How Millennials Ended Up Carrying the Burden of the Internet

For all the flak that Millennials take for being stereotypically lazy, entitled, overly-sensitive and obsessed with avocado toast, the generational cohort that came of age during 9/11 and the Great Recession finds itself with the task of navigating a digital world both foreign to its parents and all-too-familiar to its children.

Born just before the dawn of digital age, most Millennials spent their formative years figuring out what it means to be online. So-called elder or “geriatric” Millennials will remember when you still needed a college email in order to set up a Facebook account, or having to teach their parents how to use an iPhone or fix the family printer.

Now, they’re facing the unique challenge of learning how to protect their children—and the generations that will follow—from conflating social media with real life, sending their parting words of advice before the world says goodbye to the analog days for good.

“Millennials got a little bit more of the wild west of the internet. They got social media that was a little bit rawer than things were now,” Jason Dorsey, a Millennial researcher and expert on generational trends, told Newsweek. “Now, those same Millennials are frequently becoming parents and trying to figure out, knowing all we know, how do we think about digital technology with our kids?”

Karlee Kerr, a 37-year-old from Colorado, remembers growing up in the world of MySpace in high school. She still recalls when Facebook was the “weird platform” that her older sister, Kaylee, who was a college sophomore at the time, told her about.

“I was in my freshman year of college when Facebook started, and you had to have a university email address to even be on it. That was really my first experience with social media,” Kaylee Kerr, 39, told Newsweek. “It was interesting when they opened it up to anybody. All of a sudden, my mom’s on there, my grandma’s on there.”

At first, the Kerr sisters taught their grandma about things like hashtags, what an appropriate profile picture looks like and who can see certain posts. Later on, it involved cautioning her about online scams, resetting security passwords and vetting news sources.

Now that they’re both moms, they find themselves facing new versions of those same hurdles with their children.

Karlee, a mom of three, said she’s “almost constantly having conversations” with her 10-year-old and 8-year-old about the YouTube videos they’re watching.

“I want them to understand why influencers are asking them to subscribe and like,” she told Newsweek. “I want them to understand that if they subscribe and like, they’re not really going to win $4 million.”

Although Kaylee’s newborn is still too young to navigate the internet, she said she’s already had conversations with friends about implementing parental controls and how to find the middle ground of protecting her children from the online world while also arming them with the tools to navigate it.

“If you’re young and using the internet, you may not know what’s real and what’s not,” one 33-year-old father from Connecticut told Newsweek. “[My daughter] is probably going to be using the internet at a different stage in her life than I was. I was probably older than when she’s going to be.”

That generational gap will likely be similar to the one between him and his dad.

Recalling when his father traded in his flip phone for an iPhone, the 33-year-old said, “That was definitely a big learning curve.”

“He’s still a phone call kind of guy,” he said of his father. “Even to this day, when it comes to sending a text message, he’s not using his thumbs, he uses his pointer finger and most of the time he’s using talk-to-text.”

The 33-year-old told Newsweek that he thinks that teaching his young daughter how to make critical decisions about what she sees online will be a major aspect of his responsibility as a parent in the coming years.

“Not everything on the internet is true, and just because someone’s got an opinion on something doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s true,” he said.

“After the last five to 10 years of social media, Millennials seem to have a little bit of healthier skepticism [about the internet],” said Dorsey, who also serves as a lead generational researcher at the Center for Generational Kinetics.

“We’re about to enter a very treacherous area of digital literacy and online safety, not only because kids are getting smartphones at a younger age, but because they’re also able to get onto social media,” he said.

Lawmakers in several states have tried to get ahead of those dangers. Just this week, First Lady Melania Trump made a rare appearance on Capitol Hill to advocate for the bipartisan “Take It Down Act,” aimed at combating the non-consensual sharing of explicit images, including those generated by artificial intelligence, commonly known as deepfakes.

In California, state Senator Steve Padilla introduced a new bill last month that aimed to require AI programmers to implement safeguards for children using chatbots.

“Our children are not lab rats for tech companies to experiment on at the cost of their mental health,” Padilla said in a press release. “We need common sense protections for chatbot users to prevent developers from employing strategies that they know to be addictive and predatory.”

Last year, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law the Child Content Creator Rights Act that Padilla introduced in December 2023. The bill requires “family influencers” who feature minors in 30 percent or more of their content to set aside a proportionate percentage of their gross earnings in a trust the minor can access when they become an adult.

Newsom’s office told Newsweek the law “strikes a sensible balance between ensuring the family has income for its present needs while also safeguarding a portion of those earnings for the minor when they reach adulthood.”

The governor also signed a law that expanded the rights of California’s unique Coogan law, which requires parents to put 15 percent of a child actor’s earnings into a trust.

“We know of far too many instances where kids are unfortunately taken advantage of by adults who have guardianship, including online child influencers,” California Assembly member Juan Alanais, who introduced the bill, told Newsweek.

“I firmly believe that children who create online content deserve their fair share of earnings and the same protections as other child performers in California. I also recognize that not all families will act in the best interests of their children and may move to avoid the law. I take these cases very seriously and take protecting kids very seriously.”

Padilla told Newsweek he hopes to continue to champion the digital rights of children, like in his new bill, which he said would require AI programs to periodically remind vulnerable people, like minors, that chatbots are not real human beings.

“Crazy and unfortunate things are happening to young minds who don’t understand they’re not talking to a person,” Padilla said.

Despite such efforts across the county, Dorsey told Newsweek there’s “clearly a disconnect between legislation that exists and the digital experience younger generations are having.” He said while there has always been a legislative lag to respond to the issues of the day, the speed at which technology has developed has furthered that delay. Lawmakers simply cannot keep up with the speed of technological change.

“By the time a law comes into effect, it may no longer be the right fit because technology has moved so far from when that law was originally written or conceived,” Dorsey said. “As we continue to see this play out, it can also unfortunately create an impression that government is out of touch or doesn’t understand what’s going on with technology today.”

Even though Kaylee’s baby is still a couple months old, she’s seen firsthand how the digital world has become ingrained as a part of life for today’s children and teens. A high school teacher, she said her students have a vastly different adolescence than she did.

“I think about the things that they feel like they have to keep up with, all the information that they’re being inundated with, it’s just something that is so different to when I was growing up.” Kaylee said. “The other day, we were watching this video that was using AI to duplicate voices, and it feels scary to me thinking how do we protect ourselves from that.”

At the same time, she said, “the internet is also this incredible resource. Google is literally my best friend, especially as a new parent. If I’m like, ‘I don’t know, is this okay?’ I’ll Google it and find something from other parents. But I know and understand there are a lot of resources out there, and I’ll have to figure out which ones are trustworthy. I know I’ll have to teach the same thing to our daughter.”

Dorsey said one of the upshots of near total digital immersion among younger generations is that they grow up with more skepticism around what they see online.

“The idea that you can simply trust social media because it’s new and exciting is gone,” he said. “We’re going to continue to see, over the next few years, how Millennials reshape their kids’ relationship with technology, and as a result, how that impacts their kids relationship with technology as they get older.”