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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

#271

Post by Kbelicius »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #240
hattmall wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Yes, it happened over AIM and before that it happened via phone calls between friends. I'm too young to have gone to school before phones. > Did Photoshopped images of…

> Yes, it happened over AIM and before that it happened via phone calls between friends. I'm too young to have gone to school before phones.

You are comparing 2 people recounting to each other what happened to someobody posting a video of what happened so that it is immediately visible to the whole school...

> People did horrible pranks like this all the time when I was in school. They didn't get likes, they were just passed out between periods in school or taped up on windows. Photoshop was released in 1990, I can guarantee you that 15 years ago kids were Photoshopping people too.

GP wasn't saying that 15 years ago kids did not have access to photoshop but that the bullying is worse today than 15 years ago. The fact that photoshop existed 15 years ago in no way address that claim.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#272

Post by rockbruno »

atahanacar wrote: post #39
andy_ppp wrote: post #19

It’s essentially manipulation of the dopamine system in the exact same way as casinos except it’s worse because it uses AI to really start personalising what keeps us hooked. Would you let your children become addicted to gambling?

If you don't want your children to become addicted to something, be a good parent and monitor them. It is not the government's or the society's responsibility to babysit your kids. I don't want my freedoms taken away from me (in this case, freedom to anonymously use social media) just because some people don't have the capability or the motivation to parent their kids properly. Also, this "what about the children" th…

> If you don't want your children to become addicted to something, be a good parent and monitor them. It is not the government's or the society's responsibility to babysit your kids.

It's both's responsibility. There's a reason why many countries forbid, for example, television ads that directly target children. As a parent you cannot completely shield what your kids are exposed to, many aspects of life are outside of your control (e.g what types of ads appear on your videos/TV) and that's where it becomes the government's problem.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#273

Post by sw104 »

debugnik wrote: post #238
9dev wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not drinking in social settings will make you worse off by a lot. People feel uneasy and judged if someone refuses to drink alcohol with them, so unless you're very strong-willed, this coerces most people into drinking. This isn't as easy as it sounds at first.

> People feel uneasy and judged if someone refuses to drink alcohol with them I always read this on HN but I've never cared, or met any adult that seemed to care, when only a few of us drink beer in a group. Is this a US/Anglosphere thing maybe?

In the UK, it's definitely a thing.

Being teetotal excludes you from a lot of social events, and even somewhat unrelated events. We have hiking/fitness groups that typically end the training session with a round at the pub. Many workplaces go to the pub together after work.

Not engaging with this can set you back socially and professionally, because drinking is hugely ingrained in the British population. Most people drink multiple times per week. The people I work with genuinely struggle with "Dry January" and other such abstention events.

Going along to these events and not drinking gets you interrogated, and it becomes a thing to try to get you to drink / get drunk. It's probably an inferiority complex thing on the side of the people drinking because seeing somebody not drinking makes them feel bad about it (even though they needn't feel that way).

For every one person like you that doesn't care, there's many who really want to investigate it and get to the bottom of it. Telling these people you just don't like drinking isn't the solution they're looking for out of their investigation.

My 2 pennies as a lifelong teetotal.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#274

Post by DoreenMichele »

regulate_this12 wrote: post #270
DoreenMichele wrote: post #254

Maybe we could do something radical and empower parents to handle this more effectively by creating more family-friendly policies so parents have the time, energy and mental focus to handle it themselves. Maybe we could start by finding some effective means for addressing our affordable housing issues. Last I checked, the US was also the only developed country that lacked a national maternity leave policy. I'm not su…

As a parent, I say that no amount of parental empowerment can compensate for a culture that seems broadly unaware that there is even a problem. Sure, better age / times restriction tools (especially ones that unify over all device types) would help. But in the end the kids can just get their own devices and a mobile plan with data and that ends your empowerment unless you want to turn your house into North Korea. No…

I'm a parent. I don't agree with you.

My sons are now adults but had substantial internet access from a very early age. They got a "safe list" of kid-friendly links plus some local software just for them. They weren't required to stick to those kid-friendly links. It was just to make it easier for them to cope.

One son was so young, he figured out how to roll the ball under the mouse with this thumb because it was too hard to cope with navigation otherwise.

I was fortunate to be able to be a full-time parent. We were a military family, so our social reality was a little different from that of a lot of people.

If your only qualification is you are a parent, I have the same qualification for holding an opinion and we can just agree to disagree here, I guess.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#275

Post by eastbound »

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…

If you forbid ads, then only political propaganda with bring funding to content creators. It’s not just because you hide money that it’s not there.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#276

Post by DoreenMichele »

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…

That solution fails to sidestep the not minor issue of how do we determine it's a child online brought up by the article.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#277

Post by lucumo »

jmathai wrote: post #245
whatever1 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer games are also addictive. Back in my days soccer and basketball were addictive as well. I vividly remember my grandpa despising my uncle for having obsession with playing soccer and not spending more time on his homework. It seems like a pattern, grown ups just don’t like the way youngsters are spending their time. Maybe it’s totally normal in your teens to just spend aimlessly time in seemingly useless thin…

I’m not sure if you have children. Soccer and basketball exist today. I don’t think you’ll find many parents who struggle with their kids’ habits with them relative to current video games like roblox. (Super Mario Kart doesn’t have the same addictive and predatory aspects) Find a random parent and you’ll see for yourself. It’s not that parents are frustrated that their kids are playing too many video games. It’s that…

Kids are as different from each other as adults can be, so there's not really a one size fits all solution. That said, we've found that setting limits works fine. At least for the ages under 10.

There's a limit in duration and time they can use a screen, both of which are easy to keep taps on. It's 5-10 minutes before leaving for school, if and only if they are all ready to leave. It encourages them to be done quicker and it's lost time anyway. The other block is while we're cooking. That started out as a way to keep overactive little kids busy and out of the kitchen, because the parent is busy and it's dangerous to be in the kitchen when cooking.

We also have limits on what they can do on the screen. They need to spend a minimum time on some educational apps, before they are free to do whatever the machine allows. They are on Android tablets restricted by Google Family Link, but things like YouTube (YT Kids for the youngest) are still available.

I feel that they do need some freedom in tech land to follow their curiosities. Even so, it's very limited because they als use it to just veg out. But one kid basically learned to count and spell in English from BBC videos, before they could do so in their native language. There is some advantage to just letting them go.

The time limits turned out to be pretty good motivators to learn to tell the time too. They are now pretty good at keeping taps on the time themselves.

We have changed the limits a bit over time. Mostly stretching them to new areas of interest. And kids are different, so what worked for the eldest sometimes didn't work for the youngest. They do like their tablets a bit more than I'd like, but I'm not worried about addiction. They're honestly using it far less than I watched TV in the age of cathode-ray tubes.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#278

Post by chongli »

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.

Install a userscripts extension in your browser and with that install a userscript such as Focused YouTube [1]. I did and never looked back! I want nothing to do with TikTok or YouTube shorts. I watch long-form videos on science, math, and engineering topics for the most part.

[1] https://github.com/KervynH/Focused-YouTube

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#279

Post by regulate_this12 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #274
regulate_this12 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a parent, I say that no amount of parental empowerment can compensate for a culture that seems broadly unaware that there is even a problem. Sure, better age / times restriction tools (especially ones that unify over all device types) would help. But in the end the kids can just get their own devices and a mobile plan with data and that ends your empowerment unless you want to turn your house into North Korea. No…

I'm a parent. I don't agree with you. My sons are now adults but had substantial internet access from a very early age. They got a "safe list" of kid-friendly links plus some local software just for them. They weren't required to stick to those kid-friendly links. It was just to make it easier for them to cope. One son was so young, he figured out how to roll the ball under the mouse with this thumb because it was to…

Well, I was also a boy growing up with computers and from that experience I can confidently predict that either you helicoptered him to an unreasonable degree (which is in itself damaging to development) or he saw and probably enjoyed some stuff that you'd find horrifying and that might very well have caused some psychological damage. For my part, I had to deal with porn-induced ED as a young adult which I obviously didn't tell my mum.

You are right, though, that more full-time parenting would lead to better results overall but I don't agree that it's any kind of solution, let alone practical or universal, to the problems posed by technology and social media.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#280

Post by Popcorn3865 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #246
whatever1 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer games are also addictive. Back in my days soccer and basketball were addictive as well. I vividly remember my grandpa despising my uncle for having obsession with playing soccer and not spending more time on his homework. It seems like a pattern, grown ups just don’t like the way youngsters are spending their time. Maybe it’s totally normal in your teens to just spend aimlessly time in seemingly useless thin…

I spent my youth with my nose buried in books, and for a couple years it had become a problem. My parents would force me to stop reading books and spend some time talking to them, looking outside, doing anything as a kid. I would read a book at any chance I could get, I'd even sneak them into bed and use a dim flashlight to read, anything to get me out of where I was at that time. At the time I hated my parents and e…

With a book at least a parent knows what their child is consuming. I wouldn't mind if my child was consuming books (as long he stayed healthy with activity and social connection).

With the firehose of social media its whatever the providers algorithm decides it wants the user to consume.

My 11 year old son is limited to 30 mins of YouTube per day, 15 mins of Snapchat. TikTok is banned. Overall phone usage is limited to 3 hours per day, and PS5 is the same. And it's still not enough for him.

And yes, he uses these in conflict with the provider terms.

Without any exposure he lacks any commonality with his peers (who, as far as I can tell, have unfettered access to devices, apps and video games) however he will forego food, water, bathroom, hygiene if not forcibly limited.

And he agrees with statements like "I just can't stop myself" and "I feel like I've got to have it" and "I don't know what to do unless I have it". Which makes me very sad. When he goes to play with friends, he makes a bee line for those same devices and apps that he's limited from accessing at home.

He cannot self-limit his consumption and billion dollar companies are using his mind as a disposable fuel to make money for no better purpose than profit. I honestly don't know how the folk at those firms live with themselves (other than luxuriously).

I honestly wish these platforms did not exist at all, for the arguments they cause.

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