When you think of the Federal Trade Commission (on the rare occasions that you might do so), you most likely think of government regulations and enforcement regarding things like anti-trust suits, product safety violations, consumer safety issues, and similar concerns. That sort of work requires a lot of lawyers and a knowledge of trade laws. You probably don’t imagine the FTC being in the business of dealing with child psychologists, though. But that’s a business they are getting into now as Congress engages in more scrutiny of social media platforms. The FTC’s Alvaro Bedoya, working with Chairwoman Lina Khan, is bringing on child psychologists to presumably study the negative impacts of social media use on youth. But is this a government health protection concern, or a back-door to regulation of free speech? (The Record)

Bedoya told Recorded Future News in a recent interview that with the strong support of Chair Lina Khan, the FTC plans to expand its ranks of experts by next fall. The agency will bring child psychologists on staff to help inform the commission’s potential rulemaking and enforcement actions related to social media companies. Bedoya recently returned from London where he met with the UK’s top technology company regulators to understand their more aggressive approach in addressing how social media impacts kids…

He told Recorded Future News the FTC prides itself on being more than just a “bunch of civil law enforcement attorneys” and has steadily increased the number of Ph.D. economists and technologists in its ranks, better equipping it to go “head-to-head” with the companies it regulates. He expects child psychologist hires to integrate into the FTC’s operations in the same way.

The commission will start slowly by hiring just a handful of child psychologists, but Bedoya expects the number to steadily grow. The move comes as children’s online safety and the mental health impact of social media on youth are under mounting scrutiny, with significant legislation to regulate kids’ use of social media under discussion in the U.S. Senate.

Before digging into this, I would just say that you’ll get no argument from me that social media has almost certainly generated a terrible, negative influence on children, particularly those from families that don’t supervise their kids’ online activities or perhaps simply aren’t web-savvy. For that matter, I’ve long argued that the entire internet has been a net negative for all of society, adults included, but that ship has long since sailed.

With that said, this news out of the FTC is potentially disturbing for a few reasons. First of all, this seems pretty far afield for the Federal Trade Commission. Their charter is generally restricted to the regulation of products and prevention of abuse in commerce. You can generally look at a complaint from consumers and ask questions about whether the product is doing what it was advertised to do and doing so without causing harm. If the answer to either question is no, the FTC might get involved. But social media companies aren’t in that sort of business. It’s the phone or laptop or other device that is being used. The social media companies just offer apps that run on them. If the app is delivering content generated by other users, it’s apparently functioning correctly, even if the content is causing harm.

And if the harm involved is truly a mental health issue, wouldn’t that result typically be handed to another agency? If a company is selling a supplement, for example, and people were getting sick from it, wouldn’t you first go to HHS or the FDA or somewhere with expertise in that area? And – again – in this case, it would be the content on the app causing the harm, not the app itself or the device delivering it.

You really need to read the entire interview with Bedoya to get a full sense of where he’s going with this. But he’s asked at one point if he similarly feels that video games might be causing mental health issues for children. He actually responds by saying, “I do not think that because I don’t think the research bears that out. I think we now have a pretty rich tranche of research suggesting that most use of video games particularly now, where they’re cooperative, you actually have people going online with their friends working cooperatively to do things — turns out that’s actually pretty positive for child development.”

That’s just shocking to me because I would argue that video games in a multiplayer world can be just as harmful (if not more so) than social media apps. So what’s the real goal here?

Even if we assume that the content on social media may be causing harm to children (or anyone, really), what remedy is available? They’re not going to start banning phones or laptops. Would they simply shut down companies providing services used by literally billions of subscribers? That seems unlikely as well. So there is likely only one other “remedy” available. That would be censorship of specific content deemed “harmful” in the eyes of the government. Is that really within the purview of the Federal Trade Commission? It doesn’t sound like it to me. And Bedoya speaks of his recent trip to the UK where he saw social media regulatory programs that are much more restrictive than anything we have in the United States. They sound like they would like to model the US approach to what the Brits are doing, and that would be worrisome in the extreme.

At the highest level, we already know that the Biden administration has shown a great deal of interest in censoring unapproved speech on the web. Their efforts to set up their own Ministry of Truth thankfully crashed and burned when people were immediately  enraged by the consequences for free speech, but could this be a tactic to get around those issues? You know how it could be pitched… ‘we’re just doing it for the children! Don’t you care about the children?‘ We should keep a close eye on this. It simply doesn’t smell right.