The PG-13 internet fantasy

Instagram is starting to look more like TV, a move that might make some parents happy but ultimately proves that tech companies are getting closer to total victory in their campaign to capture as much of our attention as possible.

The company just announced a new default content setting for Teen Accounts that promises to show teen users only content that’s “similar to what they’d see in a PG-13 movie.” (There are also new settings that serve rough equivalents of PG- and R-rated content to teens, although parents have to approve the change.) On top of that, Instagram is exploring the idea of launching a TV app so you can watch Reels on the big screen in your living room. 

These developments dovetail nicely with the argument that Derek Thompson made a few days before Instagram’s announcement: “Everything is television.” Citing an FTC filing, he points out that only 7 percent of users’ time on Instagram involves consuming content from people you know. Meanwhile, podcasts are on Netflix, and AI can create an infinite circuit of slop to tap your consciousness into. “Digital media, empowered by the serum of algorithmic feeds, has become super-television: more images, more videos, more isolation,” writes Thompson.  

A brief history of TV rotting our brains

Old-fashioned television used to be extremely tame, thanks to a combination of technological constraints, federal regulations, and societal norms. There used to be a limited number of channels, because there was a limited amount of spectrum to broadcast on. And because there was a limited amount of spectrum, nearly a century ago, the federal government created an agency to control the airwaves: the Federal Communications Commission. 

In the medium’s early days, there was still plenty of fear that TV was ruining the American minds, especially young ones. Broadcaster Edward R. Murrow condemned the rise in entertainment television as “the real opiate of the people” in a 1957 interview with Time. A few years later, in 1961, Newton Minnow delivered his first address as FCC chair by describing TV as a “vast wasteland… a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.” This guy would have hated TikTok.

The bad things that Minnow pointed out were especially bad, because children could tune in and see them whenever they found themselves staring at a screen. The FCC would eventually police the kinds of content that could be broadcast during certain hours. Obscene content was illegal on TV, but starting in 1978, some profane or indecent material was allowed between 10 pm and 6 am, when kids were presumably asleep. (You can thank George Carlin for that.) That amounted to an early form of age verification, which, as the Instagram announcement makes clear, continues to be a problem on the internet. It also seems unsolvable.

Protecting kids nevertheless seems to be the only bipartisan motivation to regulate today’s super TV. Whether it’s social media’s controversial contribution to the youth mental health crisis, or the “unacceptable risks” AI chatbots pose to children and teenagers, lawmakers have plenty of reasons to impose new regulations on the platforms that have become the 21st century equivalents of broadcasters. Senatos Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn, co-sponsors of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), recently started campaigning to push the bill through the Senate (again) before the end of the year.

Things are changing fast, though. When you factor in new AI-powered feeds, like OpenAI’s Sora and Meta’s Vibes, it’s clear that digital media — or super TV, if you prefer — has its own vast wasteland problem.

The mirage of an age-appropriate internet

Prohibiting certain kinds of content is hard when there’s not a single government agency policing the airwaves, or these days, the tubes that keep us online. So the preferred path to regulation seems to be to create three internets: one for kids under 13, one for teens, and one for adults. A PG, PG-13, and R internet, if you will. 

Doing this successfully requires checking IDs, and the current state of age verification is a mess. In the past three years, 25 states have passed laws requiring websites with adult content, namely porn, to verify a user’s age. This is the R-rated internet. Several of these states also require age verification for social media platforms. Because the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) places limitations on websites allowing users younger than 13, this is the PG-13 internet. Presumably, the PG versions of websites would include some of these protections, including the ability to turn off addictive algorithms, as New York recently proposed.

Age verification online is really hard, by the way. For the most part, to confirm someone’s age, you need to confirm their identity. Free speech advocates warn that strict age requirements will prevent anonymous adults from accessing content that’s protected by the First Amendment. Civil liberties groups say that age verification presents a huge security risk, which seems like a reasonable worry after the recent hack of an age verification company exposed the data of 70,000 Discord users. High-tech age verification methods, like using AI to estimate a user’s age based on their activity or facial recognition to guess age based on how old they look, aren’t yet proven. And more than anything, kids can figure out how to get around age verification systems, whether by lying about their birthday or using virtual private networks (VPNs). 

Looking back to television’s golden era, when game shows and bad words were the big dangers, you can see how much the stakes have changed. Digital media is powered by math so sophisticated, even the people who wrote the code don’t know how it works. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok are interactive and deliberately addictive. Use of these products has been linked to depression, anxiety, and self-harm. 

If the three-internets strategy works, it would represent an improvement for parents who want their kids to have an age-appropriate experience online. There would probably even be positive knock-on effects, like better privacy protections, which are a hallmark of existing laws that protect kids online. Heck, it could even be handy for those of us who would simply like to avoid accidentally seeing a murder on their phone. 

Creating feeds that are safer for kids, movie rating style or otherwise, is a step towards making feeds safer for everyone. Or, at least, it’s evidence that Instagram and its competitors are capable of doing so.

A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!