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

191–200 of 593 posts

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#191

Post by baq »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #85
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…

Demonetize children has the making of a pretty good slogan.

There are billions of dollars waiting to shred any lawmaker to pieces for uttering this phrase off record and tens of billions when on record. Good phrase though.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#192

Post by protocolture »

XorNot wrote: post #61
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…

As noted by another poster[1]: how are you going to enforce it? The idea of banning people from seeking things they want to do to themselves is incredibly stupid with the "War on Drugs" and it's equally stupid here with all the same consequences: a sudden explosion of either unregulated social media alternatives (back in the day Napster had a chat function even), or suspiciously immature "18 year olds" on Facebook an…

Its weird how far modern society just assumes laws are code that is run flawlessly on flawless hardware.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#193

Post by iudqnolq »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #188
Animats wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

No it's far far more complicated than that.

See for example: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2021/20-1029

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#194

Post by DubiousPusher »

RoyGBivCap wrote: post #130
DubiousPusher wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Banning things rarely works. This depends on your definition of the term "works". Prohibition of many things has had a profound effect on the shape of human society. Prohibitions on religion for example, such as the repression of the Huguenots in France and of Christianity in Japan prevented the development of Protestantism and Catholicism in those countries respectively. Prohibition and censorship of revolutionary…

You mentioned prohibition, but for some reason left out capital-P Prohibition, which brought us mobsters, speakeasys, and the US government blinding people: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-us-government-enforced... and was eventually repealed. Drugs won the "war on drugs". We don't need more authoritarianism. Provide education, and let people choose. Anything else, they'll fight you on it.

I didn't say it was good policy. Nor did I say it didn't have unintended consequences. Nor did I say I favored it.

But it is a myth that "it doesn't work". Prohibition works in that it reduces consumption of or participation in the prohibited thing.

It's a popular historical myth that prohibition of alcohol didn't work in the U.S. It did. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w3675/w3675...

The War On Drugs is a terrible example because it went way beyond prohibition. The War On Drugs was politically entangled in immigration, US interests in foreign regimes, human trafficking, and on. You don't have to quasi-invade other countries to prohibit drugs at home. That's a policy choice influenced by many other prejudices and distortions.

Prohibition works. It's another question entirely whether it is just, whether it can be conducted while respecting human rights and whether it is worth the unintended consequences.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#195

Post by protocolture »

baq wrote: post #190
ehnto wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sweet. New Social Engineering vector just dropped.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#196

Post by protocolture »

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…

[flagged]

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#197

Post by JenrHywy »

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.

We have. So far it has been fine. Mind you it has only been relevant to our introverted sons so far. Might be harder for our daughter in a few years.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#199

Post by mixmastamyk »

snvzz wrote: post #150
Avicebron wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First used it at age 24 at work, learned socket programming two years later.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#200

Post by prawn »

If not this, at least find ways to make it easier for parents to moderate their children's usage without peer pressure working against them so aggressively. This was a suggestion in the comments about Utah taking action on this front - lots of parents saying as difficult/unworkable as the general plan might be, it would greatly assist them. "Kid, I know you really want Instagram, but state law says you can't. My hands are tied, sorry!"
Post reply on HN