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The case for banning children from social media

newyorker.com

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Re: The case for banning children from social media

#41

Post by hackerlight »

C50VGicCxmHC wrote: post #3

> These bills will likely face considerable constitutional challenges. Previous attempts to block minors from accessing Web sites via broad legislation, including the Child Online Protection Act, from 1998, have been struck down on First Amendment grounds. You might get farther instead of banning children from social media, ban all ads to children on social media. Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,0…

> If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site.

Absolutely not. Where do you think 18 year old users will come from? They will come from 17 year old users who turn 18. Therefore, social media sites will still have an incentive to corral kids onto the platform. Because they will one day turn 18 (or 16, or whatever the legislated age cutoff is) and become a source of revenue. Moreover, social media sites want network effects and want to be trendy among young people, even if these things don't directly lead to revenue.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#42

Post by ehnto »

C50VGicCxmHC wrote: post #3

> These bills will likely face considerable constitutional challenges. Previous attempts to block minors from accessing Web sites via broad legislation, including the Child Online Protection Act, from 1998, have been struck down on First Amendment grounds. You might get farther instead of banning children from social media, ban all ads to children on social media. Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,0…

From my experience it took very active moderation to even poorly enforce COPA style rules and that was with a small user base, not the mega-userbases of today's social media. Kids just sign up anyway and then the moderators wait for them to slip up and still are just making an educated guess.

The only way to make it more effective I feel is ID verification but then you are looking at collecting IDs from kids and that is a total non-starter in my opinion, not to mention they don't usually have a verifiable ID yet.

I don't have the solution, but if we look at other age prohibited activities they are usually restricted up until the age that you are considered an adult and as such ID is more reasonable to ask for.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#43

Post by hattmall »

p1necone wrote: post #11
Calvin02 wrote: post #8

What is social media? My daughters use messaging more than they use TikTok, IG, or BeReal. They send 100s of messages to each other in a span of 5 mins. However, even within their close circle of friends, I see the same social issues (peer pressure, need for validation, etc.).

I do wonder sometimes how much of the supposed ills of social media are just social media making things that were already happening much more visible. I and many others were bullied relentlessly at school through regular non technological means, and I'm sure it had a pretty negative psychological impact. I'm not really convinced it would be any worse if I was more active on Instagram/TikTok/whatever.

Did the bullying stop or slow down when you got home? Did you have to check online every 5 minutes to see what pictures of you were posted? Was embarrassing content being spread around to people you had never even interacted with on a regular basis.

Did Photoshopped images of you hanging from a ceiling fan with a Nike Swoosh and a caption saying "Just Do it" get 10,000 likes?

IMO bullying today is orders of magnitude worse than it was ~15 years ago.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#44

Post by hattmall »

swader999 wrote: post #30

For all those saying parents, take the phones away. Any idea how hard that is? That could in itself push them over the edge.

They literally can't keep phones out of maximum security prisons. I don't think many parents are up for the challenge.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#45

Post by whats_a_quasar »

reb wrote: post #31
whats_a_quasar wrote: post #14

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 increa…

Worth calling out here: that "nearly double" rate is specifically for the 10-14 age range; the next group up is up 30–50%. I say that not to minimize at all... if anything I'm more shocked by this steep rise in younger children.

Good point, updated my comment to make age/gender brackets clearer

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#46

Post by tastysandwich »

I just don't see any alternatives to banning social media, perhaps even up to the age of 18. The dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs and social media is just as addictive.

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)

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#47

Post by whats_a_quasar »

p1necone wrote: post #11
Calvin02 wrote: post #8

What is social media? My daughters use messaging more than they use TikTok, IG, or BeReal. They send 100s of messages to each other in a span of 5 mins. However, even within their close circle of friends, I see the same social issues (peer pressure, need for validation, etc.).

I do wonder sometimes how much of the supposed ills of social media are just social media making things that were already happening much more visible. I and many others were bullied relentlessly at school through regular non technological means, and I'm sure it had a pretty negative psychological impact. I'm not really convinced it would be any worse if I was more active on Instagram/TikTok/whatever.

Hospital admissions for self harm among girls ages 10-14 have almost tripled since 2010. Suicides among 10-14 year olds have doubled. There really is something different happening to teen mental health, it's not just existing problems becoming more visible [1].

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

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#49

Post by armchairhacker »

I don't necessarily think it's an ethically bad idea, but "banning all children from all social media" is simply impractical for many reasons, including:

- You essentially have to check some sort of ID and ban VPNs, banning online privacy which is BAD

- The smartest kids are way more tech-savvy than the dumbest adults, so you may end up banning adults too, which is BAD

- What will you do to children who get caught? Jail them? Call their parents, teachers, etc. who may not care? Make them take a "social media rehabilitation" classes? Consider that no matter the penalty, many, many kids will try very hard to work around this, and many parents will actively support them.

Something which would actually work is "banning" children like we ban them from seeing Rated R games and movies. Like:

- Banning children from specific social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). This can be done through laws or just activism and lobbying to pressure the sites into banning children themselves

- Encouraging parents to ban children from social media, teaching them how. You cannot call CPS on parents whose children are using social media, unless you think having many, many kids in foster care is a worthy sacrifice

- Creating stronger parental controls (which is also a part of 1 and 2: individual sites can create stronger controls like ID to ban children, and stronger parental controls will help parents)

- Simply discouraging children from using social media, maybe even with incentives

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