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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

#201

Post by non-chalad »

zigman1 wrote: post #192
jajko wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You dont have kids, do you. Seeing them being pushed out of entire school community due to higher principles is heartbreaking to say at least, this is place from which teen suicides come from. Parents usually cave in the pressure. I would go and even claim I would ban all current social media platforms below 18. Ther are simply not enough protections, consistently, its place ripe for abuse and tons abuse is happening…

> I would ban all current social media platforms below 18 Just like porn? Do you think kids would find a way around it?

Not if we implement mandatory ID internet use and social tracking system. We could introduce it with Elmo, Kermit, and Fozzie, and call it "Sesame Credit"… waka waka!

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

#202

Post by lvoudour »

hackerlight wrote: post #146
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…

An excellent point. Abstention = social isolation, which for young people is far worse than exposure. Restricting your children's access is not an option (lets' be real, they'll find a way to circumvent your efforts anyway) and moving the burden of restriction from society to individuals is not fair.

So as a society do we let unrestrained exposure or do we take collective action? I lean on the second option, but I'm not sure what this action might be.

I'm on the internet ~30 years, I loved the total anarchy of the early web, the unrestrained access to all kinds of information - good, bad and evil. It's very hard for me to get behind heavy-handed regulation. But honestly, I feel oversaturated by the modern cataclysm of information. My bullshit filters are clogged, my defense mechanisms are failing to the point I let information flow through me without an ounce of critical thinking. I can't imagine what the effect is on young untrained minds.

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

#203

Post by latency-guy2 »

willvarfar wrote: post #167
golergka wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody has bought or rented the computer that this AI runs on, somebody has launched it as a piece of code or an API call. This somebody is using his right to free speech, AI is just a tool.

Can you clarify, is your "somebody" a person or a company?

> is your "somebody" a person or a company?

What is the explicit difference between 1 person and 10 persons when it comes to their rights?

Explicit, I want to know what rights we lose as soon as "I" transforms into "we".

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

#204

Post by dt3ft »

Can a 13 year old buy a gun? No. Can a 13 year old create a social media account (by entering a fake birth date)? Yes.

Since we know there are minors on social media (parents can be blamed to an extent), should there not be a fool-proof way of determining the age of the user before allowing them in?

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

#205

Post by still_grokking »

ars wrote: post #148
agentgumshoe wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 subscrib…

So you want to ban all kinds of software forges, like for example GitHub? Or other regular coordination platforms for business?

I guess the definition of "social media" is not as simple as outlined above.

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

#206

Post by zigman1 »

Aurornis wrote: post #121
spxneo wrote: post #82

When we was teenagers we had unrestricted broadband access to the internet but what was missing was the constant comparison hellhole like Instagram that is causing mental illness. WaReZ, KaZaA, Ogrish, CD-Keys, drugs, weapon making tutorials, Mail-order-drugs. This was the wild west days of the internet. You could literally put up anything you could sell anything and everything. Classmates were downloading roms, porn…

> the constant comparison hellhole like Instagram that is causing mental illness. Anecdotally, Instagram ranks much lower than Reddit for causing problems among the young kids I’ve worked with. Reddit is an absolutely cesspool of misinformation, fake stories, propaganda, and rampant doomerism. Scrolling Instagram can’t hold a candle to the militant doomerism that seethes from sites like Reddit. I think it’s an uncomf…

I think that the first lesson anyone whos signing on Reddit should be, to approach each post with a belief it is fake and is trying to see if it can deceive you. I know that for the hn crowd this sounds as obvious as the everyday weather, but not for kids with tech-illiterate parents.

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

#207

Post by steeve »

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…

One could make that exact argument of cigarettes too. And see why it doesn't work in the real world.

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

#208

Post by non-chalad »

imgabe wrote: post #118
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…

There are two avenues to deal with a hazard. You can try to manipulate the environment to eliminate the hazard, or you can try to strengthen people to make them immune to the hazard. I think we should prefer the latter over the former whenever possible. For one thing, it's more robust. The environment is messy and control is often illusory at best. Control limits freedoms and introduces centralized points of failure…

As a friend of mine said "If you can't kid-proof the farm, you have to farm-proof the kid". Watched said kid drink from farm puddles, and lick feed bowls. Seems to have worked: She's headed to tech school now.

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

#209

Post by Barrin92 »

cdogl wrote: post #176
NoPicklez wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has the ability to exercise personal accountability for how much they gamble, smoke, eat junk food, play video games, use social media etc. However, if these consumer products become so addictive, or are designed to be so engaging and as a result people are by and large struggling to exercise personal accountability and it is causing adverse health outcomes. Then the government should step in, either should…

The simply binary of government or individual choice eliminates the middle ground where almost all change happens: the collective aggregate result of cultural change within the community. We don’t have to pick one extreme to change the world!

>the middle ground where almost all change happens: the collective aggregate result of cultural change

happened, past tense. That cultural layer, to a large extent enforced by various religious traditions both in the literal and civic sense, sometimes for better or worse is pretty much gone. Nowadays it largely is a binary question of legal action on the one hand or individual choice on the other.

If you tell people they need to make change within their community 90% are going to ask you, what community? Community with a capital C where people collectively enforce binding rules, rather than occasionally go bowling isn't much of a thing.

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

#210

Post by still_grokking »

Aurornis wrote: post #121
spxneo wrote: post #82

When we was teenagers we had unrestricted broadband access to the internet but what was missing was the constant comparison hellhole like Instagram that is causing mental illness. WaReZ, KaZaA, Ogrish, CD-Keys, drugs, weapon making tutorials, Mail-order-drugs. This was the wild west days of the internet. You could literally put up anything you could sell anything and everything. Classmates were downloading roms, porn…

> the constant comparison hellhole like Instagram that is causing mental illness. Anecdotally, Instagram ranks much lower than Reddit for causing problems among the young kids I’ve worked with. Reddit is an absolutely cesspool of misinformation, fake stories, propaganda, and rampant doomerism. Scrolling Instagram can’t hold a candle to the militant doomerism that seethes from sites like Reddit. I think it’s an uncomf…

> extraordinarily cynical and depressing

You mean, like the reality humans created for themself to suffer in?

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