“Friction is what brings us together. If we were never able to communicate in real space, we would not truly learn what it is to be human.” — Stephen Balkam
Is social media a drug? In what the Financial Times called a landmark case, Facebook (Meta) and YouTube (Google) have been found guilty this week of designing their products to be addictive to kids. Is this a big tobacco moment? the tut-tutting New York Times asked. In contrast, the free market Wall Street Journal called it a shakedown.
So what to make of this decision to make social media a narcotic? Stephen Balkam — founder and CEO of the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), amongst Washington’s most credible nonpartisan voices on kids and technology, has been on the front lines of this fight for nearly thirty years. Calling himself a radical moderate, he sees good and bad in social media. He even expelled Meta from FOSI three years ago for what he calls conduct contrary to the institute’s mission.
Balkam’s sharpest disagreement is with Jonathan Haidt, amongst the shrillest voices arguing in favor of a social media ban for kids. He “violently agrees” with Haidt on the idea of a free-range childhood — giving kids more freedom outdoors. But the evidence Haidt uses to justify banning social media confuses correlation with causation, a basic research error that, Balkam insists, academic researchers have called out. Balkam thinks the real anxious generation isn’t the kids — it’s us, the paranoid parents, projecting our mostly irrational fears onto our children.
His deeper argument is in favor of friction. Silicon Valley has spent thirty years removing friction from ordering pizza, hailing cabs, and dating. Balkam argues we need to design it back into childhood — the friction of developing friendships, building resilience, learning to think critically instead of outsourcing cognition to ChatGPT at midnight. Bring the human friction of life back, Balkam argues. It’s the most effective antidote to the drug of online existence.
