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The case for banning children from social media

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Re: The case for banning children from social media

#141

Post by Clubber »

whats_a_quasar wrote: post #47
p1necone wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Have you considered it might be their life's outlook? What do most of these girls have to look forward to after school? A well paying job? Most of them will have crap jobs barely scraping by, and most of them know it. A house? Most will pay absurd rates for an apartment and never build equity.

Our school system is pretty trash too, depending on state. I think social media might be a scapegoat, because it's easy to, "just do something," while the real issue goes against the political donor's wishes.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a capitalist, but business have done everything to push down wages and working conditions since Reagan. Would you want to be a kid today with our current outlook?

And then there's the news. Kids don't realize it's mostly fear mongering BS and they believe all the doomsayers' predictions. That's pretty hard for a 14 year old.

Social media probably has something to do with it, but we have to fix all the other stuff too if we want to actually make a difference, rather than just feeling like we made a difference.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#142

Post by worrycue »

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…

> make way more unfavorable social comparisons

I wonder if this is a huge part of it.

Instead of only having to measure up to your local friend group, who are more likely than not to be close to you in living standards and upbringing, you have to measure up to people all around the world - and most of what’s posted on social media is carefully framed and selected, making things seem better than they are; you can’t even blame them for this as people who post are incentivise to do so to increase their chances to get noticed.

One could argue that traditional mass media has already made that a thing. But I feel traditional celebrities have an air of alien-ness to them, they are like Greek gods on Olympus, such that people are less likely to compare themselves to them or at least not do so as seriously.

Social media celebrities on the other hand often present themselves as the guy/gal next door. Someone you feel you can be friends with. The fact that they might even directly reply to you via social media further reinforces that perception. All this ratchet up the pressure to measure up and when you fail to, you feel bad.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#143

Post by threatofrain »

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…

One way they might do so is to require government ID, like other countries do. If we want accountability then perhaps every account should be tied to a government ID.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#144

Post by CobrastanJorji »

d110af5ccf wrote: post #71
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hrm. I'm not a big fan of this proposal, but I think that implementation would be technically interesting. Say we create a "this is a child" header, which would be sent with all HTTP requests and would mandate that the user not be tracked or advertised to. Great solution, except that everybody would immediately switch the header on because everybody hates ads. In effect, everybody wants to be a child. So now online s…

> I'm not going to choose to "prove I'm an adult" to most of the Internet, just the sites I want to use. Except for purchases and other business or government type interactions I flat out refuse to do this. I simply do not use web sites or services that require a real name. I only rarely use ones that require an email. Yes, this means I don't use most commercial services and major websites. I honestly think I'm bette…

Right, but that's the problem with the "no advertising to kids" thing. It means that advertising probably can't be used on any site that doesn't require logins, and that means that most of the commercial sites that don't require logging in will go out of business overnight.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#145

Post by uptownfunk »

tastysandwich wrote: post #46

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…

18.. hell I’m close to 40 and I have trouble self regulating.

YouTube needs an option to disable shorts. It’s just not healthy.

TikTok I won’t even touch it. It’s virtualized crack.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#146

Post by klyrs »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #122
tastysandwich wrote: post #46

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…

Forcing social media companies to charge for accounts would be my first approach. 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,…

HN is social media. So are old-school forums. Hell, Usenet and IRC qualify in my opinion.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#147

Post by Manuel_D »

Clubber wrote: post #141
whats_a_quasar wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Have you considered it might be their life's outlook? What do most of these girls have to look forward to after school? A well paying job? Most of them will have crap jobs barely scraping by, and most of them know it. A house? Most will pay absurd rates for an apartment and never build equity. Our school system is pretty trash too, depending on state. I think social media might be a scapegoat, because it's easy to, "…

Most girls today will make more than any other female generation in history. Your statement would hold true for boys. But the rates of mental illnesses and suicide are growing faster among the former. So it's probably more complicated that economic success.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#148

Post by brucethemoose2 »

Calvin02 wrote: post #136
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, my anecdotal parental evidence suggests otherwise. My oldest was upset that her friend didn’t acknowledge a message she had sent and apparently changed the topic. Apparently this friend always does that. My daughter was complaining that it is unlikely that this person didn’t see the message that my daughter had sent. It is a complex world. I just live in it. I will never understand the subtle nuanced rules. I’ve…

Well, yeah, that is just part of growing up... that kind of angst has existed since (at least) the invention of language and gossip.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#149

Post by southernplaces7 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #119
southernplaces7 wrote: post #104

Or, one could consider the crazy option of letting parents exercise at least some modicum of decision-making on how their children live their lives. I can understand much of the disgust with social media as it is today, but some of these arguments spin off so far into emotional reactionary vitriol that they lose whole forests for meager trees about the larger dangers of laws deciding such minutia for parents.

Try making the decision that your child will not use social media and watch what happens.

Plenty of people do indeed pull it off, and before that heavy handed step, there are others that on a parental level (not by government decree), moderate the effects and use of social media for their children without relying on blanket bans in a society that seems to view even very basic freedoms as ever more maleable things.

The underlying logic of blanket social media bans is awful, and so is the enormous leeway they open for government control of information and expression in so many other ways. This entire proposal is obviously grotesque, that so many people on a site like this don't see that just because they happen to hate Facebook et al in many ways (I myself do too) is absurd.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#150

Post by snvzz »

Avicebron wrote: post #124
snvzz wrote: post #81

I'd ban children from the Internet and from the phone network. Computers are fine, as long as they're offline. Countless generations of kids have grown up fine in these conditions. We already know being online is bad for them. What are we waiting for?

Well social media as it exists today didn't exist when I was first starting out online, but I doubt I'd be in the position I am today without having free reign (my parents weren't super tech savvy) on the internet as a 9-10 year old and later. That's around when I started programming, where I got all the materials I could, made some warcraft 3 mods, that catapulted me pretty far..

I did most of that w/o being online, with an Amiga 500.

Only got a PC and later Internet at home once I was 16.

There's literally no reason for a minor to "need" access to Internet.

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