Systemic research gaps in studying social media’s psychological impacts on youth: funding biases, methodological limits, and missing structural critiques
Original framing: “BBC Inside Science” — BBC News - Science
The trickster figure of Hermes—messenger of the gods—offers a lens to invert the BBC’s framing: what if social media’s ‘harms’ are not bugs but features of a system designed to extract attention and sell data? Erasmus’ *Praise of Folly* satirizes the solemnity of institutions that pathologize youth while profiting from their engagement. The absurdity of blaming ‘screen time’ for mental health crises, when schools and parents are complicit in surveilling youth, reveals the trickster’s role in exposing hypocrisy.
The BBC’s framing reduces social media’s harms to youth as a psychological puzzle solvable through individual or parental intervention, obscuring the political economy of attention capitalism where platforms like Meta and TikTok extract billions from youth engagement while externalizing costs onto schools and families.
This depoliticization aligns with neoliberal governance, which privatizes solutions to systemic crises—mirroring historical patterns where moral panics over media (e.g., comic books, rock ‘n’ roll) diverted attention from structural inequalities. Indigenous and Global South perspectives reveal alternative models of youth development rooted in communal care and land-based learning, while trickster logic exposes the absurdity of blaming ‘screen time’ when the real culprits are unaccountable corporations and austerity-ravaged public systems. The solution pathways—decolonized literacy, algorithmic transparency, reinvestment in public goods, and youth-led advocacy—offer a blueprint to dismantle the extractive logics of the attention economy, but they require shifting power from Silicon Valley to communities. Without this, the cycle of harm will persist, repackaged as ‘research’ and ‘solutions’ by the same institutions that profit from the crisis.