The case for banning children from social media • Hacker News Board

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#301

Post by YurgenJurgensen » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 9:50 AM UTC

marcodiego wrote: post #98

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…

> 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. Ok. Now, how do we counter this very same argument against tv and video games?

We don't. Ban the business model, not the speech. Advertiser-supported television was basically proto-proto-proto-Tiktok. The desire to create an audience that passively consumes out of habit was always there; it was just less optimised. The TV and video games that wouldn't survive having advertiser-driven or quasi-gambling business models taken away aren't worth saving.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#302

Post by emptystation » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 9:50 AM UTC

Popcorn3865 wrote: post #280

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not only that. Books are not ads. There can be bad books filled with stupid ideas and garbage stories but the purpose of literature is not to advertise something.

Modern social media is just advertisement in disguise of entertainment. I am an adult, hopefully a rational one, and my buying habits (and desires!) have been heavily influenced by the social media, I can only imagine what it does to children's minds.

The social aspect of social media, ironically, is often barely present. Services like Youtube are parasocial at best.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#303

Post by cabalamat » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 9:51 AM UTC

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 - 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.

A good start would be to ban feeds based on algorithms; instead your feed would be a chronological list of new posts from channels you've chosen to follow.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#304

Post by MontagFTB » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 9:52 AM UTC

worrycue wrote: post #142

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 ev…

As a parent, this matters more to me than the ads do. Vulnerable teenagers wrestle with their self identity, and cope by doomscrolling their peer’s highlight reels on social media. Even if a kid isn’t shown ads, there’s nothing to disincentivize such unhealthy behavior.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#305

Post by YurgenJurgensen » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 9:54 AM UTC

MandieD wrote: post #178

deafpolygon wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I propose is the banning of algorithms-powered social media. There's a huge difference between a moderated age-appropriate forum and TikTok.

Not only is it the most effective thing that doesn't require an invasion of privacy, it would increase privacy and user autonomy. But how on earth do we start a political movement around it? Difficulty: needs a 10-second blurb that does not rely on the word "algorithm". "See what you want to see, not what's being pushed at you" is the best I can come up with.

If "If it's free, you're the product" wasn't slogan-y enough, then I doubt anything will.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#306

Post by PurpleRamen » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 9:58 AM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #146

marcus_holmes wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which means, a more detailed naming is necessary. Like, "personalized media" or something like that, to distinguish it from classical media where the user is not the target of engagement fishing.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#307

Post by YurgenJurgensen » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 9:58 AM UTC

jibe wrote: post #176

dereg wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think it’s okay to allow children to gamble?

Some gambling is fine. Many playground games have gambling elements. Physical trading cards have a gambling element. Kids need to learn about risk and reward, and a little loss in the real or virtual world is a good way to do it.

It's not hard to find 'kid steals parent's credit card, spends thousands of dollars on loot boxes' stories. These losses are neither little nor virtual.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#308

Post by dageshi » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 9:59 AM UTC

amatecha wrote: post #34

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…

Eh, honestly, just go all the way and ban advertising altogether (I would be so happy if this happened, even though it obviously never will). Pretty willing to tank my karma to say this, I don't care, I think advertising is one of the biggest psychological pollutants in modern society and any possible benefit (??) is vastly outweighed by the cognitive waste incurred by all who are subjected to it.

> I think advertising is one of the biggest psychological pollutants in modern society and any possible benefit (??) is vastly outweighed by the cognitive waste incurred by all who are subjected to it.

I'm pretty sure ads paid for the vast majority of useful websites that have ever existed, including sites like youtube which just wouldn't exist without them.

I tend to think a vast proportion of the freely available information on the web would not have existed without ads and that information was worth the trade off of ads.

Nobody has ever come up with a funding model for websites that actually works better than ads.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#309

Post by Tade0 » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 10:00 AM UTC

datpiff wrote: post #299

Tade0 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then how do you explain the fact that the mental health effect appeared years after the introduction of social media? We had a whole platform(MySpace) come and go without such issues.

Myspace didn't overlap much with smartphones

What follows is that smartphones were the key component necessary for the observed effect. Why not regulate that instead?

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#310

Post by lucumo » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 10:00 AM UTC

Popcorn3865 wrote: post #286

lucumo wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 quicke…

> I feel that they do need some freedom in tech land to follow their curiosities I wish that was how it was used, however my own experience (and that of parents I speak to) is that the firehose is determined by the algorithm, not the individual which subsequently drives the habits and interests. For example, my son will want to look up how to do something in Minecraft. Ace, he's using the resources available to him t…

The time limits take pretty good care of that, here. I really don't mind them watching braindead stuff for a limited time. Especially so if that's the price for watching something interesting too.

It's also slightly curated, with age limits on videos provided by YouTube, but I mostly care about that to weed out shock videos and extreme violence.