Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16

The recent World Happiness Report[0] concluded:

> In many but not all regions, the young are happier than the old. But in North America happiness has fallen so sharply for the young that they are now less happy than the old. By contrast, in the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the young are much happier than the old. In Western Europe as a whole happiness is similar at all ages, while elsewhere it tends to decline over the life cycle (with an occasional upturn for the old).

I think social media is a red herring. For whatever reason, young people in America are unhappy and instead if dealing with hard problems we think "let's just take social media away, that will fix it". Does Finland not have social media? Why are young people in Finland happier than they are in America?

I predict this trend will continue, we will take social media away from kids and they will still be unhappy as they look for things to do in their small apartment while mom and dad look at their cell phones.

[0]: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/happiness-and-age-summ...

I have a 14 year old and the content of social media seems to be what bums her out. She seems to be ingrained with the idea that she will never own a home, environmental disasters will be constant and the economy will be in shambles by the time she reaches adulthood.

Maybe America just has a uniquely depressive social media environment? I have not read any kind of large scale studies examining the "tone" of social media feeds in different countries but that would be interesting.

* Also whenever she says stuff like that I respond by letting her know she will be able to buy a house if she wants one, the economy will always be good for people who are work smart and hard, etc.

>This has become such a common trope that I think people fail to apply even a modicum of scrutiny: the internet is not the town square

Where is the majority of politics and recent events discussed? Where are new ideas shared and accepted or rejected? Where is this topic being discussed? Case rested.

>Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town square?

It's an international phenomenon, probably as old as civilizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_square

The rest of your post sounds like moral panic.

> I think few people have any doubts about social media being a net negative for young people.

They should have doubts. This position is not supported by the currently available evidence[0][1][2]. The APA’s position paper makes this explicit: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”

So long as focus remains on scapegoating ‘social media’ as the main cause of suffering, we will never solve the problem. The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally, and as far as I can tell are largely manifestations of deeper societal issues that have festered for generations.

[0] https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8221420/

[2] https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...

You're forgetting that my argument is that by pushing the age of access to social media up to 18 (as the person I replied to proposed), we'd be pushing teaching social media 'literacy' to when parents lose the tools they have to teach their kids. If an 18 year old gets debilitatingly addicted to social media, the most they can do is threaten to kick them out, which I'm sure you can agree isn't really a solution, but if say, a 16 year old does that, the parents can take away their phone and forcibly disconnect them in various ways until they find a healthier balance.

While social media is addictive and unhealthy, it is the primary means of social interaction among adults, thus, just as we introduce high schoolers to adult things like driving, sex, job interviews, citing other's work etc through partial exposure to such things (eg junior driving permits, sex ed, mock interviews or relaxed punishments for academic dishonesty), we should be teaching kids how to have a healthy relationship with social media through limited exposure BEFORE they turn 18.

To this extent, I prefer one of the other suggestions in this post, that there should be two 'tiers' of social media, kids should still be allowed to access small platforms, and in particular, forums. Those are easier to monitor for parents and lack many of the ills of more 'modern' stream-of-consciousness style social media. As an additional point in favor of that approach, forums were pretty instrumental to my development of programming skills as an early teenager. Without the ability to participate on forums, my skills would've been considerably stunted.