Mods and rockers
Earlier this week the New York Times ran a few pieces that tried to complicate the narrative about Facebook that the Wall Street Journal's earlier string of stories had worked to establish, namely that "its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands." So instead, we have Farhad Manjoo returning to his tech apologist roots to tell us that well, actually, we can't really know whether Instagram is bad for teens:
In jumping to the conclusion that Facebook’s Instagram platform and other social-media services will be the ruin of the next generation, we — the news media in particular and society generally — may be tripping into a trap that has gotten us again and again: A moral panic in which we draw broad, alarming conclusions about the hidden dangers of novel forms of media, new technologies or new ideas spreading among the youth.
He is drawing on this New York Times op-ed by psychologist Laurence Steinberg, who argues that we need "much better research" before we can conclude that Instagram is bad for anybody. "At a time when Facebook is regularly vilified (sometimes deservedly), wanting to believe that its practices have caused teenagers’ mental health to suffer is understandable," he writes. "But wanting doesn’t make it so."
Implicit in this view is that the only relevant standard of harm is to be found at the level of the individual and in behavioral studies. That there can be categorical harm intrinsic to specific practices (e.g. the various forms of surveillance that social media platforms structure, enable, perpetuate and perpetrate), or social harm that exceeds an individual's feelings (e.g. marginalizing groups based on identity traits, disseminating stereotypes, inserting disciplinary regimes into more aspects of everyday life and interpersonal communication) is sidelined.
This seems to mark the point where the moral panic about "moral panics" becomes a useful tool of obfuscation and whataboutism for tech companies, a way to distract critics and potential regulators from legitimate abuses with ambiguous findings from studies that often have dubious methodologies or funding sources. Much as oil and gas companies were able to muddy the water on climate change and tobacco companies could raise doubts about the poisonous effects of its products, tech companies will be able to trot out this kind of op-ed that represents criticism of social media platforms as efforts to stultify children under the guise of protecting them.
To the extent that criticism of Instagram is carried out in order to disempower teenagers from exercising appropriate agency, it could be considered a moral panic. But it can be hard to separate that out from the critique of Instagram precisely for its own deliberate attempts to curtail the autonomy of all its users. "Moral panic" is usually invoked to talk about how the media demonizes scapegoats; it warps the concept a bit to use it as a defense of media companies against those whose their practices manipulate.
The critique of moral panics largely derives from Stanley Cohen's Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), whose third edition includes a list of media forms that have been in his view crudely blamed for having a dangerous impact on consumers: "comics and cartoons, popular theatre, cinema, rock music, video nasties, computer games, internet porn." Manjoo has a similar list: "Comic books, television, rock music, rap music, disco, video games, Ebonics and political correctness."
But Cohen, whose book is mostly concerned with the media's distorted characterizations of "deviance" and marginalized people (and not the unfair presentation of powerful corporations) doesn't reject the idea that media can have detrimental effects:
The media play a disingenuous game. They know that their audiences are exposed to multiple meanings and respond differently to the ‘same’ message. They use this knowledge to support their indignation that they could have any malignant effect; they forget this when they start another round of simple-minded blaming of others. The powerful, increasingly homogenized and corporate news media blame other media forms. But their own effect is the most tangible and powerful, shaping the populist discourse and political agenda-setting.
We don't have to go to the New York Times anymore for "powerful, increasingly homogenized and corporate news media"; social media platforms have usurped that throne. When it steps up to defend Facebook from critics, it tries to reassert its old hegemony for its new master.