Social media and excessive internet use also harm economic capacity(1)

Extent of media consumption

In a report, published by the German Federal Ministry of Health in October 2022 on the consequences of the Corona pandemic period on substance and media use², it says, during the Corona period there was a significant increase in media consumption of adolescents (14–17 years) and young people (18–21 years) in Germany. For young people, it currently amounts to five hours per day on a typical weekday and nearly seven hours on days off. Seven hours. That is almost half of the waking hours of the day. In 2015, it was nearly three hours (166 minutes a day).³
  Accordingly, about 60 per cent of adolescents and 57 per cent of young adults showed “problematic internet use behaviour”. This affects girls and women more often than boys: Among the girls 67.7 per cent, and among the boys 50.5 per cent showed internet addiction behaviour, among young women 63.6 per cent, and 49.4 per cent among young men.
  In short: Three out of five young people in Germany aged between 14 and 17 currently show “problematic internet use behaviour”. What are the effects of this excessive, compulsive internet use?

Media use and mental stress
of girls and young women

Since around 2015, there has been a trend towards deterioration of the mental and emotional health of young girls, which has led to suicides and self-mutilation. The statistics speak an impressive language. Since 2010 hospitalisation rates of teenage girls because of self-mutilation have risen by 143 per cent in eleven countries, according to the Economist. For boys, they rose by 49 per cent.
  The main reason for this is said to be the use of social media, especially Instagram. Smartphones are particularly dangerous for girls, as boys are more involved with video games and less with “depression-inducing social media”. Numerous studies have shown that social media can cause sadness and anxiety amongst teenagers.⁴
  According to “The Guardian”, which earlier in 2021 referred to a study by the British Journal of Psychiatry, 7 per cent of all children in the UK have attempted suicide by the age of 17, and almost one of four has committed an act of self-mutilation in the year before. Girls were particularly affected. One reason cited is, that “social media can be a toxic environment”.⁵
  In the House of Lords at the beginning of 2022, in the face of rising numbers of suicides and self-mutilations among girls, there was a major enquiry into “what role social media played in the deaths of children in the UK, including suicides, self-mutilation and murder”.⁶

The dark side of Facebook,
Instagram and Mark Zuckerberg

From September 2021 onwards, the Wall Street Journal published an unusually extensive series of articles on Facebook. The Journal had been provided with internal documents of the media group, which highlight the impacts of Instagram use on the mental health of young people, especially girls.⁷ According to the internal documents, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg knew, for example, that 32 per cent of teenage girls felt worse after Instagram consumption, if they had already felt bad before. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women see and describe themselves.” Moreover, Facebook knew quite well that Instagram was addictive. In public, however, Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives had repeatedly stressed that the research results were inconclusive, that Facebook was hardly harmful and also had many beneficial influences. One US senator said Facebook had adopted the blueprint of big tobacco – luring teenagers with dangerous products while hiding the scientific results from the public. US psychology professor Jean Twenge argued: To believe that a tobacco company should be more honest about the connection between smoking and cancer is equally naive as believing that Facebook should be more honest about the link between Instagram and depression in teenage girls.

The head of the US Public Health recommends:
 No social media use under 16

In mid-June 2023, the “Wall Street Journal” published an article titled “Why 16 should be the minimum age for social media – A plea to ban TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram for children under 16”.⁸ Since the harms of social media outweigh the benefits, and since existing laws protect marketing and data collection, but not child safety, the newspaper recommended that, analogous to driving, children should not be allowed to use social media until they are 16. The business journal referred to the statements of doctor Vivek Murthy.
  Murthy is head of the US Department of Health and Human Services (Surgeon General) and wants to give his own children, aged 5 and 6, no access to social media before 16. There is plenty of scientific evidence to suggest that social media use from the age of 10 years contributes to the current youth mental health crisis. Murthy considers this the greatest challenge for public health system at the moment. Doctors and politicians agree that 13 is too young to use social media. Teenagers under 16 are far too sensitive to peer pressure, opinions and comparisons. At this early age, the brain is still far too vulnerable in its development to be exposed to social media. These are surprising statements for a business journal that advocates the freest possible capitalism.

Impact of media use on our boys

Boys partly use other types of social media, other computer games, and they usually also react differently than girls to media use. While boys live aggression more outwardly, girls often react with aggression inwardly (auto aggression). War and killer simulations such as Fortnite⁹, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty¹⁰ and so on are predominantly played by boys and young men.
  In his film “Fahrenheit 9/11”, Michael Moore already demonstrated in 2004 how young soldiers in the US military were prepared for combat missions in war through such games. These kinds of war games are deliberately used by military superiors to make the young men callous and unempathetic, to make them lack compassion, to make them no longer see the soldiers facing them as human beings, but as enemies that have to be eliminated. From the soldier’s or the war’s point of view, this makes sense. Soldiers are supposed to kill in combat operations, and compassion and empathy are obstacles to this. Soldiers are to be educated to become fighting machines. Scruples to shoot, to kill, are to be suppressed by such games. In short, these games are used to promote ruthlessness, dehumanisation and brutalisation. The professional trainers of soldiers know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it.
  It is all the more astonishing that we let our children and young people play these killer “games” to the greatest possible extent and without any significant public discussion. Age barriers are often circumvented. Often, even ten-year-olds play these kinds of killer and first-person shooter games. What is happening in the psyches of our children? Even grown men, US soldiers, apparently respond to this kind of brutalisation and become more inhuman. How much more does this apply to minors? The earlier our children are immersed in these kinds of killer games, the longer they kill on screen, the more widespread this kind of fun activity is, the more they are being raised to be inhumane.
  My fear is that after a few cohorts of children and adolescents who were hooked on these soul-crushing games at a particularly early age, we will face terrible social consequences. Aggression, ruthlessness, egoism, but also addictive behaviour and illness will be massively promoted in my opinion. Through Fortnite alone, hundreds of millions of our children and young people are already being sworn in and prepared for the war of all against all. Through Fortnite, which works with the highest intelligence, brilliant design and ingenious marketing, it has been possible for the first time to inspire legions of minors to kill each other as early as never before. For millions of young men, I believe this lowers moral standards.

E-sports trivialisation

The trivialisation of these processes is actively and deliberately promoted by the industry’s lobbyists. Time spent in front of a screen is the opposite of exercise, gymnastics and sport. Terms and naming are important for public perception, including that of parents. Labelling competitions in war and killer simulations like Counter Strike or Fortnite as “e-sports “¹¹ – that is, electronic “sports” – is a clever move by lobbyists and an accurate distortion of the truth. This says a lot about our moral standards, better: the double standards that prevail here. According to the coalition agreement, the current red-green-yellow German government plans to give e-sports the status of a non-profit organisation¹² and thus to promote processes that make our children ill by means of tax privileges.

Impact

To the extent that health declines, the labour force diminishes and we also have to put additional resources into health care. This reduces our real economic power and our standard of living. When morals and ethics decay, counter-mechanisms are set in motion that are supposed to bring about from the outside what is decaying from the inside: instead of intuitively adhering to norms and rules, of behaving decently and honestly, there is an attempt to enforce rules and laws through police violence, security, surveillance cameras, etc., through external coercion, pressure, deterrence and fear. This leads to a real decrease in our prosperity due to increasing unproductive activities. The damage to society as a whole, however, goes far beyond stagnating or declining economic power. In view of the massive harmful influences to which our youth has been exposed via the electronic media for less than 20 years, we seem to be well on the way there at the moment.

Countermeasures

China submitted a new law in early August 2023 that severely limits the amount of time young people can spend on mobile devices.¹³ According to the “Wall Street Journal”, these measures will put China even further ahead of other countries.¹⁴
  Therefore, the Cyberspace Administration of China requires device manufacturers to introduce time limits in the future. The measures are planned to “protect the physical and mental health of young people”. The new bill would only allow children under the age of eight a maximum of 40 minutes per day on mobile devices, and young people from 16 to 18 a maximum of two hours per day. Since 2021, children under 18 in China have only been allowed to play video games for a maximum of three hours per week (!). China was among the first countries to require app providers to introduce a “youth mode” that limits screen time as well as the type of use.¹⁵ From 10  pm to 6  am, internet use is to be largely blocked for minors. In 2021, the approval of new video games had been frozen for nine months.¹⁶
  In the face of growing global concerns about internet addiction and other illnesses, such as increasing teenage depression or impaired social skills as a result of heavy media use, several countries have already taken measures to protect the mental health of their children, according to the “Wall Street Journal”. In the US, the governor of Utah passed a law in March 2023 prohibiting children under 18 from using social media platforms without parental permission. France had introduced a law in June 2023 according to which TikTok, Instagram and other platforms could only be used by under-15s with the written consent of their parents.¹⁷
  These are, in my estimation, first, promising steps to protect the mental and emotional health of our children from the frontal assault of profit-maximising media corporations.  •

⁽¹⁾ The article largely reproduces statements from my book Das Ende des Wirtschaftswachstums (The End of Economic Growth), published in August 2023. Die sozialen und ökonomischen Folgen mangelnder Ethik und Moral, tredition, Hamburg.
² https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/fileadmin/Dateien/5_Publikationen/Drogen_und_Sucht/Berichte/Abschlussbericht/ACoSuM_Abschlussbericht_bf.pdf 
³ www.drogenbeauftragte.de/fileadmin/dateien-dba/Drogenbeauftragte/Drogen_und_Suchtbericht/pdf/DSB-2018.pdf
⁴ Economist from 3 May 2023: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/03/suicide-rates-for-girls-are-rising-are-smartphones-to-blame  
⁵ https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/21/uk-17-year-olds-mental-health-crisis 
⁶ https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/social-media-potential-harm-to-children/ 
⁷ https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039 
⁸ https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-case-for-banning-tiktok-snapchat-and-instagram-for-kids-under-16-37f63180 from 13 June 2023
⁹ In Fortnite, there are about 28% female users: hhttps://cybercrew.uk/blog/how-many-people-play-fortnite/ 
¹⁰  https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/2xancg/gender_and_computer_game_players_who_seems_to/:: “80 per cent of gamers who play Call of Duty are male (with those aged 15 to 19 accounting for 20 per cent of all players). And, despite the age restrictions, one in five of all players (21 per cent) are aged 10 to 14.”
¹¹ https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Sport 
¹² https://www.iwd.de/artikel/e-sport-begeistert-millionen-556635/?gclid=CjwKCAjw-vmkBhBMEiwAlrMeF2s3sbEyFfBr4mj9sH0pEA7RPEhy5A0JEF4LIIeessdKm1XqXLbupBoCPnEQAvD_BwE
¹³ https://www.faz.net/pro/d-economy/china-will-handy-nutzung-fuer-kinder-und-jugendliche-stark-begrenzen-19076280.html 
¹⁴ Wall Street Journal of 4 August 2023: “China Pleases Parents with Plan to Limit Kids’ Smartphone Use – Policy would limit time and content by age, on top of videogame restrictions”, https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-set-to-impose-mobile-device-limits-for-minors-c547cac5 
¹⁵ Ibid.
¹⁶ https://www.stern.de/panorama/china-will-smartphone-nutzung-von-kindern-beschraenken---und-fuehrt-ein-internet-verbot-ein-33707208.html 
¹⁷ Wall Street Journal of 4 August 2023: https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-set-to-impose-mobile-device-limits-for-minors-c547cac5 

* Prof. Dr Christian Kreiss, born 1962: Studies and doctorate in economics and economic history at the LMU Munich. He worked for nine years as a banker, seven of them as an investment banker. Since 2002 professor of business administration with a focus on investment, financing and economics. Author of seven books:  Gekaufte Wissenschaft (2020); Das Mephisto-Prinzip in unserer Wirtschaft (2019); BWL Blenden Wuchern Lamentieren (2019, together with Heinz Siebenbrock); Werbung nein danke (2016); Gekaufte Forschung (2015); Geplanter Verschleiss (2014); Profitwahn (2013). His latest book, «Das Ende des Wirtschaftswachstums. Die ökonomischen und sozialen Folgen mangelnder Ethik und Moral», was published in August 2023. Three invitations to the German Bundestag as an independent expert (Greens, Left, SPD). Numerous television, radio and magazine interviews, public lectures and publications. Member of ver.di and Christians for a Just Economic Order. Homepage .www.menschengerechtewirtschaft.de.