Diving into this shattered generation of 10-16 year olds, struggling with the toxic deluge of social networks, reveals a structural defect and a double renunciation. The first is the corruption of the economic model of platforms whose performance depends on the audience, therefore on the commitment (time spent and interactions), therefore on the propensity of a service to be addictive. As a result, Big Tech has no interest in deploying radical solutions to limit dependence on its products or to enforce the minimum age of access. This is all the more unacceptable since the technologies exist to prevent children under 13 – an already absurdly low age – from falling victim to a sometimes fatal addiction. In practice, the big operators only act when their reputation is damaged.
The double renunciation concerns the public sphere. That of the regulators first. Global digital regulation is provided by the United States and the European Commission. Their common characteristics are their slowness and lack of technical skills. They are content to multiply the fines, spectacular in the media but economically without effect.
A dominant chaos
The other abdication is that of the school. While there is no doubt that education in the media and social networks is the key to the problem, no serious program has ever been put in place, due to a lack of resources and political awareness.
More than thirty years after the creation of the World Wide Web, technolatics and neo-Amish continue to clash. It is not a question of forgetting the benefits of the digital age: access to immense knowledge, infinite learning possibilities. Digital technology has opened up to the world, created social ties on a local as well as global scale and allowed unprecedented freedom of expression. But the dominant chaos is now wreaking havoc. Even China, which has erected the digital panopticon into a principle of government, is doing better than us to protect its youth.