your kid before that point. Now, might feel really hard to talk to your kid about porn. Like, yeah. So what I suggest you do is you use the Marvel analogy. You tell them it's not real. You tell them it's like a superhero film.

That level of violence, because we know that pornography is getting increasingly, it's within its own attention economy, right? So it's becoming increasingly, increasingly more violent. You have conversations about the fact that it is not reflected of most normative loving relationships and that it shouldn't be used as an educational resource. It's like Superman. You tell them it's not real and you do want to do that before they see it. That's the ick one. Sorry.

Alright, so let's move to regulated versus unregulated spaces. So clearly you've got a preference for spaces, you know, be that BBC online content, YouTube kids, either kind of regulated, maybe not YouTube kids. No? No?

Okay, so regular basically regulated institutions that happen to be brought like kind of putting their content online as well Where how do you think about? Helping your child navigate and begin to move into unregulated spaces because they can't they can't be on iTunes forever Yeah, if you mean BBC yeah, BBC BB's forever. Yeah CB so

That's right. You need to begin to help them to understand that there is a space out there where harm might be seen. So there's an old 90s approach which was called shoulder surfing. So this was the guidance that came out in the 90s when people started to purchase their first home computers, which tended to sit kind of in the middle of a living room, right?

And shoulder surfing was this idea that you, because there was just one computer in the house, you could sit and read your paper and surf over the child's shoulder. And that seems really laughable now because we have so many devices and every kid has a device in a different room. But I think where you can...

begin by implementing shoulder surfing, begin by implementing that if you are going to be online, we're going to do this together or I'm going to be in the same room is a really good place to start. I do want to touch upon YouTube because you brought it up. So,

YouTube, even if you are on children's versions of social media, so like YouTube kids or Instagram kids, what is happening there is these are still algorithmically driven platforms, which are, I would say, grooming children into becoming used to these processes. Right?

They are not regulated in the way, so they exist by the community guidelines that are laid out by the social media company, which we somehow allow. So they make their own rules. So you might have tons of ads for junk food, let's say, on YouTube Kids, which I think is a huge problem. You have short form, poorly produced content, which can lead to fragmented attention spans.

And you have a lot of the same content again and again and again. So you're not getting kind of diverse content that you would have in a children's viewing hour. So I would really shy away from those. And instead, if you are going to move to online spaces, look for online spaces that are

that are producing healthier content that is looking at long form educative content and you can start talking to your children about what healthy forms of social media are versus unhealthy forms of social media by way of a shoulder serve. Journaling. Yeah. So,

Obviously being mindful, being self-aware, and maybe doing that so privately, right? So you don't have to reveal everything that you're writing in your journal. But when should you be encouraging kids to be thinking really explicitly about things that they've seen

how it's made them feel, something that might have made them feel shocked or unhappy or hurt or traumatized as well as happy. Is that something that from the very beginning we should be promoting? For sure. And everyone here, of course, as well. Yeah, we should all be, I saw something that really upset me online. We should encourage kids to be sharing things that scared them online.

that they saw in a movie or on a television set or on the TV or something that made them feel bad because that is getting us into a habit of opening up these silos. We want to open up these silos, move away from this idea that these are personal issues. This is not a personal problem. This is a community problem. We are all in this together.

And so within your own home space, you want to be creating that as a normative means of communication. That is something you talk about. Screen time. Great. So both important but inadequate. Correct. How much screen time when?

for kids. So, and I know there's so many factors, but we need specific advice. Okay, so screen time, which a lot of people here will have heard about, screen time refers to limiting the dosage of screen consumption to about one to two hours a day for kids, but we also talk about it for adults too. We talk about, I've had too much screen time today.

So screen time guidance, which is often now considered to be outdated, emerged from some very good research around childhood obesity. So that is to say, it's better for kids to run around outside than be on screens. So we should limit the dosage of their screen time so that they are more active. That's what that guidance was about.

That guidance then came to be the kind of main guidance that we give to everyone. But screen time only accounted for the quantity, not the quality of what was being consumed.

So by that, you could have one kid sitting, having their hour screen time, watching a David Attenborough documentary with their parent. It could be engaged viewing, which means you stop, have a little chat about it. You know, you have what we call interactive viewing. And then you could have another kid sitting on the same sofa beside you with headphones on, watching a tablet, watching YouTube.

By that guidance, those would have been both appropriate uses of screen time. So where we need to expand this guidance and what my work is working on at the moment is to expand that guidance away from simply a quantity approach to a quality approach. So if we are going to be using screens,

sometimes to switch off our young or to act as a babysitter. If we are going to do that, and obviously that is not the best form of childcare, we should be doing it in a very conscious way and we should be thinking about what is on those screens.

And what does that kind of consumption-based model look like? So what should we be doing most of when we're on a screen? What least of? How can we kind of think about the meaningful distinctions? So this book has a digital diet pyramid, like a food-style pyramid, so that we can think about what healthy consumption, all of us, what healthy consumption might look like. Educated content, generally pretty good.

Interacting, calling your grandmother at the other, you know, if you're calling your grandmother in another city, pretty good. Passive viewing, viewing that encourages what we might call a doom scroll or the switching off of one's mind. And we all kind of know that state, right? Less good. That's more like having, you know, a bag of crisps or it could be far worse than that.

And so what we want to look to do is look for engaged viewing, viewing that is building social skills, viewing that is, you know, interactive. You might have times where there's actually, you know, there are different types of education applications. You want to encourage that for us all and try to minimize the amount of passive viewing.

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We are almost coming out to you for questions, by the way. I've got one more question, Caitlin, for you before we do. We've been speaking a lot about social media, but I just want to look to the future a bit. Obviously, the...

the art and science of capturing our attention never stands still. There's constant innovation on new ways to do it. What do you see out there that either worries you or makes you excited about how our relationships to screen time and maybe to algorithms might change? I'm thinking like AI chatbots. Obviously people are forming very, very deep relationships in ways that I think often strike the rest of us as being quite weird and odd and certainly very different to AI. Yeah.

Is that an area you're looking at? Are there others that people should be aware of too? You mean dangers of AI? Yeah. Yeah. I'm writing about AI at the moment. So I think with AI, and this book isn't really about AI, but I think it's about actually...

encouraging the use of AI in productive ways, but also reminding people of the value of being human. Right now, I run a master's program at UCL, and the amount of emails I receive that are clearly written by ChatGPT, where I have to go through four paragraphs...

of a bot basically to get to one line at the end, I find so frustrating. And I tell them this was written by AI. I'm not answering it. And that is because my students have lost confidence in their ability to be human. They think that chat GPT is going to be better at writing that email than they are.

I have been in classrooms with high school students who have said, "I get AI to write my text to my friend," because they've lost confidence in their ability to communicate. They've become so used to using AI models to formulate their ideas and their sentences.

And I think that that is a real shame. AI essays are terrible. And I think what we really need to do is encourage young people to use the tech where it is appropriate, but also really value their humanness.

And I think those are the ones who value their humanness that will have jobs in the future. All right. Well, now it's all of your jobs, everyone, to ask some questions. So we're going to move to the Q&A. Great. Let's go there, please. Should be someone coming along with a mic. Hello. Hello. Can you talk a little bit about ed tech and the use of screens in classrooms? Yes. I was...

I haven't told you this. I was at a school, a very good school, a few weeks ago, and this question emerged. And it was, if 10 years ago we didn't have the money, would we have given every child an iPad? And they said, probably not. So I think within the education sector, we're in this interesting space where we're

We used to define digital literacy as the need to learn how to use tech, that we needed to teach how tech functions and that we actually had to learn how to use it. I don't think we need to learn how to use iPads. And so I think that when we do use screens now,

We actually need to be moving away from that more traditional approach to digital literacy and into algorithmic literacy, where we're not just talking about this is how you use a screen, but rather this is what the screen is doing. This is why this content is coming to you. And this is what you need to be critical of.

So if we are using screens, we're using it holistically across all programs of the school. But it's not so much about the functionality, but actually the corporate structure behind it. Because screens are very good at being very easy to use now. And so I would, if you are kind of doing advocacy within your own school setting, be encouraging more of that.

and less around this is how you use a computer. I mean, unless they're doing programming, but I have to say, and I have colleagues who teach programming at UCL and they would, I don't know if this is being recorded, but the question is whether in five years time we will actually need to know how to program.

But what we will need to do is be hyper, hyper critical of what those programmers are doing. Well, most certainly not. Okay, let's move over here. Hi. I saw a guy on Joe Rogan who was saying that the TikTok algorithm towards the global north is, as you represented it, in terms of that negative spiral. TikTok's algorithm towards Chinese kids is one of positivity, uplifting, progressive kids.

So I'd be really interested if you feel that's true, and then maybe a little bit about how you see from a geopolitical context the weaponization of algorithms around the world. Okay. So yes, in China there's much more censorship, of course, and what is being fed to their young people is very different.

You might query whether that is too narrow in terms of what they're allowed to consume, but yeah, it's very different. And it's a great example of regulatory might. I don't think we should go that far, but it is an example of how regulation can be utilized. The weaponization...

So I assume you're speaking about politics? Yeah. And things like the Cambridge Analytica scandal and what continues. So, yeah, this is a huge concern. And as algorithms become more and more refined, they are able to target people more and more effectively. And this is where I think...

depending on our politicians to make a change becomes really complicated because we know that it's an amazing propaganda tool. It's an amazing propaganda tool. It's amazingly targeted. You can target people based on their own personal beliefs so you'll have completely different Trump campaign ads running for one person than the next person based on their beliefs and their behaviors online. So

Yeah, that is alive and well, and it's very polarizing too, right? It's incredibly polarizing. And we haven't really gotten into older people or people who find themselves in echo chambers. One thing that I would say is that if you're sitting at your Christmas dinner table and you have a relative who is in an echo chamber...

Instead of debating them around the details of their specific belief, try and step back and start to explain the attention economy to them. And if we all did a little bit more of that, if we all started to focus on the structure more and less on the particulars of our specific narrow algorithmic feed, then

we then actually could gel together more around this. We could become a collective around this. And I actually think policy follows the public will and we could decide that we want something different. Caitlin, so we've had quite a few people on the Intelligence Squared stage, I guess, over the last six months or so that are making... Was anyone here at the Reid Hoffman event?

Reid Hoffman. We had the authors of Abundance on the podcast as well. And they're making a very different argument to you, I think. Their argument is progressive politics needs to embrace the idea of building a better future rather than simply restricting the one that we're in.

So I think they would probably say that your kind of solutions are a politics of scarcity. So less algorithms, less screen time, less consumption of digital media. Are there ways that we can build a better future too using the kind of ideas and research that you've got? Are there ways that we can kind of refashion social media more aggressively than simply trying to step away from it?

I think this, I'm sorry if I've been too negative. I think this is building a better future. I think as the public, we should come together and decide that we have power in numbers. I think we should say, again, policy follows the public will. I think we should say we want much more hard-hitting,

financial bans on tech companies. I think we should decide that we can come together because currently the system is to polarize us. And I think that there is power in that. I think there's great beauty and hope in that.

And so I'm sorry if I seem too negative. No, I think that there is optimism to be had here because I think as the people we have power. But is there a tech vision there too? Is there a world where we build better tech that doesn't corrode us either socially or psychologically? Yes, but it needs to exist with a different financial structure.

What does that look like? It cannot be built on an attention economy. So we have to decide that it needs to look something closer to a broadcast model. So like public funding? It doesn't have to be publicly funded, but we have to decide that they have a responsibility to their public. That they don't take any responsibility for what they publish on their platforms. That's the current model.

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Conor Boyle, with production and editing by Mark Roberts. This is an ad by BetterHelp.

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