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The case for banning children from social media

• theK 4y ago
  This is going to be an uphill battle. Not only is enforcement on a judiciary level extremely difficult (the kids as well as the companies have ways and reason to skirt jurisdiction on the borderless Internet) but you have the problem that addictive products will remain addictive even if there are better options out there. Personal opinion but I think the best way to counter the social media plague for young people will be something akin to making them "uncool in the schoolyards"
  • sytelus 4y ago
    It should be super uphill battle. I really hope so. Parents should determine what’s appropriate and the use cases. People trying to create laws left and right for every damn thing is just nuts. We have ended up with “I accept cookies” on every website now. Isn’t that enough for these “bring in government into every aspect of our life” nuts? My wish would be no laws could be passed unless we have 3/4th of votes and every 10 year old law gets expired unless passed again.
  • whats_a_quasar 4y ago
    You could have said the same thing about teenage smoking. It's addictive, hard to regulate away, but teen smoking regulations had demonstrable and massive health impacts. Cultural change is best, but governments have an obligation to improve public health. Particularly for minors, the vast majority of whom can't make informed decisions about addictive technology.
    • theK 4y ago
      I think youth smoking is a good example. - It wasn't enough to stop sale to minors (they still got them). - It wasn't enough to run information campaigns in schools and legislate packaging warnings (stuff like this gets blatantly ignored) What really worked in the US (but even that with a lag of 5-7 Years) was: 1. blanket banning smoking on the media in the 90s 2. progressively blanket banning smoking in the public since the 90s Edit: formating
• C50VGicCxmHC 4y ago
  > These bills will likely face considerable constitutional challenges. Previous attempts to block minors from accessing Web sites via broad legislation, including the Child Online Protection Act, from 1998, have been struck down on First Amendment grounds. You might get farther instead of banning children from social media, ban all ads to children on social media. Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,000 fine. If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • asddubs 4y ago
    have fun uploading a copy of your passport every time you visit a new domain then.
    • Xeoncross 4y ago
      Which will be very expensive for startups as well and ensure those with market dominance stay that way no matter how bad they get. This isn't sounding good.
      • C50VGicCxmHC 4y ago
        Only startups that are based on advertising.
        • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
          Or any startup that allows user-posted content, which could be an ad. Hacker News would be gone. Or at least not allow open submissions and comments because they’d all have to be individually checked to confirm they aren’t ads.
    • jackmott 4y ago
      [dead]
• ouid 4y ago
  Why not ban social media from children. It was, at a point in the not so distant past, illegal to advertise to them. Simply return to this standard, and make the penalty for non-compliance that your company is seized and auctioned.
• Calvin02 4y ago
  What is social media? My daughters use messaging more than they use TikTok, IG, or BeReal. They send 100s of messages to each other in a span of 5 mins. However, even within their close circle of friends, I see the same social issues (peer pressure, need for validation, etc.).
  • p1necone 4y ago
    I do wonder sometimes how much of the supposed ills of social media are just social media making things that were already happening much more visible. I and many others were bullied relentlessly at school through regular non technological means, and I'm sure it had a pretty negative psychological impact. I'm not really convinced it would be any worse if I was more active on Instagram/TikTok/whatever.
    • brucethemoose2 4y ago
      The engagement optimizing feeds amplifly some of the ills that are otherwise manageable in "private" groups of friends reading chronological communication. That's what really needs to go.
      • Calvin02 4y ago
        So, my anecdotal parental evidence suggests otherwise. My oldest was upset that her friend didn’t acknowledge a message she had sent and apparently changed the topic. Apparently this friend always does that. My daughter was complaining that it is unlikely that this person didn’t see the message that my daughter had sent. It is a complex world. I just live in it. I will never understand the subtle nuanced rules. I’ve made my peace with it. I just listen.
        • brucethemoose2 4y ago
          Well, yeah, that is just part of growing up... that kind of angst has existed since (at least) the invention of language and gossip.
    • 4y ago
• tfigment 4y ago
  My concern with child proofing other than I don't think it works is that it starts impacting me directly. No more sign up with email, now I i have to produce credit card or government ID or similar. Which I don't trust sites to protect anyway. Google has been bugging me for two years asking for my birthday on a 20 year old account to comply with laws like this. It can vote, its over 13.
• whats_a_quasar 4y ago
  There is a real public health issue here. Teen mental health really has fallen off a cliff in the last 10 years, in every measure available. Self-reported rates of depression and anxiety disorders have more than doubled. Suicides of 10-14 year olds have more than doubled. Suicides among 14-19 year olds have gone up ~50%. Hospital admissions for non-fatal self harm in girls 10-14 have ~tripled. It's not just an increase in diagnosis. [1] The bulk of the evidence points to smartphones and social media as the primary cause. Specifically, the combination of smartphones video/image based social media causes kids to spend way less social time in person, and to make way more unfavorable social comparisons. Heavy social media use is unambiguously correlated with depression and anxiety. And the studies on causation all show that social media causes mental health issues, not the other way around [2] Between 2003 and 2019 (pre-covid) the amount of time teens spend in person with friends dropped on average from ~144 minutes per day to ~41 minutes per day. How could that not have major health effects? [3]. The only plausible explanation for that drop at that time is smartphones. There are major freedom of speech issues with this sort of regulation. And there are major technical and policy complications to actually implementing a ban. But the evidence is that social media is a public health crisis comparable to opioids. There is a real tradeoff that needs to be made between unlimited access to digital media and public health. Lots of people on HN have a strong reaction against any attempt to regulate the internet. And there have been generations of moral panics about new technologies. But the available evidence show that this time is actually different, and we do need to have a real conversation about whether the health effects on teens are worth it. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness... [2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill... [3] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report, Figure 4
  • reb 4y ago
    Worth calling out here: that "nearly double" rate is specifically for the 10-14 age range; the next group up is up 30–50%. I say that not to minimize at all... if anything I'm more shocked by this steep rise in younger children.
• Barrin92 4y ago
  And yet another step when it comes to infantilizing American teenagers. It's bizarre how a country that superficially cares so much about freedom treats people who are almost adults like toddlers, increasingly even when they've turned 18. >How you feel about all this will likely come down to whether you believe that social-media platforms are addictive products—like cigarettes— No, the anti-smoking and anti-drinking hysteria is just as bad. I remember Christopher Hitchens like 20 years ago causing a stir in the US when he openly defended teenage drinking, pointing out that these kinds of experiences are perfectly normal and part of social life. If you look at today's teenagers in the US, anti-social, delaying almost any experience teens should make, he was completely right.
  • aynyc 4y ago
    Anti-smoking hysteria is bad? Let's be real here. I can agree on drinking, but not smoking.
    • htag 4y ago
      It seems pretty hysterical that the minimum smoking age is 21 and not 18. Should we just raise the age of adulthood from 18 to 21? We are clearly signaling they are not responsible enough to make some of their own decisions.
      • aynyc 4y ago
        This isn't about making choices. Smoking is bad, there is no good outcome from smoking whether you are 8 years old or 80 years old. Age limits, increased taxation are just some ways that our society's way to reduce smoking in general population.
• thex10 4y ago
  We are all children at heart. Ban the rest of us, too.
• andy_ppp 4y ago
  It’s essentially manipulation of the dopamine system in the exact same way as casinos except it’s worse because it uses AI to really start personalising what keeps us hooked. Would you let your children become addicted to gambling?
  • atahanacar 4y ago
    If you don't want your children to become addicted to something, be a good parent and monitor them. It is not the government's or the society's responsibility to babysit your kids. I don't want my freedoms taken away from me (in this case, freedom to anonymously use social media) just because some people don't have the capability or the motivation to parent their kids properly. Also, this "what about the children" thing is a very dangerous slippery slope. The same argument is being used by backwards governments around the world to ban anything LGBT related in public.
    • andy_ppp 4y ago
      But society stops minors from doing all sorts of harmful behaviors, like drinking, drugs, gambling, guns etc. I think we should consider limiting the algorithms applied to teenagers at least to being much simpler and maybe not allow personal information to be used. I don't think this is some loss of freedom we need to worry about.
      • atahanacar 4y ago
        >But society stops minors from doing all sorts of harmful behaviors, like drinking, drugs, gambling, guns etc. None of which affect my freedoms. >not allow personal information to be used I 100% agree with this. If a kid can't consent for anything else, how can they consent for their data being collected and processed? >I don't think this is some loss of freedom we need to worry about. You may not worry, but I do. Online anonymity is important for people ruled by shady governments, and there is no guaranteeing your government won't become a shady one in your lifetime. There are multiple examples of this worldwide, both in the past and present.
• chatmasta 4y ago
  If you want to ban your kids from using social media, you don't need to wait for the government to do it for you. Far more dangerous than social media is this increasingly pervasive attitude that the government is responsible for parenting your kids.
  • jedberg 4y ago
    I don't think the government should ban social media, but doing it on an individual level won't work. You either turn your kid into a social pariah for being the only one not on social media, or they will just figure out a way to get into it anyway.
    • chatmasta 4y ago
      Ok, I'll amend my statement to mention an even more dangerous and increasingly pervasive attitude: the government should parent your kids, so I can parent my kids!
      • jedberg 4y ago
        Like I said, the government shouldn't ban social media. I don't want the government parenting my kids or anyone else's. I want parents parenting their own kid. But the government can certainly make it better by banning things that are universally bad. I'm quite glad they kids can't legally get cigarettes. Makes my job as a parent a lot easier. Same with alcohol. I wish they wouldn't let them get coffee either.
        • inkblotuniverse 4y ago
          Yes, you want the government parenting your (and others) kids.
• jmull3n 4y ago
  I'd rather not have to provide my ID and verify my identity like on certain crypto exchanges to watch a youtube video or like a friends post on instagram. I can't see any other implementation of this working, instead we'd have 2 popups now every time we visit a new site. One for cookies, the other to say "yes I'm over 18".
  • 29083011397778 4y ago
    No, instead we could firewall the internet off behind a single-digit number of gatekeepers. Think Google and Facebook, with the engineers to build, execute, and secure a system like this. Think Apple and Amazon, who have credit card data to match a name to a digital identity. This doesn't mean two popups, this means we forfeit the open and distributed nature of the internet in a final "Think of the children" moment.
• darkerside 4y ago
  There's stunningly little data in the article about why social media is bad for kids. Most of the citations are about why other people _think_ it's bad for kids.
• asciimov 4y ago
  Maybe we just ban kids from smart phones. Or ban social media apps on phones operated by minors.
  • InCityDreams 4y ago
    Educate the kids?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• swader999 4y ago
  For all those saying parents, take the phones away. Any idea how hard that is? That could in itself push them over the edge.
  • hattmall 4y ago
    They literally can't keep phones out of maximum security prisons. I don't think many parents are up for the challenge.
• 876978095789789 4y ago
  The case for banning children from social media is stable diffusion and the prospect of perverts taking otherwise normal photos and videos that your children post of themselves (or that you post of them) and making pornography out of it. No parent in 2023 should allow their minor child to use any of these platforms.
• djha-skin 4y ago
  A bill just passed in the state of Utah where I live banning children from social media unless they have their parents permission under 18 years of age. In addition, the parents must be provided with access to all of the children's messages and posts. This now means that Facebook has to implement some sort of "are you 18" thing. Don't know how they'll implement that, reminds me of a recent law around porn in Alabama. Requiring a driver's license or some such. It also means Facebook has to implement a back door of sorts for parents to watch their children. As of the parent of a girl who will soon reach social media age, this seems a bit much to me. But the technical side of my brain screams, how on Earth are they going to implement this and keep spammers from abusing it. It changes so many things. Child predators pretending to be 14. Indeed, any kind of anonymity has been largely banned because I have to know how old you are to let you on my site. And it's not just Facebook it's any sort of social media, including our host.
  • walrus01 4y ago
    The Utah law is a back-door to Christian/Mormon fundamentalists who want to enforce religious doctrine and parental control over teenagers who are attempting to establish their own identities. This will be disastrous for any teenager in Utah who doesn't meet the local-region-socially-acceptable stereotype of a normal person, such as LGBTQ. All that I can see is even more ex-Mormon teenagers who cut off their parents they day they turn 18 and move to a city somewhere far away from Utah, at the earliest possible financially feasible moment.
    • kerpotgh 4y ago
      [dead]
    • jutrewag 4y ago
      Good. You can establish your own “identity” when you’re an adult at 18. I don’t have a religious bone in my body but I wish this law was made effective nationwide.
      • walrus01 4y ago
• medion 4y ago
  Have young kids, they won’t get a phone, tablet or whatever till well into their teens. Tablets are the new pacifier and it’s hard sometimes not to give in for a break.. we allow some limited tv sometimes but only select classic cartoons or documentaries. I cannot see any value at all in social media for kids and I personally cannot believe parents let their kids on TikTok or whatever. It’s wild.
  • uptownfunk 4y ago
    Yes agree 100% on tablets are the new pacifier. Have you noticed how hyper stimulated kids who don’t normally have a lot of screen time get when they do get their “fix” it’s eerie
• tastysandwich 4y ago
  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)
  • XorNot 4y ago
    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. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35447990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35447990
    • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
      > As noted by another poster[1]: how are you going to enforce it? The number of comments here that haven’t realized that any regulations would require huge privacy intrusions for everyone is weird to see. It’s like people are imaging some magical set of rules that would only apply to kids but wouldn’t impact themselves negatively.
      • 4y ago
• CivBase 4y ago
  Is the problem really "social media" or algorithm-driven content feeds?
• armchairhacker 4y ago
  I don't necessarily think it's an ethically bad idea, but "banning all children from all social media" is simply impractical for many reasons, including: - You essentially have to check some sort of ID and ban VPNs, banning online privacy which is BAD - The smartest kids are way more tech-savvy than the dumbest adults, so you may end up banning adults too, which is BAD - What will you do to children who get caught? Jail them? Call their parents, teachers, etc. who may not care? Make them take a "social media rehabilitation" classes? Consider that no matter the penalty, many, many kids will try very hard to work around this, and many parents will actively support them. Something which would actually work is "banning" children like we ban them from seeing Rated R games and movies. Like: - Banning children from specific social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). This can be done through laws or just activism and lobbying to pressure the sites into banning children themselves - Encouraging parents to ban children from social media, teaching them how. You cannot call CPS on parents whose children are using social media, unless you think having many, many kids in foster care is a worthy sacrifice - Creating stronger parental controls (which is also a part of 1 and 2: individual sites can create stronger controls like ID to ban children, and stronger parental controls will help parents) - Simply discouraging children from using social media, maybe even with incentives
  • judge2020 4y ago
    > - Banning children from specific social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). This can be done through laws or just activism and lobbying to pressure the sites into banning children themselves This is already the case, few will deal with the hurdles of COPPA, so most services require you to be 13 to sign up, and the platform has a general requirement to ban anyone they see that lied about their age. (I've known two friends that had a Google account at 11/12 and got banned because they said "im 12" in comments; twitter also had a IIRC 2 year period where, if you changed your DOB and it reveals that you signed up when you were <13, your twitter account was suspended, and they only fixed this by requiring you delete tweets made when you were under 13)
  • hackerlight 4y ago
    This is ignoring the impact of destroying the network effects. Even if 20% of the kids bypass the laws by accessing social media via VPN, that's no problem, because the negative influence comes from the large network and the fact that all their peers were on social media. If 80% of the cool kids aren't on it anymore, there will be no pressure or desire to participate and engage.
• RoyGBivCap 4y ago
  Banning things rarely works. Educating parents on how it can harm and hinder their children is a harder, but more effective approach.
  • jackvalentine 4y ago
    > Educating parents on how it can harm and hinder their children is a harder, but more effective approach. Is it? There are a number of teachers and allied health professionals in my family and they all say that the majority of parents have zero follow-through on simple things that will materially improve their kids lives. I can’t imagine the case would be any different with social media education for parents.
  • DubiousPusher 4y ago
    > Banning things rarely works. This depends on your definition of the term "works". Prohibition of many things has had a profound effect on the shape of human society. Prohibitions on religion for example, such as the repression of the Huguenots in France and of Christianity in Japan prevented the development of Protestantism and Catholicism in those countries respectively. Prohibition and censorship of revolutionary materials and correspondence societies in 19th century Europe absolutely slowed down the process of democratization and popular reform there. Even just in personal experience, it's much easier to get weed since it is no longer prohibited. You used to need "a source" which you had to work out in each new town or city you moved to. Then there were limits on what those people could get you.
    • RoyGBivCap 4y ago
      You mentioned prohibition, but for some reason left out capital-P Prohibition, which brought us mobsters, speakeasys, and the US government blinding people: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-us-government-enforced-prohibition-by-poisoning-americans https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-us-government-enforced... and was eventually repealed. Drugs won the "war on drugs". We don't need more authoritarianism. Provide education, and let people choose. Anything else, they'll fight you on it.
• poink 4y ago
  Social media seems like it's screwing up older people at least as much as children. Banning advertising fixes the problem for all age groups
• turtleyacht 4y ago
  Firewall! Firewall! Firewall all the things Make of a DMZ off thy router Content inspect every common packet Install on ev'ry device that sniffing Snicker--alas for lack of space, a new Line beneath: pf -f /etc/pf.conf Firewall! A backdoor of no trivial make Of maister's werk, a tiny hole Strapped alongside, whistling rockets, Detonating lines, monitored ropes Whence thy enterprising sleuth Perchance stumble or sneak On day zero of the time When secrets revealed And figured the locks And found the world Beyond Then a new sys admin is made With belt of tools; persistence too: A shoulder burdened with weight Of knowledge, yet Too a realization: imprison'd knowledge A deliberate moat, a shadowed keep To while the youngest times In learning's depths
• cyclotron3k 4y ago
  Cf. the recent article posted here[0] regarding the trend of stripping away child autonomy. [0] Giving kids no autonomy at all has become a parenting norm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35417250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35417250
• mixmastamyk 4y ago
  This is the start of a good article on the subject, but doesn't mention the surveillance capitalism aspect. > everything from gender identity... Odd—they always lead with this even though it might affect less than a few percent of the population. There might be other ways to help these folks. > might have to verify their age using official government identification Now we're getting somewhere, that's a big problem for everyone. Maybe if they made such sites charge money, which realistically means credit cards, it could largely solve this. Would probably reduce some of the dark patterns and mostly prevent kids from accessing them. That's how it worked with porn, didn't it?
• snvzz 4y ago
  I'd ban children from the Internet and from the phone network. Computers are fine, as long as they're offline. Countless generations of kids have grown up fine in these conditions. We already know being online is bad for them. What are we waiting for?
  • Avicebron 4y ago
    Well social media as it exists today didn't exist when I was first starting out online, but I doubt I'd be in the position I am today without having free reign (my parents weren't super tech savvy) on the internet as a 9-10 year old and later. That's around when I started programming, where I got all the materials I could, made some warcraft 3 mods, that catapulted me pretty far..
    • snvzz 4y ago
      I did most of that w/o being online, with an Amiga 500. Only got a PC and later Internet at home once I was 16. There's literally no reason for a minor to "need" access to Internet.
      • mixmastamyk 4y ago
        First used it at age 24 at work, learned socket programming two years later.
  • goatlover 4y ago
    How do you possibly enforce something like that for only kids without invading everyone's privacy? What makes you think kids won't find a hundred ways around it?
    • snvzz 4y ago
      I am glad you agree with the premise that we should do it, and it's now a matter of how. We can figure out the how. Say: - No sale of phones nor phone lines nor ISP's services to children. - No public access to internet for children in schools, libraries or coffee stores. - Information campaign for parents. - ToS of any internet-based service to forbid use by children. It doesn't need to go much further than this. Similar to how we don't feed caffeine to kids. Or allow them anywhere near pornography. No draconian measures are necessary, and we can introduce the measures progressively e.g. starting with under 12, then 15, then finally at 18.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Hizonner 4y ago
  People keep suggesting stuff like that as though it were somehow easy to know who was a child. It isn't. Not if you want to serve the whole world, or even very much of the world. And not if you don't want to create a panopticon where everything anybody does is associated with everything else that person does, and nothing is ever, ever anonymous. There are a bunch of sleazy "age verification" companies out there claiming they can do it. They can't, but they've spent years lobbying governments all over the world to get it required. All "ban children from X" ideas are non-starters because the damage from creating the ability to know who was a child would greatly exceed any possible benefit. Assuming there was any benefit to begin with.
  • outime 4y ago
    >And not if you don't want to create a panopticon where everything anybody does is associated with everything else that person does, and nothing is ever, ever anonymous. I have a strong feeling this will be the future of internet.
  • flerovium 4y ago
    A company needs to make a reasonable effort. If something is as popular as TikTok, and people know there are lots of children on the app, then the company is liable. GNU Taler figured out a way to verify age without revealing your identity.
    • Hizonner 4y ago
      > A company needs to make a reasonable effort. It's not "reasonable" to demand any effort that won't be effective. Period. > GNU Taler figured out a way to verify age without revealing your identity. Well, no. GNU Taler proposed a very complicated system on top of some zero knowledge concepts that have been around since the late 1990s, embedded in the rest of Taler's incredibly complicated overall system. That sort of gross impracticality, generally in the service of authoritarian goals that aren't good ideas to begin with, is how Taler rolls, and why Taler has even less chance of ever getting anywhere than cryptocurrency in general. But it's true that zero knowledge systems can in theory solve most of the problem: whoever's certifying age doesn't know what the user is doing with the credential, and the relying party doesn't know who the user is. ... and that still has no practical impact at all. You can do all kinds of things in zero knowledge, if you have the infrastructure for it. But to make AV ubiquitous, you first have to make that infrastructure ubiquitous. In practice, that will probably only happen if every government in the world starts issuing zero-knowledge credentials; only governments have the reach and the generally accepted standing to do that kind of thing. But governments in general have never shown any sign of having any enthusiasm for zero knowledge, in part because they tend to like having somebody's identity attached to everything that happens. At most you might be able to drag governments, kicking and screaming, into adopting systems where only they can invade your privacy. But probably not, because they don't trust one another. There is, of course, a possibility of a private system developing, or of governments getting off their butts. There's even a possibility of Taler's grandiose dreams of massively complicated interacting systems of public and private institutions coming to pass. However, we don't have any of those now, and even if there were the will to make them work, it'd take decades to make them ubiquitous enough. So people who want to advocate for age verification need to first go off and do about 50 years of work to build that infrastructure, before they can start talking about requiring AV for anything. In reality, of course, the intent of all real AV advocates is to totally ignore that possibility and rely on "trust me" assurances from AV vendors.
• Aeolun 4y ago
  Forget about the children. Can someone ban me from social media? Better yet, can we just ban the thing altogether?
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/9A2MP https://archive.ph/9A2MP
• southernplaces7 4y ago
  Or, one could consider the crazy option of letting parents exercise at least some modicum of decision-making on how their children live their lives. I can understand much of the disgust with social media as it is today, but some of these arguments spin off so far into emotional reactionary vitriol that they lose whole forests for meager trees about the larger dangers of laws deciding such minutia for parents.
  • mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Try making the decision that your child will not use social media and watch what happens.
    • southernplaces7 4y ago
      Plenty of people do indeed pull it off, and before that heavy handed step, there are others that on a parental level (not by government decree), moderate the effects and use of social media for their children without relying on blanket bans in a society that seems to view even very basic freedoms as ever more maleable things. The underlying logic of blanket social media bans is awful, and so is the enormous leeway they open for government control of information and expression in so many other ways. This entire proposal is obviously grotesque, that so many people on a site like this don't see that just because they happen to hate Facebook et al in many ways (I myself do too) is absurd.
      • mixmastamyk 4y ago
        Am doing it now. Prepare for constant complaints and sob-stories, everyone around you including the school doing their best to undermine you. Adults aren't included. We prohibit kids from doing many dangerous things, as we should.
    • JenrHywy 4y ago
      We have. So far it has been fine. Mind you it has only been relevant to our introverted sons so far. Might be harder for our daughter in a few years.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• htag 4y ago
  I am coming to the conclusion that my opinion on this subject is unpopular. I don't think it's a desirable thing for the government to regulate what type of software or speech happens on the internet, or runs on private silicon. Additionally, I don't like when the government takes on traditionally parental roles. Why are we all cheering on Washington to regulate the internet?
  • stevehawk 4y ago
    Because we don't want to be responsible for raising our own children. We only want to be responsible for blaming others for ruining our children.
    • htag 4y ago
      I think it's inherently an undesirable thing to reduce the amount of liberty. I don't think it has anything to do with how anyone raises their children.
• _8j50 4y ago
  If I was the government I would set up a social media use authorization portal and demand social media companies with over 1k monthly active users require their users to take a randomly generated challenge code, take it to the government portal and have it signed and submit the signed challenge in order to register (this would be a smooth UX with popup taking you to the gov portal and back), the gov portal would not ask for authentication, just a clear picture of your id. It will not allow vpns and such and if you presented fake id the that would be a crime. Now where my policy differs is that I would not prevent kids from using social media, they can still show a school id and their school or parent would need to approve and taken on that legal obligation of presenting valid id. But the critical part is that kids 14-17 and 10-13 each would have their own social media. They can join facebook for example but facebook has to prevent them from coming to contsct with adults and their content or things like adult news feeds and advertisments. Similarly advertisers would become legally liable if they advertise content that steers children to a harmful end. Social media companies must also prove that their algorithms are explicitly tuned to prevent addiction if minors to the platform and even enforce maximum legal usage hours (2h for 10-13 and 6h for 14-17).
• retox 4y ago
  The only technical way you could accomplish such a ban is to introduce mandatory ID on every website. I'm sure some groups are salivating at the mouth for such legislation.
  • 93po 4y ago
    Although the HN crowd hates it, requiring a World ID would be a technical means to limit minors without sacrificing anyone's privacy, since they won't scan anyone under 18. https://docs.worldcoin.org/id https://docs.worldcoin.org/id
  • mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Credit card payment is a proxy for adulthood.
• hungryforcodes 4y ago
  Hacker News is social media no?
• Clubber 4y ago
  This whole "social media bad" thing might be a "think of the children," argument the powers that be have been pushing for several years now to further invade our privacy. We still have the Patriot Act 22 years later. Be very careful what rights you give up.
• DoItToMe81 4y ago
  The only way to apply this "Think of the children"ism is with internet IDs and regulation only the biggest players could afford to run with. No, thanks. I'd much rather parents be parents and (re)grow the spine to say 'No' to the children they're raising.
• doomleika 4y ago
  If one brings this up 5 years ago, they are gonna be branded as authoritarian. How times are changed.
• noisy_boy 4y ago
  No need to ban anything. Just disable auto-populate on scrolling and rate limit all social media pages to one page per minute where the definition of "page" is what fits on a 6" display. In this day and age of anemic attention span, kids will throw their hands in the air and walk away in 5 mins.
• erfgh 4y ago
  That would probably be difficult to enforce. Just ban smartphones if you're so inclined.
• LoganDark 4y ago
  It saddens me that there is no easy alternative to this idea. Social media is how I grew up and how I became a better person. Without social media I wouldn't have been allowed to meet some of the most important people in my life. Without social media I wouldn't have been able to explore or even discover my DID or ADHD. Or even my own identity, which I had to form essentially from scratch due to dissociation. Most notably, I wouldn't have been able to develop any of the coping mechanisms that kept me from committing suicide during periods of depression. That is, the feeling that people out there care about me and would miss me if I died. The ability to talk to those people every day and feel love for them. I'm autistic and the internet is the only place I was ever truly able to connect with. Only now that I've started ADHD medication—something I never would have done without the help of social media, since someone had to tell me personally that I might have ADHD—I am finally able to start trying to appreciate the real world. But... I grew up years ago, and the world is different now. The social media back then is not the social media today. It does not have the same effect on children that it had on me, not even to mention that I'm highly neurodivergent. Maybe that is what truly saddens me. Can not reproduce.
• plasticeagle 4y ago
  I suspect we can't even define social media, let alone ban it.
• krashidov 4y ago
  There should be a tax on infinite scrolling. It could be a better way of regulating this. Enforcement could be very difficult though, and of course it should only come into affect at a certain number of users so we don’t stifle innovation
• faddypaddy34 4y ago
  We should really ban adults from social media as well.
• TeeMassive 4y ago
  In general, it should be illegal for strangers to contact or solicit minors anonymously.
• mcv 4y ago
  Social Media us not just harmful to kids, but also to adults. Not only is it just as addictive to us, many adults are sucked into all sorts of extremist ideas and conspiracy thinking, which is having a very real effect on our world.
• prawn 4y ago
  If not this, at least find ways to make it easier for parents to moderate their children's usage without peer pressure working against them so aggressively. This was a suggestion in the comments about Utah taking action on this front - lots of parents saying as difficult/unworkable as the general plan might be, it would greatly assist them. "Kid, I know you really want Instagram, but state law says you can't. My hands are tied, sorry!"
• protocolture 4y ago
  1. Make it more expensive to run a website. 2. Lament how the open web has fewer options with the better used networks owned by billion dollar tech companies. 3. Blame Capitalism/Communism/Whatever the latest boogeyman is that takes the pressure off of Karens and politicians who push the latest please think of the children bullshit. 4. Goto 1.
• rsolva 4y ago
  A new law in the EU will ban showing ads and using personal data for kids. Here in Norway we have had general ban on showing ads to kids for decades, but it was made in the TV age and has not been enforced on social media. We can't outright ban social media (for a lot of different reasons), but we can regulate away the most harmfull aspects. One of the fundemental underlying problems is the lack of good privacy laws. As long as companies can gather whatever they want and use it against us to show us personalized ads and posts to hold on to our attention as long as possible, we will not be able to curb the worst aspects of social media.
  • cubefox 4y ago
    I don't think that ads are the main problem of social media. It's rather the way they replace personal physical relationships with scrolling.
    • rsolva 4y ago
      That is an inherent problem with screens in general, especially mobile ones, as it is such a powerful attention grabing arena. I'm trying to be pragmatic when I propose to curb the use of algorithm driven feeds and limit businesses to gather massive amounts of highly personal data thats is used to train algorithms to become even more effective attention grabbers. There has to be limits to what a government can regulate or ban. Being social online should not be banned. Allowing companies to inject themselfs and interfere in our social interactions, gather almost unlimited data and use it to exploit our psychological quirks and weaknesses should be. EDIT: And I agree that for the user, the ads are not the main problem. However, ads are the main incentive for businesses to do whatever they can to grab your attention, and this is a big problem.
    • emptystation 4y ago
      Ads insensitive platforms to design a more and more addictive infinite feed. If they cannot profit from children scrolling endlessly, why would they want to enable children to scroll endlessly? If ads for children on social media are banned (somehow), kids' feeds will probably just become way more boring.
• Ekaros 4y ago
  I'm not against idea, but how would that even work? Porn for example is already banned from children, and they easily get hands on it. Or "violent" videogames. I don't think there is any viable way or then it just becomes whack-a-mole thing. Ban those platforms that fail or the user accounts there...
  • luckylion 4y ago
    That's very different though: porn and downloads you can get from any site. But for social media to work, by definition your peers need to be on the sites as well. If you apply that to porn, you end up with a handful of sites that have a very large userbase, and you can easily regulate those, because they're also very valuable. Now, if such a step would lead to large-scale adoption of decentralized social media, that might be another issue, but as adults wouldn't be affected, I doubt they'd invest too much time into it (+ many of the people who are capable of building it don't believe that social media is a good idea).
• jasmer 4y ago
  I'll go further - you cannot even put a photo of someone else without their permission, unless it constitutes 'public good' and to be a journalist you have to 'register' - it'd be free and open to do that, but the point being, you're 'on the record' as doing that in some capacity which might come with a few ethical rules. Sorry for the AI people but we probably want to have rules about data set collection as well. Absolutely the right to privacy, the right to 'delete' and auto-deletion periods aka 'nothing is kept forever without special consent'. Absolutely nothing about someone's social media presence can be made public or used for employment searches before age 18 aka that 'bad joke' someone told at age 16 should not ruin their life - I absolutely do not care what they said. Content that passes a threshold of 'views' must be considered a kind of 'meta public domain' and must come with warnings/notes by the 'conduit entity' (aka FB or Twitter or Spotify) if it has medical or direct political information, aka Joe Rogan (whom I respect at least a bit except when he's yapping about vaccines) has to say 'I am not a doctor, this is not medical information' whenever he opens his fat mouth about vaccines, but he can say whatever he wants about Aliens and MMA etc.. Pricing/sign-ups/trials have to be ultra clear, and current billing has to be clear. Frankly, they should make the intermediary responsible for that as well aka if you have a recurring bill on VISA, then VISA has to list that, and, give you a means to cancel. Total transparency on tracking, illegal to buy or sell most user data whatsoever. FYI the primary source for this is actually VISA, AMEX and MC. And work with industry to create 'funnel optimizations' that just don't need tracking. No advertising directly to kids unless maybe a certain kind of format (I think maybe some youtube ads are ok).
• unixgoddess 4y ago
  Few months ago there was some sort of challenge on tiktok, most kids at my local middle school arrived to school with self-inflicted bruises on the face. With this shit, if you don't do it too you are out of the group and goodbye social life. Social media are preying on the group-belonging instincts of kids with tremendous damage not only on the kids themselves, but on society as a whole. However, it's up to parents to deal with it. It's unacceptable that I have to produce my ID on the internet to remedy the damage of other people poor parenting.
  • robertfw 4y ago
    I did a stint working on trust & safety tools for a social media startup. What I learned from working with content moderators is that overall, the industry gets by doing the barest of bare minimums, and TikTok is one of the worst offenders "But the cost!", well, if the business model can't be viable when done safely, then the business model is not viable - we just don't have the externalized costs of harm done visible to help make that call
  • boxed 4y ago
    Be glad no one died, like with the blackout challenge or the cinnamon challenge.
    • unixgoddess 4y ago
      even back in the day there were raw egg or hot chili challenges... being idiots for acceptance is truly embedded in the human mind. But social media and general societal collapse bring it out several orders of magnitude worse.
  • watwut 4y ago
    You would not believe stupid crap and self harm my peers engaged in 25 years ago, before any of us had phones. Self-inflicted bruise or bruises to impress other boys were a thing among some kids.
• decafninja 4y ago
  Tangent, but I’m at an age where many of my friends are having kids and are sharing a huge amount of their children’s lives on social media. Not my business, but I can’t help but wonder what these kids will think once they become of age and realize their entire childhood has been plastered online on Instagram. My wife and I have decided if we ever have kid, we’re never going to post a single publically viewable photo or video of him/her anywhere.
  • InCityDreams 4y ago
    ..their friends will take photos.
    • decafninja 4y ago
      At that point, it’s a different game. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. But I was referring to the baby, toddler, and early elementary school age where the kid has no clue what’s going on.
• DoctorMckay101 4y ago
  Question is, what constitutes social media? I got my first PC at 11, running Windows 98. Since then I've been participating in online forums and sites like facebook and myspace. If I ever have a kid I want them to be able to experience the same stuff I did.
  • jmathai 4y ago
    The experience for kids today is nothing like what you experienced. The early internet was pretty magical. I’m not sure we will ever get that back.
• Tade0 4y ago
  Why go with the nuclear option when the crux of the issue lies not in social media itself, but the type of experience it provides? Just make the experience better for children - chiefly by removing the dark patterns that cause the problem in the first place. Sure, companies will complain, but they're not entitled to ruining teenage mental health like that.
  • jmathai 4y ago
    I think the problem lies in social media itself. Unless you mean, social media for kids should be sms.
    • Tade0 4y ago
      Then how do you explain the fact that the mental health effect appeared years after the introduction of social media? We had a whole platform(MySpace) come and go without such issues.
      • datpiff 4y ago
        Myspace didn't overlap much with smartphones
        • Tade0 4y ago
          What follows is that smartphones were the key component necessary for the observed effect. Why not regulate that instead?
• carabiner 4y ago
  It'll be fascinating to see the effect on the prestige of working for Meta if this does end up happening. It'll solidify the idea the social media = smoking. Will Facebook be forced to create resources on quitting social media? Will FB become a mostly right-leaning company that opposes government oversight for the sake of their userbase? Will Metamates have a stigma when they seek jobs elsewhere? Maybe Meta will even rebrand itself like Altria after some turnaround, as a new, "understanding" social media company, that promotes "user's choice to use..." social media.
• h0h0h0h0111 4y ago
  I'm amazed that we're still entertaining banning everything in 2023. The same song and dance was made of TV 30-50 years ago, keeping kids off the internet 15 years ago, and I'm sure for keeping kids off AI in a few years time. The cat is out of the bag, and trying to force it back in the bag is going to be no better for kids
• DoreenMichele 4y ago
  Maybe we could do something radical and empower parents to handle this more effectively by creating more family-friendly policies so parents have the time, energy and mental focus to handle it themselves. Maybe we could start by finding some effective means for addressing our affordable housing issues. Last I checked, the US was also the only developed country that lacked a national maternity leave policy. I'm not sure if I really want such, but it suggests there's lots of relatively low-hanging fruit for improving our policies with regards to being family friendly.
  • regulate_this12 4y ago
    As a parent, I say that no amount of parental empowerment can compensate for a culture that seems broadly unaware that there is even a problem. Sure, better age / times restriction tools (especially ones that unify over all device types) would help. But in the end the kids can just get their own devices and a mobile plan with data and that ends your empowerment unless you want to turn your house into North Korea. No amount of empowerment will help me as a parent when: * their friends house has open wifi or even free devices where the parents let them watch/play/consume whatever they want * when there is free wifi everywhere * they need WhatsApp or similar to participate in school, clubs and friends groups * "everyone has it" and not giving them it will make them social pariahs There used to be strong cultural norms around keeping potentially harmful stuff away from kids going so far that people would not swear around the little ones. Today we have the internet that exposes ALL of that stuff to kids, even including drug analogs like tik tok. Imagine we are in the 80ies and a coffee shop showed hardcore pornography and gave cocaine to kids on demand. Absurd. They'd been closed down and arrested within the hour. But today it's supposedly okay but all that has really changed is that they bring their own little screens.
    • DoreenMichele 4y ago
      I'm a parent. I don't agree with you. My sons are now adults but had substantial internet access from a very early age. They got a "safe list" of kid-friendly links plus some local software just for them. They weren't required to stick to those kid-friendly links. It was just to make it easier for them to cope. One son was so young, he figured out how to roll the ball under the mouse with this thumb because it was too hard to cope with navigation otherwise. I was fortunate to be able to be a full-time parent. We were a military family, so our social reality was a little different from that of a lot of people. If your only qualification is you are a parent, I have the same qualification for holding an opinion and we can just agree to disagree here, I guess.
• Dave3of5 4y ago
  I think rather than banning it which won't work if you made the SM companies financially responsible for any damages they cause the children. The government would make it easier to seek damages from SM companies that cause harm to children. For example if you required the SM companies to provide proof they actively tried to help or stop in cases of bullying and if they don't the pay a large fine. That would make it more costly to ignore and I'm pretty sure you'd fine a report button on that post to allow you to report bullying pretty quick.
  • geysersam 4y ago
    But is SM really responsible for bullying? Bullying happens irl as well. The playground builders are usually not considered responsible when bullying happens at a playground.
    • Dave3of5 4y ago
      > But is SM really responsible for bullying? Yes they are. They are not 100% responsible no but it's the main party as it provides the platform and encourages the behaviour. If their platform has become unsafe and causes harm that's the bit that they are responsible for. It's the same thing as suing a car manufacturer if the car was designed / built with a safety flaw. > The playground builders are usually not considered responsible when bullying happens at a playground. That's a great point thanks for making it. By "playground builder" I assume you are meaning the company/org that built the playground and actually they are responsible for the safety of the equipment and if a child gets hurt because of their negligence they will be sued. In my estate we have to pay for insurance for this express purpose. In terms of bullying though you don't use playground equipment to bully someone. Bullying on the school grounds is the schools responsibility and they have a duty of care to the child to help. So just because the builders built the school doesn't mean they are responsible for all actions that occur only on defects on their work that cause harm.
      • geysersam 4y ago
        While I appreciate your thorough response (I'm not exactly sure about what to make of this topic myself) I'm still a bit skeptical of assigning the responsibility for bullying to SM companies. Physical safety in a car (or on a playground) is about the equipment itself. Bullying can also happen in a car (or a school bus!) but we wouldn't typically consider the car company responsible. Regarding SM I think it's a case of we-can-so-we-should. We've moved our social interactions to a technical platform, so now social problems are more amenable (superficially in my opinion) to technical solutions. But bullying is not a problem that has a technical origin nor a technical solution, and I think trying to approach it that way might do more harm than good.
• iamnotsure 4y ago
  A fine line between puritanism, sobriety and cultural deprivation.
• hendry 4y ago
  As a parent, there is no way I'm aware of keeping an eye (remotely) on their Watch history with Youtube kids. https://dabase.com/blog/2023/youtube-kids/#watch-history https://dabase.com/blog/2023/youtube-kids/#watch-history The controls are broken.
• noobermin 4y ago
  While I'm sympathetic, this smells a whole lot like banning kids from malls, which already is happening which along with the deepening suburbanization of America just leads kids to feeling isolated. On some level, you need to let young people socialize and have a space where parents can't micromanage them. I'm not sure parents of yesteryear (boomers) or today (gen X, older millennials) are really okay with that. Given the moves throughout society of bannning kids from most public places, requiring shaperones for under 18s, even teenagers, makes me feel like we're further entrenching the mistakes made boomers made with their children and leading young people to be even more isolated and idealistic only to have them shell shocked once they experience the real world.
  • CalRobert 4y ago
    I want a town built from scratch where me and other millenial parents who want our kids to be able to run around and ride bikes and go to corner shops can actually do so.
    • TheHappyOddish 4y ago
      You could try most of the world.
      • CalRobert 4y ago
        I am! Shame we had to emigrate.
  • HPsquared 4y ago
    Really, there should be some public meeting spaces other than malls. The same applies on the internet. At least on the internet there is a wide range of places.
• tourgen 4y ago
  [dead]
• tjpnz 4y ago
  >Most people seem to agree that something should be done to protect kids from what sure looks like an addictive product. But almost no one knows what that something is. Speak for yourself. I block social media sites on my home network and will be doing the same through a VPN when they get smartphones.
• rendall 4y ago
  > "The case for banning children from social media" As a parent, I was looking forward to an article discussing reasons for banning children from social media. What are the philosophical implications? Mental health? Psychosocial? Rather, it seems the article begged that particular question and then discussed legal obstacles and consequences instead. Not the journalist's fault. Misleading headlines are the curse of our age. I still would love to read an in-depth exploration of the topic of banning children from social media.
  • toxik 4y ago
    An improved title: Utah passes laws restricting children's access to social media: The implications and civil liberties concerns
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    FWIW, there is value to this discussion reaching mainstream as limited as it is.
    • rendall 4y ago
      Fair point
• wanderingbit 4y ago
  For those discussing what it looks like for a polity to have a widespread ban on types of certain types of advertising, look no further than the great state of Vermont! We have not had billboards for as long as I've been alive, and it is great, especially when you head over to NY or Massachusetts and see how tawdry all the billboards look. Read more about the campaign to ban billboards and Ted Riehle here: https://vtdigger.org/2021/07/11/then-again-vermonts-billboard-ban-followed-a-winding-road-to-passage/ https://vtdigger.org/2021/07/11/then-again-vermonts-billboar...
• SergeAx 4y ago
  I see a lot, and I mean A LOT of people, including several of my friends, using mobile phones or tablets to show their 1-5 years old children animation videos to make them busy and stop whining while adults are doing or minding their own adult business. No wonder that those children became addicted to small screens.
• K0balt 4y ago
  We not only need to ban kids from social media because it is effectively creating very short dopamine reward loops that are likely going to make it difficult for them to enact successful long term reward strategies, but we desperately need to figure out a way to make it less tempting to put toddlers in front of a tablet instead of normal human interactions. I live in a developing nation, and education especially on child rearing is lacking in the extreme. Easily 75 percent of middle class babies, ages 2 and up, are glued to a screen basically at all times in public. Cellphone holders in strollers. The kid just sits there watching random TikTok videos usually. In these cases, the “attentive” mothers make sure it’s in YouTube kids. But these kids are getting 8 hours a day plus of screen time under age 4. I’ve seen the first wave of results and it is truly buzzard, 5 year olds that do not act like 5 year old children. They do not interact with other people in any normal manner, jump around with a degree of randomness and apparent purposelessness that is completely uncharacteristic of non neurodivergent children. This is most definitely creating divergent developmental trajectories. It looks likely to me to create a “lost generation” at a time when humanity can least afford to lose its long term planning capacity. I can only hope the situation is better in other places. IMHO social media is the new DDT^Pb when it comes to children under 7, and seems to have very bad effects in adolescents as well. Because the upper class, for the most part have some inkling about developmental psychology and child rearing, and the lowest of the lower class cannot afford phones for babies, I’m concerned that this is going to create a much more deeply stratified society.
• novia 4y ago
  The argument for banning children from social media could equally easily apply to adults. I think everything that's available on the internet, short of pornography and beheading videos, should be equally available to all children, and companies should stop using COPPA as an excuse to ban children from their platforms.
• waterbirdwow 4y ago
  This is the kind of thing that frustrates me. Begging large power institutions (especially economic ones) to raise your kids. Economic power institutions are not able to stop your kids from going online, and they don't care to. They have no ethics and will slip into whatever position they need to in order to maintain face. So they'll pretend to care when they need to, but they're suck your kids into wasting entire days online in order to compile data that can be used to manipulate them politically or economically or socially when they can make money off of that. There effectively aren't any social power institutions left (except social media itself), so the only real solution is to have a strong enough family that you can keep your kids away from this soul-rotting garbage.
• DrThunder 4y ago
  I agree, but how? As a parent I'm going to implement stuff at home to keep my kids off of it, but the reality is they'll still get access somehow. I don't see a good tech solution for keeping them completely off it.
• ryan93 4y ago
  Seems like the thing to do is just ban phones in schools. The authority is already there and you can see what affect it has.
  • InCityDreams 4y ago
    Banned in my kids' school. Not for their benefit, but for the teachers.
• PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  First thing I read all day that makes any sense.
• gspencley 4y ago
  > How you feel about all this will likely come down to whether you believe that social-media platforms are addictive products—like cigarettes—marketed to kids or that they are vital and intractable parts of the national conversation. No that doesn't affect how I feel it about it at all. I raised two daughters whose lives overlapped with the existence of social media, but who were well into their teens before everyone and their dog started using it. When they were young we asked our family to abstain from uploading pictures of them to the Internet because we wanted them to decide how much online presence they wanted for themselves when they were old enough. I do sympathize with parents today, who have to deal with the fact that "all the other kids" are on SM and even some misguided teachers will undoubtedly ask that certain assignments be completed that require the use of SM. But I still think this is 100% a matter for private households. Despite the fact that I would feel for my children if we subjected them to the "FOMO" of not being on SM, and despite the fact that I'm sure they'd find a way to get around our decrees if they really wanted to, it's just not the government (or anyone else's) place to parent my children for me and so people can (and should) do what they think is best for themselves and their families but can also fuck right the hell off if they want to impose any sort of parental decision on me with respects to media consumption or use of technology.
  • bumby 4y ago
    Just for clarity, do you extend this to the government's ban on cigarettes being sold to minors? I.e., if a parent thought cigarette smoking was an acceptable risk for their children, should those children should be allowed to smoke? Or are some risks unacceptable irrespective of the parents assessment? If you do think some things are off the table regardless of the parent's opinion, where is that line drawn? (again, I'm not judging, just trying to understand your point better)
    • AlexandrB 4y ago
      > I.e., if a parent thought cigarette smoking was an acceptable risk for their children, should those children should be allowed to smoke? I think it's pretty common for parents to give their kids alcohol before they're 18/19/21. And many kids in my high school did smoke. Where/how they got the cigarettes is unknown, but it's not like they were rounded up and jailed for the act of smoking while underage. Or are you referring to punishing the parents?
• uhtred 4y ago
  Can't we just ban social media? It's literally ruined society.
• jcarrano 4y ago
  Sadly parents have become so inept, lazy or uninterested that they need the state to step up and raise their children into good and healthy habits. Pretty sad and it's not even parenting that they will receive from the state but a mediocre nanny whose only interest is that they don't get into too much trouble.
• sizzle 4y ago
  I think juicing kid’s reward systems of dopamine and lighting up the reward pathways with social media must be detrimental to young minds in the long run, is any of this being studied?
• moi2388 4y ago
  I have an idea: parenting. I never had issues with social media, nor did any of my friends, because we had parents who talked to us, limited our online time and showed alternatives. Why should we ban something because parents are too lazy to do their job? Having said that; we should immediately ban all ads without opt-in, and the same for cookies and the like. Doing things without consent is not okay.