London: Social media giants are employing “unethical” psychologists to keep children hooked online for hours on end, industry experts have warned.
Fifty psychologists in the US have penned an open letter saying their profession is being used “to manipulate children for profit”.
The letter said the “persuasive design” of social networks and games was keeping children glued to the point that studies now showed it was affecting their mental well-being and academic attainment.
The signatories called on the American Psychological Association, which represents the profession in the US, to condemn psychologists’ role in developing such techniques.
The open letter comes as The Daily Telegraph has launched the Duty of Care campaign calling for more stringent regulation of social media networks, in order to protect children. A number of former social media employees have criticised the methods the networks use to keep people scrolling.
Justin Rosenstein, who first built Facebook’s iconic “Like” button in 2007, has since described the feature as creating “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that have helped create “a problem at a civilisation scale”.
The 35-year-old has now banned himself from social networks, such as Snapchat, which he compares to heroin.
Loren Brichter, the creator of the “pull to refresh” feature, has also expressed regret, and called it “addictive”. Dr Mark Griffiths, a psychologist at the University of Nottingham Trent, who specialises in addiction, told The Telegraph that social media and video game companies had a duty of care to the young people using their products.
“There is nothing unethical about using psychologists,” he said.
“But what is unethical is when you have a product that is consumptive and causes a problem in a minority of people and you do nothing about it.
“There is a fine line between customer enhancement and exploitation. Anything where you are deliberately trying to get every penny out of a person can be seen as exploitative.”
The signatories of the US letter said they published it “to call attention to the unethical practice of psychologists using hidden manipulation techniques to hook children on social media and video games”.
Their main concern was that psychologists were helping to develop “persuasive design” techniques to keep people scrolling and playing.
The longer people use social media, the more they can be advertised to. With video games, the more gamers play and become invested the more likely they are to spend money on microtransactions in those games. The letter cited research that showed that girls who spend more time using social media or smartphones were at greater risk of depression, and that the same techniques in video games contributed to boys playing for hours, to the detriment of their academic prospects.
The signatories warned: “The great majority of parents have no idea that the social media and video games ... are developed by psychologists and other experts who use advanced behaviour change techniques to pull kids into these platforms and keep them there as long as possible.”
