For instance here in the UK it's legal for any child over 5 to drink in private.
It is usually legal for parents to give under-18s a sip of an alcoholic beverage. It is not legal for under-18s to buy any such beverage in a shop.
Not to mention that using social media does not require a phone number, and wifi is practically ubiquitous.
An analogy would be that social media consumed by children is surely less harmful when it's a parent holding their own phone towards a child to show them a few selected photos from their Instagram feed. I doubt most people would object to that, even those that want to ban social media from children.
I think you misspelled "cool".
You seem to be setting the bar at “if anyone violates the law then the law is a failure and should be revoked.” But that’s why we have court systems. They don’t just determine if someone broke the law, but also what to do when people inevitably do. You’re operating in a world where the only restrictive laws we should have are ones where it eradicates certain behaviors 100%.
You’re basically arguing against having laws rather than the merits of the law and its efficacy. Also “drinking like a a fish” when you were a kid was terrible for your development even if you turned out ok. Many people do not. It’s not even debatable, we know the numbers on this.
> Do you see the trouble with the logic here?
I think you misunderstood my comment. The second sentence was not intended to be an argument or justification for the first sentence. The first sentence stands alone: I think it's unprincipled to ban children from drinking. The second sentence is merely a corollary. Also, I think that legalization and the introduction of adult supervision would ameliorate some of the problems associated with youth drinking, would "moderate" it to some extent.
My view is that the government should not try to be a parent, should not restrict personal freedom, not even of kids, except in so far as one's exercise of freedom harms others, and even there it has to be significant harm, e.g., you can ban violence but not hurting someone else's feelings. The drunk driving laws, which apply to all ages, may be justified by the known role of drunk driving in car accidents.
All of this also applies to adults, I don't like how corporate profit-seeeking algorithms dictate public discourse and I think it's perfectly reasonable to combat this. The great question is how to do so without trampling on people's right to freedom. The EU tends to combat "misinformation", but this has loads of problems, and I think it misses the mark of what the problem truly is. In my opinions it's the algorithms that maximize fear responses and lead people down rabbit holes that's the true problem.
I think the best way to combat it is by supporting federation and decentralization of the internet and attacking the advertising industry that maximizes eyeballs and time spent on the platform, rather than providing service to paying users. It also has the beneficial side-effect of increasing freedom of thought and speech rather than limiting it.
I know some people see the fragmentation of communities as the leading cause of echo-chambers, but this is not my impression. Actually, the smaller internet communities are often less extreme than algorithmically dominated central-hubs. Pseudonymous small communities function more like the local village that tends to mitigate extremism as the loudest, more extremist, community members can be challenged, without those challengers drowning in potential oppressive moderation and hive-mind mentality.
Even for those though, opinions are all over the place: Everything from "no rules" to "kids should be allowed to own drink alcohol under the supervision of their parents" to “it’s fine for adults to drink, but not kids” to “alcohol should obviously be banned for everyone."
For most of these we settled into a happy medium that generally everyone feels is acceptable, but we still change our opinions semi-frequently: Cigarettes being a great example in our lifetime.
I get the argument that social media is probably closer to junk food than to firearms, but:
a) Plenty of people argue that junk food should be banned for kids too! Or at least tightly regulated.
b) It’s definitely not consensus opinion that social media is more like junk food than, say, cigarettes. People will vehemently argue either side of that.
> Yes children show poorer impulse control than adults. But aren’t we all somewhat helpless in the face of the mighty tech companies?
The fact that adults can also have somewhat poor impulse control doesn't mean we should disregard the argument. And when it comes to the power of big tech - isn't that what regulation aims to mitigate?
> Brain development continues up until around 25 or so, and so it’s possible that social media does cause longer-term problems with brain development. Possible. Not proved. It’s possible social media causes long-term cognitive decline in adults. Possible. Not proved.
I don't know the studies well enough to know whether it's proved or not, but intuitively this feels like an obvious enough concern to at least be investigating it. Surely there are some general studies about whether mental health issues in early life are more likely to lead to long-term problems?
> By and large, children don’t have money. And even if they do, they don’t have other people who are dependent on it. If children were free to gamble (they sort of already are, what with in-game microtransactions and variable rewards and all the features of gambling, just without the label), I still think that the majority of harm would be borne by adults. Additionally, alongside a child’s gambling ban, we heavily regulate the gambling industry for adults. Children’s social media bans don’t appear to come with similar adult regulatory scrutiny.
Kind of lost me here. I think we should ban gambling for children, even if they don't have money or people dependent on them. Children will steal their parents money to gamble or buy Roblox points.
Yeah, we have regulations on adult gambling. I wouldn't mind more regulations on adult social media use either.
That's not how this works. If you ban vaping, not everyone - and not necessarily most people who vape - would be smoking instead.
"X isn't as bad as Y" is not a good argument in favor of X. They can both be bad.
Smoking is an interesting case. Vanishingly few people who smoke learned to do so as adults. Virtually all started as kids. Likewise, virtually all marketing of smoking was directed towards kids. Banning smoking among kids had the side of effect of reducing it in adults without the impossibility of an overall ban.
Social media is an interesting example. Of course it influences behavior. That's its purpose. Otherwise all of the advertising revenue poured into the social media industry would be wasted. The most successful social media businesses I'm aware of all started being marketed primarily to young people.
Yeah only children stealing credit cards to satisfy their addiction.
I don't know if the poster ever saw a child but they are largely sociopathic for a long time and will go great lengths to get their will.
But the argument seems to get a little lost along the way.
Yes, adults are susceptible to the same vices as children. However (as the author writes) children have poorer impulse control. They are also less inclined to or unable to consider the repercussions of their actions.
You wouldn't try to get a toddler to stop smoking by telling them it'll put them at a high risk for cancer at old age.
Speaking of smoking, anti-smoking campaigns in the US in the 90s led to a vast reduction in teen use and adult use alike.
So there is notable lasting benefit in protecting children while they lack the foresight.
Late 90s... specifically after 1997 and early 2000s. But the anti-smoking campaigns before that were not effective. In fact, educating teens and adults on the dangers of smoking increased smoking. Smoking rates for teens peaked at 37% in 1997. it wasn't until the "Truth" campaigns where they focused on how the tobacco industry was basically a conspiracy, that smoking rates began to fall. And you can't pretend that tobacco taxes didn't play a part in reducing usage either.
Likewise, there are drugs pediatricians won't prescribe for children under a certain age because they have different effects on developing children vs adults.
We treat people differently based on age for lots of valid reasons.
Overall, this blog post feels somewhat outdated.
I also can't clearly grasp the author's position: are they arguing that we should ban this for everyone, or not ban it at all? Or is the point simply that the people who write such bans or laws do so because the law doesn't apply to them?
this is something I've been dwelling on for the past couple days. I've avoided social media my entire adult life, and I'm realizing its akin to not having a car in a suburban sprawl, I can't interact properly with a lot of the modern internet, because of it.
Of course there are advantages, which I don't think i need to state in this community...
But i feel this is something people overlook when discussing banning social media for children. There is a balance to be struck, like anything.
>I don’t use TikTok and it’s no skin off of my back if it gets banned. Banned or not, though, I don’t see a reason to ban it only for children. It doesn’t seem to be more harmful for them. They don’t seem to be using it lots more than adults.
>If you’re going to ban TikTok because it’s harmful or for geopolitical reasons, fine. But ban it universally; if we’re not willing to do that, stop pretending that a child-only ban is principled. A child-only ban is what you do when you want to do something but can’t think of anything better to do, and you don’t want to impact voters.
There are now enough statistics to prove that social media has a negative impact on the mental health of users, especially children and adolescents. Even Meta has kept a study on this topic under wraps. What OP is doing here is putting adults and children on the same level and saying that what applies to children must also apply to adults. The difference, however, is that we as adults have a responsibility toward children. Children enjoy special protection in society and, for good reason, are subject to limited criminal liability. We do this because we assume that children belong to a vulnerable and easily influenced group, and lack the mental and moral maturity to adequately assess their actions. We assume that adults have the necessary mental and moral maturity to adequately assess the consequences of their own actions, which is why they are granted more rights but also more responsibilities than children. OP does not reveal any contradiction or other ‘gotcha’ moment here, unless he generally takes issue with the relationship of responsibility between adults and adolescents.
Yes, but the point of the article is compared to what.
I feel negative after 15 minutes on twitter (depending on the topic, of course), but I feel far less negative than if I'd tried getting similar info from legacy sources (10x slower, and with 10x the suits, lipstick, and ads).
The point isn't that social media are supposed to make users feel good, but that they're important information tools - a window to the world - and the alternatives - ignorance or less diverse more bloated sources - aren't the answer.
The solution isn't banning; it's the same as what we do with every single other useful but potentially dangerous thing: fires, pools, beaches.. - education. Perhaps secondary school could have modules for how to responsibly use social media, set and manage expectations/anxiety, when to use it (some people recommend not before sleep etc).
Banning only removes upside and delays downside. Education lessens/removes downside altogether with full upside.
By that token, I honestly think we should ban more things that we know don't have an upside, and only have downsides, and the people who partake are generally doing so because of mental / physical shortcomings. In other words, if we know a reasonable person would not want to partake in a behavior unless due to manipulation and weakness, then I feel protecting that person is a kindness.
I myself have suffered from addictions that I can't seem to easily "choose to stop" even though I constantly wish I could. I really wish I wouldn't have been exposed to these things when I was younger and thought it was just fun. If I could, I would pay to go back and prevent my younger self from ever trying it -- because I had no way to know. And then I am a bit astonished none of the adults had that kind of concern. Sure a few people said "that stuff isn't good", but ultimately that lost to all the other factors (constant propaganda, ads, peer pressure, convenience, taste, addictive qualities, cost). It was never a "free choice" because there was huge information and power imbalance at play, and the "responsible adults" who could help did nothing.
Granted, there is also evidence that social media has particularly harmful effects on children, which no doubt strengthens the argument. But in the general case bans targeted towards children are not (just) about that.
Ultimately the article seems to be trying to argue (implicitly) that we shouldn't ban, regulate or tax anything, because if we were to do that, we would then need to ban, regulate and tax everything in order to be "consistent". It's a common argument I see from libertarians online, including on HN. If you're going to ban guns, surely you should also ban knives and cars? If presented with a choice between permitting one specific thing or prohibiting all the things, most people will choose the former. But it's a false dichotomy. The law can treat different things and situations differently, even if those things/situations have some commonalities.
We talk about education, nurturing, etc, and how vital they are to children. We also know drugs that have different effects on children than on adults.
Why then it's so surprising social platforms could also have a bigger impact on children?
> “harmful compared to what?”
The kids can sniff glue all I care, at least we get some good punk rock out of it. That largely depends on their parents. But children spending time completely unsupervised with bunch of adult men only some of which are pedophiles while shooting into their brains 24/7 the most powerful advertisement ever known to man wrapped into an application that has the same operationational logic as one-armed bandit will not bring anything good to anybody - except loads of money to the tech bro’s. It is basically same as raising your children in a Las Vegas casino.
But you don’t have to take my word. You know you can just ask the kids who have been raised with social media, the first generation of which is adult now? Every single one of the zoomers say it sucks. That should be enpugh.
I don't have a good answer regarding where to draw the line or how to actually enforce such restrictions. This is especially difficult because limiting digital access for kids is a great backdoor for surveillance and general information control.
However, I am near certain that in a few decades, people will view social media addiction much like substance abuse. It used to be the norm for writers and musicians to be drunk more often than not, but that is less accepted now. Currently, it is accepted that people spend hours a day on social media, and I am guilty as charged.
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