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The kids with phones are alright

heatherburns.tech

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Re: The kids with phones are alright

#221

Post by ruszki »

bko wrote: post #194
gherkinnn wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media, as we have it today, is not healthy for anybody. It is bad, truly bad, and the companies responsible know it. You can't lace beer with crack and sell it. Not to a 12yo, not to a 50yo. Regulate the proverbial crack, then we see if further regulations are required. Earlier this year (0): > “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack…

Just saying "regulate" it is not an answer and won't give you the results you think. What you'll get is restrictions on speech. UK arrests thousands every year for what essentially amounts to mean tweets. There have been people that comment publicly on horrendous crimes that get harsher sentences than those that commit the crimes. At any point in time politicians could have enforced existing terms of service violatio…

Currently, the fact that these large platforms can block you and they block you randomly (which is the case of Reddit for me, because I dared to use privacy protecting extensions when I commented on a subreddit to which I wasn’t subscribed; Instagram permanently blocked me because I used VPN when I wanted to login) is way larger restriction on my speech than removing these harmful platforms completely. Currently, I’m not allowed to react to others at all on some of these platforms. Even TV is better, because there is contact information for all of them.

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#222

Post by karahime »

alt227 wrote: post #192
p1necone wrote: post #144

"The kids are alright" is evergreen. So much of the are doomed rhetoric is pure nonsense, a lot of that rhetoric is on here.

Phones and social media are a completely new type of pacifying and attention stealing threat which we have only just begun to discover the effects of. This is not your standard 'kids are doomed' rhetoric.

No, they're not, and yes, it is. I sincerely hope we do not take phones and other computers from future generations. That would be a terrible thing to do to them.

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#223

Post by duskdozer »

specproc wrote: post #168
NoPicklez wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't see the ugly contradiction. The guy was caught and shunned by the general public regarding their actions, the guy could've used a video camera and it would be no different. Again, just because a group of adults have used a piece of technology incorrectly, doesn't mean the identified risks of those devices for young people people are any different. Just because there are drunks walking around committing…

Interesting framing in "we should ask" and "social media companies should ban". We have sovereign states that make laws, companies must comply with them if they wish to make money in our markets. Otherwise, I think my perspective here is very similar. I'd personally emphasise legal publisher responsibility, a repeal of Section 230 in American. By absolving social media platforms of legal responsibility for the conten…

To me Section 230

    No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
seems less justifiable as an excuse for platforms that consist primarily of externally created content, have very large amounts of varied content, and select and target specific subsets of that content to present to specific users. It would seem more justifiable if it were random, or not individualized, or chronological.

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#224

Post by aisenik »

NoPicklez wrote: post #96

My question to these sorts of articles is, okay so what do we do then? What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids. Its not good for their attention spans or mental health to a much greater degree than other forms of media. Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones, but they should be able to use them without being engulfed in social media content that has been shown to have a negative impa…

Start by putting the people making money off it in prison.

These are capital crimes against humanity. The notion that we just have to accept it is absurdity.

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#225

Post by bko »

ruszki wrote: post #221
bko wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just saying "regulate" it is not an answer and won't give you the results you think. What you'll get is restrictions on speech. UK arrests thousands every year for what essentially amounts to mean tweets. There have been people that comment publicly on horrendous crimes that get harsher sentences than those that commit the crimes. At any point in time politicians could have enforced existing terms of service violatio…

Currently, the fact that these large platforms can block you and they block you randomly (which is the case of Reddit for me, because I dared to use privacy protecting extensions when I commented on a subreddit to which I wasn’t subscribed; Instagram permanently blocked me because I used VPN when I wanted to login) is way larger restriction on my speech than removing these harmful platforms completely. Currently, I’m…

Sure there was basically a cartel in social media. You saw coordinated censorship campaigns to ban the former president of the United States for example. But I wouldn't discount the amount of political interference there as well. The last administration admitted to flagging individual posts for the social media companies.

But it's true there is a lot of coordinated censorship even without state interference. But this tends to resolve itself as there is a market opportunity to create a better product. This coordination and censorship campaign has led to the acquisition of Twitter, which lifted its restrictions and other companies more or less followed suit because an open platform is obviously better for most people. And you had offshoots like Bluesky that had the old centralized censorious pre twitter acquisition policies, and things work out in the long run

https://substack.com/@mleverything/p-41310456

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#226

Post by graemep »

The political analysis there is completely wrong. How can she blame the "Tatler/Telegraph/Times set" for legislation passed by a Labour government? The opposition to this sort of legislation (e.g. the OSA) has largely come from the right.

> These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults.

Really? I would have said the opposite. Part of the problem is she lumps the affluent and the wealthy together. The affluent professional class go out of their way to encourage independence. They are the people who take gap years to travel, who are pushed to go away to university rather than a local one while living at home (a Scottish "policy wonk" should notice that the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews are full of affluent kids from the South of England).

The story is powerful and i agree with some of the conclusions, but forcing the conclusions to fit narrative that all bad things are the other sides fault is terrible.

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#227

Post by bko »

kraf wrote: post #200
bko wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just saying "regulate" it is not an answer and won't give you the results you think. What you'll get is restrictions on speech. UK arrests thousands every year for what essentially amounts to mean tweets. There have been people that comment publicly on horrendous crimes that get harsher sentences than those that commit the crimes. At any point in time politicians could have enforced existing terms of service violatio…

I'm not familiar with what you're talking about. Can you share a real world example of a case like this? You're saying a social media comment about a crime is somehow punished harshly and much harsher than the crime itself?

Here's an example of Westmidlands police bragging about arresting a 12 year old for racist posts.

There are 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages. It's not heavily reported for some reason but it's very real.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...

https://x.com/WMPolice/status/1282627004018364416

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#228

Post by bko »

kolektiv wrote: post #212
kraf wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with what you're talking about. Can you share a real world example of a case like this? You're saying a social media comment about a crime is somehow punished harshly and much harsher than the crime itself?

It's a common (and somewhat right-wing) trope, but it's not really true. Thousands of people aren't arrested for "mean comments" or similar. That isn't to say the UK has no problem with the balance of freedom of expression and regulation, but it is nothing like the impression you'd get from some sources. There are some high-profile cases which are commonly misrepresented to support these claims.

> Thousands of people aren't arrested for "mean comments" or similar

What are they arrested for, or are you disputing the number?

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#229

Post by specproc »

duskdozer wrote: post #223
specproc wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting framing in "we should ask" and "social media companies should ban". We have sovereign states that make laws, companies must comply with them if they wish to make money in our markets. Otherwise, I think my perspective here is very similar. I'd personally emphasise legal publisher responsibility, a repeal of Section 230 in American. By absolving social media platforms of legal responsibility for the conten…

To me Section 230 No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. seems less justifiable as an excuse for platforms that consist primarily of externally created content, have very large amounts of varied content, and select and target specific subsets of that content to present to specific users. I…

Aye, it's the curation, innit. If the platform is making opaque decisions on what you see, then it should be accountable for what it's showing you.

I think scale is important here too. If you've got a user-base that's an appreciable proportion of a country's population, you're a utility. My energy supplier has a tiny fraction of the customers of say, Meta, and is subject to considerably stronger oversight.

Re: The kids with phones are alright

#230

Post by zahlman »

graemep wrote: post #226

The political analysis there is completely wrong. How can she blame the "Tatler/Telegraph/Times set" for legislation passed by a Labour government? The opposition to this sort of legislation (e.g. the OSA) has largely come from the right. > These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skill…

Indeed. More than enough reason to flag the submission, in my view.

(It's remarkable how many of the top-level comments are pointing out this sort of problem with the article content.)

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