Young People, Social Media and the Law

Brian Simpson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317601449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This book critically confronts perceptions that social media has become a 'wasteland' for young people. Law has become preoccupied with privacy, intellectual property, defamation and criminal behaviour in and through social media. In the case of children and youth, this book argues, these preoccupations – whilst important – have disguised and distracted public debate away from a much broader, and more positive, consideration of the nature of social media. In particular, the legal tendency to consider social media as 'dangerous' for young people – to focus exclusively on the need to protect and control their online presence and privacy, whilst tending to suspect, or to criminalise, their use of it – has obscured the potential of social media to help young people to participate more fully as citizens in society. Drawing on sociological work on the construction of childhood, and engaging a wide range of national and international legal material, this book argues that social media may yet offer the possibility of an entirely different – and more progressive –conceptualisation of children and youth.

Part I

Narratives of social media present

Chapter 1

Moral panics, young people, social media and the law

New forms of technology and their subsequent application have always carried with them a mix of hope and anxiety. On the one hand, new technologies can present the hope of a better tomorrow, making our lives easier or, in the case of new communication technologies, better connected. Yet at the same time as we see the positives of technological change, there can also be a fear of the change that underpins new ways of conducting our lives that may be overwhelming. Part of this fear is of the unknown, of the various unintended and unexpected consequences of such change. Thus, while we live in an age where communication technology has evolved to certainly change our lives and social interactions in ways that only a few decades ago would have been unthinkable for many people, we nevertheless find ourselves in a tense relationship with this change. ‘Social media’, as it has come to be known, sits centrally within this tension. It is no surprise, then, that many turn to the law to mediate this tension.

1.1 The construction of social media as a legal problem

In many ways, the notion of ‘social’ within the term ‘social media’ often receives little analysis. For many, social media is anything but ‘social’. The social connection that individuals claim to feel from their use of social media does not prevent that same use being decried by others as the reason for an increasing disconnection between people. The clichéd example is the person walking along a city street looking at their phone rather than looking where they are going. Somewhat ironically, the consequences of doing this often feature in videos on social media such as YouTube, where it ends in someone falling into a fountain or hitting themselves on a wall. As some would have it, the sad fact here is that someone might be recording that person’s misfortune for subsequent sharing rather than stepping in to warn the person of what is about to occur. This is given as ‘another example’ of the social disconnection in the age of social media.

While writing this book, the May 2017 Manchester bombing at the Manchester Arena took place. As we have all come to expect when such events occur, social media played its part in informing many of what was happening before mainstream news organisations had reported the events. Yet while such communication has enabled people to find out quickly where danger exists and whether their loved ones are safe, and more broadly made all of us in effect ‘news reporters’, there is also a sense of cynicism and fear that the amount of information and questions about the authenticity of this news does not mean that all is positive in the world of social media. One of the relatives of a victim, unaware that his brother was present at the concert, commented afterwards that on the night of that attack he read tweets of the attack but himself commented that already people were sending conjecture and false information about what happened. His comment would resonate with many views of social media: ‘Social media is good for spreading fear and worry’.¹ Such sentiments resonate with many people – but is this the whole story of social media? Do such anecdotes themselves only gain a form of currency because they too become part of the social media morass?

If the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016 was the only benchmark of how social media is to be perceived, then the answer to that question may be rather straightforward. Trump’s use of Twitter is perceived as both comedic and scary.² Yet in some ways the fact that a US president tweets directly to the public epitomises both the positive and the negative aspects of social media. One attraction of social media is that it can engage people directly in conversation and provide a form of access to those with power not otherwise available to the general citizenry. Populist leaders such as Trump must regard such a sense of connection as heaven sent, in part because, as Astra Taylor remarks, ‘online, some speak louder than others’.³ While social media has an appearance of being a space for all to exchange views, as she notes there are the ‘followers’ and the ‘followed’ online.⁴ In that sense, social media is also a space of social hierarchies. However, this is not to say that social media readily facilitates the expression of power. The limitations of social media such as Twitter – at the moment still 140 characters per tweet – as well as the very direct and immediate nature of the interaction which is otherwise applauded, also carry with them the dangers associated with the expressing of views without reflection that may trigger a host of other problems, anxieties and longer-term credibility issues, especially so if the tweeter is the president of a superpower.

For that reason, it is not now clear how many powerful people manage their own social media. In part, this is the inherent problem with social media; it can be difficult to know whether the people that you think are engaging with you through that media are who they say they are. Social media is a managed space for many people, particularly for those with political or economic power, and authenticity treads a fine line between spin and cover-up as a consequence. While that can mean that many social media interactions are simply ‘fake’, this ambiguity of identity can also be manipulated to have many social media utterances re-constructed and re-interpreted by others on behalf of the person in whose name they have been made when they are later seen to be unpopular or ill-advised statements. The re-definition of the meaning of words is a well-known device in the law to accommodate changing circumstances, and social media contains many similar examples. In addition to this, it is relatively easy to question the authenticity of statements in social media on the basis that it is easy to make such statements without evidence. However, verification is not a strong hallmark of social media, and as a result many views are expressed that blur fact and opinion, truth and falsehood.

In terms, then, of how social media and its use are constructed as a legal problem, it is clear that law struggles with categorising the phenomenon so that it can place it within a traditional legal framework. The essence of social media is that it is highly disorganised (even allowing for those that attempt to manage their use of it), spontaneous and immediate. Law, on the other hand, seeks order, reflection and delay before issuing opinions. Law and social media are social phenomena that have little understanding of each other and are in an inevitable tension. This results in a legal discourse around social media that shifts between focusing on the consequences of social media that somehow relate to traditional notions of legal harm (bullying, identity fraud, loss of privacy) and giving way to a resigned recognition that social media is a ‘wild west’ that in an ideal world would be best avoided. If social media atomises our relationships with each other, it seems to follow that law tends to react to it on those terms rather than attempting to form a regulatory regime that overarches the whole. Social media has been part of a process that has turned the law into a reactionary device rather than an institution that seeks to provide a more general framework for human interaction.⁵ One outcome of this is that when we speak of rights in relation to social media, law tends towards ‘reactive’ or protective rights, such as the right to privacy or to be safe from harm. It is difficult for law to create a rights discourse around social media that is proactive, other than in general terms. For example, the law may speak of a right to access social media, but on what terms and for whom becomes far too challenging for legal traditionalists to formulate.

1.2 Social media and romantic notions of children and young people: revisiting Stan Cohen in the age of the Internet and ‘fake news’

These various impulses are demonstrated in law’s response to young people’s relationship with social media. Stan Cohen’s classic work Folk Devils and Moral Panics⁶ analyses how young people are often misunderstood, their differences amplified, and perceived problems in their behaviour presented in terms that are out of proportion to their actual threat to social order – what he termed a ‘moral panic’. The need to create ‘folk devils’ trumps, as Cohen argues, more imaginative responses to young people’s troubles. It is instructive to return to Cohen’s work in the age of the Internet, as much of his analysis of moral panics relies on the manufacturing of news and the distortion of the facts, in his study of young people, to fit with the views of dominant groups within society.⁷ If one reads contemporary debates about politics and social media, one would be forgiven for thinking that the age of ‘fake news’ is an invention of the Internet age and social media. It is why claims that social media is an effective way of spreading fear and worry resonates with many people, but it would be a mistake to think that social media began this way of manufacturing news. This is not to say that social media does not present new challenges in how news is generated and constructed. Clearly, the speed of its dissemination and the notion that anyone with a smartphone can be a reporter of the news means that social media is a different form of news in that sense. However, as Cohen’s work shows, the spreading of fear and worry in the media did not commence with social media.

To some extent it seems trite to make this point, but it is fruitful to connect current concerns regarding social media and young people with Cohen’s work for the simple reason that his remark that ‘the intellectual poverty and total lack of imagination in our society’s response to its adolescent troublemakers during the last twenty years’⁸ continues to haunt debates about young people and social media. We continue to be afraid of young people and their use of social media because it is viewed as a means of bullying others, facilitating the committing of crime and other acts of disorder, or in more recent years encouraging acts of terrorism. At the same time, we are afraid for young people and their use of social media because it is associated with activities that sexualise the ‘innocent’ child, encourage them to focus on their body image or otherwise facilitate behaviour that takes away their childhood. To paraphrase Cohen, these fears about young people and social media demonstrate a singular lack of imagination in tackling the social problems and issues generated by social media use by youth.

The law’s approach to social media and young people remains stuck in a binary conceptualisation of young people that either sees them as innocent and in need of protection from harm or regards them as to be feared and requiring to be controlled. These are longstanding analyses of childhood and youth that depend on a narrow intellectual understanding of childhood.⁹ A more rigorous approach to young people and the legal response to social media would engage with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Narratives of social media present
• Part II Narratives of social media future
• Bibliography
• Index