"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims." -- I am sorry, but how is this not true, when companies like Meta are in full control of their algorithms, tuning them to maximum addiction.
One can indeed argue what is the best way to deal with the problem of kids and social media, but I think the article is misrepresenting the situation.
If you read the rest of the piece they do argue for more regulation. They aren’t making a personal responsibility argument like other commenters are saying.
The problem with bans is they claim the technology itself is purely bad and the only solution is to keep it from children. Which on its face is nonsensical. It’s ok for a 17 year old but not a 16 year old?
We need genuine regulation tackling the actual problems with this technology. Blanket bans do nothing but make adults feel good about “protecting the children”.
Age restrictions don't say it's 'okay' for somebody above a certain age to use something. Cigarettes will screw up your body at 18 just as much as they will at 17. But at 18 you're, legally at least, an adult, the point at which our unstated social contract starts to prioritize liberty over safety. And setting it at such an age also helps significantly reduce the peer pressure to smoke.
I'd take this one step further and say this would be a major issue even without 'the algorithm' and other such 'engagement' maximization efforts. Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive. The only thing that changed with social media is that it all barriers to entry came crashing down and these sort of services became socially normalized, instead of being just made up of fringe tech enthusiasts.
And it's obviously a big problem for adults as well as kids, but I think there are many nuances there. One would be that we generally accept adults engaging in self destructive behaviors as part of the liberty of being an adult. You're free to go gamble away your life savings as an adult - but you won't even get in the door as a kid.
Another is that lot of the undesirable things that happen in schools (gossiping, conspiracies like false reporting, bullying, in-out crowds, image crafting, etc) get greatly magnified when you introduce social media. And that would happen even if the most benign/benevolent social media, absent any 'algorithm', engagement maximizing, and so on.
> Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive.
I'm not so sure about this (having lived both). The "algorithm" has a massive addictive effect that simply was not present in the BBS days, it is nearly universally agreed. Certainly it's believed enough for Meta to spend billions on it.
> Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive.
Social media today is almost nothing like BBS and Newsgroups. Social media is supercharged to be a dopamine slot machine that sells attention to the highest bidder with the explicit aim of changing their behavior. None of that existed on BBS or Newsgroups.
I actually thinks it’s far more applicable in the crack scenario than the social media scenario. There are lots of people who don’t use crack. The vast majority of humanity.
What percentage of teens don’t use social media? I don’t know the answer, and would adjust my thinking if incorrect, but my assumption is “a small minority”
Personal responsibility IS a factor that can’t be ignored when it comes to addiction. I say this as a multi substance addict who’s been clean for over a decade. Tech is a whole new beast though, because we are often forced to use it. It’s closer to food addiction than crack addiction, which, IMO, is the most brutal addiction of all (food). No one neeeds crack to survive, so stopping it is one thing. Stopping (junk) food addiction, or severe over eating, or whatever you want to call it… man, that must be brutal.
I don’t use social media, but I’m an old fogie. I’d imagine you kids can not very easily “just not use it” if they want to have any semblance of social life and to find a high paying job after college
I think personal responsibility does play into these situations to some extent, but even so, that doesn't imply there should be zero regulation.
Both for crack addicts and teens using social media, they not only hurt themselves, but also hurt those around them.
The studies on teen mental health largely suggest that mostly it's not about using a lot of social media yourself, but living in an area where social media is the coin of the realm. It's the toxic culture SM generates rather than direct use that's hurting teen mental health.
Maybe it’s because tech people are prone to binary thinking, but there seems to be the idea that if you can’t prevent a bad thing entirely, then you shouldn’t try to prevent it at all. Or maybe the other way around: if you can’t achieve a good thing completely, then why even bother trying?
While I think you're right that this is a real problem, there's also real costs to a partial solution. It encourages people to see it as a solved problem, disincentivising further reform and giving the impression you don't need to keep an eye on your kid's internet use because the state is handling it for you
Are people seriously routinely experiencing serious harm from social media use, comparable with alcohol or gambling addiction? The discussion may have suffered from much unnecessarily hyperbole in comparing YouTube to heroin, in how a single use guarantees unavoidable long term consequences with little redeeming qualities.
I'm a college age gen Z, and don't really think you can fix much with a social media ban alone, even ignoring all the implications if it's enforcement.
People don't get dysmorphia because some computer program told them so. The "influencers" are just other victims of a fundamentally toxic culture, or leaches on that insecurity.
You could say it used to be better before the internet, and maybe you'd be right. But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. As long as there are humans communicating through any medium, there will be a culture that can harbor these destructive tendencies, and the bigger more sparse that culture is, the more extreme its ideas can get.
Chronological feeds or more civic accountability for any algorithmic feeds (like forcing companies to share data with researchers to study their effects) could be a generally great initiative, but simply banning social media for anyone won't do as much as you'd hope.
Looksmaxing, the latest of these strange internet-induced mental illnesses, literally began on a phpBB forum.
Personal anecdote, and not about social media per se but the infinite-wall aspect of today's web, made my brain behave in very scary ways. I had a few times where I didn't order my hand to swipe (because I was expected to do something else right away) but my hand swiped. It was sufficiently against a part of my mind that it felt 'not me' and it happened a few times, sometimes even more complex movements.
To me it's an evidence that the brain is that sensitive to neurological reward to the point of being bent into automatic aimless actions just for the sake of keeping the cycle going.
It's not as deep and harmful as alcoholism but still too large not to ignore.
“ But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. ”
Isn’t one of the big complaints about social media that only like 1% or .1% of users get promoted?
I think the problem is your last paragraph buries the lede. - the social media companies want to make this about content, because algorithmic feeds are what make meta a trillion dollar company instead of a 50 billion dollar company.
I do think there would be a fair bit of agreement with your thesis if your minor caveat at the end wasn’t the big huge problem.
I think most of these bans are because no one has figured out how to ban the algorithmic feed and SV isn’t self-regulating.
There would still be plenty of moral panics about the content, but I think the bans are picking up speed because of the form.
I don’t care that my kid wants to join a satanic death cult I care that Meta has figured out how to monetize satanic death cult membership in the algorithm.
There is nothing wrong with social media; if anything, we need more social media.
What we need less of are the attention-maximizing, eldritch-horror things that have stolen social media and now walk around wearing the skins of the entity that summoned it.
Facebook is not social media — if you don't believe me, go on Facebook and count how many posts are from people you had mutual interactions with and actively choosen to follow and how many are everything else (not including native ads, I understand the platforms have to make moeny).
It's the same issue, if not worse, on X/Twitter.
I wouldn't know the status of TikTok for the same reason I don't know what the current status of street drugs, but as I understand it you can't even meaningfully follow people on TikTok — it's just mindless consumption from people you don't know.
How can it be social media if there's no social component?
Email is social media; chatting with your guild members in World of Warcraft is social media. Until at least a few months ago, commenting on a pull request on GitHub was more social media than Twitter was.
The first step in dealing with the world is to look at things as they actually are, not as they were twenty years ago.
Well we live in a global informational network. Instagram actually did try to not fully attentionmaxx their reels algos back in 2014 when TikTok came up, and this led to them losing 60% of the market to this.
You can't regulate the whole world, if you won't make something addictive, someone in China will and you will lose the market to them.
Next best thing is ban because regulations in software are stale the day they get released due to legal processes being slower than technological ones.
The profit motive turns social media into an opium machine gun, the maintenance of a global scale consumer social media without a profit motive impossible, and the existence of a consumer global scale social media makes both smaller scale and protocol-based forms obsolete
I can agree with this. And I’m not sure how these bans are scoped but maybe they should be scoped specifically around algorithmic feeds.
The biggest problem to me isn’t the content or posting on a friends timeline. It’s that choices are pushed to the user rather than pulled. Change that one dynamic and I may not care as much that YouTube has content I consider toxic. Add a little friction my teen has to go actively discover content he’s curious about, not pushed an algorithmic feed.
I think the problem is though - the tech companies are incentivized to make this about _content_ “ I can’t ban Andrew Tate because it’s not my job to tell people what they can and can’t watch, first amendment, blah blah blah.
And Zuckerberg isn’t wrong here exactly, but per above the real argument I think is less about content and more about form.
But the reality is these companies don’t actually make their money from the content they make it from the form.
So Zuckerberg can’t concede “oh you’re right, making the newsfeed less adddictive doesn’t violate first amendment rights, at least we’re not banning Trump, because he doesn’t care about banning Trump except for the heat he gets from republicans, he cares about you messing with the money printer.
The thing we may all be able to agree they should do is the thing they’ll push back much harder against doing.
I don't see anything wrong with a social media ban for teens in concept. In execution, it'll be difficult to do effectively though.
What I would like to see is changes to the tax code to disincentivize the social media business model and the advertising industry generally. For example...
1. Tax the crap out of advertising revenue on social media platforms
2. Stratify the ads and ban the existence of paid tiers which include advertising. If you pay for something, you don't see ads, period
3. Ban the use of trackers and fingerprinting on any paid service without explicit opt-in
4. Create a tort for data leaks that travels with any company which handled the data. If anyone in the chain leaks it, you can take an action against all of them, and the penalties are individually assessed
5. Ban the collection and sale of profiling data for anyone under 18
6. Ban the ad-supported tier for anyone under 18
This heavily disincentivizes algorithms generally and makes paid tiers more appealing, which is much easier for parents to control. The problem with social media and teens is that teens can even sign up in the first place. Make them use a credit card, and you suddenly have a much higher barrier to entry. If I tried to subscribe my parents to HBO as a kid, it wouldn't have worked, and this is why. It wasn't because the government banned 14 year olds from seeing HBO.
A disingenuous article. The 30% reduction of teen use is touted as a failure. If this was applied to cigarettes and alcohol, the solution would be stronger enforcement, but this is then labelled as doubling down.
It is not. The sources provided shows that the remaining 70% of teenagers that remain on the platforms are due to lack of enforcement from the platforms, not purposeful skirting of restrictions by the teenagers (VPN etc.).
The article further labels the teenage bans as a fight between adults and teenagers, as if the laws will breed resentment from children towards their parents. As far as I'm aware, that's not how teenagers view the issue of tobacco and alcohol bans around the world.
30% reduction is a successful start in the first year. I foresee further reduction in the coming years when less teenagers slip through the lack of enforcement and more of them pass the 16 year old threshold.
“ But less than a year in, it suggests the ban is failing: A state-sponsored survey of parents indicated that seven in 10 teens are still using social media, while academic research has reported even lower rates of compliance.”
Failure? Or 30% improvement.
“While social media can be weaponized for bullying or hate, over half of all teens turn to social media as a source of social and emotional support.”
Teens also turn to drugs as a source of of social and emotional support.
“ Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults.”
Ironically the thesis of this article. In fact I would say by banning teens from social media, we may be implicitly increasing their agency, since they’ll have to figure out how to interface with a set of technolgies that are not optimized for them.
There’s something really dystopian to me about “designing for teens in mind” and I think maybe the unintended consequence of this kind of thinking is just - the continued marketable capture of segments.
What this person is basically advocating for is a new way for tech companies to extract more value from our youth.
The whole point of being a teenager is to generate your own ways to rebel against the fact that the adult world isn’t quite built for you.
This “facebook but for teenagers” is just another opiate for the masses.
> Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces
The article is missing the point entirely. The conversation is not about “regulated spaces”, but removing them from spaces created entirely to drive advertisement, mindless engagement and consumption. If they find other spaces to join without that, perfect - it worked!
The reason social media bans miss yhe point is because they will be replaced by other addictive/predatory technology, such as gaming. It's wack-a-mole - ban one thing and another pops up. Parental involvement and school education about addiction in all its forms is the best (not perfect) solution. The goal is to allow adolescents to grow into knowledge and responsible adults. Infantilizing them and delaying their exposure to the world only delays that development. And most age verification tech just undermines privacy.
It’s easy to say, but do you want a teenage mind to compete against an army of thousands of marketers and engineers, with billions of dollars on the line, to see who wins that battle? It’s not a level playing field.
This. To be fair, adults should not be subject to this dynamic either. The lawmakers have failed to legislate around social media, and this is a weak fallback option.
I think the difference about the social media moral panic if you want to call it that is it’s about form not content.
I think there are plenty of adults who think maybe there are certain types of social media patterns that should be banned outright.
It’s not whack a mole - I _want_ my kid to engage with a replacement technology like gaming. I’m not worried about my kid playing GTA vi all day. I’m not worried about content. I’m not even really worried about Andrew Tate. I’m worried about the specific way mindless algorithmic applications mimic cigarettes more than “satanic heavy metal rock concerts”
My kid needs more satan in his life! And less growth hacker.
> The goal is to allow adolescents to grow into knowledge and responsible adults. Infantilizing them and delaying their exposure to the world only delays that development.
Epstein et al. had similar beliefs about banging them
Just because compliance isn’t 100% doesn’t mean there’s no benefit. Also these things can take time to work, but we do have evidence that bans reduce usage to an extent.
You are conflating cigarette damage with social media damage.
Social media doesn't have to be toxic, just toxic behaviour is rewarded. This is more like "sniper in park causes ban for under 18s". You are keeping the bad things but age gating it. It would be better to remove the sniper in the park.
Im barely in the back half of Gen X. My oldest kids are grown now, but grew up with iPhones in their hands.
I am reminded of all the ridiculousness of the 1980s/1990s - "Its 10pm do you know where your kids are?" "I learned it by watching you dad!" Lawsuits around backwards message in music (Later PMRC), that Bevis and Butthead caused the child to burn down the trailer (fire! fire!)...
My kids hate social media for the most part - and are much more free range than their peers. Why? Because we did the hard work of parenting them! We were involved in their lives, from their grades to their social lives, to talking about the tech in their hand and the problems it can create.
We need to have a conversation about kids - about them being able to be outside, roaming, unattended without parents being arrested. About them having third spaces, about severe restrictions on their "freedom" in the world if we want to get to the heart of the issue. They are breaking this law because social media has become their "third space" that is parent free where they can explore and figure out the world.
The big problem with these "social media child bans", is that the capitalistic extreme-addictive experience IS harming everyone. Not just children.
What should have been was what Cory Doctorow has pushed - forced open API integration. From there you can make your own clients, only see friends, de-gamify, chronological algorithm, etc.
But banning children? That's a fools game. But easy for the votes, cause politicians are attacking a population who can't vote, and are disenfranchised by default.
For the record, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has fostered world-class research and development in fields such as A.I., X Windows (Athena Widgets, Kerberos security (adopted by Microsoft in SMB and Windows Server, etc. GNU (Richard M. Stallman))) Emacs and elisp, as well as glibc and gcc compiler tool suite.
"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims."
"In scary headlines like these, the adult man in the white van is the subject, and the child is the passive victim. The child can obviously be trained to identify that adult mans talking to them in white vans may require distance even if not every person doing so is a killer."
Teen welfare is just the excuse. The teens are collateral damage along the path to mandating identification and de-anonymizing the Internet. The teens aren't enfranchised, so they can't meaningfully complain, and once they can vote, their problem is over, so why would they fight?
Don’t ban it for kids. Ban the doomscrolling algorithmic feeds for everyone. Make them only show people posts from accounts they opt-in to following, and nothing else.
Or how about you adults all grow up and gain some healthy personal accountability instead of blaming your devices and society for your lack of self control.
For certain technology there should be bans but it is not social media and algorithmic feeds. There may be speedbumps, more user controls and auto classifiying of user type with optional alteration of the feed and type of content, but full bans for things like infinite scroll are disproptional.
Should sexual content be banned on social media? Maybe? Should violent footage be banned? It depends? Should bullying or predatory behavior be banned? I guess so? Or maybe it should it only be discouraged? What kind of social media does there exist? Is it binary or is it a spectrum, and should different rules or guidelines be applied?
Way too many variables. But what is clear is that age (ID) checks for the wide spread internet are completely out of the question. Governments should not have that much control over our social lives.
Face it, technology changes the world. The smartphone with camera did. If you could, would you put that genie back in the bottle? Should all content produced on smartphones be checked and watermarked and pulled through a selection of governments fingerprints to be publishable? Be very careful what you wish for since every new technology comes with hard to imagine second order effects and threats.
Explain to the audience the nature of "personhood" of Meta(Facebook), Alphabet(Google), etm.
Parents aren't hiring thousands of behavioral psychologists to assail the public with weaponized psychology. Parents aren't running mass exploitation via emotional attacks (targeting pregnancy, anorexia, mental illness, depression, etc). Parents never encouraged or helped the genocidalists in the Rohinga genocide.
But.... You blame parents. Standard capitalist response of calling everything a 'personal choice'.
Yep I'm also in favour of legally requiring the default feed on any "social" app to be a chronological feed from people you follow. It's both better for society longer-term and a better experience for the users, just not the shareholders.
The entirety of human knowledge is about defining rules by which we can categorize thing A vs thing B. I think we can determine the difference between Facebook and HN.
On the contrary, I think social media bans are poised to accomplish exactly what they're intended to: provide a convenient justification for forced identity verification across all websites.
How so? Do you believe the average person will think twice when TikTok asks them to submit a picture of their ID? No, they'll do it without a second thought so they can go back to mindlessly scrolling through the slop.
The ones who will think twice are exactly the sort of people these laws are intended to punish: the dissenters, the wrong-thinkers, those who must be silenced. Either they choose not to verify and cease to use social media (successfully silenced), or they allow their wrong thoughts to be tied to their identity, such that they can be identified and punished accordingly.
I wouldn't mind having verified accounts _as an alternative_. Not enforced over existing SM.
I'd like to know that when I'm reading a comment, it's written (or at least endorsed) by a human being. Currently that's.. debatable, and it's only going to be more so. Entities with cash and resources can focus on the topics relevant to them and drown the conversation. I'd like to at least know that the idiotic replies I'm getting are real human idiots, and not astroturfing in one shape or another.
It is the operating systems vendors who created this scenario by creating single-user walled-garden platforms which abrogate a parents rights and agency over their children’s lives.
I should be able to give my 8 year old a mobile phone for their uses, pair it with my phone, and at any time of day be able to observe their activity on that phone - just as if I were watching what they were up to at the park, or while experimenting with matches in the garden, or riding their bikes on the street for the first time.
But there is a distinct desire by the operating system vendors to serve their true masters - ad agencies - and abrogate responsibilities of the users. “Filesystem, what filesystem?”
The idea of having a parent/child relationship encoded in the functions of the operating system is not in alignment with the idea that the true operators of the platform are faceless corporations, hell bent on harvesting every bit of data from every human being using their platforms.
With one simple trick, operating systems can change this equation entirely: give parents their rights and duties and responsibilities back. Let me see what my 8-year old is doing, in a fair and open and equitable fashion, so that I can - as a parent - fulfill my responsibilities to keep my children safe.
A phone is no less dangerous than a sharp kitchen knife. I’m perfectly fine with my 8 year old learning to use a kitchen knife properly - to gain their own agency over it as a tool - as long as I am able to observe their use of it.
And before anyone tries to make the argument “parents don’t do that, oh my god, you’re violating your child’s right to privacy” - no, that is not what I mean. A child should have privacy and they should learn to have agency over that privacy - but a parent is not absolved of the issue if that child falls of a cliff because of their negligence. Let the OS provide privacy - but let it also provide a means of review by the parents - who are the ones ultimately responsible for the child in the first place.
This needs to be an OS feature. Parents and children should, through the OS, be able to establish a strong, positive relationship with each other over this issue, with agency returned to the family unit.
Otherwise, we are creating totalitarian systems of control and putting them in the hands of people we simply cannot trust. The degradation of agency within the family unit is a function of commercial desire to exploit that lack of agency.
Operating systems, instead of serving ad agency masters, can go a long, long way to provide parents and children the right tools to solve this problem. They do, however, need to stop suckling at the teat of the nameless corporations who see the family unit as a nut that has to be cracked in order to extract the juice.
Android allows parents to monitor and control what apps children use, and for how long, on their devices.
So I block chrome, and require my permission to install any app. They get thirty minutes a day on devices that lack a browser or social media apps. Not even any YouTube.
They can browse the web on PCs that are visible to the whole living room.
That’s all in the right direction. I think there are other things OS vendors can do too - screen sharing and a logged timeline history of events would also be useful for parents.
We have tools to do this already - authentication apps, and so on - but it’s my firm opinion that these need to be built in to the OS. I’m happy to hear Android allows this to an extent already ..
"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims." -- I am sorry, but how is this not true, when companies like Meta are in full control of their algorithms, tuning them to maximum addiction.
One can indeed argue what is the best way to deal with the problem of kids and social media, but I think the article is misrepresenting the situation.
If you read the rest of the piece they do argue for more regulation. They aren’t making a personal responsibility argument like other commenters are saying.
The problem with bans is they claim the technology itself is purely bad and the only solution is to keep it from children. Which on its face is nonsensical. It’s ok for a 17 year old but not a 16 year old?
We need genuine regulation tackling the actual problems with this technology. Blanket bans do nothing but make adults feel good about “protecting the children”.
Age restrictions don't say it's 'okay' for somebody above a certain age to use something. Cigarettes will screw up your body at 18 just as much as they will at 17. But at 18 you're, legally at least, an adult, the point at which our unstated social contract starts to prioritize liberty over safety. And setting it at such an age also helps significantly reduce the peer pressure to smoke.
I'd take this one step further and say this would be a major issue even without 'the algorithm' and other such 'engagement' maximization efforts. Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive. The only thing that changed with social media is that it all barriers to entry came crashing down and these sort of services became socially normalized, instead of being just made up of fringe tech enthusiasts.
And it's obviously a big problem for adults as well as kids, but I think there are many nuances there. One would be that we generally accept adults engaging in self destructive behaviors as part of the liberty of being an adult. You're free to go gamble away your life savings as an adult - but you won't even get in the door as a kid.
Another is that lot of the undesirable things that happen in schools (gossiping, conspiracies like false reporting, bullying, in-out crowds, image crafting, etc) get greatly magnified when you introduce social media. And that would happen even if the most benign/benevolent social media, absent any 'algorithm', engagement maximizing, and so on.
> Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive.
I'm not so sure about this (having lived both). The "algorithm" has a massive addictive effect that simply was not present in the BBS days, it is nearly universally agreed. Certainly it's believed enough for Meta to spend billions on it.
> Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive.
Social media today is almost nothing like BBS and Newsgroups. Social media is supercharged to be a dopamine slot machine that sells attention to the highest bidder with the explicit aim of changing their behavior. None of that existed on BBS or Newsgroups.
I grow up with ICQ where you can click a button to talk with a random stranger. Boomers were crying about Internet addiction.
30 years later, I’m fine and the boomers are the ones getting addicted to fake stuff on the internet.
Our generation did not turn out fine. Phones are hugely a net loss for society. I stand by that.
I know people who got into car accidents and 30 years later they were fine
Exactly, it's like talking about the symptoms and missing the point of the diagnostic.
Yup. All this talk of personal responsibility in these types of situations is nothing but a perfidious form of victim blaming.
"The crack addict should've known better, it's not the dealer's fault they came back for more!"
I actually thinks it’s far more applicable in the crack scenario than the social media scenario. There are lots of people who don’t use crack. The vast majority of humanity.
What percentage of teens don’t use social media? I don’t know the answer, and would adjust my thinking if incorrect, but my assumption is “a small minority”
Personal responsibility IS a factor that can’t be ignored when it comes to addiction. I say this as a multi substance addict who’s been clean for over a decade. Tech is a whole new beast though, because we are often forced to use it. It’s closer to food addiction than crack addiction, which, IMO, is the most brutal addiction of all (food). No one neeeds crack to survive, so stopping it is one thing. Stopping (junk) food addiction, or severe over eating, or whatever you want to call it… man, that must be brutal.
I don’t use social media, but I’m an old fogie. I’d imagine you kids can not very easily “just not use it” if they want to have any semblance of social life and to find a high paying job after college
I think personal responsibility does play into these situations to some extent, but even so, that doesn't imply there should be zero regulation.
Both for crack addicts and teens using social media, they not only hurt themselves, but also hurt those around them.
The studies on teen mental health largely suggest that mostly it's not about using a lot of social media yourself, but living in an area where social media is the coin of the realm. It's the toxic culture SM generates rather than direct use that's hurting teen mental health.
Maybe it’s because tech people are prone to binary thinking, but there seems to be the idea that if you can’t prevent a bad thing entirely, then you shouldn’t try to prevent it at all. Or maybe the other way around: if you can’t achieve a good thing completely, then why even bother trying?
While I think you're right that this is a real problem, there's also real costs to a partial solution. It encourages people to see it as a solved problem, disincentivising further reform and giving the impression you don't need to keep an eye on your kid's internet use because the state is handling it for you
Are people seriously routinely experiencing serious harm from social media use, comparable with alcohol or gambling addiction? The discussion may have suffered from much unnecessarily hyperbole in comparing YouTube to heroin, in how a single use guarantees unavoidable long term consequences with little redeeming qualities.
I'm a college age gen Z, and don't really think you can fix much with a social media ban alone, even ignoring all the implications if it's enforcement.
People don't get dysmorphia because some computer program told them so. The "influencers" are just other victims of a fundamentally toxic culture, or leaches on that insecurity.
You could say it used to be better before the internet, and maybe you'd be right. But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. As long as there are humans communicating through any medium, there will be a culture that can harbor these destructive tendencies, and the bigger more sparse that culture is, the more extreme its ideas can get.
Chronological feeds or more civic accountability for any algorithmic feeds (like forcing companies to share data with researchers to study their effects) could be a generally great initiative, but simply banning social media for anyone won't do as much as you'd hope.
Looksmaxing, the latest of these strange internet-induced mental illnesses, literally began on a phpBB forum.
Personal anecdote, and not about social media per se but the infinite-wall aspect of today's web, made my brain behave in very scary ways. I had a few times where I didn't order my hand to swipe (because I was expected to do something else right away) but my hand swiped. It was sufficiently against a part of my mind that it felt 'not me' and it happened a few times, sometimes even more complex movements.
To me it's an evidence that the brain is that sensitive to neurological reward to the point of being bent into automatic aimless actions just for the sake of keeping the cycle going.
It's not as deep and harmful as alcoholism but still too large not to ignore.
Having lived many years prior to social media, it feels very clear that social media fundamentally warps people in a way they weren’t before.
If you have only lived within it, it makes sense to underestimate the impact.
Having lived many years prior to social media, I'm gonna say that "fundamentally warps people" is pretty damned overwrought language.
“ But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. ”
Isn’t one of the big complaints about social media that only like 1% or .1% of users get promoted?
I think the problem is your last paragraph buries the lede. - the social media companies want to make this about content, because algorithmic feeds are what make meta a trillion dollar company instead of a 50 billion dollar company.
I do think there would be a fair bit of agreement with your thesis if your minor caveat at the end wasn’t the big huge problem.
I think most of these bans are because no one has figured out how to ban the algorithmic feed and SV isn’t self-regulating.
There would still be plenty of moral panics about the content, but I think the bans are picking up speed because of the form.
I don’t care that my kid wants to join a satanic death cult I care that Meta has figured out how to monetize satanic death cult membership in the algorithm.
There is nothing wrong with social media; if anything, we need more social media.
What we need less of are the attention-maximizing, eldritch-horror things that have stolen social media and now walk around wearing the skins of the entity that summoned it.
Facebook is not social media — if you don't believe me, go on Facebook and count how many posts are from people you had mutual interactions with and actively choosen to follow and how many are everything else (not including native ads, I understand the platforms have to make moeny).
It's the same issue, if not worse, on X/Twitter.
I wouldn't know the status of TikTok for the same reason I don't know what the current status of street drugs, but as I understand it you can't even meaningfully follow people on TikTok — it's just mindless consumption from people you don't know.
How can it be social media if there's no social component?
Email is social media; chatting with your guild members in World of Warcraft is social media. Until at least a few months ago, commenting on a pull request on GitHub was more social media than Twitter was.
The first step in dealing with the world is to look at things as they actually are, not as they were twenty years ago.
Well we live in a global informational network. Instagram actually did try to not fully attentionmaxx their reels algos back in 2014 when TikTok came up, and this led to them losing 60% of the market to this.
You can't regulate the whole world, if you won't make something addictive, someone in China will and you will lose the market to them.
Next best thing is ban because regulations in software are stale the day they get released due to legal processes being slower than technological ones.
The profit motive turns social media into an opium machine gun, the maintenance of a global scale consumer social media without a profit motive impossible, and the existence of a consumer global scale social media makes both smaller scale and protocol-based forms obsolete
I can agree with this. And I’m not sure how these bans are scoped but maybe they should be scoped specifically around algorithmic feeds.
The biggest problem to me isn’t the content or posting on a friends timeline. It’s that choices are pushed to the user rather than pulled. Change that one dynamic and I may not care as much that YouTube has content I consider toxic. Add a little friction my teen has to go actively discover content he’s curious about, not pushed an algorithmic feed.
I think the problem is though - the tech companies are incentivized to make this about _content_ “ I can’t ban Andrew Tate because it’s not my job to tell people what they can and can’t watch, first amendment, blah blah blah.
And Zuckerberg isn’t wrong here exactly, but per above the real argument I think is less about content and more about form.
But the reality is these companies don’t actually make their money from the content they make it from the form.
So Zuckerberg can’t concede “oh you’re right, making the newsfeed less adddictive doesn’t violate first amendment rights, at least we’re not banning Trump, because he doesn’t care about banning Trump except for the heat he gets from republicans, he cares about you messing with the money printer.
The thing we may all be able to agree they should do is the thing they’ll push back much harder against doing.
I don't see anything wrong with a social media ban for teens in concept. In execution, it'll be difficult to do effectively though.
What I would like to see is changes to the tax code to disincentivize the social media business model and the advertising industry generally. For example...
1. Tax the crap out of advertising revenue on social media platforms
2. Stratify the ads and ban the existence of paid tiers which include advertising. If you pay for something, you don't see ads, period
3. Ban the use of trackers and fingerprinting on any paid service without explicit opt-in
4. Create a tort for data leaks that travels with any company which handled the data. If anyone in the chain leaks it, you can take an action against all of them, and the penalties are individually assessed
5. Ban the collection and sale of profiling data for anyone under 18
6. Ban the ad-supported tier for anyone under 18
This heavily disincentivizes algorithms generally and makes paid tiers more appealing, which is much easier for parents to control. The problem with social media and teens is that teens can even sign up in the first place. Make them use a credit card, and you suddenly have a much higher barrier to entry. If I tried to subscribe my parents to HBO as a kid, it wouldn't have worked, and this is why. It wasn't because the government banned 14 year olds from seeing HBO.
A disingenuous article. The 30% reduction of teen use is touted as a failure. If this was applied to cigarettes and alcohol, the solution would be stronger enforcement, but this is then labelled as doubling down.
It is not. The sources provided shows that the remaining 70% of teenagers that remain on the platforms are due to lack of enforcement from the platforms, not purposeful skirting of restrictions by the teenagers (VPN etc.).
The article further labels the teenage bans as a fight between adults and teenagers, as if the laws will breed resentment from children towards their parents. As far as I'm aware, that's not how teenagers view the issue of tobacco and alcohol bans around the world.
30% reduction is a successful start in the first year. I foresee further reduction in the coming years when less teenagers slip through the lack of enforcement and more of them pass the 16 year old threshold.
“ But less than a year in, it suggests the ban is failing: A state-sponsored survey of parents indicated that seven in 10 teens are still using social media, while academic research has reported even lower rates of compliance.”
Failure? Or 30% improvement.
“While social media can be weaponized for bullying or hate, over half of all teens turn to social media as a source of social and emotional support.”
Teens also turn to drugs as a source of of social and emotional support.
“ Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults.”
Ironically the thesis of this article. In fact I would say by banning teens from social media, we may be implicitly increasing their agency, since they’ll have to figure out how to interface with a set of technolgies that are not optimized for them.
There’s something really dystopian to me about “designing for teens in mind” and I think maybe the unintended consequence of this kind of thinking is just - the continued marketable capture of segments.
What this person is basically advocating for is a new way for tech companies to extract more value from our youth.
The whole point of being a teenager is to generate your own ways to rebel against the fact that the adult world isn’t quite built for you.
This “facebook but for teenagers” is just another opiate for the masses.
> Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces
The article is missing the point entirely. The conversation is not about “regulated spaces”, but removing them from spaces created entirely to drive advertisement, mindless engagement and consumption. If they find other spaces to join without that, perfect - it worked!
The reason social media bans miss yhe point is because they will be replaced by other addictive/predatory technology, such as gaming. It's wack-a-mole - ban one thing and another pops up. Parental involvement and school education about addiction in all its forms is the best (not perfect) solution. The goal is to allow adolescents to grow into knowledge and responsible adults. Infantilizing them and delaying their exposure to the world only delays that development. And most age verification tech just undermines privacy.
It’s easy to say, but do you want a teenage mind to compete against an army of thousands of marketers and engineers, with billions of dollars on the line, to see who wins that battle? It’s not a level playing field.
This. To be fair, adults should not be subject to this dynamic either. The lawmakers have failed to legislate around social media, and this is a weak fallback option.
I think the difference about the social media moral panic if you want to call it that is it’s about form not content.
I think there are plenty of adults who think maybe there are certain types of social media patterns that should be banned outright.
It’s not whack a mole - I _want_ my kid to engage with a replacement technology like gaming. I’m not worried about my kid playing GTA vi all day. I’m not worried about content. I’m not even really worried about Andrew Tate. I’m worried about the specific way mindless algorithmic applications mimic cigarettes more than “satanic heavy metal rock concerts”
My kid needs more satan in his life! And less growth hacker.
Gaming is much healthier than social media.
Sure, Jan.
Facebook measured "sentiment" and then shown weight loss influencers bullshit ads to teenagers deemed "more insecure about their looks".
Yes it feeds directly into anorexia. And yes, it had that effect.
Education wont counteract these effects, not when the company can put staggering amount of money into A/B testing for maximal impact.
> The goal is to allow adolescents to grow into knowledge and responsible adults. Infantilizing them and delaying their exposure to the world only delays that development.
Epstein et al. had similar beliefs about banging them
Why not “Teen Cigarette Bans Miss the Point”?
Just because compliance isn’t 100% doesn’t mean there’s no benefit. Also these things can take time to work, but we do have evidence that bans reduce usage to an extent.
You are conflating cigarette damage with social media damage.
Social media doesn't have to be toxic, just toxic behaviour is rewarded. This is more like "sniper in park causes ban for under 18s". You are keeping the bad things but age gating it. It would be better to remove the sniper in the park.
Im barely in the back half of Gen X. My oldest kids are grown now, but grew up with iPhones in their hands.
I am reminded of all the ridiculousness of the 1980s/1990s - "Its 10pm do you know where your kids are?" "I learned it by watching you dad!" Lawsuits around backwards message in music (Later PMRC), that Bevis and Butthead caused the child to burn down the trailer (fire! fire!)...
My kids hate social media for the most part - and are much more free range than their peers. Why? Because we did the hard work of parenting them! We were involved in their lives, from their grades to their social lives, to talking about the tech in their hand and the problems it can create.
We need to have a conversation about kids - about them being able to be outside, roaming, unattended without parents being arrested. About them having third spaces, about severe restrictions on their "freedom" in the world if we want to get to the heart of the issue. They are breaking this law because social media has become their "third space" that is parent free where they can explore and figure out the world.
The big problem with these "social media child bans", is that the capitalistic extreme-addictive experience IS harming everyone. Not just children.
What should have been was what Cory Doctorow has pushed - forced open API integration. From there you can make your own clients, only see friends, de-gamify, chronological algorithm, etc.
But banning children? That's a fools game. But easy for the votes, cause politicians are attacking a population who can't vote, and are disenfranchised by default.
For the record, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has fostered world-class research and development in fields such as A.I., X Windows (Athena Widgets, Kerberos security (adopted by Microsoft in SMB and Windows Server, etc. GNU (Richard M. Stallman))) Emacs and elisp, as well as glibc and gcc compiler tool suite.
"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims."
"In scary headlines like these, the adult man in the white van is the subject, and the child is the passive victim. The child can obviously be trained to identify that adult mans talking to them in white vans may require distance even if not every person doing so is a killer."
"The solution imposed is to ban the child from going anywhere where a white van may also exist."
Teen welfare is just the excuse. The teens are collateral damage along the path to mandating identification and de-anonymizing the Internet. The teens aren't enfranchised, so they can't meaningfully complain, and once they can vote, their problem is over, so why would they fight?
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Don’t ban it for kids. Ban the doomscrolling algorithmic feeds for everyone. Make them only show people posts from accounts they opt-in to following, and nothing else.
Or how about you adults all grow up and gain some healthy personal accountability instead of blaming your devices and society for your lack of self control.
For certain technology there should be bans but it is not social media and algorithmic feeds. There may be speedbumps, more user controls and auto classifiying of user type with optional alteration of the feed and type of content, but full bans for things like infinite scroll are disproptional.
Should sexual content be banned on social media? Maybe? Should violent footage be banned? It depends? Should bullying or predatory behavior be banned? I guess so? Or maybe it should it only be discouraged? What kind of social media does there exist? Is it binary or is it a spectrum, and should different rules or guidelines be applied?
Way too many variables. But what is clear is that age (ID) checks for the wide spread internet are completely out of the question. Governments should not have that much control over our social lives.
Face it, technology changes the world. The smartphone with camera did. If you could, would you put that genie back in the bottle? Should all content produced on smartphones be checked and watermarked and pulled through a selection of governments fingerprints to be publishable? Be very careful what you wish for since every new technology comes with hard to imagine second order effects and threats.
Explain to the audience the nature of "personhood" of Meta(Facebook), Alphabet(Google), etm.
Parents aren't hiring thousands of behavioral psychologists to assail the public with weaponized psychology. Parents aren't running mass exploitation via emotional attacks (targeting pregnancy, anorexia, mental illness, depression, etc). Parents never encouraged or helped the genocidalists in the Rohinga genocide.
But.... You blame parents. Standard capitalist response of calling everything a 'personal choice'.
Yep I'm also in favour of legally requiring the default feed on any "social" app to be a chronological feed from people you follow. It's both better for society longer-term and a better experience for the users, just not the shareholders.
> Ban the doomscrolling algorithmic feeds for everyone.
HN itself will get banned under this criteria.
I don't think so. Everyone sees the same feed. It's more like the New York Times homepage than it is Facebook.
The entirety of human knowledge is about defining rules by which we can categorize thing A vs thing B. I think we can determine the difference between Facebook and HN.
I’d celebrate the revival of the ca 2000‘s blogosphere.
It's already banned for everyone who doesn't want to send their ID documents to Persona.
Persona already has the ability to access your ID, or they would otherwise not be able to determine if the ID you sent was genuine.
On the contrary, I think social media bans are poised to accomplish exactly what they're intended to: provide a convenient justification for forced identity verification across all websites.
That's just a means of banning social media for everyone, which is even better than banning it for teens.
No, it's a means of removing anonymity so promoters of ideologically unsound sentiment can be identified.
How so? Do you believe the average person will think twice when TikTok asks them to submit a picture of their ID? No, they'll do it without a second thought so they can go back to mindlessly scrolling through the slop.
The ones who will think twice are exactly the sort of people these laws are intended to punish: the dissenters, the wrong-thinkers, those who must be silenced. Either they choose not to verify and cease to use social media (successfully silenced), or they allow their wrong thoughts to be tied to their identity, such that they can be identified and punished accordingly.
I wouldn't mind having verified accounts _as an alternative_. Not enforced over existing SM.
I'd like to know that when I'm reading a comment, it's written (or at least endorsed) by a human being. Currently that's.. debatable, and it's only going to be more so. Entities with cash and resources can focus on the topics relevant to them and drown the conversation. I'd like to at least know that the idiotic replies I'm getting are real human idiots, and not astroturfing in one shape or another.
They don't care about social media bans, they care about linking users to their government ID.
It's baffling to me that anyone has still not realized that.
Who is "they"?
I care about social media bans.
The people introducing those laws and the people financing them. Meta is the biggest lobbyist in the US for this, why do you think that is?
It is the operating systems vendors who created this scenario by creating single-user walled-garden platforms which abrogate a parents rights and agency over their children’s lives.
I should be able to give my 8 year old a mobile phone for their uses, pair it with my phone, and at any time of day be able to observe their activity on that phone - just as if I were watching what they were up to at the park, or while experimenting with matches in the garden, or riding their bikes on the street for the first time.
But there is a distinct desire by the operating system vendors to serve their true masters - ad agencies - and abrogate responsibilities of the users. “Filesystem, what filesystem?”
The idea of having a parent/child relationship encoded in the functions of the operating system is not in alignment with the idea that the true operators of the platform are faceless corporations, hell bent on harvesting every bit of data from every human being using their platforms.
With one simple trick, operating systems can change this equation entirely: give parents their rights and duties and responsibilities back. Let me see what my 8-year old is doing, in a fair and open and equitable fashion, so that I can - as a parent - fulfill my responsibilities to keep my children safe.
A phone is no less dangerous than a sharp kitchen knife. I’m perfectly fine with my 8 year old learning to use a kitchen knife properly - to gain their own agency over it as a tool - as long as I am able to observe their use of it.
And before anyone tries to make the argument “parents don’t do that, oh my god, you’re violating your child’s right to privacy” - no, that is not what I mean. A child should have privacy and they should learn to have agency over that privacy - but a parent is not absolved of the issue if that child falls of a cliff because of their negligence. Let the OS provide privacy - but let it also provide a means of review by the parents - who are the ones ultimately responsible for the child in the first place.
This needs to be an OS feature. Parents and children should, through the OS, be able to establish a strong, positive relationship with each other over this issue, with agency returned to the family unit.
Otherwise, we are creating totalitarian systems of control and putting them in the hands of people we simply cannot trust. The degradation of agency within the family unit is a function of commercial desire to exploit that lack of agency.
Operating systems, instead of serving ad agency masters, can go a long, long way to provide parents and children the right tools to solve this problem. They do, however, need to stop suckling at the teat of the nameless corporations who see the family unit as a nut that has to be cracked in order to extract the juice.
Android allows parents to monitor and control what apps children use, and for how long, on their devices.
So I block chrome, and require my permission to install any app. They get thirty minutes a day on devices that lack a browser or social media apps. Not even any YouTube.
They can browse the web on PCs that are visible to the whole living room.
That’s all in the right direction. I think there are other things OS vendors can do too - screen sharing and a logged timeline history of events would also be useful for parents.
We have tools to do this already - authentication apps, and so on - but it’s my firm opinion that these need to be built in to the OS. I’m happy to hear Android allows this to an extent already ..
Please contact me or share your contact information, I am working on something exactly like this.
Interesting - for which OS?
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“It failed now please don’t try anymore, see it can’t be done, trust the kidz.”
Someone’s nervous.
lol