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The case for banning children from social media

newyorker.com

221–230 of 593 posts

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#221

There is a real public health issue here. Teen mental health really has fallen off a cliff in the last 10 years, in every measure available. Self-reported rates of depression and anxiety disorders have more than doubled. Suicides of 10-14 year olds have more than doubled. Suicides among 14-19 year olds have gone up ~50%. Hospital admissions for non-fatal self harm in girls 10-14 have ~tripled. It's not just an increa…

> Self-reported rates of depression and anxiety disorders have more than doubled

I wouldn't take this as seriously as you do. Self reporting this doesn't mean a whole lot, especially in a culture (among teens) where it's common, and a source of clout even, to assign labels like "trauma" "depression" and "disorder" to things that are not that.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#222
I'm not against idea, but how would that even work?

Porn for example is already banned from children, and they easily get hands on it. Or "violent" videogames.

I don't think there is any viable way or then it just becomes whack-a-mole thing. Ban those platforms that fail or the user accounts there...

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#223
I'll go further - you cannot even put a photo of someone else without their permission, unless it constitutes 'public good' and to be a journalist you have to 'register' - it'd be free and open to do that, but the point being, you're 'on the record' as doing that in some capacity which might come with a few ethical rules.

Sorry for the AI people but we probably want to have rules about data set collection as well.

Absolutely the right to privacy, the right to 'delete' and auto-deletion periods aka 'nothing is kept forever without special consent'.

Absolutely nothing about someone's social media presence can be made public or used for employment searches before age 18 aka that 'bad joke' someone told at age 16 should not ruin their life - I absolutely do not care what they said.

Content that passes a threshold of 'views' must be considered a kind of 'meta public domain' and must come with warnings/notes by the 'conduit entity' (aka FB or Twitter or Spotify) if it has medical or direct political information, aka Joe Rogan (whom I respect at least a bit except when he's yapping about vaccines) has to say 'I am not a doctor, this is not medical information' whenever he opens his fat mouth about vaccines, but he can say whatever he wants about Aliens and MMA etc..

Pricing/sign-ups/trials have to be ultra clear, and current billing has to be clear. Frankly, they should make the intermediary responsible for that as well aka if you have a recurring bill on VISA, then VISA has to list that, and, give you a means to cancel.

Total transparency on tracking, illegal to buy or sell most user data whatsoever. FYI the primary source for this is actually VISA, AMEX and MC.

And work with industry to create 'funnel optimizations' that just don't need tracking.

No advertising directly to kids unless maybe a certain kind of format (I think maybe some youtube ads are ok).

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#224

I just don't see any alternatives to banning social media, perhaps even up to the age of 18. The dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs and social media is just as addictive. It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff - especially in our highly polarised political climate. The right will immediately target "wokeness", and the left will immediately target "hate speech". And the kids will be…

> but I do use YouTube I don't have Google auth cookies on my primary browser and every Google property has cookie autodeletion when the last tab is closed. Every time I start YouTube fresh, I get a new profile that I have to mold back to the content I prefer. On a fresh window I'm constantly bombarded with superficial crap I never click on. I'm also perplexed by the amount of T&A clickbait that gets offered in the s…

I never found youtube particularly addictive. I'm guessing that's because (1) I don't have the app installed on my phone and (2) out of habit I only use it in a webbrowser in a new Incognito/Private tab, so the default recommendations tends to crap.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#225
Few months ago there was some sort of challenge on tiktok, most kids at my local middle school arrived to school with self-inflicted bruises on the face.

With this shit, if you don't do it too you are out of the group and goodbye social life.

Social media are preying on the group-belonging instincts of kids with tremendous damage not only on the kids themselves, but on society as a whole.

However, it's up to parents to deal with it. It's unacceptable that I have to produce my ID on the internet to remedy the damage of other people poor parenting.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#226

> These bills will likely face considerable constitutional challenges. Previous attempts to block minors from accessing Web sites via broad legislation, including the Child Online Protection Act, from 1998, have been struck down on First Amendment grounds. You might get farther instead of banning children from social media, ban all ads to children on social media. Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,0…

I don't think that banning ads would make much difference.

TikTok doesn't even have that many ads.

And weirdly - TikTok ads are generally decent - they are short, to the point, kind of authentic, not creepy. It's actually something they've done well.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#227
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18.. hell I’m close to 40 and I have trouble self regulating. YouTube needs an option to disable shorts. It’s just not healthy. TikTok I won’t even touch it. It’s virtualized crack.

It's your (our) generation who built all this stuff. We thought it would be "neat".

We thought it would be lucrative.

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#228
post #222

I'm not against idea, but how would that even work? Porn for example is already banned from children, and they easily get hands on it. Or "violent" videogames. I don't think there is any viable way or then it just becomes whack-a-mole thing. Ban those platforms that fail or the user accounts there...

That's very different though: porn and downloads you can get from any site. But for social media to work, by definition your peers need to be on the sites as well. If you apply that to porn, you end up with a handful of sites that have a very large userbase, and you can easily regulate those, because they're also very valuable.

Now, if such a step would lead to large-scale adoption of decentralized social media, that might be another issue, but as adults wouldn't be affected, I doubt they'd invest too much time into it (+ many of the people who are capable of building it don't believe that social media is a good idea).

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#229

Few months ago there was some sort of challenge on tiktok, most kids at my local middle school arrived to school with self-inflicted bruises on the face. With this shit, if you don't do it too you are out of the group and goodbye social life. Social media are preying on the group-belonging instincts of kids with tremendous damage not only on the kids themselves, but on society as a whole. However, it's up to parents…

I did a stint working on trust & safety tools for a social media startup. What I learned from working with content moderators is that overall, the industry gets by doing the barest of bare minimums, and TikTok is one of the worst offenders

"But the cost!", well, if the business model can't be viable when done safely, then the business model is not viable - we just don't have the externalized costs of harm done visible to help make that call

Re: The case for banning children from social media

#230
Tangent, but I’m at an age where many of my friends are having kids and are sharing a huge amount of their children’s lives on social media.

Not my business, but I can’t help but wonder what these kids will think once they become of age and realize their entire childhood has been plastered online on Instagram.

My wife and I have decided if we ever have kid, we’re never going to post a single publically viewable photo or video of him/her anywhere.

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