Prospect co-founder and co-editor Robert Kuttner talks with author and Harvard Medical School lecturer Susan Linn. They discuss the ways that big business uses technology to addict children to social media and sell advertising, and what can be done about it. You can listen to the conversation below, and an edited transcript follows.
Robert Kuttner: Susan Linn is a psychologist, a child advocate, and a ventriloquist who worked with Fred Rogers. She virtually invented puppet therapy, working with cancer patients at Children’s Hospital using puppets. She is a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Susan is also the founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which is now called Fairplay. She is the author of three important books: Consuming Kids, The Case for Make Believe, and most recently, Who’s Raising the Kids: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children.
Susan has written for several magazines, including the Prospect. Among her achievements as a child advocate, she convinced Disney to stop marketing Baby Einstein on the premise that it had any educational value. And the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood worked with the FTC to prevent Google from monetizing information on kids that Google had gotten through YouTube Kids. Susan has been my friend for more than 40 years.
Susan, let me start by asking you, your book Consuming Kids was published almost two decades ago. What has worsened in the last two decades that persuaded you that there needed to be another book on this?
Susan Linn: The technology. You know, the technology didn’t get worse. It got better, it got more powerful. It made marketing to children more confusing, more omnipresent, more invasive than it ever was before. In 2004, the major concern was television. And that was powerful enough. But the new technologies are just so much more powerful.
Kuttner: What are some examples of that? Is the problem the medium? Or is it the message, or is it both?
Linn: It’s both. We have to remember that marketing doesn’t just sell products. It sells values as well. People don’t think enough about how the values of commercialism, the values of consumer capitalism, are really antithetical to democratic values. So we’re immersing kids in this culture, that tells them that “me first” is more important than cooperation; a culture that encourages them to think by impulse, to consume, consume, consume. Given the crisis of global warming, it is basically encouraging kids to adopt values that will ultimately destroy themselves and the planet.
Kuttner: So it isn’t just the evil of screen time per se, although that’s part of the story. It’s the use of screen time by big corporations to hook kids on behalf of more commercialism.
Linn: Screen time in and of itself is not evil. I worked in television. I worked with Fred Rogers. I think that allowing children access to really good stories can be powerful and good for them. The problem is the business model. With television, the problem was commercials. With the tech companies, they are in a war for our attention, they want to hook us and hook our children, 24/7, and keep them glued to the screen, and the content on screens is supported by advertising. People accuse me of being anti-tech or anti-screen. I’m not. I’m anti the business model.
Kuttner: You were telling me an absolutely hair-raising story about a social media game, the essence of which is for parents to humiliate their kids.
Linn: That’s something that I’ve been taking a deep and disturbing dive into. Basically, pranks are big on social media. You know, practical jokes, the purpose of which is to fool somebody. Make somebody look silly, surprise them.
We can debate whether that’s good or not good for adults doing it to adults. But what’s happening on TikTok and other social media sites is that parents who want to monetize their families are “pranking” their kids. Maybe older kids can understand the joke. You can think that’s good or not. But there are parents doing this to babies and toddlers and preschoolers who don’t have the cognitive capacity at all to understand what’s happening.
So for instance, there’s an app that can change what you look like. So a father posted a video of himself, holding his baby on his lap, and his face morphed into a cartoon creature donkey. And the child was terrified, screaming. Developmentally, babies are in the process of learning what’s stable in the world, and also learning to trust their parents. To have their parents suddenly disappear and become a terrible monster is really frightening.
There’s another awful one. It’s called the Poop Challenge. Parents pretend to get fake poop on their toddlers. And again, that’s exactly anti-positive development. Toddlers are in the process of either moving to toilet training or being toilet-trained. They’re learning that they’re not supposed to touch poop. And then when they find that it’s on them, they’re terrified.
There was another challenge on TikTok called Meet Your Teacher. For kids just starting kindergarten to have their parents call them to their phone and say, your teacher wants to FaceTime with you, and then show them a horribly deformed and frightening face is terrifying. A lot of the parents doing this are parents who are either already monetizing their families, or are hoping to be able to do it by getting millions of views.
Kuttner: Your fundamental point is that all of this perverse behavior is being driven by commercialism. Somebody makes a buck off of this. So in this case, TikTok benefits from the proliferation of this form of sadistic play.
Linn: TikTok, like other social media sites, makes its money through advertising. The more views, the more advertising money.
There’s lots of great programming for kids on public television. But so much of it is funded by licensing. There’s no on-screen entertainment for kids that isn’t selling them something.
Kuttner: So TikTok is promoting a use of social media that is perverse for child development, and then it’s seducing parents to play along with this on the premise that parents can monetize their kids. So it’s a double seductiveness that is horrible for the kids.
Linn: Maybe triple, because what it also does is to normalize behavior which should not be normalized. It normalizes hurting kids or terrifying kids and undermining trust in parents. I saw a video of one TikTok influencer with his baby on his lap. He had rigged the technology so that people saw on the screen a plane crashing, from the inside of the plane. The baby can’t recognize what’s on the screen, but the father gets more and more agitated. And the child picks up the father’s emotion.
We have just about no laws to protect children online. There are a couple of bills in Congress that would protect kids in terms of their privacy and also stop personalized advertising. Neither has passed.
Kuttner: When you succeeded in getting Disney to stop marketing Baby Einstein as something that was educational for babies, you used a combination of publicity and shaming and allies in government.
Linn: And also a threatened lawsuit.
Kuttner: But the evil was easy to understand, easy to grasp, once you refuted the premise, or you got scientific research to refute the premise that this was actually good for kids. This is more insidious, because parents are enlisted as allies. It’s not that they think this is going to make their kids smarter. They must have a sense that they’re humiliating their kids, but they’re monetizing their children. So what’s the remedy for this?
Linn: The remedy for this is really complicated. Where the law stands now is that companies are not responsible for the content that they post.
Kuttner: This is Section 230 of the Federal Communications Act, where digital platforms are excused from being held responsible for content. Now you’ve got an interesting left-right coalition because a lot of conservative Republicans are very anti-Big Tech mainly because Big Tech supports Democrats politically more than they support Republicans. So you’ve got a number of Republicans who want to rein in Big Tech. There are probably some traditional-family-values conservatives who recognize that this is not good for families, that this is sadistic. And then you’ve got the fact that TikTok is a Chinese company. So you’ve also got the fact that there are people in both parties who want to rein in China. Do you see any hope that the particular provision of the Federal Communications Act that holds digital platforms harmless for content, no matter how harmful the content, might be altered?
Linn: I wish I were optimistic about it. We have to keep working towards that, but I think it’s an uphill climb. One thing we could do that wouldn’t be caught up in the courts is do a massive public-health campaign around child development, and what children need. Young children, particularly. There’s also a lot of concern about teenagers and depression and suicides and the way that teens are exploited on social media. There’s a lot of activism about it. There’s concern in Congress. But I think that we need to start with babies.
People just don’t understand child development. They never learn it. It’s not taught in schools. It should be mandatory. A course in high school, a course in college, where people really learn about how children develop and what babies need. That would not solve the privacy issues or the personalized advertising issues which are huge and problematic. But we really could do more to get the message about what kids need out to parents. Not just TikTok, but YouTube and Twitter, and not just because of these cruel games, but because, you know, there’s mounting evidence that putting babies in front of screens for long periods of time is really harmful to their brain development.
The brain research is showing that it affects parts of their brain that are linked to executive function. You know, the capacity to begin a task and bring it to completion. That’s a really, really important skill. Also self-regulation. That’s another attribute that seems to be undermined in babies who spend a lot of time with screens.
Putting a baby for five minutes in front of a screen is not going to harm the baby. But the problem is that it’s hard to keep it at five minutes, because it’s so powerful. The babies just glom onto screens. If you go to YouTube and you search for videos for babies, there are tons of them that come up that claim things like we can stop your baby from crying. We will teach your baby language development, and so on. In fact, the research tells us that babies can’t learn language from a machine. It has to be in relation to a person. So the tech companies, starting with infants, are coming between parents and children, and in a way claiming to be able to parent the kids.
Kuttner: And this is connected to other policy failures. If we had decent pre-kindergarten programs, and decent child care, or paid family and medical leave, parents would not be so strung out. Parents could spend more time with their kids, and not frantically stash the child in front of the screen in the hope of just amusing the kid, so that the child will shut up so that the parent can do what the parent has to do. So the two things seem to be feeding on each other. There is too little support for parents and here is this incredibly compelling babysitting device that turns out to be bad for child development.
Linn: It’s never been harder to be a parent, because there is this incredibly powerful, seductive, commercialized culture that is undermining parents’ relationship with their children.
One thing we could do that wouldn’t be caught up in the courts is do a massive public-health campaign around child development, and what children need.
Kuttner: One of your books was titled The Case for Make Believe. One of the things I’ve learned from you over the years is the importance of play in child development. Screen time is the antithesis of authentic play in which the child is following the child’s own imagination with other children or with parents. Could you talk a bit about that?
Linn: Again, it’s not necessarily a screen that’s the problem. When I was writing The Case for Make Believe, I was urging parents to cut back on children’s screen time to encourage creative play. But I realized that in my own childhood, media was incredibly important to me. I became a ventriloquist because of television. My parents were not ventriloquists. It was watching a ventriloquist on television who was inspirational to me. And so I became a ventriloquist. I tried it out myself.
Then there was Peter Pan, in the theaters, and Flash Gordon, which was on television. When I went to see Peter Pan, I was completely enraptured by that character and that story. And the same was true with Flash Gordon. Those two media programs inspired years of creative play for me and my friends. And so I thought, how can I be such a hypocrite? I mean, what’s the difference? And it took me a while to sort it out, but there was a difference, and the difference is access.
I saw Peter Pan in the movie theater when I was six, and I didn’t see it again until I was 19. Flash Gordon came on, maybe once a year for a few years. What happens today is that kids may see a movie but they also have access to videos. They can see it at home. They can see it in the back seat of their parents’ cars. They can see it on their phones. They can wear technology that can show them things. It’s repeated over and over and over again. It becomes fixed in a child’s head that this is the script. This is how the characters behave.
But what makes it even worse is the business model, the way that media is supported. Children’s media is all about licensing. It’s not just going to see Star Wars. It’s all of the Star Wars figures that are for sale, and Star Wars clothes or SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas. Barbie this and that. It just goes on like that, and so there’s no opportunity for children to initiate their own meaningful play. And play is important for all of us. But for children, because it’s the foundation of learning, creativity, constructive problem-solving, and the capacity to wrestle with life to make it meaningful.
Kuttner: Where do you put video games in this saga? I know children, who shall remain nameless, whose idea of play is to play video games with their close friends, and yet the whole thing is scripted, not to mention often violent. I’m talking about video games that are not just solo—the kid and the screen—but two kids playing remote video games. Is that corrosive of authentic play?
Linn: It’s problematic because it’s being mediated by a corporation. Kids who are playing Minecraft together are being mediated by a corporation. Fortnite is another one that kids really love, and I play Fortnite. It’s fun, but it’s also filled with advertising, Not necessarily third-party advertising, although there’s probably that as well. But to buy skins like outfits for your avatar and to spend money on all of these other virtual things. They’re dropped online regularly. Fortnite is marketed as a free game. But you’re being told that it’s not fun unless you get the latest skins or the latest whatever.
Minecraft had a lot of creative potential for kids. When it started out, you could build all sorts of amazing things, and you can do that. But from what I’ve seen of it, it’s more violent. And also it’s the same kind of commercialism. It’s possible to create video games that are creative for older kids, not for younger kids, because younger kids—babies, toddlers, preschool—they need to explore the world with all of their senses.
Kuttner: So the medium of screens could have constructive use consistent with the development of real creativity, as in the case of when you watched Peter Pan, and it influenced your play off-screen. But it’s the fact that corporations are dominating this medium that makes it particularly insidious.
Linn: We don’t have real public media anymore. Fred Rogers wouldn’t be able to get on the air today. The way to keep things on the air is to license everything, to sell them to kids. There is a National Endowment for Children’s Television. But it was funded for three years and then never had funding again. You know, there’s lots of great programming for kids on public television. But so much of it is funded by licensing. There’s no on-screen entertainment for kids that isn’t selling them something.
Kuttner: Do you have any allies whatsoever in the business community, maybe outside the world of tech?
Linn: It’s hard in the business community, because there’s a model for how you make money. And once somebody wants to make a profit, it’s just hard, if not impossible, not to do it. That’s why we need regulation.
The FTC has been really, really good about this. As we said, they’re the ones who fined Google for the way that they were advertising to kids on YouTube. That’s a big deal. They, you know, just put out a whole treatise on marketing to kids and on tech that I thought was very good.
In 1978, the FTC came out and said that we should end marketing to children under the age of eight and junk-food marketing to kids under the age of 12, and they said that they were going to do it. But there was so much pressure on Congress from every industry who stood to benefit from marketing to kids that Congress actually defunded the FTC for a while, and then made it much more difficult to regulate marketing to kids.
And then in 1984 under Reagan, the FTC basically ended regulating children’s television. And it became fine to create a program for the sole purpose of selling toys. We have a really good FTC right now. There are people in Congress who at the moment are concerned about teenagers. But whether there will be the political will in the near future to really change things, I don’t know.
Kuttner: Well, on that note, I would say you’re doing as much as anybody to create the political will. Susan Linn’s latest book is Who’s Raising the Kids: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children.
Susan, thank you so much for your work, and thank you for this conversation.
