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 totally forgotten about.
That's why I think, don't bother trying to regulate social media. Just ban it for under 18s when they're most vulnerable.
I don't relish this solution either. When I was 13, I was on forums making online friends. I loved it. But it was clearly different back then, before smartphones, before content-creators, when the internet was mostly nerds.
(I don't use social media, but I do use YouTube. I was amazed how quickly, after watching one fitness video, it immediately started showing videos of the most ripped, steroid-abusing bodybuilders, and how I could achieve their "amazing" physiques. Then videos started popping up about all types of performance-enhancing drugs. SARMs, trenbolone - it was crazy how quickly it devolved to this)
> It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff
It's not hard. It just upsets vested interests.
Make it illegal to show ads to kids. You don't have to make "kid" identification airtight, because few people of any age want to opt into ads. The ad industry was very upset when the American Psychological Association proposed this back in 2004.[1]
This doesn't raise constitutional issues because ads are considered commerce rather than speech.
Ads have very little to do with the harmful effects on minors of social media use.
And besides, banning ads will not prevent social media from trying to lock minors in, either to already have them when they turn 18, or to benefit from peer network effects to rope in more of the 18+ audience.
Ads have everything to do with because they are the incentives shaping social media.
> will not prevent....
While "first drugs are free" is not unheard of, e.g. "gratis" licenses for schools, I think you vastly overestimate the willingness for long term investment. E.g. if the law says "no ads for under 18", they might stomach the costs for 16, 17, but starting at 13? 5 years of "gratis, adfree"? No change at all? You think so?
But the ability to show ads is the only reason to allow the youth on the apps. Remove the commercial reason for brainwashing kids, and the rest will probably sort itself out (I guess is the logic)
To some degree. But addiction describes a range of behavioral symptoms with a variety of durations and dynamics. The expected return of designing platforms to entertain 17-year-olds will decrease a little, but the expected return of designing a platform to entertain 13-year-olds will decrease a lot. By the time the latter group is monetizeable, they might move to a competitor's platform — just as prescription painkiller addicts have an easy time substituting heroin when they find it's cheaper.
One thing that's particularly convenient for regulators in this case is the tendency of adolescents to deliberately change their behavior as they approach adulthood in order to reinforce a sense of personal growth. 18-year-old me didn't want much to do with games and movies for 13-year-olds.
The problem is what is an Ad? Is the Cryptobro shilling for the coin of the week an Ad? is the Influencer that "casually" is using her brand of Mascara while talking an Ad? Do creators need to have two versions of the same video (one with promotion, one without)? Most ads now are difficult to tell apart from content. Is this review really a review or content length ad?
Another problem is the definition of "ad". Is kid playing with fancy toys is an ad? Is product placement in movie an ad? How and who will determine if this is and ad or not?
> not enough context, maybe
> Probably some corporate compliance drones and underfunded government stooges.
Youtube alone has 720,000 hours of fresh video content per day
Tiktok must have less number of hours but more Videos per day.
Add Instagram, facebook, Twitter and it's impossible for anyone to verify this manually so in the end how is the platform supposed to decide what to show and what not where the "not enough context, maybe" is the most common answer?
> Is product placement in movie an ad?
> yes, clearly
Perhaps, and I'm fine with that. Children's media shouldn't be funded by corporate advertising directed at the children, period. I don't care what kind of sledgehammer that takes to the ad industry, I care about the children's well-being.
Next, let's ban all advertising, is what I'm thinking.
I just realized that banning blatant advertisement may be one of the most effective measures to help slow down the reckless consumption of natural resources
Imagine if people didn't think they needed 27 hilarious t-shirts they'll never wear or wear once, a tool to cut an apple into slices (plus one for all the other fruits and veg), plastic bags for everything they pack for their kids, toys that will go on the pile of other toys, a new phone and car each year, 137 pairs of sneakers, etc.
Not to mention no longer getting ear-and-eye-fucked with billboards, pop-ups, required logins, and product placements in media! Oh man, I would (almost) give up my only kid to have this dream come to fruition!
you had me on your side, but then you came for a tool to cut apples and now you have mortal enemy. i will defend a right to ikea apple cutter with all my might and will soread the word about it as far as possible.
no, really. its a very convenient and often used tool in my home.
Well, let's meet in the middle and say they should make stronger apple cutters (apple core-ers?), with stainless steel or something, that could be passed down for generations, and doesn't shed microplastics in the trash when it breaks :)
I like to play the Pokemon card game with my son. Yes - his interest in that corporate franchise leads us to some spending, but I don't find that excessive for the benefit we get from it, which goes beyond fun, as he learns strategy, focus, pattern application, counting etc. I don't think my son would be better off without that in his life. I also don't find it unreasonable for the corporation to profit of the product they provide.
How does banning advertising, even all advertising, prevent the company from making Pokemon card games? I assume you mean the mobile game, which is very predatory with microtransactions and such (check their recent price increases for shit you can use to win the game). I would be fine with that particular type of system ("freemium", "loot boxes", "pay to win") being banned and eliminated from existence. Pokemon existed long before all of the current bullshit and something similar will be around even without all the ad-driven nonsense.
I have to go to sleep, but I'm militant in my hate for advertising. I would burn the entire idea of advertising to cinders.
As I said earlier, almost all media directed at children aims to create a brand loyalty and will try to convince them to buy more. In this case I'm talking about the actual card game - it's good and features cute pretend animals, thus it makes children want related merchandise.
Moreover, Pokemon was never immune to that. The very first game already introduced the mechanic where you couldn't actually get all the creatures, which was one of the goals. In order to do that, you had to trade with friends that happened to buy a different color version. That's great, because it created engagement and communities around the game, but it's also clearly a marketing ploy.
If you fail to see this in that case, what about The Lego Movie? It's was made to make Lego relevant with the next generation of kids. It's also a good movie. And Lego sets are not bad toys to have.
It's simply not black and white and there's a big difference between Studio Ghibli selling Totoro merch and placing unhealthy snacks at a 5 year old eye level in a checkout aisle.
There is nuance to this, sure, but I’m open to blowing it all up and seeing what emerges. Good thing I’m not the dictatorial ruler of America, I guess.
Even that isn't as clear-cut as it seems. It isn't just the company that you need to include.
Does your company produce ads for the company that produces Proprietary Toy and get money if they sell more products?
Does your company supply batteries for Battery Operated Proprietary Toy?
Does your store sell either Proprietary Toy?
All these other questions are also just "yes." You're looking for nuance where there isn't any. Sponsorship is ads, product placement is ads, giving free product to influencer to review is ads. There are certainly edge cases some of them likely to be thorny but none of the things either of us has mentioned so far are them.
I think there’s absolutely nuance here and pretending “make it illegal for kids to see ads” is a simple or even attainable solution is a bit naive I think.
What about product placement? Nearly every movie in Hollywood from the past 40 years has some level of product placement, so under this new law we’ll either go back and edit it out or slap an R rating on it? How about arena ads or billboards? Special AR headsets for teens which will block ads from sight? It’s a silly hypothetical, of course, but you did just say that it’s a hypothetical without nuance.
I think it’s easier to imagine a world where advertising is outlaws entirely than one where we specifically shield it only for those underage.
I didn't mean to suggest the issues were already solved, only that there's already precedent for defining advertising in law as well as regulating adverts aimed at children.
Take a look at the Fortune 500 list, and you can see exactly why the US has the problems it does. The largest companies correlate to the shortcomings, e.g. oil & gas & cars vs. public transit, or all of the healthcare companies that are in the F50 vs. affordable healthcare.
So... I'm not sure that ads are the center of negative consequences... AND it's not actually true that advertisements aren't considered speech with first ammendment protections in the USA, it is (although it has LESS protections than some other speech, and can be regulated, probably including in this way)...
But on top of all of that... what is an "ad"? Is it an "influencer" who is getting paid to promote a product but doesn't actually disclose that? Which already violates FTC regulations, and we aren't even managing to enforce the regulations we've already got, cause this is pervasive.
Not only can you tie all of your speech to a government-issued ID, you can do it for the low price of $160 and a piece of ID that forty-percent of Americans will have no other use for!
How's about we start testing for maturity, and despite a person being 45 years of age, their maturity tests to be 12 years of age, so no social media for them. That would actually be significantly better for everyone involved. But who can trust anyone with a "maturity test" and then who can be trusted to administer said test honestly? Perhaps our entire society is immature and nobody deserves social media?
This is, in my opinion, a serious issue facing the human race today: we have a material number of flat out immature adults, and some of those immature idiots (looking at you Elon, and you Murdock, and many more) are far too powerful for their childish insatiable minds.
Ah, the subtle aspect you're missing: it is the corporations that created and promote the environment in which the kids abuse one another. It's similar to creating a large park, and then not policing the situation when bullies take over the park, and probably also accepting payments of some kind from the bullies for their extraordinary access to the corporation's "park for people and kids".
But then the bullies park will let you kid in for free and then charge an adult fee for you to retrieve them or supervise them. They still make money either way, so the problem will still exist - an attractive park built for kids which disregards safety.
The court upheld the City of Austin on prohibiting off-premises digital signs, even if some of what they displayed was non-commercial. So that's not a problem.
"par for the course 1A stuff" suggests that advertisements actually ARE first ammendment protected in the USA. Because... they are. Original commenter suggested they were not even considered "speech" and were not, which is not accurate description of the law.
(In fact, though, advertisements are not treated exactly the same way as other kinds of speech, say, political speech. The bar is different, and more regulation of advertisements is allowed than, say, political speech. Who knows if the current supreme court and other courts will change that though, they are changing a lot, often in favor of protections for commerce).
There's way too much gray area here for an effective law to ever be defined.
How do you define what is considered an ad here? How is age verified online? What if I have Hulu on TV from my account while my kids is in the room? Are other forms of ads banned as well, like cable TV commercials or billboards? Cereal boxes only use cartoon mascots to advertise to children...so also illegal?
> That's why I think, don't bother trying to regulate social media. Just ban it for under 18s when they're most vulnerable.
> I don't relish this solution either. When I was 13, I was on forums making online friends. I loved it. But it was clearly different back then, before smartphones, before content-creators, when the internet was mostly nerds.
The main difference between forums like that (which still exist) and social media is monetization, which leads to optimizing for "engagement" and incentivizing addictive behavior.
So IMO the solution would be to ban corporate/for-profit social media.
That's not the only difference. Social media has a strong effect on the way kids talk to each other, treat each other, and most importantly: Bully each other. It's a vector for allowing petty childhood dramas go viral in dangerous ways that cause serious mental health issues up to and including suicide.
Advertising to kids is obviously a big part of the problem. But it's not the ONLY problem with social media – it's just one piece of a much bigger puzzle.
I don't think you'd even have to ban for-profits. If someone wants to run a niche forum and try to make a small business around it there's nothing wrong with that.
https://diysolarforum.com comes to mind, Will runs a related informational site and YouTube channel. I don't know if he technically made a business for it but he could have, and if it continued to grow there could be good reason to hire a few employees.
I think the real difference between social media and forums is the algorithmic feed. We could likely codify a ban on algorithmic feeds of user generated content. That would go a long way and would be much easier to spell out in a law than a targeted ban on advertising, social media use by age, or certain types of business models.
The main goal of raising children, after keeping them alive, is teaching them the skills they need to survive and (hopefully) thrive in their world. These skills have changed over time and vary based on environment, society.
Today, that means teaching kids how to cope with social media. It is in their world. It’s not going away. As a parent, I can understand the temptation to just want to ban it. I wish I could ban a lot of things I would rather my kids not have to deal with. But parenting just doesn’t work like that. They need to learn to deal with it, and it’s my job to try my best to help them do that.
Today that means teaching them how to cope with [nicotine | gambling | hand guns | fentanyl]. It is in their world. It is not going away. As a parent, I can understand the temptation to just want to ban it. I wish I could ban a lot of things I would rather my kids not have to deal with. But parenting just doesn’t work like that. They need to learn to deal with it, and it’s my job to try my best to help them do that.
Actually, we protect children from lots of things that they will need to confront as adults. My baby will need to learn how to safely navigate stairs eventually, but for now, the staircase is gated so she doesn't hurt herself before she's ready.
And as this comment explains[1], social media is hurting our children in real and profound ways.
> Today that means teaching them how to cope with [nicotine | gambling | hand guns | fentanyl]. It is in their world. It is not going away. As a parent, I can understand the temptation to just want to ban it. I wish I could ban a lot of things I would rather my kids not have to deal with. But parenting just doesn’t work like that. They need to learn to deal with it, and it’s my job to try my best to help them do that.
Well yes. Once your child turns 21, they’ll have legal access to all of these things. A parent is still obligated to educate their children to make good choices, regardless of what the legal age is.
> Actually, we protect children from lots of things that they will need to confront as adults. My baby will need to learn how to safely navigate stairs eventually, but for now, the staircase is gated so she doesn't hurt herself before she's ready.
Fortunately, the government does not ban the usage of stairs by minors in an attempt to “protect the children”.
Banning it is a way of teaching them how to deal with it.
Snakes are part of the world, but you teach your kids that you don't let snakes into your house because they are toxic. You can apply the same analogy to social media.
You make social media inaccessible to your kids until they have developed into a confident young adult at which point they will have acquired the mental strength to navigate through the toxicity of social media themselves with a strong self identity which will make them immune to a lot of the online grift and attempts to feed off their insecurities.
That doesn't require a ban, it requires parents to be actively involved in their children's lives and to make the decision for how they want to raise their own kids.
Let's make Heroin, prostitution and assault rifles legal to under age kids, because after all if you are a good parent then you can be sure that your child will certainly not get access to those things via their friends or other avenues. Why have rules, laws or bans (just a form of law) for anything anywhere. All evil things in this world are just a matter of parenting. Gosh, you're so fecking clever how come nobody else ever was able to enlighten us before. We could have zero issues in the world this way.
Indeed, social interaction is, generally, addictive. But if you ban the kids from HN they aren't apt to give up social interaction cold turkey, they'll go interact with the neighbours instead to get their fix.
Is that actually a win? Emotionally, I can see why some hang onto the idea of talking face to face just like in the good old days, but at the same time you are trading for greatly reduced access to the world's most interesting people. The whole reason we're here and not talking to our neighbours is because we can seek out people of significance, not just who happens to move in next door.
I don't think HN falls into the category of social media in the sense that it is debated by lawmakers at the moment. Not every online community is social media just like not every shopping site that has girls posing in tight bikinis (Victoria Secret, Nike, etc.) is an adult site.
If HN isn't social media, I'm not sure what is. Perhaps you are referring to plain old media where there is no meaningful social interaction, rather one-way consumption of produced content?
Indeed, lawmakers do seem concerned about new entrants to the media space, like producers on TikTok, no doubt because they struggle to exert the same kind of control over the content like they used to be able to when there were only a small handful of regulated media companies. That's well beyond the topic of social media taking place here, though.
In fact, I see a considerable difference. Instagram and TikTok, have no meaningful social component. It's just content producers producing content for consumption by consumers. They are effectively cable TV providers, only deviating from traditional cable TV in that there is no hard limit on the number of channels.
HN is social media. Active, two way conversation which emulates going outside to talk to your neighbour, except with people around the globe, is what attracts people here. The users here aren't here just to watch TV like they are on Instagram and TikTok.
Social interaction is addictive in the way food is addictive. A lot of the draw of social media/games/drugs is an attempt to fill the hole left by a lack of social interaction. Indeed, take away social media and people will hang out more often. I would argue that's exactly what we want as a society. Less social interaction mediated by big corporations is a win.
Banning multi-billion dollar companies in a society dealing with regulatory capture, or help teach kids to deal with the world around them. One sure seems more easily attained than the other.
100% agree. Social media is as addictive as drugs but even more damaging with life long effects on that person.
A big part of going through teenage years is the development of one's own personality and finding YOUR OWN identity. Figuring out who you are and who you want to be, building real relationships with real people to learn about social contracts, trust, bonds, friendships, mistakes, and most importantly it is a key part of building a healthy amount of confidence and self-love which are important character traits that everyone should establish to some level in order to weather through tough times in life later on.
Social media makes all of the above impossible. Even worse, it makes this important development phase very toxic. It teaches teenagers and children the opposite of friendships, the algorithm is constantly looking to outrage children and to rattle their feelings in order to drive engagement. The algorithm is tuned to feed into young people's insecurities in order to drive clicks on ads and increase their ad revenue. This is why so many kids suffer from mental health issues, are immensely under confident, unhappy, feel alone and worthless.
It's shameful that policy makers are not acting fast enough. There is already a huge generation of damaged children who just turned or are turning into adults now and we already see the effects of that.
About twice as many people die from drug overdoses as from suicide in the US. Not all of those ODs are heroin, but surely not all suicides are caused by social media.
Install a userscripts extension in your browser and with that install a userscript such as Focused YouTube [1]. I did and never looked back! I want nothing to do with TikTok or YouTube shorts. I watch long-form videos on science, math, and engineering topics for the most part.
> YouTube needs an option to disable shorts. It’s just not healthy.
I have disabled them along with suggestions with a browser extension, but the temp station is always there to enable again even briefly. Shorts are particularly addictive and must play hell with our dopamine receptors.
> 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.
Ok. Now, how do we counter this very same argument against tv and video games?
Children don't really watch TV (anecdotally). They watch YouTube, which is just as bad.
The key difference between television and video games of yore is the feedback loop. TV and video games were one shot deployed and then ratings were gathered after, averaging across the entire audience.
Now YT and video games don't have end states - same thing as social media. While you often won't have individual-centric recommendation algorithms in a video game, you have dark patterns and gambling mechanics in all the most popular games which is just as bad.
The argument really isn't that we need to ban children from social media, we need to guard their dopaminergic regulation the way we guard their physical and mental health... oh wait.
Ultimately its the responsibility of the parent (at least in the US). Parents who are aware of the pitfalls of high-dopamine-low-effort activities, poor diet, and low physical activity are going to guard against these things. The ones who don't will likely suffer later in life.
I literally don't understand how anyone can say that - there are more games of any genre than ever before. Yes if you only play CoD and nothing else it's all monetised and algorithm driven to hell. But for every CoD there are literally thousands of games that tell incredible and beautifully crafted stories. Thousands more where the focus is on gameplay. Endless remakes and reimaginings of older games with all their good and bad parts. Video games aren't just the top 3 best selling titles and it's weird to judge the whole industry that way. It's like saying that all movies are the same nowadays because Marvel films have turned into a more-of-the-same gloop.
Now go to Steamcharts, find first game that isn't a game-as-a-service and calculate ratio of its hours played in relation to everything above it. Then do that for the second and third - see if the ratio grows or shrinks further.
The fact that non-predatory games do exist is hardly relevant if what people are actually playing most of the time are indeed endless, dark pattern ridden grinds if not outright no-win casinos of which mobile gaming consists almost exclusively.
Whole industry needn't be banned, but a lot of its practices absolutely have to be at least regulated.
You are arguing a strawman. GP did not claim that all games were bad, but that the situation is as bad as with social media. That there are many high value games is irrelevant if what gets the most play time are the skinner boxes with psychologist on staff whose job it is to make the game as addicting as possible so that people end up spending more on "micro" transactions.
They're more boring than ever. Games people tend to be most addicted to appear to be glorified network social platforms, i.e. MMORPGs/LoL and the massive online communities extending them.
> and the massive online communities extending them.
As I said, the most addicting draw is the social component surrounding the games. The co-operative/team-based format means there's a baseline level of coordination in the background.
Something can be said about competition itself, but games that are by design 1-vs-1 are nowhere near as popular. As goes for actual sports.
> While you often won't have individual-centric recommendation algorithms in a video game, you have dark patterns and gambling mechanics in all the most popular games which is just as bad.
Matchmaking in multi-player games and level scaling in single-player games are somewhat like an individual-centric recommendation algorithm providing you with a constant stream of games that are just hard enough to be engaging and keep you hooked, or at least trying to.
I would say that the main difference is that most modern social media apps use adaptive learning algorithms to curate an intentionally addictive feed. Traditional TV is not personally adaptive and video games with lootboxes have a comparable dopamine impact and have been seeing (justifiable) regulation.
We don't. Ban the business model, not the speech. Advertiser-supported television was basically proto-proto-proto-Tiktok. The desire to create an audience that passively consumes out of habit was always there; it was just less optimised. The TV and video games that wouldn't survive having advertiser-driven or quasi-gambling business models taken away aren't worth saving.
That argument has always been there. Growing up my parents and most of my friends parents never let their kids just go 24/7 playing games and watching tv. We all go forced outside and had limits on exposure. Nowadays, it's just acceptable to sit your toddler down on an ipad all day long and let them do whatever they want.
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 shorts specifically. I have to spend time clicking animal videos to steer that to something less obnoxious.
Whenever I visit YouTube or Reddit on a new browser where I haven't logged in it's like I'm seeing an entirely different site it's so jarring. Instead of seeing a page off mostly educational and technical content they're filled with click bait. I'm embarrassed to even tell others I use them for fear they don't understand the extent to which the experiences can be curated.
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.
I'm not familiar with how cookies work these days, but could you build up your base profile, then back up the cookie and overwrite with it periodically to maintain a certain balance?
Computer games are also addictive. Back in my days soccer and basketball were addictive as well. I vividly remember my grandpa despising my uncle for having obsession with playing soccer and not spending more time on his homework.
It seems like a pattern, grown ups just don’t like the way youngsters are spending their time.
Maybe it’s totally normal in your teens to just spend aimlessly time in seemingly useless things ?
I spent my youth with my nose buried in books, and for a couple years it had become a problem. My parents would force me to stop reading books and spend some time talking to them, looking outside, doing anything as a kid. I would read a book at any chance I could get, I'd even sneak them into bed and use a dim flashlight to read, anything to get me out of where I was at that time. At the time I hated my parents and everything they did. In hindsight I was in a complicated phase of my life (for reasons besides this post) and I needed the kick to go out and get out of my own head. Should we ban books so kids can't get addicted? Parenting is hard.
With a book at least a parent knows what their child is consuming. I wouldn't mind if my child was consuming books (as long he stayed healthy with activity and social connection).
With the firehose of social media its whatever the providers algorithm decides it wants the user to consume.
My 11 year old son is limited to 30 mins of YouTube per day, 15 mins of Snapchat. TikTok is banned. Overall phone usage is limited to 3 hours per day, and PS5 is the same. And it's still not enough for him.
And yes, he uses these in conflict with the provider terms.
Without any exposure he lacks any commonality with his peers (who, as far as I can tell, have unfettered access to devices, apps and video games) however he will forego food, water, bathroom, hygiene if not forcibly limited.
And he agrees with statements like "I just can't stop myself" and "I feel like I've got to have it" and "I don't know what to do unless I have it". Which makes me very sad. When he goes to play with friends, he makes a bee line for those same devices and apps that he's limited from accessing at home.
He cannot self-limit his consumption and billion dollar companies are using his mind as a disposable fuel to make money for no better purpose than profit. I honestly don't know how the folk at those firms live with themselves (other than luxuriously).
I honestly wish these platforms did not exist at all, for the arguments they cause.
It's not only that. Books are not ads. There can be bad books filled with stupid ideas and garbage stories but the purpose of literature is not to advertise something.
Modern social media is just advertisement in disguise of entertainment. I am an adult, hopefully a rational one, and my buying habits (and desires!) have been heavily influenced by the social media, I can only imagine what it does to children's minds.
The social aspect of social media, ironically, is often barely present. Services like Youtube are parasocial at best.
Social media is correlated with many negative issues. Like depression, suicide, etc. meanwhile playing sports is correlated with many positive outcomes.
It’ll take some time to prove causation. But I think we have enough evidence to know that curtailing social media will improve lives.
Cue the usual correlation and causation caveat. Also, playing sports is not all sunshine and roses. If you're an overweight kid, which is even more common these days, it's hard and can cause feelings of shame and inadequacy.
Soccer and basketball exist today. I don’t think you’ll find many parents who struggle with their kids’ habits with them relative to current video games like roblox. (Super Mario Kart doesn’t have the same addictive and predatory aspects)
Find a random parent and you’ll see for yourself. It’s not that parents are frustrated that their kids are playing too many video games. It’s that they are concerned their kids are becoming addicted before they turn 10.
Kids are as different from each other as adults can be, so there's not really a one size fits all solution. That said, we've found that setting limits works fine. At least for the ages under 10.
There's a limit in duration and time they can use a screen, both of which are easy to keep taps on. It's 5-10 minutes before leaving for school, if and only if they are all ready to leave. It encourages them to be done quicker and it's lost time anyway. The other block is while we're cooking. That started out as a way to keep overactive little kids busy and out of the kitchen, because the parent is busy and it's dangerous to be in the kitchen when cooking.
We also have limits on what they can do on the screen. They need to spend a minimum time on some educational apps, before they are free to do whatever the machine allows. They are on Android tablets restricted by Google Family Link, but things like YouTube (YT Kids for the youngest) are still available.
I feel that they do need some freedom in tech land to follow their curiosities. Even so, it's very limited because they als use it to just veg out. But one kid basically learned to count and spell in English from BBC videos, before they could do so in their native language. There is some advantage to just letting them go.
The time limits turned out to be pretty good motivators to learn to tell the time too. They are now pretty good at keeping taps on the time themselves.
We have changed the limits a bit over time. Mostly stretching them to new areas of interest. And kids are different, so what worked for the eldest sometimes didn't work for the youngest. They do like their tablets a bit more than I'd like, but I'm not worried about addiction. They're honestly using it far less than I watched TV in the age of cathode-ray tubes.
> I feel that they do need some freedom in tech land to follow their curiosities
I wish that was how it was used, however my own experience (and that of parents I speak to) is that the firehose is determined by the algorithm, not the individual which subsequently drives the habits and interests.
For example, my son will want to look up how to do something in Minecraft. Ace, he's using the resources available to him to research and learn how to do something.
Then he's effectively spammed with highly addictive content (relating to Minecraft), with sound effects, music, editing visual effects and voice over from some "creator" whose only goal is to monetise.
Now he sits watching endless (if I don't stop him) clips, and if I ask him what he's watched, he doesn't remember (and he's also highly irritated that I've stopped him consuming).
This stuff is, at least, just as addictive to a young mind as pleasure drugs, and worse, it's available without any barriers and pushed towards the consumer at great speed and volume.
At least with TV, someone somewhere made a decision about what to air. With the current technology, anyone chooses what they publish and the algorithm chooses what you'll consume (based on what will increase your addiction).
It honestly sounds like you're circling around the idea that the internet just isn't a good place for children (or adults for that matter). Wouldn't an attempt to ban a specific problem of the internet just be dodging the real problem?
If the internet as we've made it over the last 20 years is a breeding ground for addictive content and advertising, why not just stop using it? If we're going to ban anything because of this problem it should be situations that effectively force us to use the internet or be left behind.
Kids shouldn't have to be online for school. Adults shouldn't have to be online to get a job. Banning those kinds of situations would at least leave the door open for individuals to decide if using the internet regularly is really worth it to them.
The time limits take pretty good care of that, here. I really don't mind them watching braindead stuff for a limited time. Especially so if that's the price for watching something interesting too.
It's also slightly curated, with age limits on videos provided by YouTube, but I mostly care about that to weed out shock videos and extreme violence.
YT Kids (the app at least) has a setting where only videos and channels are allowed that are whitelisted by the parent. We used to limit it to stuff from BBC Cbeebies, Numberblocks & Alphablocks, Sesame Street, Disney, and similar stuff in their own language and in English.
I think nowadays we just limit it to the age restrictions (<=4, 5-8, 9-12), so they don't see stuff that gives them nightmares. Everything else can be taken care of with the time limit.
I used to be concerned about my kid's video game use a bit, though more Fortnite and Rocket League than Roblox, as we blocked the latter due to the abundance of user-created content and chatting with strangers (because why on earth would you have your 12 year old on the Internet with strangers? We blocked chat other than "quickchats" in the others.). Then he hit high school, and at this point, I miss the days where that was his computer use I was concerned with.
To be fair though, playing sports had a lot to do with breaking the video game cycle -- when you have 12 hour days between school and 2 sports teams, suddenly worrying about your "dailies" and other hooks these games have just stops being an option.
I didn't know any kids who were addicted to soccer in the sense of spending 15+ hours 365 days per year playing soccer. It's just not feasible physically.
I am Southern European by the way and I played more soccer than most kids. Even so, it wasn't possible for me to take soccer out of my pocket when I went to the toilet or when I was in bed and should be sleeping or when I was in class.
Football was practically the only sport we could play (anything can be a ball if it can be kicked) but you can only play at recess and after school outside. And most of the time is hanging out with kids learning social norms (you lose sometimes, somebody may be better than you, it is mostly a team effort, rules are for a reason,…). I’m glad I got to spend my childhood offline.
Being addicted to playing computer games and using social media are not the same as being obsessed with playing sports and exercising.
One has tangible benefits to your health, social life, boosts your confidence, gets you out in the fresh air and sun, and forms healthy lifestyle habits.
The other has you sitting staring at a screen for (sometimes as many as 10) hours
per day, pretending to be an Italian plumber, or giving themselves depression from looking at fake lives on Instagram.
This is quantifiably not the same thing. If an entire generation was stressed out and killing themselves over Soccer we’d surely be doing something about it.
Just like the popular saying, "it's the economy, stupid!", when it comes to kids and social media we might as well say "it's the parents, stupid!"
> Like so many parents these days, my wife and I have ceded
So the parents are to blame here. "Ceded" to what exactly? To your kids unsupervised wishes? Most of the inadequate and harmful use of these addictive social networks is done at home, so, it's your jurisdiction, not the government's. Teach your kid how to use tech early on. Even if imperfect, put digital guard-rails and time limits and be on top of it at all times with discernment, commentary and openness.
> L.G.B.T.Q. child living in a household with disapproving parents might have fewer resources to find community and support because their parents would be able to look into their messages
Good argument. But, again, the disapproving parents are to blame here, not the kids. Educate the parents while giving children more channels and more people to talk to, so they don't need to go into dark digital alleys seeking relief.
You can blame polarization, the Chinese (TikTok), advertising, the Government or free-speech, but raising kids is a full-time job parents, not Uncle Sam, are supposed to do.
I'm learning it the hard way -- it's not easy being a parent of two, but the rewards are good when you are loving, persistent and listen to their needs. Trust me, if you put in the time and effort, your kids will beat addictive algorithms any time of day.
Show me a reliable way to set a time limit on social media, and I’ll concede the point.
You can set a time limit on particular paths to reach social media, but as I saw with trying to block youtube, it is effectively impossible without blocking it at router level for the whole household. Kids are so creative, and nothing is more fun than subverting digital locks.
I do agree to the point that talking and listening to your kid is key. Kids that don’t feel comfortable showing vulnerability to their parents are at risk in the digital world.
I've had no trouble just controlling the terminals. The tablets and laptop that can be used by them are stored in shared spaces. If they want to access them, they'll have to get past us.
But I can see that get more difficult when they need to have both more access and more privacy. I hope to have taught them enough by then that tripping up won't be a big issue. It's not far into the future, but I think they'll be fine.
I agree, but I also wonder how feasible that is for a lot of parents.
The older I get, the more astounded I am at the fact that nobody in my family has social media brain rot. Or political brainworms. My grandparent's generation is mostly dead, sadly, but there are 3 living generations ranging in age from 0 to 78 and dozens of people and we're all fine. This is regardless of educational level (ranging from HS dropouts to MDs), political affiliation (everything from center Dem to anarchists, socialists, and even some Christian conservatism for spice), or religion. If I had to pinpoint the difference, it's that we were all raised by and surrounded by adults that understood the interaction between technology and daily life. But most people becoming parents don't have that, the Internet just crashed into their life and upended a lot of what they thought they knew without leaving anything in its place.
I also question that it's solely based on the parents because the older I get (I'm in my mid 30s), the more I think access to non-parental adults with this ability is the key to our relative stability, particularly tech-knowledgable adults that openly disagree with each other. Kids do stupid shit, especially when they're adolescents. They will disobey their parents/ignore their advice because it's part of growing up and figuring out their own values and boundaries, but when an entire group of adults who don't agree on politics, religion, or worldview all agree that something is a bad idea, then that idea becomes a cultural taboo. I don't think my paternal cousins and I have ever voted for the same things and I'm the weirdo gay heretic socialist to their traditional Catholic, but both I and my cousins are going to agree on the important of things like basic op-sec and when to tell people what online. So even if their kids rebel hard, the rebellious adults are going to reaffirm 'don't put your hand on the stove/do things like delete metadata from photos'.
I don't know if there's enough cultural knowledge communicated to the parents for them to parent effectively even though I agree that's their job.
My idealistic, engineer self tells me that the State should reward parents that go through parenting training, workshops and "performance" reviews.
This is something that is normally done for social-serviced families already, but too late, when they are deep in the road to failure and despair. Such wide-spread public parenting-aid would be expensive, have flaws, generate political push-backs and there are not enough studies on effectiveness yet. OTOH, social/public financial support for families, including money stipends, tax breaks and plenty of paid vacation days help reduce parenting stress, which in turn tend to have a positive effect with kids at home -- something some countries are significantly better at than others.
The importance of parenting is underestimated in society.
I would love to see more such efforts, but I don't know if Americans could do that at this point. The question of who could make such a curriculum would immediately be hijacked by political and other interests. Our government doesn't (broadly speaking) have the knowledge necessary. The most powerful group that does have that knowledge is Big Tech itself, and handing people like Zuckerberg the ability to choose how to teach the parents just seems like a bad idea.
If you go back far enough. I think in part we see forums through rose-tinted glasses. Moderation was looser than people are accustomed to now, and I've seen several taken over by conspiracy nuts. Some still make friends online almost the exact same way, using discord or whatever. I've been a part of communities, but never made "friends" online. The idea is a farce to me.
I was an "always-online" teenager. That was a mistake, but I didn't know then, Neither did parents. Just as no one knew that frequently watching pornography could lead to problems. Internet access and culture led to a brave new world.
You can pin certain issues more specifically to modern social media (e.g. endless scroll), but it's deeper than that. Most of what is identified as addicting content is an extension of what existed before, but with a far larger pool people accessing it.
At any rate - banning is redundant. Parents are apparently receptive to to the idea that it could pose a problem, to a neurotic level for some. This is a new idea. Let them do their jobs.
The idea of making "friends" on the internet, on forums, Facebook, or Discord, has always been ludicrous.
Unless you reach a stage where you meet up in real life and share human experiences, you're basically just talking with the equivalent of an AI chatbot.
I owe my career to friends made online. Online friends are no substitute for in-person interaction but it's perfectly possible to have a meaningful relationship with a person over the internet.
There's a semantic problem, because we have no other word for it. There's certainly some value to what people deem online friendship, by virtue that they experience it, but that does not mean it's a replacement or substitute for in-person friendship and interaction. Even that argument can get a strong reaction sometimes which I suspect is a defense-mechanism.
As noted by another poster[1]: how are you going to enforce it?
The idea of banning people from seeking things they want to do to themselves is incredibly stupid with the "War on Drugs" and it's equally stupid here with all the same consequences: a sudden explosion of either unregulated social media alternatives (back in the day Napster had a chat function even), or suspiciously immature "18 year olds" on Facebook and Tiktok.
Best way to enforce it is to do what the Fed's doing currently: crash the economy, dry up the advertising dollars, and make the advertising platforms wither on the vine.
Let's just hope they don't take too many banks down with 'em in the process.
Totally, that's why I figured it's easier to just ban it for under 18s, then leave it alone for over 18s. I'm an adult - I don't want to be told what I can and can't see.
(Obviously, "banning it" is not so clear-cut. Are you going to force Instagram to require that everyone uploads an ID to verify their age?)
> Totally, that's why I figured it's easier to just ban it for under 18s, then leave it alone for over 18s.
There is no such thing as "leave it alone for over 18s".
If you institute strict age requirements, those have to be enforced for every user account. So yes, that means every site you use would require you to go through something like a KYC process.
Privacy on the internet would be gone. You can't enforce age restrictions if you allow users to remain private.
Not sure how viable this is in the US due to reasons but a centralized auth service could in theory not provide any PII back to the service requesting an age verification, and the auth provider wouldn't necessarily have to be get data back from the service except for the first time a user registers an account.
Much of the EU uses centralized auth services for critical services like banking, taxes, applying for schools, applying for loans. It's pretty great honestly. There are also APIs for integrating into these where the user chooses what pii they want to share with the service.
I know it's a controversial topic but the argument that age verification and auth services must remove privacy and inevitably leads to mass surveillance is a false narrative which I find kind of funny as if anybody should know these technical realities it's users on hn.
To me, it seems the only way to enforce this is to invoke some sort of KYC mandate for social media sites. Obviously, in practice this would only target legitimate companies. So yeah, I think you would simply need to require that people verify their accounts in the same manner that say a Cryptocurrency exchange verifies a person. In such a universe Elon Musk might finally gets all his users to buy a blue mark.
Such regulations would drive me to use only foreign-owned shady companies who do not care about US law. I'd be sure to spread the word to my fellow citizens.
People love to say that the war on drugs didn't work, but I for one haven't consumed illegal drugs even though I have been curious at times. Since I haven't spent time with people who regularly break the law I have not been introduced to any element where I could have had access to illegal drugs. So war on drugs has worked at least on me and I live under to illusion that I am somehow unique.
Yes. Of course addicts will addict. If we ban social medias tomorrow some people will still use them or build new ones, but putting any kind of barrier for entry does have an effect. This is why we complain when something is opt-out instead of opt-in since people do the default thing and if default thing is that social medias are illegal then that will deter many if not even most people from using them.
I reiterate my first question: how are you going to enforce it?
Because the war on drugs has a very specific enforcement mechanism: people who take drugs are given criminal records, locked up in prison, and have their future opportunities permanently curtailed.
Is this your plan for an under-18 accessing social media? Do you think a policy of "we're going to help teens with their mental health" is going to accomplish that goal by specifically and overtly destroying it?
Require by law that everyone on social media authenticates their age (maybe also their names, this would be good way to get rid of bots as well). This can be done with government ID or with via your bank or even with requiring social security number when creating an account. Or government can just make a new digital ID system that you have to go and register at whatever place is suitable for this and you can use that ID for anything and everything you need.
And if that doesn't seem to work just fine social media companies say a million dollars per minor per day that minor uses the service. You see enforcement go up fast AF.
That's a really good point. And a case in point - I remember when I was 12, joining forums, there was always a prompt asking me if I was over the age of 13. Obviously I clicked yes and registered anyway!
But part of the danger is the ubiquity of it I think. Every teenager has social media, so there's this massive peer-pressure. If you don't have it, you get picked on. I wonder if banning it would reduce the numbers at least enough to reduce this effect.
I'm definitely not saying this is some silver bullet... But I think we have to do something, and maybe this is a reasonable starting point.
It's interesting how all the overblown controversy around violent video games decades ago can now actually be applied to social media in its current state. It was like some of the pundits were correct in forecasting the potential behavioral motivators from massively popular media, but were incorrect in the degree of harm. Video games with blood and gore were not able to cause upticks in violence, but being exposed to millions of people in one network can cause kids to show up with bruises to school.
I think it's the human factor. People aren't going to empathize with an avatar or 3D model the same way they do with a real person filming themselves with a smartphone. It makes me think that the real bar for extreme content in video games is having a politically opinionated theme, not just subtext (which no AAA studio would ever risk producing) with sufficient realism.
I think social media are too useful to ban, even to children.
And while it is not clear how we are going to regulate them, or more generally deal with the negative effects, it is something we must figure out, a blanket ban is not the solution. You have to realize that even sites like Stack Overflow can be considered social media.
They certainly have addiction potential, maybe not dissimilar to drugs, but guess what, even some hard drugs like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine are not banned, they are regulated, because they have some use in medicine. Sugar is addictive too, and as of now, a serious health problem, but no one talks about banning sugar of course, instead calling for regulation.
> I don't relish this solution either. When I was 13, I was on forums making online friends. I loved it. But it was clearly different back then, before smartphones, before content-creators, when the internet was mostly nerds.
If I were to ban social media for my children, I would ban specific sites like Facebook, Instagram, etc. I wouldn't ban niche forums.
It does seem like a reasonable solution. A rewind back to the age when it had been just the newsgroups. Without +1 algorithms that result in the algorithm making a choice what users see and not the opposite.
Certainly a better solution, if compared to forcing everyone to show their Real Id, just to verify their age to access the Internet.
With HN and other sites with a non-personalized feed, at least what you see is the same as what everyone else sees. And if there's voting, which isn't perfect, it's based on community feedback.
Well, you can go ahead and independently verify something like that pretty easily. Kind of weird to veer towards lies and malice at the drop of a hat here
Out of interest, what's your definition of social media? Because mine is a site / app whose value is derived from its users, where users are all of (roughly) equal importance. Which puts forums / reddit / hacker news into that category.
You can quibble about definitions, but I'd say it's got a lot to do with being personalized. So anything where you need to know something about the viewer in order to optimise what to show each individual. That can be for anything from the content itself to the advertisements, if you need to know something about who is watching, it's what we currently think of as social media.
FB, Instagram, TikTok, but also Google search, and every ad supported site.
Drinking causes severe societal ills and is unhealthy in any amount. Everyone should indeed stop drinking. We should tax alcohol until it is unaffordable for the vast majority.
The world would be better off without widespread use of alcohol. It's not even a question, everything else similar, a society that chooses not to drink alcohol would have a social, economical, and psychological edge over one which does. Individuals are better off if they don't drink, it's just not good.
I wouldn't advocate for a ban on alcohol, it's much too ingrained in culture and too easy to make, but I hope that society some day gets to the point that it rejects it, much like we reject huffing shoe polish.
I’d ban photos, pictures, video and sound. Leave text only. Greatly reduces deepfake potential, manipulation options by state actors, dopamine hits from looking at pretty cat pictures too.
I don’t want to say IRC was fine but it was better than Instagram.
Because we live in a society (that mostly) allows adults to make choices for themselves. Just because a few adults can't handle themselves doesn't mean that all adults should be punished for it. You can say the same thing about gambling, smoking, drinking, eating sweets etc.
Also, the effects on undeveloped brains are far greater. Our job is to teach kids and raise them. Not be their friends and just let them do whatever adults do.
> if the dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs
I highly doubt the implied semantics of this statement. We don't know everything there is to know about "dopaminergic effects". The pharmacology of smoking weed is probably very different than from say, scrolling through memes.
Pharmacology, yes. But we can compare social media and other addictions in terms of social harm, health harm, psychological and emotional harm, withdrawal symptoms, financial consequences, impairment to decision-making, procrastination and distraction impacting attainability of personal goal, prerogatives and decreasing motivation, relationship harm (it is difficult to form relationships with those "terminally online" for example), cognitive/executive function impairments, self-esteem harm, sleep hygiene harm, personal hygiene harm (difficult topic for some addicted people to talk about but in my opinion, it is related to internet addiction as much as alcohol or drug addictions), harm on enjoyment of life, and many others.
The effects of dopamine bombing yourself with on line content are not very dissimilar to effects of drugs. I would argue they are more similar than dissimilar.
In my experience you don't become terminally online unless there's something else going on in your life. People talking about the ills of social media seem to forget that children nowadays are: institutionalized for 8 hours of their day, raised on diets of processed garbage, etc. Like, a well adjusted kid isn't going to treat social media as more important than their friends unless they think they can make a living from it or have no friends.
I think "dopamine bombing" is not what it sounds. See discussions on dopamine fasting for what I mean. The relationship between the things you do and dopamine are complex, probably more complex than the relationship of what you physically consume and dopamine.
> In my experience you don't become terminally online unless there's something else going on in your life
That's true, but it's also true for other addictions.
> a well adjusted kid isn't going to treat social media as more important than their friends unless they think they can make a living from it or have no friends.
Probably mostly true, but also a lot of friendships are moving online.
> I think "dopamine bombing" is not what it sounds
Can you elaborate? I think it sounds like abusing the dopamine hits you get when scrolling through SM, for example.
It implies a direct connection with neurochemistry that's much less direct than drugs (and even moreso diet), which can directly stimulate the release of dopamine. For example if I'm feeling tired of scrolling through memes, I can just put my phone away. I can't stop caffeine from stimulating my neurons, or ignore a macronutrient deficiency in my body.
It might be that this is an unimportant distinction in the end, but I'm not sure we know.
Quite many people can't just put their phone away, even when they try to concentrate on something else. The behaviour seems to be very similar to other addictions.
The dragnet spying that forms the core of social networks' business model ought simply be illegal. It's disgusting and tremendously dangerous. That'd help a lot—by destroying some of the companies, and removing many of their worst incentives.
Also, they shouldn't be able to launder responsibility for editorial choices by saying "an algorithm did it!" and hiding behind laws meant to protect email and IM providers and web hosting companies and ISPs and such.
Social media is unlike drugs in that if you abstain while your peers use you're in some ways worse off. I wonder if there's a narrower ban to be had, either on image usage or especially on filters
Not drinking in social settings will make you worse off by a lot. People feel uneasy and judged if someone refuses to drink alcohol with them, so unless you're very strong-willed, this coerces most people into drinking.
> People feel uneasy and judged if someone refuses to drink alcohol with them
I always read this on HN but I've never cared, or met any adult that seemed to care, when only a few of us drink beer in a group. Is this a US/Anglosphere thing maybe?
Being teetotal excludes you from a lot of social events, and even somewhat unrelated events. We have hiking/fitness groups that typically end the training session with a round at the pub. Many workplaces go to the pub together after work.
Not engaging with this can set you back socially and professionally, because drinking is hugely ingrained in the British population. Most people drink multiple times per week. The people I work with genuinely struggle with "Dry January" and other such abstention events.
Going along to these events and not drinking gets you interrogated, and it becomes a thing to try to get you to drink / get drunk. It's probably an inferiority complex thing on the side of the people drinking because seeing somebody not drinking makes them feel bad about it (even though they needn't feel that way).
For every one person like you that doesn't care, there's many who really want to investigate it and get to the bottom of it. Telling these people you just don't like drinking isn't the solution they're looking for out of their investigation.
I was a teetotal until I was 25 and I still drink maybe 2x a year. You're right that some people don't really know what to do with that. I've taken to blaming my meds when really I'm just not a big drinker.
That's because you've never been in the reverse situation. Think about not drinking at weddings, your birthday, Christmas, family gatherings in general, milestone celebration at work, and lots of other occasions where people typically drink.
I can assure you someone will ask if you're okay, urge you to drink "at least one", or "just a glass of Champaign, it's a special one".
That may be true of illegal drugs, but if you abstain from alcohol you may well be missing out on some social opportunities, and depending on your profession, that could extend to professional opportunities (though admittedly less now than in decades past). Cigarettes for a long time also had this quality, though that's mostly done.
Missing invites to parties, social gatherings etc.
Even for not having an iphone I suffer from this, and would miss out on tons more if not for Facebook for event invites, Snapchat/Instagram stories, etc.
Everyone in my middle school used social media to know when to submit assignments, class schedules etc. Without social media you're going to be left out.
Sounds like the kind of info you would get from your teacher. I assume the teachers didn't publish it on social media. So why did you need that info from social media?
Addressing center-left, middle-class women (like myself): "Worried about your son being sucked into the incel movement because he watched some video game playthroughs? Concerned that your daughter's depression is being driven by the unrealistic standards of femininity that influencers are pushing into her Instagram feed? Is your kid a zombie after spending more than a few minutes on TikTok? Did your mother become irrationally scared of trans people after she started spending too much time on Facebook? Is your husband getting into stupid arguments with people he doesn't know and doesn't follow on Twitter? Did you miss your kid's school snow-day announcement because you were trying to scroll past all the crazy right-wing conspiracy garbage that keeps coming up on Facebook?"
"Our attention should belong to us, not to advertisers and influencers."
Whoa whoa whoa, you had me until the husband part. You can't just go letting people be WRONG on the Internet without stepping up and doing something about it.
Third-party apps that pick comments from randos who follow politicians you can’t stand, I suppose… perhaps like the “freak” relationship from ca. 1999 Slashdot (“friends” of people you designated as “foes”)
Edited to add: but only randos who have indicated they want randos to argue with them :)
> 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.
This is greatly exaggerated, if not outright false:
If it's clear that social media is terrible for children (and I'd argue it's terrible for everyone), why can't we leave it up to parents to stop their kids from using it?
I'm not sure how realistic it would be to enforce ban on social media under a certain age. The ban would have to be enforced on social media companies but they'd likely only be held to doing a best effort solution. They already set a minimum age at 13 for creating a social media account but that hasn't stopped kids from getting into TikTok, Instagram, etc
If parents are okay with their kids using social media, I'm not sure that I should have the right to tell them otherwise.
How would a ban even work though, without ultimately depending on parent intervention? Companies could throw up a "are you over 18?" banner, but those don't work. They could go full KYC and require users to provide government issued IDs, but that feels like a drastic step away from privacy and data security and could still be dodged when a kid grabs a picture of their parent's ID.
I'm not saying there's a clear path forward. And to be honest, I'm not even really advocating for a government ban. The cynic in me says, "Hey if I raise my kid better, it's just an opportunity for them to be better prepared than someone else's kid." (i.e. Less competition)
But the optimist in me says once a kid grows up, there's a ton of "past wrongs" that they can choose to right, given they have the proper self awareness.
There's also a chance I'm just flat-out wrong, but... I'm betting my child's future that I'm not.
If some parents are okay with their kids smoking and drinking and peddling drugs, are you still not sure that you (or rather, "the state") should have the right to tell them otherwise?
> 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 totally forgotten about.
A good start would be to ban feeds based on algorithms; instead your feed would be a chronological list of new posts from channels you've chosen to follow.
> A good start would be to ban feeds based on algorithms; instead your feed would be a chronological list of new posts from channels you've chosen to follow.
The replacement you've described for an algorithm is still an algorithm.
HN has no concept of following certain individuals, and is a niche website aimed at a particular audience. I mean in things like Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.
Bring back the time-honored practice of teens lying about their age. If nothing else, it would force kids who circumvent the ban to pretend to be adults. Plus, "you type like a child" could become a legitimate reason to get annoying adults who type immaturely in trouble.
tasty, while I agree with your sentiment, I disagree with your characterization because it falls into a trap of giving legitimacy to groups that have no legitimacy or credibility.
Whenever you start talking about banning a specific group, your efforts are wasted because who decides the group. Someone at the top, and can they always be trusted to decide that? No.
If you need to talk about banning something outright, that's a far more approachable argument that doesn't add to the noise.
Also, it is known that the brain continues to develop after 18, there isn't some magic switch at 18 that says these people aren't still vulnerable.
Addiction and exploitation continue to happen regularly after that age, just look at gaming in general how many people are now in their 40s and spend more than 10 hours a week on gaming?
Some people are more equipped than others to deal with addiction than others, what that difference is between success outcomes and others should be promoted and studied.
Any system that can amplify or de-amplify a message runs into these problems. Its not just social media. Its algorithms too, and they are designed to exploit you and your psychology to get what they want which is profit or control in one way or another. That's what the humans who built these algorithms optimized for.
When I was 14, I too was chatting with strangers on the Internet, be it on IRC or AIM, or sites like Livejournal or independent forums.
That said, I've been contending with this situation having a 14 year old of my own at this point. The reality is, at that time, swatting was not a thing. Pictures on the Internet were like, something a minority of people had, because it involved taking a film picture and scanning it in (assuming you had access to a scanner). Video? Forget it.
Honestly I wouldn't have blamed my own parents for being more restrictive with me had they known how to, but the tech went entirely over their head. Seeing how far it's come in that time and just how much more damage can be VERY rapidly done, particularly with the more developed blackmail scams, or just kids making poor choices that result in some very real criminal charges, have me pretty okay with taking a much heavier hand on the matter than was taken with myself.
I suppose I'd liken it to "free range children" in farmland, vs. free range children in a gangland ghetto. While we can certainly lament the lack of a good environment for kids to run free, the alternative is an unsafe environment. Perhaps platforms can be made to bring back a corralled in space that would be sensible, but allowing them loose on what the modern Internet has turned into would be frankly irresponsible.
That all said, there's only so much we can do at the legislative level. Kids are already not allowed on many sites they get onto (now, just the same as back then). What I find most necessary as a parent is the ability to lock down devices so that I can allow my child access to specific resources without being forced into allowing access to others. iPhones are frankly AWFUL at this -- I'm happy to report my experience on Android has been much smoother, and Windows is quite a bit better than my initial expectations as well (though router-level configuration is handy for home devices as well). IF we must use the heavy hand of government to address the matter, requiring the availability of usable, effective parental control measures that engage in app-level (if not hardware level in the case of cameras) whitelisting would be where I think we'd have the most bang for our buck without too much in the way of collateral damage. Better still would be some market pressure, but unfortunately, most parents I talk to seem to just feel entirely helpless and don't even know what to look for, and just assume there's no choice but to let their kids get raised by the Internet.
If you're new to raising kids in this era, do yourself and your kid a favor -- familiarize yourself with tools available, and demand platforms that give you the ability to effectively administrate your devices.
Honestly I'm definitely within the "New Internet" age range (currently a teen), and my talking to internet strangers experience when I was 14 was not too different from what you've described- being effectively anonymous, sharing a photo/video of yourself would've been a pretty major faux pas, only difference being I wound up on Discord rather than forums/IRC.
Its anecdotal for sure (maybe I just got lucky? maybe I had more sense than the average kid? maybe the shift is US/Western Nation localised?), but I don't think the internet has gotten worse everywhere at once.
Young people should be driven to school and from school from parents. They should not have phones and all their movement should be controlled by parents all the time. Even better, they should be homeschool, so that you can exclude influence of peers in school.
I am sure they will turn out just fine after being released from constant surveillance and prison only after 18.
> The dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs and social media is just as addictive.
I'm sorry, this sentence doesn't explain to me why banning social media is necessary. What are "dopaminergic" effects? Why is it so awful that social media is addictive?
The phrase “the dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs and social media is just as addictive” is very unclear.
Very few people know what dopaminergic means. It might not be a real word.
“Is not dissimilar from” is a stock phrase used in an academia and by people trying to sound very smart.
The poster included just enough technobabble and stock phrasing to imply they are a specialist. But specialists know when speaking to non-specialists you should avoid technical language and stock phrasing.
So it really just seems the poster was signaling “I am very smart and possibly have a degree in something related and a current on research.”
"Dopaminergic effects" clearly means something along the lines of 'activity of dopamine within the human brain'. I just think we need more than an analogy to reach the conclusion that social media needs to be banned. The sentence "the dopaminergic effects of exercise are not dissimilar to drugs" is equally as true. Clearly dopaminergic effects alone aren't enough to ban something.
When I read that the top comment thought banning social media was clearly necessary I was flabbergasted. I read the comment multiple times looking for a compelling argument. I read the article multiple times looking for a compelling argument too. I'm still struggling on this.
I would really like to read a concise logical argument for why we should ban social media.
Some gambling is fine. Many playground games have gambling elements. Physical trading cards have a gambling element. Kids need to learn about risk and reward, and a little loss in the real or virtual world is a good way to do it.
It's not hard to find 'kid steals parent's credit card, spends thousands of dollars on loot boxes' stories. These losses are neither little nor virtual.
Everyone must do an ID check when signing up to social media. If you are not an adult yet then your account will be locked until you become 18. This would also eliminate all the bots and fake people or double/triple anonymous accounts which are trying to game the algorithm to push for certain toxic agendas. Nobody should be anonymous on social media. Social media is to connect with humans, not with trolls or bots, so being anonymous is an oxymoron to being social in the sense of social media. Whistleblowers, which often get mentioned, don't need to be anonymous on social media. We have journalists and whistleblowers can already anonymously reach out to journalists and leak information so that journalists can publicise it under the protections of their profession.
> Everyone must do an ID check when signing up to social media. If you are not an adult yet then your account will be locked until you become 18.
what is the definition of social media? does that include messaging apps?
> This would also eliminate all the bots and fake people or double/triple anonymous accounts which are trying to game the algorithm to push for certain toxic agendas.
any places (countries) where this was instituted and worked out as you describe?
> Whistleblowers, which often get mentioned, don't need to be anonymous on social media.
they dont?
> We have journalists and whistleblowers can already anonymously reach out to journalists and leak information so that journalists can publicise it under the protections of their profession.
and what if you don't have access to a journalist....?
> what is the definition of social media? does that include messaging apps?
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter & Co
It's not messaging apps, or HN or a pet forum. Yes some of the other apps/sites have similarities, but those similarities are not greater than the similarities between the Nike or Victoria Secret online shopping page for Brazilian bikinis and an adult site. If we can distinguish the latter than it's also possible for us to find an easy way to distinguish the former.
> any places (countries) where this was instituted and worked out as you describe?
Any places (countries) where this was instituted and it didn't work out as I described?
> they don't?
No, they don't. Whistleblowing has nothing to do with social media. You can already anonymously contact a journalist and leak information in a secure way, in fact using social media for whistleblowing would already be the dumbest way of doing it amongst all other ways of how someone could do it.
> and what if you don't have access to a journalist....?
If you don't have access to a telephone or the internet and email then I guess you board the next ship which will fly to Earth and visit an internet cafe.
that's my problem with social media bans for children. how the fuck do we do it?
"just id check" -- hey, what if i don't want my social media tied to my personal account for any reason? let's say i'm an atheist and my family is quite religious? or what if i'm gay and i don't want to show it to the world while expressing myself through social media?
> "just id check" -- hey, what if i don't want my social media tied to my personal account
Your ID (driving license or whatever) is not your personal account.
> let's say i'm an atheist and my family is quite religious
Ok, so what? LOL people have different beliefs, only because you are an atheist you don't have to troll your family members on social media. You wouldn't do that in real life with your family so why do you feel the need on social media? I don't understand the issue which you're trying to raise here. Just be an atheist, so what. Social media is not subdivided into religious cults so you can mingle happily amongst other people from other beliefs, no issue there!
> or what if i'm gay and i don't want to show it to the world while expressing myself through social media
Then don't? Again, I don't get the issue here. If you don't want to express your gayness publicly then just don't do it. It's your choice. Nobody forces you to upload your dirty videos with your partner to social media.
Social media is a platform for real people to connect, not for anonymous trolls to shout some bullshit into the void. If you don't like that then perhaps social media as it was originally intended is not a platform for you. It seems you want it to be something that it isn't. We have 4chan, Reddit and other things where you can probably much better exhibit these desires.
I don’t know what “dopaminergic” is but processed sugar is like a drug to kids (pre-teen kids). And you would never be able to ban that (for pre-teens).
Why ban at all? Enforcing it is an issue. Privacy-intrusion is a given for everyone, not just kids. It probably would not work, similarly to any related bans. Again, why ban at all? Let the parents do the parenting... I guess? Or ban having sex without the use of contraceptives if you are so keen on banning.
It's incredibly hard for parents to intervene. Even if you ban your child from using it, since every other kid is using it, the harmful effects are still there.
The best you can do is try to explain and contextualise everything your kid might be seeing, which is very hard to do.
Also, not all parents are engaged with their kids as well as they should be. Having bad parents doesn't mean you're not worth protecting.
> Or ban having sex without the use of contraceptives if you are so keen on banning.
Who else would it be if not parents, the Government? How would that really go? Would we really have to provide our ID to Facebook and such? That would suck.
We can't track kids so instead we'll track every single internet user so that we can stop tracking kids. Nevermind you'll need to remember this is a kid in the browser session to show them the nerfed / non-tracking version anyway.
This fits with my theory that "woke" is actually "change I'm too old to deal with" and "hate speech" is "speech I hate". The worst part of either is having to fucking hear about the complaints about either, which I actually hear about, rather than the things they complain about, which may as well not exist for how much I see them.
Social media is a punishment for those to stupid to avoid it.
Funnily enough with ChatGpt like language models available even without banning censorship will become very prevalent. Instead of banning your child from social media outright you will be able to get a bot to monitor their account and filter out what you feel is inappropriate. So instead of their social feed being controlled by a company it can be monitored and controlled by parents.
I am not promoting this nor do I agree with it but I am predicting this will happen. The internet bubble people live in will go to the extreme.ie the chinese firewall available to every government, corporation or parent.
Citizens of western countries are under the misconception that their governments do not try to hide information or topics they do they are just not that successful at it.
Forcing social media companies to charge for accounts would be my first approach.
Either by taxing it so much that they have to, or by explicitly requiring payment. I'm not sure how you'd define "social media" vs say, HN (or is HN social media?).
Taxing advertising revenue at a higher rate could also do it (hmm, thinking about this, this might solve a lot more problems too).
For countries that don't do credit cards, there are other means - usually through the telco that provides mobile access.
Anyway - making users pay for it would associate the account with a credit card, and kids would have to do the same thing they do with mobile games and other paid-for stuff online - negotiate with their parents to get access. At least their parents would be aware.
Which means, a more detailed naming is necessary. Like, "personalized media" or something like that, to distinguish it from classical media where the user is not the target of engagement fishing.
I'd happily pay ~$3 a month for HN or other social media; I already pay way more on average per creator on Patreon and I frequently don't get a monthly benefit from that.
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 totally forgotten about.
That's why I think, don't bother trying to regulate social media. Just ban it for under 18s when they're most vulnerable.
I don't relish this solution either. When I was 13, I was on forums making online friends. I loved it. But it was clearly different back then, before smartphones, before content-creators, when the internet was mostly nerds.
(I don't use social media, but I do use YouTube. I was amazed how quickly, after watching one fitness video, it immediately started showing videos of the most ripped, steroid-abusing bodybuilders, and how I could achieve their "amazing" physiques. Then videos started popping up about all types of performance-enhancing drugs. SARMs, trenbolone - it was crazy how quickly it devolved to this)