Children's screen time a gold mine for greedy big companies

Social media
Children's brains are easy prey in the pursuit of profit

Andreas Cervenka

Reporter and economic commentator

This is a commenting text. Analysis and positions are the writer's.

Published 12.43

Anyone remember the Prime hysteria? It's a question that, to a boomer, flies so high above the mark that Roberto Baggio's penalty in the 1994 World Cup final appears well-placed (to use a comparison only old people understand).

For many parents with school-age children, the issue tears open wounds that have barely healed.

Prime is an energy drink that last year was sold for a hundred rings a bottle. In the streets (in schoolyards) it is said to have gone for 20 bucks a glass.

It sounds like a form of fraud, which is exactly what it was.

Also stupid. No sane person pays a hundred kroner for a bottle of sugar water.

But now it was not homo sapiens with fully developed brains that Prime was targeting, but children.

Behind the campaign were social media profiles Logan Paul and KSI with tens of millions of followers. It was when their enchanted followers turned to their parents that chaos erupted.

The Prime hype died out almost as quickly as it came, which has to be considered a bit of a good thing because in addition to symbolizing marketing in its most cynical form, the drink was also downright dangerous to health with sky-high levels of caffeine.

Prime is just one example of how 2020s consumerism works.

During the year, little girls' strange desire to buy expensive skin care products has been debated and other campaigns are in full swing.

Mr. Beast on Youtube with 313 million followers on just one of his channels is a kind of one-man Ullared who sells everything from sweets to food, clothes and sporting goods. In addition to pulling in billions on ads.

Photo: Pontus Lundahl/TT

The business model can be simply described as follows.

First, the social media giants, using carefully crafted algorithms, have lowered the mental immune system of children by eroding self-esteem and creating feelings of loneliness and depression. (The number of studies linking social media and mental illness in children is so numerous and so alarming that it is almost tiresome to mention.)

Then they are bombarded with so-called content about the importance of cash and gadgets.

After that, the anglers can step in.

There has long been a ban on advertising directly aimed at children under the age of 12. This applies to, among other things, radio, television, letters, SMS and telephone. If you want to be mean to the legislators, you can say that they forgot the fax and tube mail. The rules therefore apply to media that children barely know what it is, let alone use.

In contrast, the digital worlds where young people live their lives, social media, are basically lawless land. So convenient for anyone who has something to sell.

Letting polished marketing dudes equipped with AI and petabytes of user data prey on children is like sending the National Task Force to arrest a 95-year-old in a wheelchair. It's not exactly an even fight.

Unsurprisingly, this has been a strategy that has met with resounding success, not only in profit here and now but more importantly in securing future sales.

A recent report from the Youth Barometer shows that generation Alpha, children between the ages of 7 and 14, is not only the most numerous generation in the country in terms of numbers, but also perhaps the most purchasing power. Two out of five primary school students (!) state that they are "very interested in shopping". For the entire Alpha generation, the figure is 44 percent. More than one in two (54 percent) say their parents buy clothes and gadgets they ask for.

It hardly comes as a surprise that today's children are also very interested in money, a third of 7 to 14-year-olds believe that it will be very important for them to earn a lot as adults. (Goodbye the defence, goodbye the police, goodbye the teaching profession, good luck to society!).

This is not the result of unfortunate circumstances or ignorance.

It is an alliance between the influencer industry, companies such as Google and Facebook and some of the world's largest consumer goods companies. They obey the profit-maximizing business logic that governs listed companies.

In this world, it's obvious to pick up the easiest wins first, or if you want, start by felling the lonely and weak gazelles on the savannah. Which is children.

But it's only for the parents to say no, right?

Says everyone without kids or who raised kids before the internet.

This argument is best met with a question: If Jesus had been out early with merch, do you think he would have sold anything?

Of course, parents always have a responsibility, but to put the entire burden there requires an ignorance of how addictive algorithms work that borders on arrogance. It's like entering the debate about the opioid crisis in the United States with the comment: but can't people just stop using drugs?

That's not really how the conversation went, instead the sellers of the drugs, including the Sackler family, have quite rightly had to run a street race. Why should we be kinder to those who make a living distributing digital drugs?

Those who seriously believe that someone in Yotutube's management team lets their children hang out all day on Youtube must reasonably live in the belief that the Sackler children died like flies from overdoses.

Spoiler: they didn't.

We already knew that there are companies that love their profit and loss statements more than anything else, indeed more than life itself.

And it's always fun when share prices go up.

But please, leave the kids out.