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

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#531

Post by bumby » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 3:55 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #519

bumby wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for clarity, do you extend this to the government's ban on cigarettes being sold to minors? I.e., if a parent thought cigarette smoking was an acceptable risk for their children, should those children should be allowed to smoke? Or are some risks unacceptable irrespective of the parents assessment? If you do think some things are off the table regardless of the parent's opinion, where is that line drawn? (again,…

> I.e., if a parent thought cigarette smoking was an acceptable risk for their children, should those children should be allowed to smoke? I think it's pretty common for parents to give their kids alcohol before they're 18/19/21. And many kids in my high school did smoke. Where/how they got the cigarettes is unknown, but it's not like they were rounded up and jailed for the act of smoking while underage. Or are you r…

I'm not referring to punishment at all. I'm trying to understand the OP's point in terms of the roles of parents/governments in regards to making decisions that impact children.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#532

Post by mxkopy » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 3:56 PM UTC

clnq wrote: post #242

mxkopy wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs I highly doubt the implied semantics of this statement. We don't know everything there is to know about "dopaminergic effects". The pharmacology of smoking weed is probably very different than from say, scrolling through memes.

Pharmacology, yes. But we can compare social media and other addictions in terms of social harm, health harm, psychological and emotional harm, withdrawal symptoms, financial consequences, impairment to decision-making, procrastination and distraction impacting attainability of personal goal, prerogatives and decreasing motivation, relationship harm (it is difficult to form relationships with those "terminally online…

In my experience you don't become terminally online unless there's something else going on in your life. People talking about the ills of social media seem to forget that children nowadays are: institutionalized for 8 hours of their day, raised on diets of processed garbage, etc. Like, a well adjusted kid isn't going to treat social media as more important than their friends unless they think they can make a living from it or have no friends.

I think "dopamine bombing" is not what it sounds. See discussions on dopamine fasting for what I mean. The relationship between the things you do and dopamine are complex, probably more complex than the relationship of what you physically consume and dopamine.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#533

Post by puglr » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

gspencley wrote: post #522

bumby wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for clarity, do you extend this to the government's ban on cigarettes being sold to minors? I.e., if a parent thought cigarette smoking was an acceptable risk for their children, should those children should be allowed to smoke? Or are some risks unacceptable irrespective of the parents assessment? If you do think some things are off the table regardless of the parent's opinion, where is that line drawn? (again,…

For context my default position on all issues stems from my personal world view that the only justifiable role of government is to protect the rights of its citizens. With respects to cigarettes, I am open to being persuaded by the fact that an enormous amount of empirical data underscores the risk to an individual's health posed by the consumption of cigarettes and, therefore, it can be argued that a parent allowing…

> an enormous amount of empirical data underscores the risk to an individual's health posed by the consumption of cigarettes and, therefore, it can be argued that a parent allowing their children to smoke could potentially amount to child endangerment or abuse, depending on the context.

1. Would you agree that reasonable people exist who, right or wrong, believe that the psychological toll of SM on children, while not in the same universe as the physical toll of cigarettes, still manages to cross the line of "this is sufficiently harmful that the government must make parenting decisions"?

2. Are you open to the possibility that, in a hypothetical future with sufficient empirical data, those beliefs might be shown to be accurate?

I don't have children / a horse in this race, I'm more exploring your position about the role of government.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#534

Post by edgyquant » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

whatever1 wrote: post #232

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…

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…

This is quantifiably not the same thing. If an entire generation was stressed out and killing themselves over Soccer we’d surely be doing something about it.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#535

Post by edgyquant » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 4:01 PM 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…

That’s almost 7 hours or screen time, nearly a full time job. Does he go to school as well?

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#536

Post by rendall » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 4:03 PM UTC

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #402

rendall wrote: post #395

> " The case for banning children from social media " As a parent, I was looking forward to an article discussing reasons for banning children from social media. What are the philosophical implications? Mental health? Psychosocial? Rather, it seems the article begged that particular question and then discussed legal obstacles and consequences instead. Not the journalist's fault. Misleading headlines are the curse of…

FWIW, there is value to this discussion reaching mainstream as limited as it is.

Fair point

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#537

Post by edgyquant » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 4:08 PM UTC

_heimdall wrote: post #422

Popcorn3865 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It honestly sounds like you're circling around the idea that the internet just isn't a good place for children (or adults for that matter). Wouldn't an attempt to ban a specific problem of the internet just be dodging the real problem? If the internet as we've made it over the last 20 years is a breeding ground for addictive content and advertising, why not just stop using it? If we're going to ban anything because o…

Because it isn’t the internet, it’s ad driven content services.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#538

Post by CobrastanJorji » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 4:13 PM UTC

d110af5ccf wrote: post #77

bastawhiz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's say that there's a Government Identity office that, when you turn 18, grants you an Adult Citizen ID# security key that lets you verify your identity digitally. There's really no reason a non-SSN identification number couldn't be used for this. If SSNs weren't sensitive, you could just have a government endpoint that takes an SSN tells you whether the holder is over 18 (or "no, or the SSN is not valid). The o…

There's also nothing stopping the service from remembering this hypothetical SSN equivalent (or a fingerprint of it), exchanging data with other service providers, and tracking you that way. There are certainly cryptographic primitives that can be used to solve the privacy concerns but I have approximately zero confidence that they would even be considered for use by the current technically illiterate batch of legisl…

Maybe, if we're being idealistic, it needn't be particularly powerful. We could just say that every authority would get their own permutation of the ID, a hash of the real ID and the authority's ID or some such, just to make it fairly difficult for two companies to see if their respective IDs are identical. Not perfect, but simple and makes it harder to exploit.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#539

Post by maxwell » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 4:21 PM 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.

> ban advertising altogether

Not going to happen in the U.S. What is possible though, is banning billboards. See Maine, Vermont, Hawaii, and Alaska. Billboards are visual pollution, and blanket bans (as opposed to content bans) are constitutional.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#540

Post by Mezzie » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 4:23 PM UTC

ojosilva wrote: post #506

Mezzie wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dropout…

My idealistic, engineer self tells me that the State should reward parents that go through parenting training, workshops and "performance" reviews. This is something that is normally done for social-serviced families already, but too late, when they are deep in the road to failure and despair. Such wide-spread public parenting-aid would be expensive, have flaws, generate political push-backs and there are not enough…

I would love to see more such efforts, but I don't know if Americans could do that at this point. The question of who could make such a curriculum would immediately be hijacked by political and other interests. Our government doesn't (broadly speaking) have the knowledge necessary. The most powerful group that does have that knowledge is Big Tech itself, and handing people like Zuckerberg the ability to choose how to teach the parents just seems like a bad idea.