Tech is entering its prohibition era

When the US outlawed alcohol in 1920, people found ways to keep drinking — whether by sneaking into secret speakeasies in dingy basements or by obtaining dubious prescriptions for medicinal booze.

By 1933, when lawmakers finally legalized hooch, drinking levels were comparable (about 70%) to what they were before.

The failure of prohibition to make a meaningful dent in the country’s imbibing habits is instructive as tech companies and governments increasingly seek to impose limits on the use of ubiquitous software, such as social media and AI for kids and teens.

In recent months, Meta announced a slew of restrictions for teen users of Instagram and Facebook, New York City effectively banned AI in its public school classrooms, and frontier AI companies have called on the federal government to set limits on their development.

The measures, however well-intentioned, could have the unintended consequence of pushing people toward unregulated platforms without proper safeguards. “My concern about the bans is that people will go underground,” said Uttara Ananthakrishnan, a professor of technology at the University of Washington. “When they go underground online, bad things happen — really terrible things happen.” The data, Ananthakrishnan told Business Insider, shows that flat-out bans on tech people already use rarely work.

Now, with VPNs — software allowing an online user to spoof their true location — they’ve become pretty fruitless.

Ananthakrishnan said her research has broad applications, particularly in the context of social media bans. “People are just going to find other ways to get around it,” she said of the bans. “Enforcing it is incredibly difficult.” In a study published in April, Ananthakrishnan and her colleagues found that when adult websites implemented age-verification checks, people rapidly migrated to websites without them. “This pattern suggests that age verification laws did not trigger systematic diversion of users from adopting or exiting platforms toward non-adopting ones,” the study says.

Last year, Australia barred kids under 16 from using any social media apps.

As Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos pointed out, the measure is hardly having any effect.

The parental-control tool company Qustodio said in a report that within a few months, teens and preteens got right back online at levels that matched pre-ban numbers, largely by entering incorrect ages or using VPNs.

And last month, Meta settled a landmark social media addiction lawsuit by agreeing to implement a number of restrictions on teen users of Instagram and Facebook.

Among the restrictions are a two-hour daily daytime limit for under-18s, a default nighttime block for young users, and a notification block during school hours.

Though Meta tried to entice other short-form video providers, such as TikTok and YouTube, to enact similar restrictions, that hasn’t happened so far.

Ananthakrishnan said that without standardized, industry-wide regulation, teen users will quickly migrate to other platforms that offer unrestricted access. “The network is very easy to shift,” she said.

New York City and Los Angeles, which have the first- and second-largest school districts in the country, both announced restrictions on the use of generative AI in the classroom last month.

In New York’s case, students in the city’s elementary and middle schools will have no access to generative AI programs on school-owned hardware.

High school students will take two “AI literacy courses” each year and will have access to AI programs in limited educational contexts.

Some have said that the moratorium will have New York’s students using AI in an unmonitored, unregulated fashion. “They’re using AI outside of the education space,” Keri Rodrigues, the founding president of the National Parents Union, told Business Insider. “They are going to use all kinds of means to go around the system, but also overconsume.

But also overconsume in secret,” she said. “Every kid I know — and I have five sons — has ChatGPT on their phone.” Rodrigues said she’d like to see AI policies that teach students how to use the tools responsibly and safely.

There are some limits to the analogy here.

For one, it wasn’t exactly possible, a century ago, to use a VPN to purchase alcohol from, say, an online distributor.

The workarounds were often explicitly criminal and required daring and complex operations to smuggle booze from Canada or the Caribbean while avoiding undercover federal agents.

Also, amending the constitution to outlaw alcohol amounts to a far more thorough and drastic step than if, for example, individual manufacturers imposed limits to the alcoholic content of certain beverages.

That being said, there are some very poignant parallels.

Alcohol, like Instagram, was and is a ubiquitous part of American life — though people are drinking less alcohol now.

Social media levels, however, remain persistently high.

A 2023 Gallup study found that 51% of US teens spend more than 4 hours per day on social media.

And now, with easier methods of circumvention, tech companies and governments might find that restrictions are easier said than done. “Once you get a taste of whatever your convenience is, and if the convenience is taken away from you, people will find ways to get back to that convenience,” Ananthakrishnan said.