The case for banning children from social media

My concern with child proofing other than I don't think it works is that it starts impacting me directly. No more sign up with email, now I i have to produce credit card or government ID or similar. Which I don't trust sites to protect anyway. Google has been bugging me for two years asking for my birthday on a 20 year old account to comply with laws like this. It can vote, its over 13.

There is a real public health issue here. Teen mental health really has fallen off a cliff in the last 10 years, in every measure available. Self-reported rates of depression and anxiety disorders have more than doubled. Suicides of 10-14 year olds have more than doubled. Suicides among 14-19 year olds have gone up ~50%. Hospital admissions for non-fatal self harm in girls 10-14 have ~tripled. It's not just an increase in diagnosis. [1]

The bulk of the evidence points to smartphones and social media as the primary cause. Specifically, the combination of smartphones video/image based social media causes kids to spend way less social time in person, and to make way more unfavorable social comparisons. Heavy social media use is unambiguously correlated with depression and anxiety. And the studies on causation all show that social media causes mental health issues, not the other way around [2]

Between 2003 and 2019 (pre-covid) the amount of time teens spend in person with friends dropped on average from ~144 minutes per day to ~41 minutes per day. How could that not have major health effects? [3]. The only plausible explanation for that drop at that time is smartphones.

There are major freedom of speech issues with this sort of regulation. And there are major technical and policy complications to actually implementing a ban. But the evidence is that social media is a public health crisis comparable to opioids. There is a real tradeoff that needs to be made between unlimited access to digital media and public health.

Lots of people on HN have a strong reaction against any attempt to regulate the internet. And there have been generations of moral panics about new technologies. But the available evidence show that this time is actually different, and we do need to have a real conversation about whether the health effects on teens are worth it.

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...

[2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

[3] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report, Figure 4

The engagement optimizing feeds amplifly some of the ills that are otherwise manageable in "private" groups of friends reading chronological communication. That's what really needs to go.

We are all children at heart. Ban the rest of us, too.

If you want to ban your kids from using social media, you don't need to wait for the government to do it for you.

Far more dangerous than social media is this increasingly pervasive attitude that the government is responsible for parenting your kids.