Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The case for banning children from social media

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 593 posts

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#181

Post by tehnub »

startupsfail wrote: post #160
hackernewds wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs, and evidently just as bad, why not ban them for adults as well?

HackerNews included? 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.

With HN and other sites with a non-personalized feed, at least what you see is the same as what everyone else sees. And if there's voting, which isn't perfect, it's based on community feedback.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#182

Post by mcv »

Social Media us not just harmful to kids, but also to adults. Not only is it just as addictive to us, many adults are sucked into all sorts of extremist ideas and conspiracy thinking, which is having a very real effect on our world.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#183

Post by baq »

hackernewds wrote: post #156
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…

if the dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs, and evidently just as bad, why not ban them for adults as well?

I’d ban photos, pictures, video and sound. Leave text only. Greatly reduces deepfake potential, manipulation options by state actors, dopamine hits from looking at pretty cat pictures too.

I don’t want to say IRC was fine but it was better than Instagram.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#184

Post by Animats »

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…

> It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff

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.

[1] https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/advertising-children

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#185

Post by sgt »

uptownfunk wrote: post #145
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.

It's your (our) generation who built all this stuff. We thought it would be "neat".

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#186

Post by baq »

hyperhopper wrote: post #96
brigadier132 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you worse off? Also, do we count whatsapp as social media?

Missing invites to parties, social gatherings etc. 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.

Green bubble/blue bubble issue?

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#187

Post by SCdF »

FractalHQ wrote: post #168
hackernewds wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs, and evidently just as bad, why not ban them for adults as well?

As someone 8 years sober from social media, I’m convinced the benefits of banning it would far outweigh the cost.

Out of interest, what's your definition of social media? Because mine is a site / app whose value is derived from its users, where users are all of (roughly) equal importance. Which puts forums / reddit / hacker news into that category.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#188

Post by galaxyLogic »

Animats wrote: post #184
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…

> It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff 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 con…

Great point about speech

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#189

Post by xbmcuser »

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…

Funnily enough with ChatGpt like language models available even without banning censorship will become very prevalent. Instead of banning your child from social media outright you will be able to get a bot to monitor their account and filter out what you feel is inappropriate. So instead of their social feed being controlled by a company it can be monitored and controlled by parents.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#190

Post by baq »

ehnto wrote: post #42
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…

The government or a bank or some other private or public trustworthy institution could be a limited identity provider which could authenticate that this guy is not really a kid.

The trustworthy part is going to be difficult though. It works in Europe for adults, but US folks seem to be allergic to the idea.

Post reply on HN