Task force to focus on social media algorithms, gun storage education to help keep NC kids safer in 2024

Task force to focus on social media algorithms, gun storage education to help keep NC kids safer in 2024

The state’s Child Fatality Task Force is working on the topics and programs it will push legislators to tackle this year. Two issues are familiar, even though the group saw some success with advancing them last year.

Jennifer Fernandez

NC Health News

In 2024, North Carolina’s leading child health and welfare advocates hope to build on some of last year’s successes and tackle other threats to children in the state.

The Child Fatality Task Force, which is made up of volunteer experts in child health and safety, state agency leaders, community leaders and state legislators, has been working since 1991 to prevent child death and promote child well-being.

Last year, task force members saw success with several of their recommendations to state legislators. The biggest success — the creation of the Office of Child Fatality Prevention — came after years of lobbying.

The group’s focus areas for 2024 so far include supporting legislation to address addictive algorithms on social media and encouraging the General Assembly to provide recurring funding to increase the numbers of certain school health personnel and to continue the new N.C. SAFE campaign that is geared toward educating people about securing firearms.

The task force will meet on Feb. 29 to finalize its 2024 action agenda, the recommendations that it includes in an annual report to the governor and General Assembly.

Addictive algorithms

The percentage of teens age 13-17 who said they are online constantly has risen from 24 percent in 2014-15 to 46 percent last year, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.

Last May, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a warning about the role social media use may be playing in a widening mental health crisis among youth.

Sam Hiner, a UNC Chapel Hill junior, says he knows all too well how social media can send young people into a dangerous spiral. Hovering too long over content about dieting, for instance, can lead to a person’s feed being inundated with unusual diet techniques and pictures of unrealistic body standards, he said.

“What ends up happening to a lot of these teens is their feeds become full of really harmful content. And that’s all they see anymore because of the way the algorithm works,” Hiner told Child Fatality Task Force members during a November meeting.

Hiner is executive director of the Young People’s Alliance, which he started while in high school after seeing how young people were underrepresented in politics generally. He feels the mental health crisis among his generation isn’t being addressed by policymakers.

Finding ways to protect young people is important because of how much they use social media and because that use comes at a critical time in their development, Eva Telzer, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill, told task force members at that November committee meeting.

Social media has really “transformed what it means to be an adolescent today,” Telzer said.

“This increase in social media use is happening at a really important developmental period when the adolescent brain is also going through really dramatic changes,” she said. “It’s becoming very sensitive to the social world. It thrives and connects on having peer interactions. The adolescent brain is rewiring in a way that makes it very sensitive to social rewards to avoiding social punishment.”

She said social media can be both a positive and negative force, depending on how it is used.

For example, children can find supportive communities online that they might not have otherwise. They might be able to find greater diversity in online interactions. They can get involved in civic engagement and activism. However, social media can also reinforce negative feelings. It can become addictive. It can interfere with sleep.

Hiner told task force members that changing the algorithms social media companies use to determine when and where to place ads could protect young people.

He said it is important to target the algorithms by cutting off the data supply of information coming from children who are online so that the algorithms don’t know what kind of content will keep children online for as long as possible.

“Then it won’t be able to send them down certain rabbit holes,” he said. “So, instead, you’ll be left with a more balanced feed that’s reflective of everything that’s happening online, rather than just a feed full of content that’s all about your specific insecurity that this platform is exploiting to keep you online.”

Hiner’s nonprofit has been working to get state and federal legislation passed to address the algorithms used in social media.

Jennifer Fernandez (children’s health) is a freelance writer and editor based in Greensboro who has won awards in Ohio and North Carolina for her writing on education issues. She’s also covered courts, government, crime and general assignment and spent more than a decade as an editor, including managing editor of the News & Record in Greensboro.