From sexually explicit bots to school-burning pandas, AI “friends” are already chatting with 72% of teens. Here’s what parents and educators need to know before digital intimacy becomes the norm.
Oof, Mandy, this article hit hard. As a person in the world, scary. As a parent of small children, terrifying. It’s enough to make me want to pull the plug and hide us in a cutoff location somewhere. I love the strong recommendations you share at the end. It’s certainly helping me think about what checks to put in place for my kids, at the least.
100%, we've got to focus on the actions to drive a better future for our kids! The real world is less scary than it's thought to be and the digital world is so much scarier than most people realize.
Sickening Mandy. After watching the horrifically failed social media lab rat experiment callously deployed at scale on my children’s generation — Gen Z — I’ve been feeling hopeful for the better prepared Gen Alpha parents, teachers and kids. Reading your piece was my very first experience ever in quite literally gasping out loud in abject horror 4 or 5 different times. I assumed, obviously naively, that lawmakers, policymakers, regulators, parents, and every other youth concerned constituency, were naturally at work incorporating the hard lessons learned from years of abuse and exploitation at the hands of the social media companies. I was way off. I’m horrified. Please do let us know whatever we can do to help you in this fight.
Thank you so much for this thoughtful response, David. I felt a lot of the same horror while researching and writing it. You're not alone in assuming we'd have learned from the damage social media caused - I hoped those lessons would shape stronger guardrails moving forward. But you're right, we’re not there yet.
We’ll need a broad coalition of voices - parents, educators, researchers, and policy leaders - if we want to shift the trajectory.
Oof, Mandy, this article hit hard. As a person in the world, scary. As a parent of small children, terrifying. It’s enough to make me want to pull the plug and hide us in a cutoff location somewhere. I love the strong recommendations you share at the end. It’s certainly helping me think about what checks to put in place for my kids, at the least.
100%, we've got to focus on the actions to drive a better future for our kids! The real world is less scary than it's thought to be and the digital world is so much scarier than most people realize.
Sickening Mandy. After watching the horrifically failed social media lab rat experiment callously deployed at scale on my children’s generation — Gen Z — I’ve been feeling hopeful for the better prepared Gen Alpha parents, teachers and kids. Reading your piece was my very first experience ever in quite literally gasping out loud in abject horror 4 or 5 different times. I assumed, obviously naively, that lawmakers, policymakers, regulators, parents, and every other youth concerned constituency, were naturally at work incorporating the hard lessons learned from years of abuse and exploitation at the hands of the social media companies. I was way off. I’m horrified. Please do let us know whatever we can do to help you in this fight.
Thank you so much for this thoughtful response, David. I felt a lot of the same horror while researching and writing it. You're not alone in assuming we'd have learned from the damage social media caused - I hoped those lessons would shape stronger guardrails moving forward. But you're right, we’re not there yet.
We’ll need a broad coalition of voices - parents, educators, researchers, and policy leaders - if we want to shift the trajectory.