Some birthdays are better than others.

Twenty years ago, I was fortunate to be part of the team working on ESPN’s huge marketing and sponsorship initiative to celebrate the network’s 25^th anniversary.  It was a hugely successful project, in part because the company had built so much trust, affinity and admiration among sports fans since its humble beginnings in 1979.  Viewers who loved ESPN were excited about the moment.

As it happens, back in 2004 while Sean Hanrahan, Laura Gentile, Rob Temple, Spence Kramer, me, and many more colleagues were toiling away on “ESPN 25,” a new kind of media company came into the world in Cambridge.  In February of that year a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg launched “thefacebook.com.”  You know the rest.

I thought of ESPN 25 when I read the coverage of Facebook’s 20-year milestone last week.  Unlike the case with ESPN, there has been no outpouring of excitement for Meta/Facebook’s birthday.  And unless I missed it, other than a video posted by Zuckerberg the company doesn’t seem to be doing much to mark the occasion, at least externally. 

Something tells me if that happened Gatorade and Bud Light wouldn’t have put the ESPN 25 logo on a billion packages that year.

Zuckerberg and the other social media pioneers unleashed the furies on our society and culture when they launched their companies with no safeguards and little forethought to the potential dangers.  We have yet to recover.

“Ok, boomer!”  I can hear the dismissive retort from the under 30 crowd.  (For the record I’m a proud member of Gen X, thank you very much).  I’m well aware that complaints about social media from people my age are often dismissed as little more than the futile wails of an animal facing extinction. 

But my generational cohort notwithstanding, there’s no question that there has been a sea change in how we think about social media.  Where once Zuckerberg and others like him were hailed as bold innovators, now there is an emerging consensus about the extreme costs our society has paid while the barons of social media pursued their growth at all costs strategies.

There’s a lot of material to mine when talking about the sins of social media – its negative impact on news, politics, and basic notions of truth.  But what it’s done to our kids is the most terrifying.

A cursory look at the data will break your heart.  Incidence of depression and suicide is exponentially higher among kids who overuse social media.  Bullying.  Stalking by criminals who prey on the young.  Psychological and emotional trauma impacting a kid’s sense of self-esteem and self-worth.  Countless young lives have been lost or irretrievably damaged while social media companies sat back and did basically nothing and got absurdly rich.  I could go on, but you get the point.

The answer is simple:  the unregulated cesspool of social media is no place for kids.  We don’t let kids drive until their 16, both for their protection and that of the broader community.  The same should be true for access to social media.  It would nice if our politicians did their jobs and passed legislation rather than focusing on scoring points in the press.

Mark Zuckerberg is one of the richest, most powerful people on the planet. He’s also undeniably brilliant.  All by himself, without the assistance of any politicians, he could go a long way to fix the problem if he decided unilaterally to ban kids from his platforms.  But it doesn’t appear to be something he’s considering at the moment.

To be fair, social media hasn’t been all bad.  It has helped foster new relationships, rekindled old ones, fueled positive social movements among the oppressed and provided a way for people to stay connected when they are otherwise housebound.  And from a financial perspective social media has created massive wealth for investors, hundreds of thousands of jobs, and economic opportunity for the millions of businesses that rely on it to market themselves.

None of these benefits can be minimized or dismissed.  The history of social media is complicated, filled with both good and bad.  We need to consider all of it.  I’m barely scratching the surface here.

But in the final analysis I believe a society is judged on how it treats and protects its most vulnerable.  Keeping our young safe is the primal urge of every parent.  It’s one of the main reasons why humans first organized themselves into tribes at the dawn of history. 

Seen in that light and despite the benefits social media has brought us, the judgment of history on Meta and other platforms that exploit our young for profit will be deservedly harsh.  Scott Galloway likes to say that “Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have blood on their hands.”  I know it sounds harsh, but if you look at the carnage among our youth caused by social media it’s hard not to agree with him. 

There are rays of hope.  Mark Zuckerberg is still a young man and supremely gifted.  And unlike twenty years ago now he’s also a parent.  No one is better positioned to effect change.  I have no doubt that if he directed his immense talents and energies to fixing this problem our youth and society would be better for it.  Here’s hoping “Facebook 25” is a happier occasion for all of us.