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Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, announced Tuesday that it would begin rolling out measures that restrict what kind of content young people can access, who they can talk to, and how much time they spend on special media. The new measures will begin with an Instagram rollout that began September 17 in the US, but will eventually be implemented on Facebook and WhatsApp, too.

The new policies include automatically making Instagram accounts of users 16 and under private, limiting who can contact teen accounts or tag them in posts, muting certain words associated with online bullying, and defaulting to the most restrictive content access, as well as encouraging young people to spend less time on the app.

The new protocols come after years of discourse regarding the effect of social media use on young people, with pundits and politicians arguing that social media and smartphones are to blame for a decline in teenagers’ well-being.

Legislation and lawsuits have blamed social media for issues ranging from bullying and suicidal ideation to eating disorders, attention problems, and predatory behavior. Meta’s new policies gesture toward those concerns, and some may have positive effects, particularly those geared toward privacy. But they also address the rhetoric of politicians rather than teenagers’ well-being and come even as some experts caution that there’s no causal relationship between youth social media use and those poor outcomes.

Meta and other social media companies have been subject to intense scrutiny for their perceived ill effects on the mental health and well-being of young people. Cyberbullying, eating disorders, anxiety, suicidal ideation, poor academic outcomes, sexual exploitation, and addiction to social media and technology are all concerns that Meta’s new Instagram protocols were designed to address.

In recent years, reporting — like the Wall Street Journal’s 2021 series Facebook Files — has explored how Meta’s leadership knew that Instagram could be toxic for teen girls’ body image, yet did not try to mitigate the risks to vulnerable users. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has also placed the blame for increasing rates of depression and anxiety on social media use; his office released a report last year warning that social media use was a leading contributor to a decline in young people’s mental well-being.

The report says that up to 95 percent of American children ages 13 to 17 use social media, and nearly 40 percent of children ages 8 to 12 do, too. “At this time, we do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents,” the report’s introduction states, and cites excessive use, harmful content, bullying, and exploitation as the main areas for concern.

Murthy also called for a surgeon general’s warning label on social media — similar to the one on cigarette packs and alcohol bottles warning about those products’ risk to health — in a New York Times op-ed in June. The op-ed also called for federal legislation to protect children using social media.

Such legislation is already making its way through Congress — the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). KOSA passed the Senate in July and is headed to the House for markup Wednesday; it’s not clear whether any version of the bill will end up passing both chambers, but President Joe Biden has indicated that he would sign such a bill if it did.

The version of KOSA that passed earlier this summer would require companies to allow children or teen accounts to turn off targeted algorithmic features and limit features that reward or enable sustained use of the platform or game in question. It would also require companies to limit who could communicate with minors, as Meta’s new policies do; “prevent other users [...] from viewing the minor’s personal data”; and mitigate and prevent harms to teen mental health.

The Senate-approved version of KOSA goes further than Meta’s new teen account policies do, particularly when it comes to young people’s data privacy, and it’s unclear what effect the Instagram Teen accounts will have, if any, on legislation surrounding young people’s social media use.

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The language in Meta’s press release is geared toward parents’ concerns about their children’s social media use, rather than young people’s online privacy, mental health, or well-being.

The reality is that Meta’s teen accounts, as well as the KOSA legislation, can only do so much to address cultural and political fears about what social media does to children’s well-being because we simply don’t know that much about it. The available data does not show that social media use has more than a negligible outcome on teens’ mental health.

“A lot of things that are proposed to fix social media are not really questions of scientific rigor, they’re not really questions about health or anxiety or depression,” Andrew Przybylski, a professor of human behavior and technology at Oxford University, told Vox. “They’re basically matters of taste.”

Stetson University psychology professor Christopher Ferguson, who studies the psychological effect of media on young people, said that in his view the uproar over social media’s effect on kids’ well-being has all the makings of “a moral panic,” echoing earlier generations’ concerns that radio, television, the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, and other new media would ruin the minds and morals of children.

It’s unclear exactly what metrics Meta plans to use to decide whether the new rules are helping children and parents; when asked about those metrics, Meta spokesperson Liza Crenshaw only told Vox that the company would “iterate to ensure Teen Accounts work” for Instagram users. Crenshaw didn’t respond to follow-up questions by publication time.

“These all look like good-faith efforts,” Przybylski said. “But we don’t know if it’s going to work.”

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The pager and walkie-talkie explosions, explained: On Tuesday, hundreds of pagers exploded simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria in an attack that seems to have targeted members of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Islamist militant organization and Lebanese political party. On Wednesday, thousands of walkie-talkies also reportedly exploded. Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate. Here’s what we know about the possible attack by Israel so far.

Interested in buying a home? Here’s what the Fed has to say: The Federal Reserve cut interest rates by 0.5 percentage points on Wednesday, a cut more aggressive than many had predicted. While many potential home buyers have been waiting for this moment, lower interest rates don’t necessarily result in lower home prices. With this move, some economists think there is a possibility that home and rent prices could increase.

Why Trump’s latest claims about immigrants feel different: Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans’ false claims that Haitian immigrants are eating pets and spreading diseases is considered “blood libel” by many experts — a kind of rhetoric that parallels that of fascist governments throughout history.

Is there really an insect apocalypse?: Worrisome research on insects shows that studied populations have declined by nearly 30 percent over the last two decades. While that might sound like a positive thing in a world where we use more pesticides than we have at any point in human history, insects are an invaluable part of our ecosystem that we can’t afford to lose.

IVF bill gets blocked: Republicans in the Senate have blocked a bill for a second time that would make in-vitro fertilization treatments a nationwide right. Last February, Alabama’s Supreme Court concluded that frozen embryos created through IVF count as “children” under state law, thrusting the longstanding practice into the center of a larger national political debate. Here’s a refresher on how IVF treatment is regulated in the United States.

Saudia Arabia’s controversial new megacity: Neom, a massive desert city real estate project in Saudi Arabia, is part of the kingdom's wider “Vision 2030 project,” which is valued at over $1 trillion. However, Neom has been plagued by worker deaths, racism, misogyny, and other corruption controversies that have highlighted larger tensions between the West and Saudi Arabia over human rights. [The Wall Street Journal]

Yet another Covid variant: A new Covid-10 variant known as XEC is rapidly spreading globally. So far, there have been 25 cases with XEC lineage in the United States. While the CDC has not yet determined if the new strain has any unique symptoms, it’s still important to protect yourself. [USA Today]

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I picked up Tracy O’Neill’s Woman of Interest because I heard that it was an adoption memoir wrapped in a detective story. I love a detective story and happen to have lived an adoption memoir (if an unwritten, unfinished one). And that description of this moving, poetic book is not altogether untrue, which makes for a notably compelling start.

There’s a reality, though, that can’t be avoided for any adoptee interested in their own past: When you look into your personal mystery, it stops being a mystery — but also can’t really be solved. What starts here as a kind of noir, featuring snappy patter with a world-weary P.I., necessarily gives way to the complicated and shifting reality of O’Neill’s biological family, especially her birth mother — her titular woman of interest.

What’s captured in place of a potboiler is the gradual and arresting way you get a sense of people who have, as O’Neill understands, everything and nothing to do with who you are now, and the little-charted ambiguity of what comes after. 

—Meredith Haggerty, senior culture editor

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow!

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