Autocomplete Zeitgeist Revisited - 2026

Before we begin

In this post, which examines the American zeitgeist, I adopt a tone of playful criticism. Please don’t mistake me for one of those tedious killjoys who only finds fault. Believe me, I am grateful for my country and its people.

Introduction

As everybody knows, Google Autocomplete is a function of Google Search that starts providing feedback even before you’ve finished typing your query. The search engine predicts what you’re looking for based on others’ recent searches across the Internet. I find Autocomplete a good indicator of where people’s heads are, so in a long-ago post I asked Google a range of questions designed to examine the national zeitgeist as of March 31, 2018. Then, exactly four years later, I googled the same questions to see how things had changed and what people sought answers for in 2022. And now, another four years later (to the day), I peer back into Autocomplete suggestions to see where our heads are at in 2026.

(Note: to improve the accuracy of this experiment—that is, to make it more about the American people instead of about me—I turned off “Personal Results,” so my own previous searches won’t influence the suggestions.)

Persecution mania

Four years ago, the query “is it illegal to…” prompted Autocomplete suggestions that included burning money, hitting a girl, and working weekends in France. Today, this same short phrase produces these suggested queries as the top five:

• Is it illegal to write on US currency
• Is it illegal to talk to dolphins
• Is it illegal to drive barefoot
• Is it illegal to collect rainwater in California
• Is it illegal to drive without insurance

Driving barefoot has appeared in the top five for both my previous studies, suggesting that—even though Gen Z doesn’t seem very interested in driving—they’re still interested in this topic. Maybe they’re tired of their parents (or Uber drivers) going barefoot?

Now, this bit about writing on US currency I’ve never seen before, not even in the top ten—it’s completely new. So I asked myself, what’s changed that this is suddenly a #1 concern? The answer is simple: as described here, Donald Trump will soon be the first sitting president in history to have his signature adorn US currency, specifically the $1 bill. Now, I’m not here to take sides in matters of politics, but I think everyone can agree that this presents a tantalizing opportunity for the anti-Trump camp: they naturally want to write something like “sucks” right after his signature. Kind of a tit-for-tat: like, fine, you wanna write on my currency, I’m gonna write on it, too. But to consider actually indulging this temptation begs the question: will I get arrested for this?

If you think I’m being ridiculously paranoid, I’ll just say that a) it’s not necessarily the case that the typical American isn’t paranoid, and b) there is ample precedent to reasonably ask this question. The Donald saw to it that his face is prominently displayed right next to George Washington’s on US National Park season passes, and the backlash created a cottage industry of stickers designed specifically to obscure his picture.

The Department of the Interior reacted by prohibiting these stickers, claiming that they somehow bypass “security features,” and declared that affixing them can invalidate the $80 pass. As related here, this led to companies innovating again, this time with handy sleeves that cover up the picture until it’s time to present the pass to a park ranger. Given the history here, I can’t blame my fellow Americans for being careful.

Now let’s talk about the legality of talking to dolphins. As it turns out, the popularity of this search query is largely Google’s own fault because their AI summary indicates that it basically is illegal to talk to dolphins.

There’s not a direct link between this AI summary and the popularity of the Autocomplete text, but this kind of overstatement tends to get people up in arms, which is exactly what has happened. As described in a legal journal here, “A viral claim spread … suggesting that simply speaking to or near a dolphin is a federal crime.” So a paranoia has emerged about this activity, just like with defacing currency.

I’m going to skip over the rainwater thing for a moment and address “driving without insurance” next. (You’ll see why in a minute.) I am perplexed by these driving-related inquiries given how Gen Z isn’t much into cars. So I dug a little deeper into that, and surfaced this fascinating blog post challenging the popular theories about this generational change in driving behavior. The data do not show that this reluctance to learn to drive is due to the popularity of ride-sharing apps, or teens being too busy studying or doing extracurricular activities that improve their college applications, or because of our tough economic times, or because of increasing rates of depression. All of these explanations are refuted via data going back decades. The author argues, instead, that Gen-Z teens are just growing up more slowly—they’re “less likely to date, have a paid job, drink alcohol, and have sex than teens in previous generations” and that young adults “also take longer to get married, have children, and settle into careers.”

Worrying about having to get car insurance sounds like exactly the kind of grown-up task Gen-Z kids shrink from. I can just sense the eye-rolling and their thinking, “OMG, if I have to get actual insurance just to drive a car, forget about it!”

Could this delayed adulthood miraculously explain the rainwater gathering thing as well? Well, maybe. It could be Gen-Z, while afraid to drink tap water due to widespread mythology about it being unhealthy, also lacks both a car and the grown-up discipline of knocking out errands, and is thus too lazy to head to the grocery store for bottled. Or who knows, maybe young adults are so stunted they forget to pay their water bill. So they’re like, maybe we just put a bucket out back and drink from that … if we’re allowed.

Moving on to a slightly different search, “is it against the law to…” I get mostly the same results, but with these two additions appearing in the top five:

• Is it against the law to burn an American flag
• Is it against the law to not file taxes

Interestingly, flag burning was the very first Autocomplete suggestion eight years ago, but four years ago it didn’t appear at all. So why has this one returned? Well, it may well be a political matter, so let’s look at who was president when I did my two previous studies. My first Autocomplete post was halfway through Trump’s first term, which is when we first saw this burning question (pun intended, couldn’t resist); my second post was halfway through Biden’s term (when this suggestion disappeared); and now, halfway through Trump’s second term, it’s back. I’m not suggesting that Americans are more interested in burning flags during conservative reigns. It could be that the American flag simply figures more prominently in the national dialogue when we have a polarizing, populist president whose followers seem to believe they own this national icon.

In case you think that’s just a pet theory of mine, I did a little light research, and this article describes a 2025 poll of 2,404 U.S. adults on the topic of flags vs. party. (The sample was “weighted to be representative of adults nationwide according to gender, age, race, and education, based on the U.S. Census.”) The poll found, among other things, that forty-two percent of respondents assume a person flying the flag is conservative, whereas only ten percent assume a person displaying the flag is liberal.

I’m not suggesting that liberals want to burn our flag and are making sure this is allowed. I’m also not insinuating that conservatives, fearing that liberals are going to start burning flags, are seeing whether or not they can call the cops. Probably more to the point, when people are politically agitated in general, as they are now, the flag itself and notions of waving vs. desecrating it are more top-of-mind.

Moving on to our next query, “can you be arrested for…,” the top five include “a misdemeanor,” “speeding,” and “driving without a license,” all of which I saw last time. “Driving without insurance” shows up here, too. But I also see a newcomer to the suggestions, which is “can you be arrested for littering in Texas.”

I know my point with this post is to determine what can be inferred about the American zeitgeist from Autocomplete suggestions, but these highly local issues make it tricky. The question is, what happened recently in Texas that would drive this kind of query? I’m generally the wrong guy to ask because I keep my finger as far from the pulse of my fellow man as possible, eschewing all social media and most news sources. Whereas many people have FOMO (fear of missing out), I’m more plagued by “FONMO” (fear of not missing out)—that is, fear of being dragged into pointless gossipy discussions about this or that viral inflammation. But it’s really easy to research such stuff now, thanks (?) to AI chatbots. Claude drew my attention to this article about a cop beating up a woman for littering. Obviously this is a travesty, but worrying whether or not it’s illegal to litter seems to be missing the point. If this is how people fact-check before joining an online dialogue, I doubt they’re really in a position to fix the problem. It’s likely just more performative outrage.

Mercifully, since I have a lot to cover here, suggestions to complete the query “can you be arrested for…” haven’t changed since four years ago so I can skip them. No such luck with “can a police officer…” but that does turn up some very interesting results:

• Can a police officer arrest an ice agent
• Can a police officer search your car
• Can a police officer serve a restraining order
• Can a police officer arrest a federal agent
• Can a police officer date a felon

The first one naturally reflects current events, which have little to do—I suspect—with the American zeitgeist and more to do with remarkable changes in federal law enforcement. I mean, if Mount St. Helens erupted again with widespread atmospheric effects, it would certainly influence search suggestions, even though nothing about Americans would have changed.

But it’s an interesting scenario. I suppose the gist of this inquiry is whether a cop could arrest an ICE agent just for doing his or her job (and I’m going to guess the answer is “no” but I’m not performing that query because I don’t actually care). But what if people are just wondering if ICE agents can do as they please? Hold up a liquor store and the cops turn a blind eye?

The second query is pretty dumb, obviously. If a cop can punch you in the face for dropping litter from your car, he can certainly search it. So make sure you never have a taillight out, if you don’t want a cop finding that exploded can of Spam in the storage area where the spare tire used to be. (True story! My wife had stashed foodstuffs in case of, like, a zombie apocalypse. Turns out tinned meat can expire, big time.)

I have to confess, the popularity of the restraining order inquiry threw me. (Fortunately, my experience around this is nil.) The law is somewhat complicated around serving restraining orders and sometimes it’s the sheriff, not a patrol officer, who does it. So the question becomes, why now, when this question wasn’t popular four or eight years ago? Domestic violence hasn’t obviously increased, but light research indicates that there have been important legal updates lately, including explicit coverage of cyberstalking, GPS tracking, and smart home device manipulation. I find all of this kind of depressing so let’s move on to the final suggestion: can a police officer date a felon?

This one is kind of fascinating. Is it police officers asking this, because they think felons are kind of hot? Or is it felons (convicted or not) who are kind of turned on by cops? I have to think there’s some frisson there; I mean, it’s not like anyone is asking if urban planners can date botanists. Specifically, this query puts me in mind of Lil Wayne’s song “Mrs. Officer,” which includes the passage, “Yeah, doing a buck in the latest drop /  Got stopped by a lady cop, haha / She got me thinking I can date a cop, haha / ‘Cause her uniform fit her so tight / She read me my rights / She put me in her car, she cut off all the lights…”

(If you’re puzzled by that first line, “doing a buck” is driving at 100 mph, and “latest drop” means a recently released luxury car model. So Lil Wayne goes from being the man, all cocky driving at insane speed in his high-status car, to suddenly being chastised by a cop, but without the terror that would normally accompany that … all in the span of a few short lines. It’s really very clever.)

Now, four years ago I’d have simply shrugged at the popularity of this Autocomplete suggestion because honestly, how could I really learn the reason without a whole lot of work? But now, of course, we have AI, and I asked Claude for some perspective. It replied, “The broader cultural backdrop is probably the explosive growth of true crime, prison content, and ‘felon influencer’ culture on social media over the past few years. People with criminal records have become a significant content demographic on TikTok, sharing their experiences openly in a way that simply wasn’t happening in 2018.” Who knew? I questioned Claude further about this trend, and it explained that “lot of felon-related content isn’t really ‘influencer’ content in the glamorous sense — it’s practical. ‘Can I get this job with a felony?’ ‘Can I rent an apartment?’ ‘Can a cop date me?’ These are real pressing questions for millions of Americans — there are roughly 19 million people in the U.S. with felony convictions — and TikTok became a place where people with lived experience answer those questions in a way that law-related websites don’t.”

And here’s where things get really strange: one of the search results Claude cited included “a “caption/hashtag description from a TikTok video: ‘I got stopped by a lady cop… she got me thinking i can date a cop #texas #fyp #viralvideo #texasstatetroopers.’” Remarkably, Claude surfaced this without the context of the Lil Wayne song I mentioned above. Whether this caption was a deliberate reference to the song or just an independent expression of the same widespread fantasy, we can only guess.

Wrapping up with our final query for today, we’ll see what Autocomplete suggests for “are you allowed to.” Here are the top five:

• Are you allowed to fight in hockey
• Are you allowed to be gay in the military
• Are you allowed to carry a gun in California
• Are you allowed to bring food on a plane
• Are you allowed to go to Antarctica

The only suggestion that’s same as four years ago is fighting in hockey, which moved up from fourth place. I examined this topic at length in my previous post so if you’re interested, click here.

This second one might be a case of faulty memory. I mean, it’s such old news that “don’t ask, don’t tell” was repealed (this was in 2011, for crying out loud) that I have to suppose people have just forgotten. Either that, or people far below military age back then just weren’t paying attention. (In fairness, an 18-year-old now would have been just three then.) Or who knows, maybe people who were gainfully employed adults in 2011 ignored the issue then but are suddenly considering joining the military since corporate America laid them off. (On a related note, a popular query both four and eight years ago, “are you allowed to retire at age 50,” no longer appears in Autocomplete suggestions, surely because in modern times it’s beside the point: anyone approaching 50 can expect to be laid off at any time, so why not wait for the severance package?)

As for carrying a gun in California, four years ago we had a similarly popular query, “are you allowed to carry a knife in California.” I guess things are even scarier here now, but at least people have wised up a bit. I mean, illegal to carry a knife? Seriously? I carry a pocketknife on bike rides!

Now, the next one, “bring food on a plane,” is just ridiculous and reinforces the notion that Gen-Z is just slow to enter adulthood. Anyone asking this clearly hasn’t been to an airport and watched—and smelled—people bringing their takeout food with them to the plane. And it’s not like airport personnel are going to bother differentiating between airport food and “outside” food. What, they’re gonna be like, “Sir, that looks like a Ziploc bag. You didn’t make that sandwich at home, did you?” (And by the way, I’m pretty sure I’ve brought a burrito from home wrapped in foil, no less. Just don’t bring a beverage or a Go-gurt.)

Which brings us to the final Autocomplete suggestion, “are you allowed to go to Antarctica.” As with so many of these inquiries, I’m reminded of the question, “Which is a bigger problem—ignorance or apathy?” and its answer, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” That is, I’m tempted to conclude that people are strange, and not give the matter another thought. But it’s now too easy to chase this kind of thing down, and I’ve discovered that there was a famous Internet influencer (over a million followers) who last year, at age 19, landed a little plane illegally in Antarctica and was detained there for two months while they performed various experiments on him and eventually stole his kidneys. Okay, I drifted off into fantasy for  a moment there but most of the story is true and—should you care—you can read it here. But actually, what does this have to do with the legality of traveling to Antarctica (which has been serviced by tour groups for sixty years)? Is anybody actually thinking of going? Why aren’t people googling “are you allowed to plagiarize albertnet”? (By the way, you’re not.)

Tune in next week…

As you have doubtless noticed, this post went on a bit longer than I expected, so I’ll cut it off here for now and post Part II next week. Check back because I’ll be covering a number of other Autocomplete categories: Who, what, where, why, how, and the future.

Other Autocomplete Zeitgeist posts

• Autocomplete Zeitgeist Revisited - 2026 - Part II
• Autocomplete Zeitgeist Revisited - Part II
• Autocomplete Zeitgeist Revisited
• The Autocomplete Zeitgeist

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Can We Unplug Our Kids? - Part II: Mea Culpa

Introduction

I just read a very distressing New Yorker article, “Has Social Media Fuelled a Teen-Suicide Crisis?” which made me remember an essay I posted here a few months back. In “Can We Unplug Our Kids?” I referenced a new book about the epidemic of mental illness among teens, which cited social media as a main cause, and then I made the case that ahead of any societal interventions to protect teens on social media, parents can help fight the tide by setting appropriate boundaries. I cited my own family’s experience to support this position. Looking back, I realize that my post—by focusing only on my own history—neglected to consider how thorny the issue really is across the spectrum of American families. Now I have a sheepish feeling that my essay, if not outright smug, was naïve and incomplete, with air about it of “let them eat cake.” So I’m revisiting the topic here, to do it better justice.

A bit of background

Having just trashed my first post a bit, I won’t expect you to go (re-)read it now. To summarize, I explained how I guessed that some parents are somewhat complicit in teens’ dependence on smartphones, since the parents can use them as digital leash (i.e., keep tabs on their kids). In return the kids get basically unfettered access to everything these phones bring, including a steady stream of social one-upmanship and algorithm-driven news and gossip. Meanwhile, I asserted, parents themselves often set a poor example with these devices, erring on the side of embracing the always-online culture for fear of missing out. Then I explained the draconian online policies my wife and I enforced to good effect, such as no social media, no gaming, no phone until high school, no smartphone until college, and limits on video streaming and time online. My post explained how this kept my kids from getting sucked too far into the online world, and had the added (and unexpected) benefit of possibly making them more autonomous and resilient as young adults.

Looking back, and especially in light of the recent New Yorker article, I realize my focus was too much on parents and what they can control, without enough examination of the size and complexity of the challenge they’re up against. Sure, my family was up to the challenge, but I didn’t fully grasp how much my own privilege and luck played into that. I hope to shed more light on the larger problem, so that parents who happen to read this can a) cut themselves some slack, and b) understand how important it is that society better regulate this profit-driven online world to take some of the burden off of parents.

Privilege

It’s embarrassing mistaking one’s own privilege for a just, merit-based society. Decades ago I applied for a job and the branch director, who had the final say in hiring me, was the last to interview me. He stood about six-foot-five, and the first thing he said to me was, “You’re tall … I like that!” Obviously he was joking, and I took the joke as a harmless ice-breaker, but over time I’ve come to appreciate that affinity bias is a big deal, and the fact that this director and I could laugh about it really underscored how unfair it was. If I’d been short and he’d joked, “You’re short, but I’ll try to look past that,” I wouldn’t have found it funny at all. I’m reminded of a great New Yorker cartoon (click here and advance to cartoon 10) where a small fish is thinking, “There is no justice in the world,” and a larger fish about to eat him is thinking, “There is some justice in the world,” and an even larger fish, about to eat him, is thinking, “The world is just.”

The ability my wife and I had to set limits on our kids’ online life had everything to do with privilege. If these girls were raised by, say, a single mother working two jobs to make ends meet, they wouldn’t have benefited from nearly as much oversight. My wife was able to stay home with the kids, and thus have all kinds of time and energy to build rapport with them, and read to them, and never needed to use a TV or computer as a babysitter.

Meanwhile, I worked from home part of the time, so I could help set the right example, and have more time with the kids, and (since our one shared family laptop lived down in the home office) could even supervise them somewhat. I had the luxury of requiring them to log, on paper, their online time, and could police this. Moreover, through my job I had a solid understanding of how tech companies market online services, and how concepts like page views, dwell time, and share/forward metrics are used in designing and “improving” their products. I also had enterprise-grade firewall and WiFi equipment, and the know-how to use it, which made it possible to shape and limit my kids’ Internet access.

Obviously not every family enjoys this kind of privilege. This really hit home for me when I read, in the recent New Yorker article, about a couple who lost a daughter to suicide after her torturous experience online, culminating in Instagram’s algorithm sending her suicide-related content. Her mother lamented:

“In the Black community, low-income, where I teach, parents are not educated enough on any type of technology … We [parents] thought we were two well-educated people. I want to educate the parents first and then the students: What’s an algorithm? What do these sites do?”

Here’s an analogy. Suppose the sidewalk between your home and your kids’ school were littered with broken glass, razor blades, and used syringe needles. If you have the time to walk your kids to school, you’d see this for yourself and would take immediate action. If you don’t walk your kid to school, but you’re a connected and concerned parent, perhaps you’d hear about this problem from other parents. Meanwhile, even a totally overworked parent who doesn’t have time to talk to other parents would benefit from the overall community’s awareness of the problem. But social media, unlike my simplistic sidewalk scenario, features threats that are invisible. Addictiveness is built into these products by design, for profit; the algorithms driving teens’ behavior are opaque to anyone outside the industry; and these algorithms care only about increasing dwell time and shares, even if this means sending suicide-themed videos to depressed kids, instead of the phone number for a suicide hotline. How could a typical parent grasp this threat? It is a sad state of affairs that only a parent who has a background in tech, and who has time to read news articles like the one in The New Yorker, knows he needs to inculcate his kid practically from birth on the downside of the online world.

Luck

In my previous post on this topic I also failed to appreciate the role that blind luck played in my family’s navigation of the Internet and social media. For one thing, we got an early start, simply because my brother has kids a fair bit older than mine and I got to learn from their experience. One incident comes immediately to mind. Decades ago, because I wanted personal email with no ads, I bought a service with at least a dozen mailboxes on my own private domain. I used this for my own address, my wife’s, my mom’s, and my mother-in-law’s, and offered it to my brothers and their kids. One of them eventually came to me asking to be set up because, to her great anguish, Google had abruptly shut off her Gmail, deleting her address book and all her stored emails, because they decided nobody under the age of thirteen should have it. (This was probably because of their AdSense context-based ads.) The wrinkle was that Google never know any user’s age until and unless that user tried to sign up for Google+, their fledgling (and ultimately unsuccessful) social media platform that featured an age limit, hence the suddenness of the Gmail lock-out. This abrupt change caused quite a stir on the Internet, and I read—with fascination—the comments that parents put below one of the articles. One outraged parent, lamenting the disruption this caused his daughter, ranted, “My daughter practically lives online!” I couldn’t detect any irony in this statement, so I guess he saw no problem with her behavior, and I found this more than a little spooky.

I was also surprised, although I perhaps shouldn’t have been, that my young niece would blithely sign up for a social media account without thinking to ask her parents, and that if Google+ had accepted her, her parents might not have even known she had the account. This episode got me thinking generally about the ramifications of kids being online, before my own kids were even old enough to participate, which was a really helpful head start. Had I happened to be the firstborn instead of the last, I’d have been blindsided like so many parents.

I also got lucky, as a parent, based on my own approach to popularity and the regard of my peers. My parents were oddballs, and we grew up largely without TV, and my father in particular had an air of superiority which unfortunately rubbed off on me, the upshot being that in elementary school I was nerdy and mostly shy but also a bit arrogant. For example, I was outspoken about hating football, and pooh-poohed other kids for wearing sweatbands on their wrists like their favorite players and for collecting little toy NFL helmets. My shy-plus-slightly-arrogant personality came across as total arrogance, which (in combination with my nerdiness) irritated people and made me an obvious target for bullying. Being a pariah, and then rising above it when I was older, taught me a lot. More than other kids, I think, I realized how tenuous and ultimately pointless popularity was and is, the result being that instead of suffering from FOMO (fear of missing out) like a lot of adults, I have FONMO (fear of not missing out) or perhaps, as one of my nieces puts it, FOFI (fear of fitting in). Thus, I was able to easily model opt-out behaviors for my daughters; my strict policies would have chafed a lot more if I hadn’t walked the walk.

But wait, there’s more. It likely wasn’t just circumstance that biased me against putting very little stock in the feedback loop of social media. I’ve been reading lately about inborn differences in personality around how people respond to social rewards. As detailed here, reward dependence (RD) has been correlated with very specific neurotransmitter system, and “individuals with high RD personalities have a disposition to recognize salient social cues which in turn facilitates effective communication, warm social relations, and their genuine care for others, but these individuals are then disadvantaged in being excessively socially dependent.” My wife self-identifies as being very low-RD, and experience bears that out; she dislikes being the center of attention to the extent that I had to practically beg her even to have a wedding. I’m not much different (for example, I’m perfectly content to labor over this blog even though I receive very little indication that people are even reading, much less enjoying, my posts). So by random chance, we both appear to be predisposed by our brain chemistry to avoid online likes and smileys, which has given us a concerted parenting approach that includes, for example, disallowing social media on our WiFi. Many high-RD parents might naturally assume that the positive feedback their kids get online could be an unalloyed good thing.

On top of all this, reward dependence is thought to be innate and moderately heritable, and indeed my kids strike me as fairly low in RD, just like my wife and me. Thus, the success we’ve had with our restrictive policies may have as much to do with genetic traits as it does with our ability to explain and justify our position on phones and social media. Other parents, with higher-RD kids, might not have it so easy.

My final examination of luck involves the love my wife and I have for reading. We both have had a lifelong appreciation of books that so far nothing—not Netflix, YouTube, podcasts, or social media—has been able to compete with. This made parenting easier because we could enjoy, right alongside our kids, the books that had to stand in for other forms of entertainment. I can honestly and sincerely tell you that I enjoyed all the books I read to my kids, even the earliest ones made of fabric so the hapless kid couldn’t accidently whack himself with it and dent his forehead. It is without exaggeration that I can say I actually looked forward to reading Clifford’s Bathtime —a board book so basic and simple I had it memorized after only like the twentieth reading—every time one of my daughters asked for it. I combed the online used bookstores to buy up the books I’d enjoyed as a boy, like Cowboy Sam, the Moomintroll books, and the William Pène du Bois Otto books, so I could relive them with my kids. While other dads were watching sports on TV or manning the grill, I was sitting in the La-Z-Boy with one or both kids reading Bridget and the Gray Wolves or Hepcat. I realize this behavior is not normal, and in fact (though I probably shouldn’t admit this), half the reason I even wanted kids was to get to read to them from whatever book struck their fancy. I look forward to having grandkids for this very reason, and in the meantime here’s a recent photo of me reading to my great-niece.

In contrast, I once saw a dad reading to his kid in a doctor’s office waiting room, and he was skipping words and even entire sentences, apparently figuring his kid couldn’t tell the difference so why not get through the book faster? I was scandalized and my impulse was to drag the guy outside and beat him. And yet I realize not all parents are that into books, especially kids’ books, and thus they may have a harder time keeping their kids entertained without resorting to laptops, tablets, or a phone. What a random gift, this love of reading. I highly suspect that the sting of a non-digital life was made easier to bear for my children when they could curl up in my lap for a dose of not just dopamine but serotonin, or (later in their childhood) a good discussion of dramatic irony, or a debate about which translation of Nikolai Gogol is superior.

In conclusion

I hope you, too, love reading, since I admittedly rambled a bit just now. Suffice to say, if you are a parent struggling to compete with the endless barrage of images, videos, and messages flooding your kid(s) through their devices, and with this nonstop virtual party they’re attending that you weren’t invited to, just do your best. And, as a voter and a concerned citizen, please also do what you can to help reign in these tech companies who clearly are putting profit above any sense of social responsibility. I realize now that not all parents are in the same position I have been to impose strict limits on their kids’ activities online, and I apologize if my earlier post implied that it all comes down to responsible parenting. The problem is much, much larger than that.

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Family Internet Use Policy

Abstract

Generally, parents don’t go snooping around in their kids’ laptops or phones.  We want to respect our kids’ privacy.  And yet, these devices are like mega-megaphones, capable of blasting our kids’ unbridled ideas and photos all over the Internet.  Privacy in this realm is an illusion:  even with peer-to-peer online communication, kids cannot prevent their supposedly private content from being posted publicly or forwarded.  I describe here a way for parents to put much-needed limits on our kids’ online autonomy.

Introduction

My community has been through a serious scandal.  Some high school kids formed a secret Instagram group and, over a period of weeks, posted a lot of racist and misogynistic content (e.g., doctored photos and hateful sentiments).  Only a couple of kids were actually contributing content, but 14 or 15 others followed along, on an ongoing basis, instead of leaving the group.  What’s more, a number of these followers posted supporting comments and/or “likes.”  (It is widely hoped, but impossible to establish, that peer pressure was a stronger force here than bigotry.)  Finally one kid blew the whistle, and the whole thing unraveled, to the great shame of the students and families involved.

This episode has engendered a lot of soul searching among us parents.  We like to think we are instilling proper values in our kids—that we really know these people—but how can we be sure?  It’s easy to appraise the benefits of private music lessons, great schools, and organized sports teams, but how do we measure character and virtue?  At a minimum, how can we feel confident that our own kids won’t be embroiled in the next Internet scandal?

In this post I describe a solution.  It isn’t complicated, but it’s difficult.  I propose that every family establish and enforce a family Internet use policy.  The idea is to put limits on the secret online life that modern kids have, that gives them total freedom of expression with no parental supervision.  If we fail to instill the values and character we’re looking for, at least we can safeguard our kids against shaming themselves, their families, and their community.

A sample family Internet use policy

My family Internet acceptable use policy is based on the one my employer uses.  To wit, “[Company] monitors employees’ use of [Company’s] communications devices, computer systems and networks.”  I have told my kids up front, “I know your computer password and network logins, and reserve the right to read any of your online correspondence.  Consider nothing on your computer to be private.”  (If my kids had phones, those would be fair game, too.)

The premise here is that kids are less likely to post or consume offensive content if they know their parents can see it.  If this seems Orwellian to you, remember than in 1984 it was the government snooping, not parents.  I have a right to know what my kid is doing on the Internet, just as my employer has a right to know what I’m doing with the tools they give me.

Your policy doesn’t have to be this restrictive, of course—but you should have a policy, and something with more teeth than “Do whatever you want and we’ll hope for the best,” or “If you do something bad we might take away your phone.”

Do my kids tolerate this?  Yes, though of course they’re not thrilled.  Fortunately, I got an early start with this policy.  I introduced it before my kids were even online, so they were fine with it initially.  In fact, as they hadn’t yet developed the recklessness of teenagers, they were rightly concerned about accidentally stumbling on gross stuff online.  As they’ve reached their teens, their feelings have changed, but my wife and I won’t budge and they know it.  At least they’re used to the constraint.

So is this a perfect fix?  Probably not, but I’m sure it helps.  Without parental oversight, a kid is bound to be more bold and less inhibited with his or her expression.  I guarantee that the kids in my community who posted offensive photos to that Instagram account would not have printed hard copies and left them around the house.

Isn’t social media visible to parents anyway?

Kids might have you believe you can keep an eye on their virtual life via the public nature of social media.  But this isn’t true anymore.  Snapchat is all about messages and photos that are designed to be temporary. (Of course they’re actually not; your kid’s blunder can be captured for eternity by another kid’s screen grab.  It’s true, though, that once that transmission leaves your kid’s device, it’s too late for you to see it.)

Do parents grasp this?  Not always, as I learned from a workshop given by My Digital TAT2, a nonprofit organization seeking to promote responsibility in the digital era.  The lecturer quoted a teen correspondent as saying, “My favorite thing about Snapchat is that my parents don’t understand it.”  Most teens using Snapchat and Instagram have two accounts each:  one that their parents know about, and one that they don’t.  Many have a third account with which to assume a fictitious identity, which they use for retaliation and/or catfishing.  With all this subterfuge about, doesn’t it make sense to have access to the source of our teens’ online content—that is, their devices? 

Again, the point isn’t that you’re always snooping—it’s that your kids know you could, and behave accordingly.  As I candidly told my older daughter, I have peeped at her online correspondence exactly twice so far.  I explain to my kids that I generally don’t bother checking up, because I trust them—but I have to reserve the right to do so, or my policy goes up in smoke.

A kid’s right to privacy

Is my stance fair and reasonable?  Or am I violating my kids’ right to privacy?  That begs another question:  do kids even have a right to privacy?

Of course they do!  When one of my daughters was ten, she kept a diary.  Although I was sorely tempted to read it (because it was surely very cute), I honored my promise not to.  Likewise, I wouldn’t eavesdrop on my kids’ face-to-face conversations or phone calls, and I wouldn’t read a letter they got in the mail.  But the Internet is a game-changer.  It gives these kids the capability of broadcasting their ostensibly private communications to 3 billion people.  Mistakes are made, due to these kids’ own poor judgment, that of their friends (or “friends”), and by sheer accident.  I consider it irresponsible to give kids total autonomy online.

Setting limits isn’t just a parent’s right—it’s our job.  Are adults allowed to keep loaded guns around the house?  Unfortunately, they are.  Is it a good idea to give kids access to those loaded guns?  Of course not!  But think about Internet platforms like Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter:  they’re dangerous too, in their own way.  You almost couldn’t devise a more efficient way of giving teens new ways to screw up; of catching them in the act of screwing up; of widely publicizing the screw-up; and of documenting, time-stamping, and definitively establishing the fact of the screw-up, and the identity of the perpetrator, for all time.

Consider this scenario:  the year is 1980.  Teen 1, who is stupid and ignorant, tells Teen 2 a racist or misogynist joke.  Teen 2 laughs (maybe not because he even thinks the joke is funny; maybe because he’s uncomfortable).  Teen 3 overhears this exchange, and tells Teens 4 through 20 how racist/misogynistic these two are.  The damage is limited, because it’s all hearsay.  Teen 1 denies telling the joke, Teen 2 denies hearing it, Teen 3 is largely ignored, and Teens 4 through 20 shrug and move on.  Years later, Teen 1, who has become less ignorant, is privately ashamed of having told that joke, and Teen 2 is privately ashamed of having laughed.  They were just stupid kids, and thank goodness they can put that joke in the past and move on.  That’s pre-Internet.

Today, a couple dozen parents in my town—good, respected people, contributors to our community—are suffering deep shame because there is irrefutable evidence that their children consumed and in some cases “liked” racist and/or misogynist online content.  There is no way to repudiate the evidence; about all these beleaguered parents can do is assert that their kids aren’t actually hateful, that they were just swept away by a hateful meme.  That doesn’t go very far … not with the victims, and not with the community. 

Of course this isn’t an isolated case; these scandals are popping up everywhere.  And yet we parents have been standing back and allowing our teens unfettered access to these volatile Internet technologies.

The crux of the matter

Whether or not you agree about the non-sanctity of a teenager’s connected device, we need to help our kids understand something fundamental:  there’s no such thing as Internet privacy.  Once a photo or sentiment leaves your kid’s device, it’s a short step away from the great unwashed Internet.  If copy-and-paste isn’t available on the app that was used, screen grabs always are.  Any content that touches the Internet can be posted publicly and/or forwarded, whether by a recklessly playful or vindictive pal, or by mistake.  And we’ve seen that the law does not uphold the anonymity of Internet haters; consider this landmark case.  If a kid (or adult) thinks he or she can safely communicate his or her darkest thoughts via the Internet, even under some kind of shadow identity, he or she is mistaken.

Why isn’t it considered bad parenting to give these kids unfettered access to fun, easy, powerful online tools capable of permanently disgracing themselves and their families?  Probably because the beloved tech companies behind this Internet revolution are having their way with us.

The Internet and FOMO

I can’t think of a parent who hasn’t complained about his or her kid being glued to a screen all day, but nobody seems to know what to do about it.  In many cases parents are afraid of what would happen if they took away a kid’s phone or laptop.  (Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt,” published in 1950, was eerily prescient in this regard.)  The Internet and its addictive social media trappings weren’t dumped on us; they evolved so gradually we never saw the danger coming.

Meanwhile, to push back against technology is to seem backward, unsophisticated, and out of touch.  Society expects all of us, including students, to use the Internet daily.  As we adults suffer our own insecurity around keeping up with the rapidly evolving online culture, we are tempted to celebrate and emulate our kids’ prowess.  We blithely accept this totally separate virtual world, which becomes a constantly growing blind spot, like a locked door between ourselves and our kids.  In the process we lose touch with our kids’ morals, standards, and character.  Kids are typing things online that we’d shudder to hear them say out loud, and sharing photos that might shock us.

So if parents aren’t policing this, who is?  The Internet platforms themselves?  Yeah, right.  Remember, Mark Zuckerberg’s first online venture was a site where you rated your fellow students in terms of who was hotter than who.  He and his ilk most certainly do not have your kids’ backs. 

Consider this excerpt from a New Yorker article, which describes the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s misgivings about the Enlightenment, and how it threatened the idea of a universal moral code: 

It becomes impossible to settle moral questions or to enforce moral rules; the best we can do is agree to disagree. Such a world falls into the hands of managers and technocrats, who excel at the perfection of means but lack the tools with which to think deeply about ends.

I don’t have strong opinions about the Enlightenment, and MacIntyre was writing in the ‘80s, but that last sentence fits social media companies to a T.  The means of capturing and directing people’s attention are being perfected, but the impact on society is being largely ignored.  Venture capitalists are backing the companies best poised to monetize this stuff; they’re not throwing money at watchdog outfits like Digital TAT2.  Popularity—measured by the number of eyeballs on your app, the number of “likes,” and the number of links to your content—comprise the currency of our era.  (We parents are somewhat complicit here.  I’m sure many a parent dreams of his kid becoming the next Zuckerberg.  I doubt many are hoping their kid becomes the next great moralizer.)

Platforms like Instagram and Snapchat have our kids’ attention.  To an increasing degree we parents do not.  The scale is tipping increasingly toward a peer orientation where our parental influence is marginalized.  Only by reigning in the access to this virtual world can we hope to maintain our crucial role in guiding our children.  Failing that, the least we can do is limit the damage they can do online.

More albertnet posts on this topic

Dopamine, Parenting, & Social Media

Teens, Texts, & the Marshmallow Test

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