Workshop [5]

Dear [Chief Product Officer of Instagram/TikTok name],

I am writing to you as a Master's student of Learning, Education and Technology, highly interested in how technologies and digital tools are affecting people's learning experiences. I am writing regarding a highly relevant topic to your work and my interests, which are the operations of social media and their correlation to young people as users.  

Firstly, laying down my own experience with social media, I can say that it has been present in one way or another throughout my early teenage life onwards. Firstly, through Tumblr which was a means of expression and communication with friends, then with Facebook and Instagram, and most recently, TikTok. It gradually took a deeper role in my life, often affecting my emotions based on content that I watched, affecting my views, shaping my self-image. In my adult life, social media has been accompanying me daily, most of the times for entertainment purposes but is also my main source of information about the world. That being said, I think it holds a great weight for me as for the majority of people, therefore the mechanisms behind it, such as data collection, profiling and recommender algorithms, should be discussed further.      

On the one hand, personalizing a user's experience by providing recommendations according to their interests, can be beneficial for the user's interaction with the social media application, because it might help them discover similar products, activities and can somehow save time from people trying to find this information themselves. It is an efficient workaround that deals with the problem of information abundance and targets the meaningful content for the users. 

On the other hand, there are matters or privacy, consent, and overall freedom of choice regarding users' data being collected. In most cases, there isn't enough transparency by the companies who perform such actions, about the methods they are using, the endpoint to which the data reach, but also the extent of the data collection, or, if there is any relevant information, it is not in an accessible format. This overall creates a justified suspicion, when, simultaneously news are being heard about "data being sold for X amount of money", about "data breaches" in huge companies like Zoom a few years ago, and the list goes on. Moreover, the demographics also is a core point of interest. Specifically, as you already know, in major social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok that you are working on, the majority of users are young teenagers and children, with the age average dropping lower as the years go by. This changes the whole landscape of how information should be processed and presented to the users.

When referring to children and young people as users, undeniably there is a shared responsibility among parents and the social media platform. The platform itself cannot be held responsible for the uncontrollable exposure on children on it, since it is something that originates from the child's way of living, boundaries that have been set inside the family and active effort from the parents to engage the child in other activities and cultivate interests. However, the people working in lead positions behind those platforms can be, and should be, held accountable for potentially harmful content and for their intentions not being as human-centered as possible. It is no secret that protecting people's feelings or identities is not the priority.

Therefore, as a person studying people's learning, I highly recommend that social media platforms would take into account principles of educational psychology and the multifaceted aspects of one's learning. There are two directions in which my recommendation is based on. The first one is that young people, with their systematic use of social media, unknowingly start to create digital footprints, build on their digital identities and are becoming active contributors to a global digital community. They are experiencing all of this, though, without having any digital literacy skills to base their actions on. So my proposal would be that the instrument of expression/communication/entertainment, which is social media, should also become the instrument for transmitting important information. I believe that data collection results have given plentiful information already about what is it that captures young peoples' attention, so it could be used for building appealing educational material. What remains to be done is for teams like yours to actually utilize this information and collaborate with other experts, building a multi-disciplinary group that studies young people's interactions with social media in different scopes, but with a common goal, to raise their awareness on digital literacy, digital security and safety. 

The second direction of my thinking is that children's, especially young teenagers' emotional world is very unstable and fragile. This significant information cannot be omitted. A young person that consumes content on social media is a novice user that is highly influenced by current trends and often follows them mindlessly. Also, children and young people are curious by nature, they might often search for content that displays acts of violence, or other potentially harmful content to their mentality.They are now at the stage of figuring out the world around them, themselves,their self-image, their sexuality, interests, their real identity. Profiling them and presenting recommendations based on their choices alone, without taking into account that the content that they watch and the content that is good for them are two different things, creates unsafe, if not harmful, environments for young people. Additional filtering of the content is essential. Again, this requires collaboration and formation of expert groups that deal with the developmental stages of people based on educational psychology concepts and apply those in social media algorithms.

Closing this letter off, I strongly believe that all people, but especially young ones should not be considered as pawns for companies to making profit out of, but their identities should be protected as valuable members of our societies that are still developing their mental, emotional worlds. The basis of this is reforming the social media companies' intentions and priorities. Institutional knowledge exists, the learning scientists and educational experts are plenty, but the links are missing. I hope that you will take the time to read and consider my proposals.

Best Regards,

Athina Kardiakou