I don't have Google auth cookies on my primary browser and every Google property has cookie autodeletion when the last tab is closed. Every time I start YouTube fresh, I get a new profile that I have to mold back to the content I prefer. On a fresh window I'm constantly bombarded with superficial crap I never click on. I'm also perplexed by the amount of T&A clickbait that gets offered in the shorts specifically. I have to spend time clicking animal videos to steer that to something less obnoxious.
The best you can do is try to explain and contextualise everything your kid might be seeing, which is very hard to do.
Also, not all parents are engaged with their kids as well as they should be. Having bad parents doesn't mean you're not worth protecting.
> Or ban having sex without the use of contraceptives if you are so keen on banning.
I'm not sure what that means.
Individualism is strong in the US, but if parents sucks kids suffer.
The idea of banning people from seeking things they want to do to themselves is incredibly stupid with the "War on Drugs" and it's equally stupid here with all the same consequences: a sudden explosion of either unregulated social media alternatives (back in the day Napster had a chat function even), or suspiciously immature "18 year olds" on Facebook and Tiktok.
The number of comments here that haven’t realized that any regulations would require huge privacy intrusions for everyone is weird to see.
It’s like people are imaging some magical set of rules that would only apply to kids but wouldn’t impact themselves negatively.
(Obviously, "banning it" is not so clear-cut. Are you going to force Instagram to require that everyone uploads an ID to verify their age?)
There is no such thing as "leave it alone for over 18s".
If you institute strict age requirements, those have to be enforced for every user account. So yes, that means every site you use would require you to go through something like a KYC process.
Privacy on the internet would be gone. You can't enforce age restrictions if you allow users to remain private.
I know it's a controversial topic but the argument that age verification and auth services must remove privacy and inevitably leads to mass surveillance is a false narrative which I find kind of funny as if anybody should know these technical realities it's users on hn.
Let's just hope they don't take too many banks down with 'em in the process.
But part of the danger is the ubiquity of it I think. Every teenager has social media, so there's this massive peer-pressure. If you don't have it, you get picked on. I wonder if banning it would reduce the numbers at least enough to reduce this effect.
I'm definitely not saying this is some silver bullet... But I think we have to do something, and maybe this is a reasonable starting point.
People love to say that the war on drugs didn't work, but I for one haven't consumed illegal drugs even though I have been curious at times. Since I haven't spent time with people who regularly break the law I have not been introduced to any element where I could have had access to illegal drugs. So war on drugs has worked at least on me and I live under to illusion that I am somehow unique.
Yes. Of course addicts will addict. If we ban social medias tomorrow some people will still use them or build new ones, but putting any kind of barrier for entry does have an effect. This is why we complain when something is opt-out instead of opt-in since people do the default thing and if default thing is that social medias are illegal then that will deter many if not even most people from using them.
Because the war on drugs has a very specific enforcement mechanism: people who take drugs are given criminal records, locked up in prison, and have their future opportunities permanently curtailed.
Is this your plan for an under-18 accessing social media? Do you think a policy of "we're going to help teens with their mental health" is going to accomplish that goal by specifically and overtly destroying it?
And if that's not your plan, then what is it?
And if that doesn't seem to work just fine social media companies say a million dollars per minor per day that minor uses the service. You see enforcement go up fast AF.
Banning all social media is even simpler.
2. How would "social media" be defined if you want to ban it?
2. Anything where you can post based on this "conversation"
Even for not having an iphone I suffer from this, and would miss out on tons more if not for Facebook for event invites, Snapchat/Instagram stories, etc.
Everyone in my middle school used social media to know when to submit assignments, class schedules etc. Without social media you're going to be left out.
I submit that this is not unlike drugs (incl. alcohol), or even golf.
This isn't as easy as it sounds at first.
I always read this on HN but I've never cared, or met any adult that seemed to care, when only a few of us drink beer in a group. Is this a US/Anglosphere thing maybe?
Being teetotal excludes you from a lot of social events, and even somewhat unrelated events. We have hiking/fitness groups that typically end the training session with a round at the pub. Many workplaces go to the pub together after work.
Not engaging with this can set you back socially and professionally, because drinking is hugely ingrained in the British population. Most people drink multiple times per week. The people I work with genuinely struggle with "Dry January" and other such abstention events.
Going along to these events and not drinking gets you interrogated, and it becomes a thing to try to get you to drink / get drunk. It's probably an inferiority complex thing on the side of the people drinking because seeing somebody not drinking makes them feel bad about it (even though they needn't feel that way).
For every one person like you that doesn't care, there's many who really want to investigate it and get to the bottom of it. Telling these people you just don't like drinking isn't the solution they're looking for out of their investigation.
My 2 pennies as a lifelong teetotal.
I can assure you someone will ask if you're okay, urge you to drink "at least one", or "just a glass of Champaign, it's a special one".
Ok. Now, how do we counter this very same argument against tv and video games?
Children don't really watch TV (anecdotally). They watch YouTube, which is just as bad.
The key difference between television and video games of yore is the feedback loop. TV and video games were one shot deployed and then ratings were gathered after, averaging across the entire audience.
Now YT and video games don't have end states - same thing as social media. While you often won't have individual-centric recommendation algorithms in a video game, you have dark patterns and gambling mechanics in all the most popular games which is just as bad.
The argument really isn't that we need to ban children from social media, we need to guard their dopaminergic regulation the way we guard their physical and mental health... oh wait.
Ultimately its the responsibility of the parent (at least in the US). Parents who are aware of the pitfalls of high-dopamine-low-effort activities, poor diet, and low physical activity are going to guard against these things. The ones who don't will likely suffer later in life.
They're more boring than ever. Games people tend to be most addicted to appear to be glorified network social platforms, i.e. MMORPGs/LoL and the massive online communities extending them.
As I said, the most addicting draw is the social component surrounding the games. The co-operative/team-based format means there's a baseline level of coordination in the background.
Something can be said about competition itself, but games that are by design 1-vs-1 are nowhere near as popular. As goes for actual sports.
I literally don't understand how anyone can say that - there are more games of any genre than ever before. Yes if you only play CoD and nothing else it's all monetised and algorithm driven to hell. But for every CoD there are literally thousands of games that tell incredible and beautifully crafted stories. Thousands more where the focus is on gameplay. Endless remakes and reimaginings of older games with all their good and bad parts. Video games aren't just the top 3 best selling titles and it's weird to judge the whole industry that way. It's like saying that all movies are the same nowadays because Marvel films have turned into a more-of-the-same gloop.
The fact that non-predatory games do exist is hardly relevant if what people are actually playing most of the time are indeed endless, dark pattern ridden grinds if not outright no-win casinos of which mobile gaming consists almost exclusively.
Whole industry needn't be banned, but a lot of its practices absolutely have to be at least regulated.
Matchmaking in multi-player games and level scaling in single-player games are somewhat like an individual-centric recommendation algorithm providing you with a constant stream of games that are just hard enough to be engaging and keep you hooked, or at least trying to.
I'm sorry, this sentence doesn't explain to me why banning social media is necessary. What are "dopaminergic" effects? Why is it so awful that social media is addictive?
Very few people know what dopaminergic means. It might not be a real word.
“Is not dissimilar from” is a stock phrase used in an academia and by people trying to sound very smart.
The poster included just enough technobabble and stock phrasing to imply they are a specialist. But specialists know when speaking to non-specialists you should avoid technical language and stock phrasing.
So it really just seems the poster was signaling “I am very smart and possibly have a degree in something related and a current on research.”
When I read that the top comment thought banning social media was clearly necessary I was flabbergasted. I read the comment multiple times looking for a compelling argument. I read the article multiple times looking for a compelling argument too. I'm still struggling on this.
I would really like to read a concise logical argument for why we should ban social media.
He's got a number of articles if you Google his name, and he's also appeared in a few podcasts (eg Lex Fridman's).
Dopaminergic literally means "related to dopamine". It's the first Google result.
And how is the word "dissimilar" academic technobabble?
Let's have good-faith discussions in future as I think this is a really interesting topic :)
It is a real word though.
If you go back far enough. I think in part we see forums through rose-tinted glasses. Moderation was looser than people are accustomed to now, and I've seen several taken over by conspiracy nuts. Some still make friends online almost the exact same way, using discord or whatever. I've been a part of communities, but never made "friends" online. The idea is a farce to me.
I was an "always-online" teenager. That was a mistake, but I didn't know then, Neither did parents. Just as no one knew that frequently watching pornography could lead to problems. Internet access and culture led to a brave new world.
You can pin certain issues more specifically to modern social media (e.g. endless scroll), but it's deeper than that. Most of what is identified as addicting content is an extension of what existed before, but with a far larger pool people accessing it.
At any rate - banning is redundant. Parents are apparently receptive to to the idea that it could pose a problem, to a neurotic level for some. This is a new idea. Let them do their jobs.
Unless you reach a stage where you meet up in real life and share human experiences, you're basically just talking with the equivalent of an AI chatbot.
Either by taxing it so much that they have to, or by explicitly requiring payment. I'm not sure how you'd define "social media" vs say, HN (or is HN social media?).
Taxing advertising revenue at a higher rate could also do it (hmm, thinking about this, this might solve a lot more problems too).
For countries that don't do credit cards, there are other means - usually through the telco that provides mobile access.
Anyway - making users pay for it would associate the account with a credit card, and kids would have to do the same thing they do with mobile games and other paid-for stuff online - negotiate with their parents to get access. At least their parents would be aware.
It may work at first, but it will devolve into a stratified system of people who can afford it, and those who can't.
We signed away our integrity for validation and money.
I have disabled them along with suggestions with a browser extension, but the temp station is always there to enable again even briefly. Shorts are particularly addictive and must play hell with our dopamine receptors.
It does seem like a reasonable solution. A rewind back to the age when it had been just the newsgroups. Without +1 algorithms that result in the algorithm making a choice what users see and not the opposite.
Certainly a better solution, if compared to forcing everyone to show their Real Id, just to verify their age to access the Internet.
What? To me it is extremely naive to think that social media services wont try to use every single loop hole.
Also, cant help but notice you didnt actually answer the question - just dismissed it.
- if you make a claim then burden of proof is on you
- I never actually claimed that HN was tailored, just pointed out that you can't tell if that was the case
I won't be reading more from you
FB, Instagram, TikTok, but also Google search, and every ad supported site.
Not WhatsApp or the chat services, interestingly.
I wouldn't advocate for a ban on alcohol, it's much too ingrained in culture and too easy to make, but I hope that society some day gets to the point that it rejects it, much like we reject huffing shoe polish.
I don’t want to say IRC was fine but it was better than Instagram.
I used to stay up all night reading books under my covers with a flashlight.
When I'd get caught my parents would take my books away.
The idea that we're going to ban things that people really want and control behavior is laughable.
How many times has that worked in human history? Did anyone have trouble finding alcohol at high school parties as a teenager?
I highly doubt the implied semantics of this statement. We don't know everything there is to know about "dopaminergic effects". The pharmacology of smoking weed is probably very different than from say, scrolling through memes.
The effects of dopamine bombing yourself with on line content are not very dissimilar to effects of drugs. I would argue they are more similar than dissimilar.
I think "dopamine bombing" is not what it sounds. See discussions on dopamine fasting for what I mean. The relationship between the things you do and dopamine are complex, probably more complex than the relationship of what you physically consume and dopamine.
That's true, but it's also true for other addictions.
> a well adjusted kid isn't going to treat social media as more important than their friends unless they think they can make a living from it or have no friends.
Probably mostly true, but also a lot of friendships are moving online.
> I think "dopamine bombing" is not what it sounds
Can you elaborate? I think it sounds like abusing the dopamine hits you get when scrolling through SM, for example.
It might be that this is an unimportant distinction in the end, but I'm not sure we know.
Also, we give adults the freedom to fuck themselves up to a great extent that probably most people think it would be unethical with children.
Also, the effects on undeveloped brains are far greater. Our job is to teach kids and raise them. Not be their friends and just let them do whatever adults do.
But how on earth do we start a political movement around it? Difficulty: needs a 10-second blurb that does not rely on the word "algorithm".
"See what you want to see, not what's being pushed at you" is the best I can come up with.
"Our attention should belong to us, not to advertisers and influencers."
It's not hard. It just upsets vested interests.
Make it illegal to show ads to kids. You don't have to make "kid" identification airtight, because few people of any age want to opt into ads. The ad industry was very upset when the American Psychological Association proposed this back in 2004.[1]
This doesn't raise constitutional issues because ads are considered commerce rather than speech.
See for example: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2021/20-1029
This shows there isn't a blanket exemption from first amendment scrutiny for advertising.
(In fact, though, advertisements are not treated exactly the same way as other kinds of speech, say, political speech. The bar is different, and more regulation of advertisements is allowed than, say, political speech. Who knows if the current supreme court and other courts will change that though, they are changing a lot, often in favor of protections for commerce).
Yeah, this is what makes regulating anything hard or pointless, if the "vested interests" are powerful enough.
I just don't think banning people from the internet is the answer.
Why not use passport verification for any enough big social network? Anyway there is almost impossible to use them anonymously.
> Is kid playing with fancy toys is an ad?
not enough context, maybe
> Is product placement in movie an ad?
yes, clearly
> How and who will determine if this is and ad or not?
Probably some corporate compliance drones and underfunded government stooges.
Next, let's ban all advertising, is what I'm thinking.
I have to go to sleep, but I'm militant in my hate for advertising. I would burn the entire idea of advertising to cinders.
Moreover, Pokemon was never immune to that. The very first game already introduced the mechanic where you couldn't actually get all the creatures, which was one of the goals. In order to do that, you had to trade with friends that happened to buy a different color version. That's great, because it created engagement and communities around the game, but it's also clearly a marketing ploy.
If you fail to see this in that case, what about The Lego Movie? It's was made to make Lego relevant with the next generation of kids. It's also a good movie. And Lego sets are not bad toys to have.
It's simply not black and white and there's a big difference between Studio Ghibli selling Totoro merch and placing unhealthy snacks at a 5 year old eye level in a checkout aisle.
Not to mention no longer getting ear-and-eye-fucked with billboards, pop-ups, required logins, and product placements in media! Oh man, I would (almost) give up my only kid to have this dream come to fruition!
no, really. its a very convenient and often used tool in my home.
Youtube alone has 720,000 hours of fresh video content per day Tiktok must have less number of hours but more Videos per day. Add Instagram, facebook, Twitter and it's impossible for anyone to verify this manually so in the end how is the platform supposed to decide what to show and what not where the "not enough context, maybe" is the most common answer?
> Is product placement in movie an ad? > yes, clearly
not so clearly even in this case. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-x8DYTOv7w, a very nice recap of what an ad is.
Does your company produce ads for the company that produces Proprietary Toy and get money if they sell more products? Does your company supply batteries for Battery Operated Proprietary Toy? Does your store sell either Proprietary Toy?
And so on.
> Does your company produce ads
There it is, don't do that.
All these other questions are also just "yes." You're looking for nuance where there isn't any. Sponsorship is ads, product placement is ads, giving free product to influencer to review is ads. There are certainly edge cases some of them likely to be thorny but none of the things either of us has mentioned so far are them.
What about product placement? Nearly every movie in Hollywood from the past 40 years has some level of product placement, so under this new law we’ll either go back and edit it out or slap an R rating on it? How about arena ads or billboards? Special AR headsets for teens which will block ads from sight? It’s a silly hypothetical, of course, but you did just say that it’s a hypothetical without nuance.
I think it’s easier to imagine a world where advertising is outlaws entirely than one where we specifically shield it only for those underage.
Edit: In the UK advertising regulations are handled by the Advertising Standards Authority who already have rules specific to advertising to children.
https://www.gov.uk/marketing-advertising-law/advertising-cod...
Programmers tend get caught up with definitions and "loopholes". Laws don't care.
And besides, banning ads will not prevent social media from trying to lock minors in, either to already have them when they turn 18, or to benefit from peer network effects to rope in more of the 18+ audience.
One thing that's particularly convenient for regulators in this case is the tendency of adolescents to deliberately change their behavior as they approach adulthood in order to reinforce a sense of personal growth. 18-year-old me didn't want much to do with games and movies for 13-year-olds.
> will not prevent....
While "first drugs are free" is not unheard of, e.g. "gratis" licenses for schools, I think you vastly overestimate the willingness for long term investment. E.g. if the law says "no ads for under 18", they might stomach the costs for 16, 17, but starting at 13? 5 years of "gratis, adfree"? No change at all? You think so?
How do you define what is considered an ad here? How is age verified online? What if I have Hulu on TV from my account while my kids is in the room? Are other forms of ads banned as well, like cable TV commercials or billboards? Cereal boxes only use cartoon mascots to advertise to children...so also illegal?
> It's not hard. It just upsets vested interests.
Vested interests are precisely why it is hard.
Vested interests rule the US at this point.
But on top of all of that... what is an "ad"? Is it an "influencer" who is getting paid to promote a product but doesn't actually disclose that? Which already violates FTC regulations, and we aren't even managing to enforce the regulations we've already got, cause this is pervasive.
Huge win for helicopter parents
It seems like a pattern, grown ups just don’t like the way youngsters are spending their time.
Maybe it’s totally normal in your teens to just spend aimlessly time in seemingly useless things ?
Soccer and basketball exist today. I don’t think you’ll find many parents who struggle with their kids’ habits with them relative to current video games like roblox. (Super Mario Kart doesn’t have the same addictive and predatory aspects)
Find a random parent and you’ll see for yourself. It’s not that parents are frustrated that their kids are playing too many video games. It’s that they are concerned their kids are becoming addicted before they turn 10.
There's a limit in duration and time they can use a screen, both of which are easy to keep taps on. It's 5-10 minutes before leaving for school, if and only if they are all ready to leave. It encourages them to be done quicker and it's lost time anyway. The other block is while we're cooking. That started out as a way to keep overactive little kids busy and out of the kitchen, because the parent is busy and it's dangerous to be in the kitchen when cooking.
We also have limits on what they can do on the screen. They need to spend a minimum time on some educational apps, before they are free to do whatever the machine allows. They are on Android tablets restricted by Google Family Link, but things like YouTube (YT Kids for the youngest) are still available.
I feel that they do need some freedom in tech land to follow their curiosities. Even so, it's very limited because they als use it to just veg out. But one kid basically learned to count and spell in English from BBC videos, before they could do so in their native language. There is some advantage to just letting them go.
The time limits turned out to be pretty good motivators to learn to tell the time too. They are now pretty good at keeping taps on the time themselves.
We have changed the limits a bit over time. Mostly stretching them to new areas of interest. And kids are different, so what worked for the eldest sometimes didn't work for the youngest. They do like their tablets a bit more than I'd like, but I'm not worried about addiction. They're honestly using it far less than I watched TV in the age of cathode-ray tubes.
I wish that was how it was used, however my own experience (and that of parents I speak to) is that the firehose is determined by the algorithm, not the individual which subsequently drives the habits and interests.
For example, my son will want to look up how to do something in Minecraft. Ace, he's using the resources available to him to research and learn how to do something.
Then he's effectively spammed with highly addictive content (relating to Minecraft), with sound effects, music, editing visual effects and voice over from some "creator" whose only goal is to monetise.
Now he sits watching endless (if I don't stop him) clips, and if I ask him what he's watched, he doesn't remember (and he's also highly irritated that I've stopped him consuming).
This stuff is, at least, just as addictive to a young mind as pleasure drugs, and worse, it's available without any barriers and pushed towards the consumer at great speed and volume.
At least with TV, someone somewhere made a decision about what to air. With the current technology, anyone chooses what they publish and the algorithm chooses what you'll consume (based on what will increase your addiction).
It's also slightly curated, with age limits on videos provided by YouTube, but I mostly care about that to weed out shock videos and extreme violence.
But in both cases, they are happier and more creative (as kids should be) when we remove devices altogether.
I’m not sure what curation you’re talking about. YouTube kids is just ads, for example. It’s not violent, but it’s also not … not ads.
I think nowadays we just limit it to the age restrictions (<=4, 5-8, 9-12), so they don't see stuff that gives them nightmares. Everything else can be taken care of with the time limit.
If the internet as we've made it over the last 20 years is a breeding ground for addictive content and advertising, why not just stop using it? If we're going to ban anything because of this problem it should be situations that effectively force us to use the internet or be left behind.
Kids shouldn't have to be online for school. Adults shouldn't have to be online to get a job. Banning those kinds of situations would at least leave the door open for individuals to decide if using the internet regularly is really worth it to them.
To be fair though, playing sports had a lot to do with breaking the video game cycle -- when you have 12 hour days between school and 2 sports teams, suddenly worrying about your "dailies" and other hooks these games have just stops being an option.
With the firehose of social media its whatever the providers algorithm decides it wants the user to consume.
My 11 year old son is limited to 30 mins of YouTube per day, 15 mins of Snapchat. TikTok is banned. Overall phone usage is limited to 3 hours per day, and PS5 is the same. And it's still not enough for him.
And yes, he uses these in conflict with the provider terms.
Without any exposure he lacks any commonality with his peers (who, as far as I can tell, have unfettered access to devices, apps and video games) however he will forego food, water, bathroom, hygiene if not forcibly limited.
And he agrees with statements like "I just can't stop myself" and "I feel like I've got to have it" and "I don't know what to do unless I have it". Which makes me very sad. When he goes to play with friends, he makes a bee line for those same devices and apps that he's limited from accessing at home.
He cannot self-limit his consumption and billion dollar companies are using his mind as a disposable fuel to make money for no better purpose than profit. I honestly don't know how the folk at those firms live with themselves (other than luxuriously).
I honestly wish these platforms did not exist at all, for the arguments they cause.
Modern social media is just advertisement in disguise of entertainment. I am an adult, hopefully a rational one, and my buying habits (and desires!) have been heavily influenced by the social media, I can only imagine what it does to children's minds.
The social aspect of social media, ironically, is often barely present. Services like Youtube are parasocial at best.
It’ll take some time to prove causation. But I think we have enough evidence to know that curtailing social media will improve lives.
One has tangible benefits to your health, social life, boosts your confidence, gets you out in the fresh air and sun, and forms healthy lifestyle habits.
The other has you sitting staring at a screen for (sometimes as many as 10) hours per day, pretending to be an Italian plumber, or giving themselves depression from looking at fake lives on Instagram.
Biologically there’s just no comparison to the dopamine bath your brain takes when using social media or video games.
Thing is, people of all ages are using social media. Grownups recognize it as dangerous to themselves too.
I really think this is less of a rock and roll situation and more of a tobacco situation.
> I don't relish this solution either. When I was 13, I was on forums making online friends. I loved it. But it was clearly different back then, before smartphones, before content-creators, when the internet was mostly nerds.
The main difference between forums like that (which still exist) and social media is monetization, which leads to optimizing for "engagement" and incentivizing addictive behavior.
So IMO the solution would be to ban corporate/for-profit social media.
https://diysolarforum.com comes to mind, Will runs a related informational site and YouTube channel. I don't know if he technically made a business for it but he could have, and if it continued to grow there could be good reason to hire a few employees.
I think the real difference between social media and forums is the algorithmic feed. We could likely codify a ban on algorithmic feeds of user generated content. That would go a long way and would be much easier to spell out in a law than a targeted ban on advertising, social media use by age, or certain types of business models.
Advertising to kids is obviously a big part of the problem. But it's not the ONLY problem with social media – it's just one piece of a much bigger puzzle.
Social media is a punishment for those to stupid to avoid it.
A good start would be to ban feeds based on algorithms; instead your feed would be a chronological list of new posts from channels you've chosen to follow.
The replacement you've described for an algorithm is still an algorithm.
That said, I've been contending with this situation having a 14 year old of my own at this point. The reality is, at that time, swatting was not a thing. Pictures on the Internet were like, something a minority of people had, because it involved taking a film picture and scanning it in (assuming you had access to a scanner). Video? Forget it.
Honestly I wouldn't have blamed my own parents for being more restrictive with me had they known how to, but the tech went entirely over their head. Seeing how far it's come in that time and just how much more damage can be VERY rapidly done, particularly with the more developed blackmail scams, or just kids making poor choices that result in some very real criminal charges, have me pretty okay with taking a much heavier hand on the matter than was taken with myself.
I suppose I'd liken it to "free range children" in farmland, vs. free range children in a gangland ghetto. While we can certainly lament the lack of a good environment for kids to run free, the alternative is an unsafe environment. Perhaps platforms can be made to bring back a corralled in space that would be sensible, but allowing them loose on what the modern Internet has turned into would be frankly irresponsible.
That all said, there's only so much we can do at the legislative level. Kids are already not allowed on many sites they get onto (now, just the same as back then). What I find most necessary as a parent is the ability to lock down devices so that I can allow my child access to specific resources without being forced into allowing access to others. iPhones are frankly AWFUL at this -- I'm happy to report my experience on Android has been much smoother, and Windows is quite a bit better than my initial expectations as well (though router-level configuration is handy for home devices as well). IF we must use the heavy hand of government to address the matter, requiring the availability of usable, effective parental control measures that engage in app-level (if not hardware level in the case of cameras) whitelisting would be where I think we'd have the most bang for our buck without too much in the way of collateral damage. Better still would be some market pressure, but unfortunately, most parents I talk to seem to just feel entirely helpless and don't even know what to look for, and just assume there's no choice but to let their kids get raised by the Internet.
If you're new to raising kids in this era, do yourself and your kid a favor -- familiarize yourself with tools available, and demand platforms that give you the ability to effectively administrate your devices.
Its anecdotal for sure (maybe I just got lucky? maybe I had more sense than the average kid? maybe the shift is US/Western Nation localised?), but I don't think the internet has gotten worse everywhere at once.
A big part of going through teenage years is the development of one's own personality and finding YOUR OWN identity. Figuring out who you are and who you want to be, building real relationships with real people to learn about social contracts, trust, bonds, friendships, mistakes, and most importantly it is a key part of building a healthy amount of confidence and self-love which are important character traits that everyone should establish to some level in order to weather through tough times in life later on.
Social media makes all of the above impossible. Even worse, it makes this important development phase very toxic. It teaches teenagers and children the opposite of friendships, the algorithm is constantly looking to outrage children and to rattle their feelings in order to drive engagement. The algorithm is tuned to feed into young people's insecurities in order to drive clicks on ads and increase their ad revenue. This is why so many kids suffer from mental health issues, are immensely under confident, unhappy, feel alone and worthless.
It's shameful that policy makers are not acting fast enough. There is already a huge generation of damaged children who just turned or are turning into adults now and we already see the effects of that.
I suspect heroin has caused considerably more felony convictions and fatal overdoses then any social media platform.
Well, what else are you gonna do when all your "friends" are more beautiful than you, than shoot up and forget about life for a while?
I don't disagree, but how do you propose we do that exactly?
> Everyone must do an ID check when signing up to social media. If you are not an adult yet then your account will be locked until you become 18.
> This would also eliminate all the bots and fake people or double/triple anonymous accounts which are trying to game the algorithm to push for certain toxic agendas.
> Whistleblowers, which often get mentioned, don't need to be anonymous on social media.
> We have journalists and whistleblowers can already anonymously reach out to journalists and leak information so that journalists can publicise it under the protections of their profession.
"just id check" -- hey, what if i don't want my social media tied to my personal account for any reason? let's say i'm an atheist and my family is quite religious? or what if i'm gay and i don't want to show it to the world while expressing myself through social media?
Your ID (driving license or whatever) is not your personal account.
> let's say i'm an atheist and my family is quite religious
Ok, so what? LOL people have different beliefs, only because you are an atheist you don't have to troll your family members on social media. You wouldn't do that in real life with your family so why do you feel the need on social media? I don't understand the issue which you're trying to raise here. Just be an atheist, so what. Social media is not subdivided into religious cults so you can mingle happily amongst other people from other beliefs, no issue there!
> or what if i'm gay and i don't want to show it to the world while expressing myself through social media
Then don't? Again, I don't get the issue here. If you don't want to express your gayness publicly then just don't do it. It's your choice. Nobody forces you to upload your dirty videos with your partner to social media.
Social media is a platform for real people to connect, not for anonymous trolls to shout some bullshit into the void. If you don't like that then perhaps social media as it was originally intended is not a platform for you. It seems you want it to be something that it isn't. We have 4chan, Reddit and other things where you can probably much better exhibit these desires.
> what is the definition of social media? does that include messaging apps?
It's not messaging apps, or HN or a pet forum. Yes some of the other apps/sites have similarities, but those similarities are not greater than the similarities between the Nike or Victoria Secret online shopping page for Brazilian bikinis and an adult site. If we can distinguish the latter than it's also possible for us to find an easy way to distinguish the former.
> any places (countries) where this was instituted and worked out as you describe?
> they don't?
> and what if you don't have access to a journalist....?
I am sure they will turn out just fine after being released from constant surveillance and prison only after 18.
Today, that means teaching kids how to cope with social media. It is in their world. It’s not going away. As a parent, I can understand the temptation to just want to ban it. I wish I could ban a lot of things I would rather my kids not have to deal with. But parenting just doesn’t work like that. They need to learn to deal with it, and it’s my job to try my best to help them do that.
Actually, we protect children from lots of things that they will need to confront as adults. My baby will need to learn how to safely navigate stairs eventually, but for now, the staircase is gated so she doesn't hurt herself before she's ready.
And as this comment explains[1], social media is hurting our children in real and profound ways.
Well yes. Once your child turns 21, they’ll have legal access to all of these things. A parent is still obligated to educate their children to make good choices, regardless of what the legal age is.
> Actually, we protect children from lots of things that they will need to confront as adults. My baby will need to learn how to safely navigate stairs eventually, but for now, the staircase is gated so she doesn't hurt herself before she's ready.
Fortunately, the government does not ban the usage of stairs by minors in an attempt to “protect the children”.
Banning multi-billion dollar companies in a society dealing with regulatory capture, or help teach kids to deal with the world around them. One sure seems more easily attained than the other.
Snakes are part of the world, but you teach your kids that you don't let snakes into your house because they are toxic. You can apply the same analogy to social media.
You make social media inaccessible to your kids until they have developed into a confident young adult at which point they will have acquired the mental strength to navigate through the toxicity of social media themselves with a strong self identity which will make them immune to a lot of the online grift and attempts to feed off their insecurities.
Is that actually a win? Emotionally, I can see why some hang onto the idea of talking face to face just like in the good old days, but at the same time you are trading for greatly reduced access to the world's most interesting people. The whole reason we're here and not talking to our neighbours is because we can seek out people of significance, not just who happens to move in next door.
Indeed, lawmakers do seem concerned about new entrants to the media space, like producers on TikTok, no doubt because they struggle to exert the same kind of control over the content like they used to be able to when there were only a small handful of regulated media companies. That's well beyond the topic of social media taking place here, though.
> If HN isn't social media, I'm not sure what is.
HN is social media. Active, two way conversation which emulates going outside to talk to your neighbour, except with people around the globe, is what attracts people here. The users here aren't here just to watch TV like they are on Instagram and TikTok.
> Like so many parents these days, my wife and I have ceded
So the parents are to blame here. "Ceded" to what exactly? To your kids unsupervised wishes? Most of the inadequate and harmful use of these addictive social networks is done at home, so, it's your jurisdiction, not the government's. Teach your kid how to use tech early on. Even if imperfect, put digital guard-rails and time limits and be on top of it at all times with discernment, commentary and openness.
> L.G.B.T.Q. child living in a household with disapproving parents might have fewer resources to find community and support because their parents would be able to look into their messages
Good argument. But, again, the disapproving parents are to blame here, not the kids. Educate the parents while giving children more channels and more people to talk to, so they don't need to go into dark digital alleys seeking relief.
You can blame polarization, the Chinese (TikTok), advertising, the Government or free-speech, but raising kids is a full-time job parents, not Uncle Sam, are supposed to do.
I'm learning it the hard way -- it's not easy being a parent of two, but the rewards are good when you are loving, persistent and listen to their needs. Trust me, if you put in the time and effort, your kids will beat addictive algorithms any time of day.
You can set a time limit on particular paths to reach social media, but as I saw with trying to block youtube, it is effectively impossible without blocking it at router level for the whole household. Kids are so creative, and nothing is more fun than subverting digital locks.
I do agree to the point that talking and listening to your kid is key. Kids that don’t feel comfortable showing vulnerability to their parents are at risk in the digital world.
I've had no trouble just controlling the terminals. The tablets and laptop that can be used by them are stored in shared spaces. If they want to access them, they'll have to get past us.
But I can see that get more difficult when they need to have both more access and more privacy. I hope to have taught them enough by then that tripping up won't be a big issue. It's not far into the future, but I think they'll be fine.
The older I get, the more astounded I am at the fact that nobody in my family has social media brain rot. Or political brainworms. My grandparent's generation is mostly dead, sadly, but there are 3 living generations ranging in age from 0 to 78 and dozens of people and we're all fine. This is regardless of educational level (ranging from HS dropouts to MDs), political affiliation (everything from center Dem to anarchists, socialists, and even some Christian conservatism for spice), or religion. If I had to pinpoint the difference, it's that we were all raised by and surrounded by adults that understood the interaction between technology and daily life. But most people becoming parents don't have that, the Internet just crashed into their life and upended a lot of what they thought they knew without leaving anything in its place.
I also question that it's solely based on the parents because the older I get (I'm in my mid 30s), the more I think access to non-parental adults with this ability is the key to our relative stability, particularly tech-knowledgable adults that openly disagree with each other. Kids do stupid shit, especially when they're adolescents. They will disobey their parents/ignore their advice because it's part of growing up and figuring out their own values and boundaries, but when an entire group of adults who don't agree on politics, religion, or worldview all agree that something is a bad idea, then that idea becomes a cultural taboo. I don't think my paternal cousins and I have ever voted for the same things and I'm the weirdo gay heretic socialist to their traditional Catholic, but both I and my cousins are going to agree on the important of things like basic op-sec and when to tell people what online. So even if their kids rebel hard, the rebellious adults are going to reaffirm 'don't put your hand on the stove/do things like delete metadata from photos'.
I don't know if there's enough cultural knowledge communicated to the parents for them to parent effectively even though I agree that's their job.
This is something that is normally done for social-serviced families already, but too late, when they are deep in the road to failure and despair. Such wide-spread public parenting-aid would be expensive, have flaws, generate political push-backs and there are not enough studies on effectiveness yet. OTOH, social/public financial support for families, including money stipends, tax breaks and plenty of paid vacation days help reduce parenting stress, which in turn tend to have a positive effect with kids at home -- something some countries are significantly better at than others.
The importance of parenting is underestimated in society.
I'm not sure how realistic it would be to enforce ban on social media under a certain age. The ban would have to be enforced on social media companies but they'd likely only be held to doing a best effort solution. They already set a minimum age at 13 for creating a social media account but that hasn't stopped kids from getting into TikTok, Instagram, etc
Legislation would benefit children who were born to parents who do not understand the risks.
How would a ban even work though, without ultimately depending on parent intervention? Companies could throw up a "are you over 18?" banner, but those don't work. They could go full KYC and require users to provide government issued IDs, but that feels like a drastic step away from privacy and data security and could still be dodged when a kid grabs a picture of their parent's ID.
But the optimist in me says once a kid grows up, there's a ton of "past wrongs" that they can choose to right, given they have the proper self awareness.
There's also a chance I'm just flat-out wrong, but... I'm betting my child's future that I'm not.
And while it is not clear how we are going to regulate them, or more generally deal with the negative effects, it is something we must figure out, a blanket ban is not the solution. You have to realize that even sites like Stack Overflow can be considered social media.
They certainly have addiction potential, maybe not dissimilar to drugs, but guess what, even some hard drugs like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine are not banned, they are regulated, because they have some use in medicine. Sugar is addictive too, and as of now, a serious health problem, but no one talks about banning sugar of course, instead calling for regulation.
I think it's the human factor. People aren't going to empathize with an avatar or 3D model the same way they do with a real person filming themselves with a smartphone. It makes me think that the real bar for extreme content in video games is having a politically opinionated theme, not just subtext (which no AAA studio would ever risk producing) with sufficient realism.
If I were to ban social media for my children, I would ban specific sites like Facebook, Instagram, etc. I wouldn't ban niche forums.
Also, they shouldn't be able to launder responsibility for editorial choices by saying "an algorithm did it!" and hiding behind laws meant to protect email and IM providers and web hosting companies and ISPs and such.
I expect that combo'd fix a lot of problems.
This is greatly exaggerated, if not outright false:
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2023/04/addicted-to-social...
Which is not to say social media isn't harmful, but let's refrain from imputing pseudoscientific explanations for the dangers.
Whenever you start talking about banning a specific group, your efforts are wasted because who decides the group. Someone at the top, and can they always be trusted to decide that? No.
If you need to talk about banning something outright, that's a far more approachable argument that doesn't add to the noise.
Also, it is known that the brain continues to develop after 18, there isn't some magic switch at 18 that says these people aren't still vulnerable.
Addiction and exploitation continue to happen regularly after that age, just look at gaming in general how many people are now in their 40s and spend more than 10 hours a week on gaming?
Some people are more equipped than others to deal with addiction than others, what that difference is between success outcomes and others should be promoted and studied.
Any system that can amplify or de-amplify a message runs into these problems. Its not just social media. Its algorithms too, and they are designed to exploit you and your psychology to get what they want which is profit or control in one way or another. That's what the humans who built these algorithms optimized for.
It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff - especially in our highly polarised political climate. The right will immediately target "wokeness", and the left will immediately target "hate speech". And the kids will be totally forgotten about.
That's why I think, don't bother trying to regulate social media. Just ban it for under 18s when they're most vulnerable.
I don't relish this solution either. When I was 13, I was on forums making online friends. I loved it. But it was clearly different back then, before smartphones, before content-creators, when the internet was mostly nerds.
(I don't use social media, but I do use YouTube. I was amazed how quickly, after watching one fitness video, it immediately started showing videos of the most ripped, steroid-abusing bodybuilders, and how I could achieve their "amazing" physiques. Then videos started popping up about all types of performance-enhancing drugs. SARMs, trenbolone - it was crazy how quickly it devolved to this)