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Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

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Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#141

Post by oblio »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #103
willcipriano wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> completely destroying internet anonymity. Stores that sell age restricted products already can also sell "adult passes". Each adult pass costs less than $5, and contains a single use scratch off code that you can use to prove you are of age. When you want to sign up for social media or porn, you need a code. Mutiple companies can implement and sell them.

There would be a huge black market of selling to the underage immediately defeating the purpose.

That would limit the total addressable market from 100% to, say, 1-5%. Statistically, legally, socially, that's not "defeating the purpose", that's "job done", instead.

Most people here should be engineers or at least analytical. No solution is 100%.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#142

Post by littlestymaar »

Aurornis wrote: post #116
miki123211 wrote: post #95

This author is seriously suggesting that governments ban children's use of social media, and that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity. Any policy that actually achieved this, without being trivial to circumvent, would basically need to replicate the great firewall of China. Doing this in a half-assed way is even worse than not doing anything at all. If you just require ID checks for…

> that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity. This is why I can’t take any calls for banning social media for kids on HN seriously: The moment anyone introduced any legislation to limit social media access by age, this creates a de facto requirement to verify ID. The people in this thread would be up in arms as soon as the government tried to force companies to collect their ID to use…

With the rise of IA, identity verification on the internet is going to be inevitable on the internet anyway, to make sure people are actually humans. But it doesn't need to break anonymity, cryptography can be used to allow for a zero-knowledge humanity or age proof.

Fighting against regulations in the name of anonymity is the best way to actually harm anonymity. We can have both (while we currently have neither in practice …)

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#145

Post by rgbrenner »

The author had it right in the first paragraph. In the 90s version of this hysteria, Congress passed a law that would have prevented access to education medical information, dirty curse words, and other filth from being published on the internet to protect the children. The federal government fought a case all the way to the Supreme Court to enforce it. If they had won that case, the internet would look very different today. But the Supreme Court got it right when they said it would squelch free speech.

You may not like FB, IG, TikTok, etc.. I certainly don't care for any of these products. But these are communications platforms. Restricting the right to free speech does have negative consequences... from the development of critical thinking skills; development of technical skills; and limiting of educational information. Being exposed to shit on the internet teaches you there's bullshit on the internet, and not to believe everything you see.

And just like the Supreme Court wrote 30 years ago, the answer is the same today: if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them. Restrict your children's access to these platforms.

I certainly dont believe anyone should be forced to use these platforms. I don't use any of these products, and havent since they launched. That's a freedom you and everyone else can take advantage of also. But those who advocate censorship aren't advocating for freedom... they're advocating for their personal parental decisions to the be decisions of the entire nation.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#146

Post by hackerlight »

rgbrenner wrote: post #145

The author had it right in the first paragraph. In the 90s version of this hysteria, Congress passed a law that would have prevented access to education medical information, dirty curse words, and other filth from being published on the internet to protect the children. The federal government fought a case all the way to the Supreme Court to enforce it. If they had won that case, the internet would look very differen…

> if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them.

Relevant bit from the essay:

"But much of my book is about the collective action traps that entire communities of adolescents fall into when they move their social lives onto these platforms, such that it becomes costly to abstain. It is at that point that collective mental health declines most sharply, and the individuals who try to quit find that they are socially isolated. The skeptics do not consider the ways that these network or group-level effects may obscure individual-level effects, and may be much larger than the individual-level effects."

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#147

Post by willvarfar »

hollerith wrote: post #124
mptest wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>elevate internet anonymity to a new fundamental principle for organizing society You mean privacy? Internet anonymity is a downstream byproduct of our right to privacy, not some new concept devised in the internet age. We've had the fourth amendment for quite some time.

There's no right to privacy in the 4th Amendment. But more importantly, there are huge differences between internet anonymity and the older comceptualization of a right to privacy, which has mostly to do with shielding conversations between people who know each other's identities (real names and addresses) from prying government eyes. Shielding such conversations from prying government eyes is not incompatible with p…

It's interesting that, historically, privacy didn't need protecting because it was trivially available and people won't have thought much about the possibility that in the future it would not longer be technically available.

Privacy didn't need protecting in history before bugging. If a founding father wanted to talk to someone privately they just went stood apart from everybody else.

50 years ago, standing apart no longer provided privacy because of long range microphones etc, but those were targeted attacks on diplomats etc.

Nowadays, you can probably do a nice undergrad project to recreate conversations from lip reading streetview video clips.

Privacy was defacto available hundreds of years ago, but is technically impossible now. (Imagine the kinds of body checks that will be introduced before you enter a US SCIF post the chess cheating scandal!)

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#148

Post by ars »

agentgumshoe wrote: post #133
mixmastamyk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t have to be a technical ban. Just make it the law and let companies, schools, parents, and kids take their punishment when found to happen. This should be enough for the risk averse to take open devices away from children and bolster parents. It’s not important to stop every possible access, simply that adults have the authority to say no and be supported by society instead of undermined.

Now, define 'social media' clearly and we're all good.

Social media has the following elements (which would be prohibited):

Recommendation based on previous views. Recommendation based on what is currently being viewed is permitted. Recommendation based on current view that is customized to user is not permitted.

Ratings up/down.

Sorting based on rating or based on users' interest. Chronological sorting is permitted.

Suggesting content is forbidden. Specifically subscribed content is permitted to be suggested - but only chronologically, or in response to a search.

No public comments. Private comments permitted. Comments in room/forum/group permitted. User must specifically subscribe/join to see the comments.

Comments sorting/notification rules same as above.

"Reactions" to messages show up as additional/new replies, and are not attached to the original message.

Discussion:

The idea is to reduce addictive methods, and to modify discussion/views to reflect ordinary human behavior: No one rates your sentence spoken in a group, no one goes back and promotes certain things you said, words are said in a group chronologically.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#149

Post by Buttons840 »

The charts in this article are deceptive and cause me to not trust the author.

Look at long term teen suicide rates and you will see that suicide rates were quite high around 1990, and then rates dropped until about 2005, and are now on the rise again but have not yet reached 1990 levels (I think).

So, the author of this piece wants to make it look like suicides and self harm are on the rise because of social media, so where does he choose to start the charts? 2005.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#150

Post by firewolf34 »

brailsafe wrote: post #47
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

I feel so bad for teenagers/kids who we essentially screwed over with this tech experience. That said, I don't feel great for the rest of us either! I feel like my phone has become a significant negative in my life. And in general, I'm quite scared because we have put things in place that we know are bad for mental health: 1. Even if we may not like it all the time, there is tons of data that show that personal inter…

Your points here are worth more emphasis. As a chronically unemployed software dev who's burnt out and crashed at least 3 times, I've spent a hell of a lot of time reflecting, and try my best to communicate these ideas to people who have the opposite problem; lots of work, but no new friends since highschool, and desperately single. People tend to rely far too heavily on the easiest way to convince themselves they're…

> My theory is that to meet a new person and have it be substantial, you basically need to spend a few hours, a few times per week, in the same space doing some arbitrarily interesting thing for a common reason, without being too eager but with a signaled sense of openness.

I like this concept, and I feel like I've experienced this as well, but I'm having trouble picturing an example of what you're describing, practically speaking, for the average city-dweller. Care to elaborate on this?

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