Someone’s nervous.
The ones who will think twice are exactly the sort of people these laws are intended to punish: the dissenters, the wrong-thinkers, those who must be silenced. Either they choose not to verify and cease to use social media (successfully silenced), or they allow their wrong thoughts to be tied to their identity, such that they can be identified and punished accordingly.
One can indeed argue what is the best way to deal with the problem of kids and social media, but I think the article is misrepresenting the situation.
"The crack addict should've known better, it's not the dealer's fault they came back for more!"
Both for crack addicts and teens using social media, they not only hurt themselves, but also hurt those around them.
The studies on teen mental health largely suggest that mostly it's not about using a lot of social media yourself, but living in an area where social media is the coin of the realm. It's the toxic culture SM generates rather than direct use that's hurting teen mental health.
What percentage of teens don’t use social media? I don’t know the answer, and would adjust my thinking if incorrect, but my assumption is “a small minority”
Personal responsibility IS a factor that can’t be ignored when it comes to addiction. I say this as a multi substance addict who’s been clean for over a decade. Tech is a whole new beast though, because we are often forced to use it. It’s closer to food addiction than crack addiction, which, IMO, is the most brutal addiction of all (food). No one neeeds crack to survive, so stopping it is one thing. Stopping (junk) food addiction, or severe over eating, or whatever you want to call it… man, that must be brutal.
I don’t use social media, but I’m an old fogie. I’d imagine you kids can not very easily “just not use it” if they want to have any semblance of social life and to find a high paying job after college
HN itself will get banned under this criteria.
"In scary headlines like these, the adult man in the white van is the subject, and the child is the passive victim. The child can obviously be trained to identify that adult mans talking to them in white vans may require distance even if not every person doing so is a killer."
Yes it feeds directly into anorexia. And yes, it had that effect.
Education wont counteract these effects, not when the company can put staggering amount of money into A/B testing for maximal impact.
The article is missing the point entirely. The conversation is not about “regulated spaces”, but removing them from spaces created entirely to drive advertisement, mindless engagement and consumption. If they find other spaces to join without that, perfect - it worked!
It's baffling to me that anyone has still not realized that.
I care about social media bans.
I should be able to give my 8 year old a mobile phone for their uses, pair it with my phone, and at any time of day be able to observe their activity on that phone - just as if I were watching what they were up to at the park, or while experimenting with matches in the garden, or riding their bikes on the street for the first time.
But there is a distinct desire by the operating system vendors to serve their true masters - ad agencies - and abrogate responsibilities of the users. “Filesystem, what filesystem?”
The idea of having a parent/child relationship encoded in the functions of the operating system is not in alignment with the idea that the true operators of the platform are faceless corporations, hell bent on harvesting every bit of data from every human being using their platforms.
With one simple trick, operating systems can change this equation entirely: give parents their rights and duties and responsibilities back. Let me see what my 8-year old is doing, in a fair and open and equitable fashion, so that I can - as a parent - fulfill my responsibilities to keep my children safe.
A phone is no less dangerous than a sharp kitchen knife. I’m perfectly fine with my 8 year old learning to use a kitchen knife properly - to gain their own agency over it as a tool - as long as I am able to observe their use of it.
And before anyone tries to make the argument “parents don’t do that, oh my god, you’re violating your child’s right to privacy” - no, that is not what I mean. A child should have privacy and they should learn to have agency over that privacy - but a parent is not absolved of the issue if that child falls of a cliff because of their negligence. Let the OS provide privacy - but let it also provide a means of review by the parents - who are the ones ultimately responsible for the child in the first place.
This needs to be an OS feature. Parents and children should, through the OS, be able to establish a strong, positive relationship with each other over this issue, with agency returned to the family unit.
Otherwise, we are creating totalitarian systems of control and putting them in the hands of people we simply cannot trust. The degradation of agency within the family unit is a function of commercial desire to exploit that lack of agency.
Operating systems, instead of serving ad agency masters, can go a long, long way to provide parents and children the right tools to solve this problem. They do, however, need to stop suckling at the teat of the nameless corporations who see the family unit as a nut that has to be cracked in order to extract the juice.
What we need less of are the attention-maximizing, eldritch-horror things that have stolen social media and now walk around wearing the skins of the entity that summoned it.
Facebook is not social media — if you don't believe me, go on Facebook and count how many posts are from people you had mutual interactions with and actively choosen to follow and how many are everything else (not including native ads, I understand the platforms have to make moeny).
It's the same issue, if not worse, on X/Twitter.
I wouldn't know the status of TikTok for the same reason I don't know what the current status of street drugs, but as I understand it you can't even meaningfully follow people on TikTok — it's just mindless consumption from people you don't know.
How can it be social media if there's no social component?
Email is social media; chatting with your guild members in World of Warcraft is social media. Until at least a few months ago, commenting on a pull request on GitHub was more social media than Twitter was.
The first step in dealing with the world is to look at things as they actually are, not as they were twenty years ago.
You can't regulate the whole world, if you won't make something addictive, someone in China will and you will lose the market to them.
Next best thing is ban because regulations in software are stale the day they get released due to legal processes being slower than technological ones.
The biggest problem to me isn’t the content or posting on a friends timeline. It’s that choices are pushed to the user rather than pulled. Change that one dynamic and I may not care as much that YouTube has content I consider toxic. Add a little friction my teen has to go actively discover content he’s curious about, not pushed an algorithmic feed.
I think the problem is though - the tech companies are incentivized to make this about _content_ “ I can’t ban Andrew Tate because it’s not my job to tell people what they can and can’t watch, first amendment, blah blah blah.
And Zuckerberg isn’t wrong here exactly, but per above the real argument I think is less about content and more about form.
But the reality is these companies don’t actually make their money from the content they make it from the form.
So Zuckerberg can’t concede “oh you’re right, making the newsfeed less adddictive doesn’t violate first amendment rights, at least we’re not banning Trump, because he doesn’t care about banning Trump except for the heat he gets from republicans, he cares about you messing with the money printer.
The thing we may all be able to agree they should do is the thing they’ll push back much harder against doing.
Just because compliance isn’t 100% doesn’t mean there’s no benefit. Also these things can take time to work, but we do have evidence that bans reduce usage to an extent.
Social media doesn't have to be toxic, just toxic behaviour is rewarded. This is more like "sniper in park causes ban for under 18s". You are keeping the bad things but age gating it. It would be better to remove the sniper in the park.
I'm a college age gen Z, and don't really think you can fix much with a social media ban alone, even ignoring all the implications if it's enforcement.
People don't get dysmorphia because some computer program told them so. The "influencers" are just other victims of a fundamentally toxic culture, or leaches on that insecurity.
You could say it used to be better before the internet, and maybe you'd be right. But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. As long as there are humans communicating through any medium, there will be a culture that can harbor these destructive tendencies, and the bigger more sparse that culture is, the more extreme its ideas can get.
Chronological feeds or more civic accountability for any algorithmic feeds (like forcing companies to share data with researchers to study their effects) could be a generally great initiative, but simply banning social media for anyone won't do as much as you'd hope.
Looksmaxing, the latest of these strange internet-induced mental illnesses, literally began on a phpBB forum.
Isn’t one of the big complaints about social media that only like 1% or .1% of users get promoted?
I think the problem is your last paragraph buries the lede. - the social media companies want to make this about content, because algorithmic feeds are what make meta a trillion dollar company instead of a 50 billion dollar company.
I do think there would be a fair bit of agreement with your thesis if your minor caveat at the end wasn’t the big huge problem.
I think most of these bans are because no one has figured out how to ban the algorithmic feed and SV isn’t self-regulating.
There would still be plenty of moral panics about the content, but I think the bans are picking up speed because of the form.
I don’t care that my kid wants to join a satanic death cult I care that Meta has figured out how to monetize satanic death cult membership in the algorithm.
What should have been was what Cory Doctorow has pushed - forced open API integration. From there you can make your own clients, only see friends, de-gamify, chronological algorithm, etc.
But banning children? That's a fools game. But easy for the votes, cause politicians are attacking a population who can't vote, and are disenfranchised by default.
I am reminded of all the ridiculousness of the 1980s/1990s - "Its 10pm do you know where your kids are?" "I learned it by watching you dad!" Lawsuits around backwards message in music (Later PMRC), that Bevis and Butthead caused the child to burn down the trailer (fire! fire!)...
My kids hate social media for the most part - and are much more free range than their peers. Why? Because we did the hard work of parenting them! We were involved in their lives, from their grades to their social lives, to talking about the tech in their hand and the problems it can create.
We need to have a conversation about kids - about them being able to be outside, roaming, unattended without parents being arrested. About them having third spaces, about severe restrictions on their "freedom" in the world if we want to get to the heart of the issue. They are breaking this law because social media has become their "third space" that is parent free where they can explore and figure out the world.
It is not. The sources provided shows that the remaining 70% of teenagers that remain on the platforms are due to lack of enforcement from the platforms, not purposeful skirting of restrictions by the teenagers (VPN etc.).
The article further labels the teenage bans as a fight between adults and teenagers, as if the laws will breed resentment from children towards their parents. As far as I'm aware, that's not how teenagers view the issue of tobacco and alcohol bans around the world.
30% reduction is a successful start in the first year. I foresee further reduction in the coming years when less teenagers slip through the lack of enforcement and more of them pass the 16 year old threshold.
What I would like to see is changes to the tax code to disincentivize the social media business model and the advertising industry generally. For example...
1. Tax the crap out of advertising revenue on social media platforms
2. Stratify the ads and ban the existence of paid tiers which include advertising. If you pay for something, you don't see ads, period
3. Ban the use of trackers and fingerprinting on any paid service without explicit opt-in
4. Create a tort for data leaks that travels with any company which handled the data. If anyone in the chain leaks it, you can take an action against all of them, and the penalties are individually assessed
5. Ban the collection and sale of profiling data for anyone under 18
6. Ban the ad-supported tier for anyone under 18
This heavily disincentivizes algorithms generally and makes paid tiers more appealing, which is much easier for parents to control. The problem with social media and teens is that teens can even sign up in the first place. Make them use a credit card, and you suddenly have a much higher barrier to entry. If I tried to subscribe my parents to HBO as a kid, it wouldn't have worked, and this is why. It wasn't because the government banned 14 year olds from seeing HBO.
The Study TFA references: "The most common reason children still had their social media accounts was that they had not yet been asked by the platform to verify their age."
So, basically the first quote is an attempt to manipulate people by appealing to a cliche. Who would have thought?
> The companion narrative to technological determinism is something I’d call adult saviorism. Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults. In this narrative, teens lack the media literacy or judgment to save themselves. The conclusion to this line of thinking, when it comes to regulation, is that teens need not be involved, since they themselves are compromised.
This totally devalues the long-accepted wisdom that adults are responsible for raising children and sometimes have to make decisions that children don't like but that are necessary and beneficial for their well-being.
In the author's narrative, teens who have no meaningful context in which to understand how their brains are being manipulated by multi-billion dollar companies for profit are somehow supposed to participate in proposing regulations that protect them from said companies.
> While adult saviorism is, in many ways, well-intentioned, often coming from a place of concern about child safety, it fails to recognize teens’ expertise and creativity in using technology. Most teens are skeptical that their parents and policymakers know better than they do about the good and bad of the online world, and for good reason. Consider the U.S. congressional hearing held in 2021, in which Facebook’s then global head of safety was asked by Senator Richard Blumenthal, “Will you commit to ending Finsta?” Needless to say, such embarrassing lines of questioning — which neither began nor ended with Blumenthal — should inspire very little confidence.
Teens think they know more than their elders?!? What an astonishing revelation!
This is such a straw man argument. Arguing that some geezer in Congress saying "Finsta" is evidence that adults are incapable of making sensible decisions about protections for children is a bad look for anyone associated with an institution of higher learning.
I feel like this is the key for fighting all negative behaviors.
Fill the time, burn the energy, with better stuff so that nobody has any left for the bad stuff.
The ones who will think twice will have to see their children ostracized because all the cools are on it except themselves.
I lean towards teen bans. We already have the same framework for cigarettes and alcohol. They didn't prevent teenage consumption 100% anyways but they did their job
I'd like to know that when I'm reading a comment, it's written (or at least endorsed) by a human being. Currently that's.. debatable, and it's only going to be more so. Entities with cash and resources can focus on the topics relevant to them and drown the conversation. I'd like to at least know that the idiotic replies I'm getting are real human idiots, and not astroturfing in one shape or another.
30 years later, I’m fine and the boomers are the ones getting addicted to fake stuff on the internet.
The problem with bans is they claim the technology itself is purely bad and the only solution is to keep it from children. Which on its face is nonsensical. It’s ok for a 17 year old but not a 16 year old?
We need genuine regulation tackling the actual problems with this technology. Blanket bans do nothing but make adults feel good about “protecting the children”.
Is driving a car on your own ok at age 15? why 16 and not 15? Why not 14? It's ok to drink in Australia at 18 age, why not 17, or 16? Legal drinking age in the US is 21, why not 18 like it is in Australia? Why not allow 20 year olds to smoke, not just 21 year olds.
Its because it is the legal age in which we have established people as adults where they're given more liberty as opposed to safety.
I remember the ol "family computer", the kid isn't going to go hunt porn with their parents sitting in the same room, and giving kids these 24x7 smartphones, especially unsupervised, yeah I don't get it. Yes, obviously if a parent trusts their kid but it seems like the entire tech world is being coerced into unpaid babysitting commitments lol
And it's obviously a big problem for adults as well as kids, but I think there are many nuances there. One would be that we generally accept adults engaging in self destructive behaviors as part of the liberty of being an adult. You're free to go gamble away your life savings as an adult - but you won't even get in the door as a kid.
Another is that lot of the undesirable things that happen in schools (gossiping, conspiracies like false reporting, bullying, in-out crowds, image crafting, etc) get greatly magnified when you introduce social media. And that would happen even if the most benign/benevolent social media, absent any 'algorithm', engagement maximizing, and so on.
Social media today is almost nothing like BBS and Newsgroups. Social media is supercharged to be a dopamine slot machine that sells attention to the highest bidder with the explicit aim of changing their behavior. None of that existed on BBS or Newsgroups.
I'm not so sure about this (having lived both). The "algorithm" has a massive addictive effect that simply was not present in the BBS days, it is nearly universally agreed. Certainly it's believed enough for Meta to spend billions on it.
I think the algorithm's primary purpose is to be able to more seamlessly push ads. I also think that at some point there was a sort of dystopic interest in seeing if people could be controlled by content. Facebooks emotional control experiments are public validation of that. But these are again tangential red herrings once we establish clearly that addiction happens even without such, and it certainly did and does.
This is like saying short form content scrolling apps are adictive but it's just the same as TV back in the day. Yeah there were studies on TV addiction. Yeah it was a discussed topic. No they're not equally addictive. It's not even close.
Beyond that I think there's also a first principles approach one can take. Not only were these services addictive, but so was Facebook (and other similar services) long before 'the algorithm' was a thing. The core interaction is interpersonal, and people simply want to see what other people are saying. We could define that as FOMO, entertainment, or whatever else - but I think this is the shared common core.
Even on this site, there are many people who are clearly addicted - myself probably amongst them. Yet there's not even a notification of when something you've written has been responded to, let alone some guiding algorithm. Even having to jump through hurdles to achieve interpersonal dialogue, it is still quite addictive.
Thank you, I don't know why nobody else brings this up. The engagement algorithms certainly aren't good, we should regulate them, but it seems like a stretch to think they're the root of the problem.
Heck, you don't even have to go back to BBS and newsgroups. People can get addicted to group chats, to games, to browsing HN. Kids can get bullied on all these places. No engagement algorithm needed.
I think there's a fallacy of sorts where when something becomes harmful we assume it's evil. Computers make it really easy to shovel entertainment at our eyeballs, it's easy to get addicted to that and for it to cause social problems.
For certain technology there should be bans but it is not social media and algorithmic feeds. There may be speedbumps, more user controls and auto classifiying of user type with optional alteration of the feed and type of content, but full bans for things like infinite scroll are disproptional.
Should sexual content be banned on social media? Maybe? Should violent footage be banned? It depends? Should bullying or predatory behavior be banned? I guess so? Or maybe it should it only be discouraged? What kind of social media does there exist? Is it binary or is it a spectrum, and should different rules or guidelines be applied?
Way too many variables. But what is clear is that age (ID) checks for the wide spread internet are completely out of the question. Governments should not have that much control over our social lives.
Face it, technology changes the world. The smartphone with camera did. If you could, would you put that genie back in the bottle? Should all content produced on smartphones be checked and watermarked and pulled through a selection of governments fingerprints to be publishable? Be very careful what you wish for since every new technology comes with hard to imagine second order effects and threats.
Parents aren't hiring thousands of behavioral psychologists to assail the public with weaponized psychology. Parents aren't running mass exploitation via emotional attacks (targeting pregnancy, anorexia, mental illness, depression, etc). Parents never encouraged or helped the genocidalists in the Rohinga genocide.
But.... You blame parents. Standard capitalist response of calling everything a 'personal choice'.
I think there are plenty of adults who think maybe there are certain types of social media patterns that should be banned outright.
It’s not whack a mole - I _want_ my kid to engage with a replacement technology like gaming. I’m not worried about my kid playing GTA vi all day. I’m not worried about content. I’m not even really worried about Andrew Tate. I’m worried about the specific way mindless algorithmic applications mimic cigarettes more than “satanic heavy metal rock concerts”
My kid needs more satan in his life! And less growth hacker.
Epstein et al. had similar beliefs about banging them
So I block chrome, and require my permission to install any app. They get thirty minutes a day on devices that lack a browser or social media apps. Not even any YouTube.
They can browse the web on PCs that are visible to the whole living room.
We have tools to do this already - authentication apps, and so on - but it’s my firm opinion that these need to be built in to the OS. I’m happy to hear Android allows this to an extent already ..
If you have only lived within it, it makes sense to underestimate the impact.
The fundamental is there, the warping is there. What do you suppose is overwrought about the language?
To me it's an evidence that the brain is that sensitive to neurological reward to the point of being bent into automatic aimless actions just for the sake of keeping the cycle going.
It's not as deep and harmful as alcoholism but still too large not to ignore.
This is a pretty inaccurate representation of heroin. This exact question has been studied, and the rate is about 1/4 for dependency after a single dose. Still super scary and it's not something I'll ever try, but it's a far shot from "guarantees unavoidable long term consequences"
Admittedly it's harder to take the rest of your comment about addiction seriously when it begins on such shaky foundations, sorry.
techblueberry•1d ago
Failure? Or 30% improvement.
“While social media can be weaponized for bullying or hate, over half of all teens turn to social media as a source of social and emotional support.”
Teens also turn to drugs as a source of of social and emotional support.
“ Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults.”
Ironically the thesis of this article. In fact I would say by banning teens from social media, we may be implicitly increasing their agency, since they’ll have to figure out how to interface with a set of technolgies that are not optimized for them.
There’s something really dystopian to me about “designing for teens in mind” and I think maybe the unintended consequence of this kind of thinking is just - the continued marketable capture of segments.
What this person is basically advocating for is a new way for tech companies to extract more value from our youth.
The whole point of being a teenager is to generate your own ways to rebel against the fact that the adult world isn’t quite built for you.
This “facebook but for teenagers” is just another opiate for the masses.