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Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

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Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#421

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Or parents could just take responsibility for their own children and not buy them a phone instead of outsourcing their parental responsibilities to the government.

So no social life for kids then? It’s not 1995 any more. My 13 year old gets social contact doing things like playing Minecraft with people from school, organised via WhatsApp with group chats and then yelling about diamond swords and lava chickens or whatever. There’s then the simple reality that most schools require smartphones for things like homework. It’s set on devices you can only access via an app. Ok maybe y…

The opposite. Those children who are barred to own phones are forced to actually seek out an actual social life.

The digital illusion of a "social life" that smartphones create is neither social, nor living.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#422

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>My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car. I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard and if you have the attitude that things aren't hard that tends to be true. Don't set your kid up for failure.

> I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard [..] I would hazard a guess you didn't meet that many other drivers on the farm (!) > Don't set your kid up for failure I'm doing my damndest not to ... but you have no idea ;)

Driving on the farm is actually a lot different, you usually have no more than one or two other drivers, but there's no rules. You have to know where everybody is, know what they intend to do, and know whether or not they know where you are and if they can see you.

it makes people much better and more patient drivers because you can't just rely on traffic laws you have to know the intention of somebody in a piece of machinery and if they plan to back up or where they're going and what's in their head... and how to communicate with hands or a yell

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#423
post #354

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Once the data is in bosses will see the massive benefits and ban mobile phones entirely during work hours.

Good. I recall "no personal calls" at work as a rule, in the old days. Inbound emergencies allowed, of course. Why do people think looking at their personal email, or looking at their phone is acceptable at work? It's no different than sitting, reading a magazine pre-Internet. The very idea would have been absurd.

This sort of work culture ruined the world way more than social media ever did.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#424
post #268

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This sounds like a temporary issue.

> This sounds like a temporary issue. There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

There is nothing less permanent than software. Permanent solutions in software last 5 years.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#425

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This sounds like a temporary issue.

Why? It's not because a hardware token based solution that will work on desktops is technically impossible, but they literally wrote me that they have no plans to investigate the possibility of offering that. This is officially the plan for the permanent solution.

Permanence in software is measured in half decades.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#426

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Is building a successful business automatically horribly indecent? What about winning the powerball? If you had to choose the least horrible billionaire you can think of, what horrifically indecent things have they done to acquire that wealth?

If you are a terrible being, yes. Succeeding at business does not alone make you a billionaire; that's a whole new level above "successful business owner". Most successful business owners are millionaires but not billionaires. As I said, no one becomes a billionaire without doing horrible things because said horrible things are exactly how you amass such a large amount of wealth amongst a single person. Also, winning…

I mean Masa will make you a billionaire if you just have a shit business idea you’re enthusiastic enough about, no need to be a terrible person.

Compared to the amount of billionaires there are also relatively many lottery jackpots that will get you there if you just stick your winnings in an index fund.

Not to mention that there’s a decent amount of people who become billionaires by just working on relatively boring ”normal” business like real estate development, where some luck, good decisions and leveraging bank loans will get you there without having to be a slumlord or doing anything terrible.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#427

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There was a - very similar - moral panic in the 1700s about young people 'reading excessively', which was blamed for escapism, unhappiness[1] and even increases in suicide rates (see: Werther Effect). The language used was 'reading addiction' - much like todays 'smartphone addiction' or, more modern, AI-related 'illnesses'. Today, the panic is that kids read too little, or the wrong stuff. What is and isn't societall…

What about the health and wellbeing of individuals? Were there well studied negative health impacts from reading excessively during this very similar scenario? I'm not a historian so I'm curious to see the parallels because right now it looks like we're talking about two completely different things.

Increased suicide rates were being discussed, and there were doctors claiming they had empirical evidence (worse eyesight, loss of sense of reality, 'melancholy' (aka: depression) ...).

Of course, that was 200 years ago, so our standards of 'rigorous empiricism' can hardly be compared to what they had. But the patterns still are eerily similar.

Also, note how modern diagnostics not only concern the well-being of the media-consuming/delusional individual, but also their environment. Polemically speaking: You can be perfectly happy being weird, if your environment feels negatively affected by you, you technically still are a psychiatrical case and need 'fixing' according to the DSM.

Hell is other people, only the young can defend themselves and their interests less and are easier being picked on.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#428

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> This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told. The interesting tidbit in the case of social media and smart phones is that they are at least partially pushed by the parents (I've seen plenty of examples of parents demand tha…

"but this time it's different" has also been a universal historical argument >The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. Honestly you could just cut and paste the same arguments about jazz music in the 1920s or rock music in the later 20th century and they'd be indistinguishable. Just replace the mentions o…

Making bad decisions is only a net benefit if they can recover from them in time. Then it becomes a lesson and not an anchor. With addictive behaviors like drugs, nicotine included… making the early mistake ends up being a permanent mistake.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#429

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The idea of treating under 18s like they are human is extremely undesirable in the USA because it among other things opens up a lot of doctors to be held accountable for their participation in the mass mutilation of baby boys. It also holds a whole lot of physically abusive parents to a standard where their children could call CPS and get their parents in legal trouble for corporal punishment. Of course, these are in…

what did i just read

You are also impacted by the real life ketar SCP object that keeps the masses not caring that millions of baby boys in the USA get mutilated shortly after birth.

I am not. One day, that object will be found, shut down and destroyed. I hope you eventually see the error in your current sensibilities.

Re: Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15

#430

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I don't think HN is a social media site. The goals of a social media site is to keep you engaged for as long as possible with the assistance of various algorithms, dark patterns while your data is sold to businesses so they can have a slice of your attention pie via ads and supported content. I dont feel as if any of that applies here. In fact HN has gotten further from a social media site by not displaying comment p…

You can argue this, but if you hand over this authority to government, it will not be up to you. Fundamentally this is an upvote driven social media platform no different from Reddit, which everyone agrees is social media. If you live in Denmark, get ready to tie your State ID to your HN profile to login and hope that you don't say anything that would make the wrong official (or your employer) upset with you. As we k…

Happen to be a Dane and I fully agree with your sentiment. I happen to agree (I think) that keeping children away from social media on a large scale, to avoid social isolation for those who might opt out of choice, might be overall good for the children. But the means that will likely be required to do so are, like you say, essentially more steps towards mass surveillance. And like you say, laws that can be exploited so easily by a government in bad faith are so dangerous to allow into public law, even in times when exploitation seems unlikely, because they'll likely never be removed (hah) or even amended before it's too late. Like Chat Control (though it seems pretty clear to _me_ that that is set up for abuse to begin with). I'm so embarrassed we're spearheading that abomination.
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