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

afterbabel.com

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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've seen, parents have been made extremely fearful of a mass shooter type of incident. The "need" for smartphones in school is seen as a way to get in touch with a child when the absolute worst has happened. Ironically, the same logic often isn't appreciated for those who choose to legally carry a gun.

Give the kid a LifeAlert. If it works for gram grams falling down the front stoop, it'll work for little Billy when he's dodging lead from the bullied kid who couldn't take it anymore.

or give them a flip phone

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

#222

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…

Achieving 90% of not is simpler than you think: ban smartphones from schools during school bours. If the parents want the kid to have a phone, then the parents can get a flip phone.

I think we should go even further: ban all phones during school hours. There is absolutely no reason that kids need to have a phone in school. If the parent needs to reach them, then call the school office who can get your kid on the line. There is no emergency so dire that a few minutes' delay in talking to your child will make a meaningful difference.

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

#223
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then don't use them This assumes that humans are rational agents. I think that drug addiction, wars in Israel and Ukraine, conspiracy theorists, and free-climbers sufficiently prove that this is not the case. If only life were so easy, we would not even need to have this discussion.

It's the country's role or more specifically, the role of education to equip citizens with skills that will help them navigate virtual, deceiving and fake internet space.

That is certainly an opinion and a higher goal we could hold ourselves to, but education is generally just a way to ensure kids grow up to be good citizens - and today good tends to mean productive, contributing to the economy.

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

#224

I will attempt to at least inject some hope into this discussion. My formative years from ages 15-25 were spent in the 80's and 90's. It was the apex of the mall experience. We saw the mall as a place to get away from our parents, hang out with our buds, run into other classmates and feel some sense of freedom while running amok playing video games in the arcade and chowing down tacos in the food court. Then smartpho…

> Its like an entire generation has re-discovered the mall again and its refreshing to see... Sometimes I feel like I'm in a dream

I am really really sorry to go off-topic here, but as an European this is... So strange and slightly hilarious to me. We went to a park. Or local river/lake.

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

#225

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…

you have many ways you can solve the issues without ristricting free speach.

you can ristrict how you can monitize a product - I think the problem would be much smaller if you have to pay a price congruent to the value you get. Only a few people would pay for Facebook.

you can make the platforms resposinsible for what is published on them and enforce that. they would never scale this much.

> 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.

We have already collectively agreed that this is not an argument. That is why there are agencies like the FDA, etc.

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny .. earlier today there was a front page HN post about the federal government mandating safer circular saws. It seemed like the majority of users in the thread were in favor of the federal government mandating technology changes to prevent harm from being done to the population. Now for this issue, there's harm being done to children, and the majority of users in the thread seem to be against government int…

While both paternalism. Requiring safety features on a saw does not restrict free speech. It's more akin to seatbelt laws. It's also made to protect everyone who uses a table saw and not just children. Imo, I do think social media needs to be reeled in by policy. But I can see why it makes people uncomfortable and why there is a difference with the saw.

I wonder how many would be for seatbelt laws if the addition of seatbelts say doubled the price of car.

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

#227

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…

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…

Except "struggle" is entirely subjective. In fact, outside of a few things that causes physical dependence (which vary in length except they all, eventually at least, end), the concept of addiction as used by the government does not necessarily match up to how those in the particular field of research would. Government makes laws and laws prefer bright line rules. Something like "did you, without authorization, use the credit card given to you by your company to make purchases unrelated to your work", for example, have concrete, definable, and answerable elements that are universal and more or less binary, provided that the statute has a definition section that makes sense. But "so addictive" or "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" is pretty much the antithesis of that. The government would need to define "addictive", "designed" would need to have an intent element (one designs the software, sure, but you're asking for not what the software itself does but one step further - what its impact is on the population at large). How does the government prove that intent, especially since criminal law tends to define intent as intent to act which combined with the act itself, creates the crime. What counts as "so engaging" or even "engaging"? Does it require active engagement? Plenty of platforms do not require any active engagement to partake in the conventional sense, unless reading is engagement. How many people counts as "by large" (I assume that's what you mean, feel free to correct)? How would the government show that the product and any struggle is causatively linked and not merely correlative? How does one define struggle to exercise personal accountability? Where did the duty of exercising personal accountability even come from as to establish liability and would that criminalize those who are disabled or injured as to being unable to exercise such responsibility writ large? And what counts for adverse health outcomes? All these need to be worked out in legislation and likely argued over in court. Every single element needs to be worked on as to not to be overly inclusive or exclusive. And since it's the government, the consequences for violation is without question enormous, and therefore, anything that can be misconstrued can result in the ruin of a company or persons in a variety of ways, but do you really want to have the government determine who is an edge case that doesn't count? Because the government have done that based on assumptions of potential harm and it has caused what today would be considered horrific abuses of human rights and very little positives beyond enriching those whose income derives from the enforcement of the government's scheme.

Laws are lagging indicators but they also last a long time. the CFAA was passed before the advent of the WWW and it took until 2021 to even set a basic check on the part of the Supreme Court that effective set the ground rule that to access what amounts to a computer linked to some network beyond authorization, an authorization scheme needs to exist in the first place. Before that, one can easily be charged and even sent to prison or be assessed massive fines when there's no meaningful distinction between what is authorized and unauthorized space. These were not problems in the early to mid 80s but when problems did arise, it still took a quarter century to resolve. To have one future-proof goldilocks solution is already next to impossible, but you're asking for five or six stringed together in order to have a sensible law that is well tailored enough so that it is effective without being oppressive. Not to mention that unless the behavior is generally abandoned by users, it creates black markets that are simply illegible to the state. The government then effectively loses control over what it purports to control to those with means, leaving only those without subject to the full force of the legislation.

That of course all predicates on the premise that there can be commonly agreed and sensible ways to define all those, and it is in the best interest of the government to do so and passes Constitutional muster not just on speech grounds but a host of other potential issues, like, is this a purely civil matter or a purely criminal matter or both? The federal government can treat this explicitly, or kick it off to an agency as part of its mandate, but which one? Do we need a new one? Are there checks and balances that would provide some sort of agility that keeps up with the times? What if new research comes out that shows the lack of a link, but by legislating it, you've effectively frozen the relevant conclusion in time. Enforcement creates constituencies who do not care about science or potential upsides. The DEA is on the record in the federal register that patient access to legitimate medication is secondary and effectively an afterthought to enforcement of supply, because the agency's mandate presupposes that substances need controls and are presumed harmful and that enforcement, with the teeth provided for by the DOJ, will trump any study the FDA or our academic institutions can ever show. By the time that particular moral panic was given a name, the US government had been attempting repeatedly to use prohibition as a way of imposing a specific set of social mores that at first was a pretext to target specific racial minorities and when that became socially unacceptable (legally it was unacceptable under the 14th Amendment anyway, but they effectively smuggled the laws in through the Treasury Department and protectionist regimes by taxing the goods into oblivion, and avoiding the tax obviously is also a violation of the law).

In that sense, the government operates very much like a machine, whereas given a concrete goal to achieve and it can likely achieve it, but the manner by which it achieves it may create additional problems and convoluted interpretations that ripples through history in ways unimaginable. The loudest voices in the room, or those with existing financial resources or interests, can use the rent-seeking system known as lobbying to shape the laws to begin with. And where does the fines end up? Certainly in most cases they are not given back to the community, but end up enriching the enforcement agencies. Go to a police auction and see how much they're raising from the sale of "proceeds of crime", except not all of it are crimes that are proven in court, and much of it are crimes without specific victims and so, it becomes a regime of appropriation of private property to enrich a few in the public sector.

There's usually an annoying gap between concept and reality. In isolation you want a policy that can solve problems in a targeted and fair way. In reality it almost never happens.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If they find a workaround, they will still be unable to sit there around the clock, which is decent reduction of consumption. Also there won't be many, just like smoking schoolkids, so no social pressure. You can ban it completely or you can have your lovely bookface 1 hour per day, why not, it's dangerous when they spend there 10 hours per day.

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

#229
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Community need not be tight for change to occur. A random stranger calling you out on your shit is just as effective. Maybe even more effective as it doesn't always hit so hard when someone you are comfortable with says it.

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

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny .. earlier today there was a front page HN post about the federal government mandating safer circular saws. It seemed like the majority of users in the thread were in favor of the federal government mandating technology changes to prevent harm from being done to the population. Now for this issue, there's harm being done to children, and the majority of users in the thread seem to be against government int…

While both paternalism. Requiring safety features on a saw does not restrict free speech. It's more akin to seatbelt laws. It's also made to protect everyone who uses a table saw and not just children. Imo, I do think social media needs to be reeled in by policy. But I can see why it makes people uncomfortable and why there is a difference with the saw.

How does not having social media restrict free speech? Do you think free speech didn't exist before social media?

Arguably, the presence of social media homogenizes the speech we're allowed to have.

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