I'm almost invariably anti-regulation, but in this case - absolutely!

There's extensive evidence that social media is exceptionally harmful to people, especially children. And in this case there's also a major network effect. People want to be on social media because their friends are. It's like peer pressure, but bumped up by orders of magnitude, and in a completely socially acceptable way. When it's illegal that pressure will still be there because of course plenty of kids will still use it, but it'll be greatly mitigated and more like normal vices such as alcohol/smoking/drugs/etc. It'll also shove usage out of sight which will again help to reduce the peer pressure effects.

This will also motivate the creation/spread/usage of means of organizing/chatting/etc outside of social media. This just seems like a massive win-win scenario where basically nothing of value is being lost.

Are you a parent? It's not as easy as saying "no social media" to your kids. In this day and age, it's basically equivalent to saying "you can't have friends". Online is where kids meet, hang out, converse etc. I'd LOVE to go back to the days before phones and social media, where kids played with neighbours and ride their bikes to their friends house, but that's slowly slipping away.

We try pretty hard to get our kids to play with their friends in person (we invite them or give rides to playdates) but what do they do when they meet up? Sit on the couch with their tablets and play virtually in Roblox :-)

When my friends would meet up in the 80's-90's, quite a bit of Nintendo happened. Is it really that different? The proportion of video games should eventually drop (not to zero), in favor of (if you're lucky) talking and whatever music bothers you the most.

You organize playdates for middle & high schoolers?

They didn't say anything about the age of their kids. Roblox is played by almost all ages.

>Are you a parent?

I have 5 children. Does that count?

> It's not as easy as saying "no social media" to your kids.

I didn't. I taught them about risks so they'll have tools. But social media isn't where life-changing harm came from.

The harm came from growing up in a world with 24/7 adult presence and zero places to roam. It's development-ruining hellscape that 10k years of children didn't have before.

Yes, parents should not have unlimited rights to determine what is good/bad for their children.

Social media is a powerful, addictive and dangerous. Pretty much anywhere on this earth, parents will end up in jail or lose custody of their kids, if they give them harmful substances like drugs. Social media should be regulated like how drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes are regulated.

Because drug regulations are so effective with no collateral damage at all. /s

Do you also think that children should be allowed to buy cigarettes? I'll be honest, I am not certain that social media is any less deleterious than tobacco.

I'm a pretty pro-market guy, but there are times when the interests of the market are orthogonal to the interests of mankind.

I can pretty confidently say that the half a million deaths a year attributable to smoking is a little more deleterious than getting bullied online and the suicides which follow. Many orders of magnitude more.

Just because one thing is worse than the other doesn't mean the less-bad thing is suddenly good.

The original statement was:

> "Do you also think that children should be allowed to buy cigarettes? I'll be honest, I am not certain that social media is any less deleterious than tobacco."

To which I pointed out that cigarettes kill far more people than social media. And your response was somehow that I'm implying that a less-bad thing is good? Are you sure you're following the conversation? It's really not clear that you're addressing anything I said, and it's unclear what your point is.

I was following the conversation. You seemed to be implying that social media restriction was unnecessary.

If you weren't, then I think you were being a bit pedantic, because I don't think the person you were replying to was literally suggesting that millions of smoking deaths were equivalently bad to social media. Context matters, and the context of the conversation is legal restriction of social media.

Either way, feel free to ignore my comment if it bothers you.

Parents can make accounts to use on collaboration with their children.

The law prevents the corporation from directly engaging with the child without parental oversight.

Parents don’t have the right to get their kids a tattoo, vote or buy alcohol before a regulated age. Is this different?

Actually, in many states there is no minimum age to get a tattoo with parental consent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_tattooing_in_t...

Likewise for cosmetic surgical modification of the penis by a doctor, or puncturing the earlobe by a non-medical-professional.

That is…shocking

So your answer is yes?

Your position is that decisions about youth access to social media should be fully taken from the parents and made by govs instead. Penalties can be assumed from your examples.

This is the reality that you want imposed on parents and children - yes?

There's actually a really simple and elegant penalty - forfeiture of the device used to access the social media. With all seized devices to then be wiped and donated to low income school districts/families. This gets more complex when using something like a school computer, but I think it's a pretty nice solution outside of that. That's going to be a tremendous deterrent, yet also not particularly draconian.

Yep thats what low income families need: more cell phones.

Now they too can get on social media!

Is your position that no age limits should exist for anything?

I never said that. You introduced that notion to the conversation.

This is already the reality for alcohol and plenty of other things. Maybe not everywhere. Reality check: parents giving unrestricted access to these things are usually perceived as irresponsible.

Missouri law allows minors to consume alcohol if purchased by a parent or legal guardian and consumed on their private property.

edit: Apparently Missouri is not the only state. I had trouble finding a definitive list though. There are also other exceptions such as wine during religious service.

While there are exceptions, and in general exceptions seem pretty common, they still require businesses to officially get approval and it gives power to parents to enforce rules that would otherwise be hard to do so. Even with the exceptions for children to legally be allowed to drink, I would be surprised if that led to more kids drinking than alcohol obtained illegally, which means the question should be back on how well does the law work (obviously not perfectly, but there is a large gap between perfect and so poorly that it is useless purely from an efficiency perspective).