Jono, Ben & Megan - The Podcast - Inside TikTok: Nadia Maxwell’s Experiment on Algorithms and Youth Culture

Episode Date: December 1, 2024

A must listen if you have young kids on social media We sit down with Christchurch-based documentary filmmaker Nadia Maxwell to explore the fascinating social media experiment she conducted, delving into how TikTok curates and delivers content to young users. Through her insightful investigation, Nadia sheds light on the algorithms shaping the next generation's digital experiences and the hidden forces behind their feeds.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Hits with the Jono and Ben podcast. Cheers to Dilma, making the world a better tea. Guest on the phone. Nadia Maxwell is a documentary maker. Someone who's probably far too educated to appear on our show, but thank you for joining us, Nadia. Thank you for having me. Just to give the backstory, as Jono said, you're a documentary maker

and you set up some pages on social media sites, basically said you were a 13 year old girl yeah and you know we're prompted i gave my interest as things like animals health and fitness you know taylor swift things that my own kind of teenage girls are interested in i thought it might you know maybe take a week or so for you know disturbing content to crop up it took tiktok 22 minutes and 15 seconds for the first kind of really heavy traumatic content to be pushed my way. And so then I'd go and try to redirect the algorithm. I'd put in netball and I'd watch, you know, five videos about netball.

And then I'd go back to the 4U feed and just over kind of a three-day period, take something like kittens, I think on the first day it was sort of 12% kittens. And on the next day it was 3% kittens, and on the last day there were no kittens at all, whereas disturbing content rose so that by day three, 65% of what was waiting for me in the four-year feed, despite trying to redirect the algorithm, was really, really full-on heavy content.

Is there not any responsibility from TikTok or the social media companies? Yeah, I mean, you would think so, right? And someone recently said to me, after I did this experiment, you can actually hold on a video and an option will come up to say you're not interested. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. So I tried that this morning. I put a mental health into the search feed so that I knew it would start sending me some, again, traumatic kind of content. And then when that content came up, I held on it and I said,

not interested. And then about 15 videos later, it showed me another clip. So again, I said, not interested. And then again, another minute later, more. So it's like, you know, they're saying we've got filters and we've got things that you can use, but actually when you try to use them, and I went online and just kind of read on online communities,

are other people finding this fit to work? And everyone's just no when i say i'm not interested why does tiktok yeah that is really fascinating because as you also said in the in the article i was reading as well you know it's a lot for young brains to process on tiktok because you're not really expecting some of the stuff you're going from like a lip sync video or funny and then all of a sudden something quite full-on comes up and then it's a lot for adults to even get their head around well i mean it's emotionally confusing you know you see something really heavy and then suddenly like you say it's a lip sync video so there's no time to mentally process what you what you've seen and and this is me coming you know at it as an adult

i've got like a whole lifetime of experience to draw on i know that i can you know shut it down and go for a walk in the park and make myself feel better, but I think it's just so much to put on to young kids, and we know, you know, theoretically the legal age is their thing, but we all know so many kids that are on these platforms around age 10 or 11, and it's really frightening. You know, and also

what does it do to empathy if you're not actually your kind of brain's been trained not to have time to reflect and have empathy around what you're seeing. Social media companies, as you say, it's age 13 for TikTok. They've got pretty clear guidelines, and they say they remove a lot of the videos, but it sounds like there's a lot of it still coming your way.

No, and you don't even have to put in a last name to sign up for these platforms. You put in your first name, and you make up an age, and you're in. It's far too easy, and obviously across the ditch in Australia it's really encouraging to see that their government are going to bring in and it remains to be seen how it actually looks, but they're raising the legal age

to 16 and I feel like that's what we need to do here in New Zealand because it's not fair to put it on, definitely not fair to put it on kids to monitor what they're doing and it's also not fair to put it on us as parents. Kids have got a portal in their pocket to the digital world. And if you're beside them every minute of the day, you can't reasonably be expected to protect them.

Do you think the age limit will actually be effective? Yeah, well, there's a great researcher in New Zealand, Dr Samantha Marsh, and she says, well, look, probably not going to be 100% effective. But, you know, it doesn't mean we still shouldn't try. You know, like it might be 80%. Well, I guess, too, if it does become law and not that you need to be weak in your parenting, but I think if you're like, oh, my mate Timmy, he's on Instagram,

he's allowed to do it. But then if it's a law that gives a parent something to reference and go, hey, this is law. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Let's make the government bad cops, not all us as parents. That's right. Wild west, wild west out there, not all us as parents. Wild West out there. Even as adults, I think you said it earlier, we can't even... Sometimes I pull myself

out of a whole 25 minutes just scrolling, looking at cat videos and things. It's the best and the worst of humanity, all in a quick scroll isn't it sometimes? Well Nadia, really, really fascinating research out of Christchurch. Thank you so much for your time and your conversation this morning.