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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

#411

Post by rsolva »

emptystation wrote: post #404
cubefox wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that ads are the main problem of social media. It's rather the way they replace personal physical relationships with scrolling.

Ads insensitive platforms to design a more and more addictive infinite feed. If they cannot profit from children scrolling endlessly, why would they want to enable children to scroll endlessly? If ads for children on social media are banned (somehow), kids' feeds will probably just become way more boring.

Exactly. If we want to get a grip on the most damaging effects of social media, we have to correctly identify the incentives that has put us in current mess we are in.

Every commercial social media platform that I know of earns money primarily by selling and displaying personalized and targeted ads – so that is where we should start. The 'targeted' part can be addressed by strengthening privacy regulations and enforcing them vigorously, and the 'ads' part can be attenuated by banning ads made for and shown to kids and young people.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#412

Post by djhn »

Joeri wrote: post #391
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…

Ads have very little to do with the harmful effects on minors of social media use. And besides, banning ads will not prevent social media from trying to lock minors in, either to already have them when they turn 18, or to benefit from peer network effects to rope in more of the 18+ audience.

But the ability to show ads is the only reason to allow the youth on the apps. Remove the commercial reason for brainwashing kids, and the rest will probably sort itself out (I guess is the logic)

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#413

Post by Clubber »

Manuel_D wrote: post #147
Clubber wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mentioned more things than just economic success. It's a culmination of multiple things all bearing down on the upcoming generation. To simplify it as "it's social media," is, I believe, dismissive, as if your mind is made up. Trying to remove social media from the equation would probably make it worse by removing supportive groups found there, not to mention when you ban things and people still do it, now they can get a criminal record.

We've been doing this same stuff for decades. Something bad, ban it and throw people in jail for doing it. It doesn't work, it just makes things worse. Why don't we realize this yet? It's been generations.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#414

Post by _heimdall »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #237
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…

> That's why I think, don't bother trying to regulate social media. Just ban it for under 18s when they're most vulnerable. > I don't relish this solution either. When I was 13, I was on forums making online friends. I loved it. But it was clearly different back then, before smartphones, before content-creators, when the internet was mostly nerds. The main difference between forums like that (which still exist) and s…

I don't think you'd even have to ban for-profits. If someone wants to run a niche forum and try to make a small business around it there's nothing wrong with that.

https://diysolarforum.com comes to mind, Will runs a related informational site and YouTube channel. I don't know if he technically made a business for it but he could have, and if it continued to grow there could be good reason to hire a few employees.

I think the real difference between social media and forums is the algorithmic feed. We could likely codify a ban on algorithmic feeds of user generated content. That would go a long way and would be much easier to spell out in a law than a targeted ban on advertising, social media use by age, or certain types of business models.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#415

Post by somethingreen »

gambiting wrote: post #219
meowkit wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video games nowadays are just as bad. Children don't really watch TV (anecdotally). They watch YouTube, which is just as bad. The key difference between television and video games of yore is the feedback loop. TV and video games were one shot deployed and then ratings were gathered after, averaging across the entire audience. Now YT and video games don't have end states - same thing as social media. While you often w…

>>Video games nowadays are just as bad I literally don't understand how anyone can say that - there are more games of any genre than ever before. Yes if you only play CoD and nothing else it's all monetised and algorithm driven to hell. But for every CoD there are literally thousands of games that tell incredible and beautifully crafted stories. Thousands more where the focus is on gameplay. Endless remakes and reima…

Now go to Steamcharts, find first game that isn't a game-as-a-service and calculate ratio of its hours played in relation to everything above it. Then do that for the second and third - see if the ratio grows or shrinks further.

The fact that non-predatory games do exist is hardly relevant if what people are actually playing most of the time are indeed endless, dark pattern ridden grinds if not outright no-win casinos of which mobile gaming consists almost exclusively.

Whole industry needn't be banned, but a lot of its practices absolutely have to be at least regulated.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#416

Post by gampleman »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #27
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…

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…

Surely you could have a trusted age verifier (perhaps a non-profit open source platform) that has the legal responsibility to verify age (via credit-card or photo or gov id or some other way). Then you can have something like an oauth flow, except the only piece of identity it exchanges is the is18? boolean field.

One has to realise that for social media their networks effects are both their biggest strengths and their biggest weaknesses. Unlike for things like gaming or porn where there is a relatively large problem (i.e. 20%) if you manage to block only 80% of illegitimate access, for social media if suddenly 80% of the network disappears, than the incentive for the remaining 20% to keep coming drastically decreases.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#417

Post by _heimdall »

blitz_skull wrote: post #407
_heimdall wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's clear that social media is terrible for children (and I'd argue it's terrible for everyone), why can't we leave it up to parents to stop their kids from using it? I'm not sure how realistic it would be to enforce ban on social media under a certain age. The ban would have to be enforced on social media companies but they'd likely only be held to doing a best effort solution. They already set a minimum age at…

I mean that’s the status quo already. Parents who understand the inherent risks, probably already stop their children from using it. Legislation would benefit children who were born to parents who do not understand the risks.

If parents are okay with their kids using social media, I'm not sure that I should have the right to tell them otherwise.

How would a ban even work though, without ultimately depending on parent intervention? Companies could throw up a "are you over 18?" banner, but those don't work. They could go full KYC and require users to provide government issued IDs, but that feels like a drastic step away from privacy and data security and could still be dodged when a kid grabs a picture of their parent's ID.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#418

Post by Mezzie »

ojosilva wrote: post #372
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…

Just like the popular saying, "it's the economy, stupid!", when it comes to kids and social media we might as well say "it's the parents, stupid!" > Like so many parents these days, my wife and I have ceded So the parents are to blame here. "Ceded" to what exactly? To your kids unsupervised wishes? Most of the inadequate and harmful use of these addictive social networks is done at home, so, it's your jurisdiction, n…

I agree, but I also wonder how feasible that is for a lot of parents.

The older I get, the more astounded I am at the fact that nobody in my family has social media brain rot. Or political brainworms. My grandparent's generation is mostly dead, sadly, but there are 3 living generations ranging in age from 0 to 78 and dozens of people and we're all fine. This is regardless of educational level (ranging from HS dropouts to MDs), political affiliation (everything from center Dem to anarchists, socialists, and even some Christian conservatism for spice), or religion. If I had to pinpoint the difference, it's that we were all raised by and surrounded by adults that understood the interaction between technology and daily life. But most people becoming parents don't have that, the Internet just crashed into their life and upended a lot of what they thought they knew without leaving anything in its place.

I also question that it's solely based on the parents because the older I get (I'm in my mid 30s), the more I think access to non-parental adults with this ability is the key to our relative stability, particularly tech-knowledgable adults that openly disagree with each other. Kids do stupid shit, especially when they're adolescents. They will disobey their parents/ignore their advice because it's part of growing up and figuring out their own values and boundaries, but when an entire group of adults who don't agree on politics, religion, or worldview all agree that something is a bad idea, then that idea becomes a cultural taboo. I don't think my paternal cousins and I have ever voted for the same things and I'm the weirdo gay heretic socialist to their traditional Catholic, but both I and my cousins are going to agree on the important of things like basic op-sec and when to tell people what online. So even if their kids rebel hard, the rebellious adults are going to reaffirm 'don't put your hand on the stove/do things like delete metadata from photos'.

I don't know if there's enough cultural knowledge communicated to the parents for them to parent effectively even though I agree that's their job.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#419

Post by harvey9 »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #378
vincnetas wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another problem is the definition of "ad". Is kid playing with fancy toys is an ad? Is product placement in movie an ad? How and who will determine if this is and ad or not?

Aren't there already legal definitins for adverts? They're regulated today. Edit: In the UK advertising regulations are handled by the Advertising Standards Authority who already have rules specific to advertising to children. https://www.gov.uk/marketing-advertising-law/advertising-cod...

Problem with the ASA is that they can only react to advertising that's out there and by the time they do, the campaign is usually done.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#420

Post by ndriscoll »

dageshi wrote: post #308
amatecha wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

This is exactly why ad funded businesses should be banned: it's an anticompetitive business practice that hugely distorts markets. It makes it impossible to even charge at cost for a service because your competition is permanently dumping all the way to zero (or even paying the customer) using money from their advertising business.

Separately, it incentivizes creating noise. All of the talk about the web becoming poisoned by AI isn't fundamentally about AI; it's about affiliate marketing that allows people to make money on something none of their "customers" would otherwise pay for. Creating content with zero or negative value becomes a viable business, and this drowns out the useful information. Ban affiliate programs and there's no reward for creating this noise anymore. Search engines become more useful. The cost to run them goes down because there's less noise to index and try to filter.

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