6 ms·
Disclosure: I work for a social media company. However I live in the UK. Most schools in the UK ban phones in school. The difference here is that in this study
by KaiserPro 2y ago
Disclosure: I work for a social media company. However I live in the UK.
Most schools in the UK ban phones in school. The difference here is that in this study phones were taken away for 21 days, even after school. They lost access to the phone completely during that time.
I am less convinced that we should wholesale ban phones for kids, because in the UK at least, there is no longer any culture of letting kids go out and socialise. We need to provide spaces for kids to be kids, and safe.
However I do think social media use should be severely restricted, unfiltered video being zapped into young minds is not the way to build a cohesive society. tiktok/reels/youtube should probably be editorialised so that we can avoid the stupid, bullying and dangerous stuff being spread by arseholes.
Furthermore I think phone use should be time limited by default. That is, the default is that the phone stops all notifications after 20:00 apart from things like parents.
I have two kids, and I despair at other parents who think its fine to allow their 10/11 year olds to start group video calls at >20:30. Or the ones who let their kids bully on the class whatsapp.
Part of this is education, most of it is tech companies wanting to make money from kids (including mine.)
- quotemstr 2y ago[flagged]
- rmbyrro 2y agosome types of content are indisputably disturbing for kids, like violence, war footage, sexualized content (esp. a sexualized female image targeting male kids & teens), etc
- cma 2y agoSo outlaw Betty Boop and Jessica Rabbit? Will dating before 21 without a religious chaperone be OK?
- rmbyrro 2y agoyou can be agnostic while not objectifying the female image to a point of forming a generation of young man that are addicted to porn and can't talk and connect to a real women
- cma 2y agoIs this true that men aren't connecting to real women? What's the evidence? US STD rates are up 90% from 2004.
- gosub100 2y agoWe can recruit them to fight in a war, but it might be disturbing to show them what they signed up for.
- Thorrez 2y agoWe can recruit kids to fight in a war?
- ninalanyon 2y agoPeople who are too young to do all or some of vote, drink, drive a car, etc., can join the army in some countries such as the US.
- Thorrez 2y agoI believe I was driving at 14 in the US. The current Michigan law is 14y9m to get a level 1 license. The article was talking about year 8 students in the UK, which is 12-to-13-year-olds. The other commenters in this thread also seemed to be talking about younger kids, not 17-year-olds. Yes, it's important to clarify what age group people are talking about. But we shouldn't automatically assume everyone it talking about military-aged students.
- gosub100 2y agoRecruiters operate in US high schools to reach minors.
- Thorrez 2y agoThe article was talking about year 8 students in the UK, which is 12-to-13-year-olds. The other commenters in this thread also seemed to be talking about younger kids, not 17-year-olds. Yes, it's important to clarify what age group people are talking about. But we shouldn't automatically assume everyone it talking about military-aged students.
- immibis 2y agoIs it censorship when school teaches you maths but not how to skibidi a toilet?
- causality0 2y agoI had unfiltered internet access from around the age of ten onwards. I can confidently say that was a horrible idea and I would have been much better off as a person without it.
- 4ggr0 2y agoi think about this a lot as someone who had unfiltered access to the internet since being a kid around 2010. on the one hand i learned to understand english as a young boy, on my own, without realizing. on the other hand i've seen videos of beheadings, terrorist acts, violent accidents, war crimes and many more, lovely things. that being said...still not sure if it's a net-negative. feels positive to me, just not without there being negative aspects.
- DirkH 2y agoI agree with you that it isn't necessarily net-negative. I cannot begin to tell you how much more respect and care I give to the road and cars after witnessing so many videos of how violently and suddenly car accidents can take a life. Many of the horrors of these videos are burnt into my mind and I am confident this is for the better. We live in the real world. It is important to see the real world as it is. There are if course mental health limits to this. I never want to be desensitized. But in moderation I think it can be net-positive.
- 4ggr0 2y ago> We live in the real world. It is important to see the real world as it is. yeah, agree. i guess there's a balance you gotta reach between 'seeing the real world as it is when you're adult' and 'watching a terrorist behead a captive in 4k as a kid'. i mean there is some kind of bias at play in our societies, as i remember watching documentaries at school as a 13-14 year old, clearly displaying mass-graves at nazi concentration camps. i appreciate having been educated about this topic in such a direct way, yet is is very gruesome and haunting as well.
- __turbobrew__ 2y ago
- mateus1 2y agoThe idea that parent control is censorship is very funny. Kid’s brains shouldn’t be exposed to addictive and exploitative content.
- AzzyHN 2y agoWhere'd you get ten years from?
- interludead 2y agoI agree, we need to regulate tech more thoughtfully, yet we also need to rebuild a culture that allows kids to connect
- novaRom 2y ago> stops all notifications after 20:00 Better to stop absolutely all notifications. When I need to know if someone of my friends is asking something I can open a chat app and check. If something is urgent then just a phone call. The amount of distractions is enormous, thus disabling it by law might be more effective solution, otherwise intellectual decline/underdevelopment of the future society is predetermined.
- KaiserPro 2y agoWhilst I understand your point, I don't think banning notifications is actually a good step. They are a symptom of something else. For group chat, its missing out on socialising, Nobody wants that. How do you allow kids to socialise via mobile phone is that actual question there. For video based stuff, _what_ are they being exposed to? how tightly does the selection algorithm push the viewer into certain categories? Who is making that media, and why? Given that UK had the BBC to "inform and entertain", why are we outsourcing the entertain and leaving the "inform" to people sponsored by shady companies and malicious actors?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago> there is no longer any culture of letting kids go out and socialise. Could this have died due to tech?
- red_admiral 2y agoI don't think so, it started much earlier than that. Unless tech includes having a television in the living room. There was the Great Satanic Panic in the 1980s and 90s, and there were more and more places where you need a car to get anywhere. Urban crime, or at least the perception of it, also did its part. It started much earlier than the smartphone era in the US and the UK, but there's still parts of the Nordics and other places where kids go out to socialise and play in the forests or fields or whatever's around today. Tech on the one hand has given kids a new way to socialise, even if you can't meet up in person for whatever reason, you can still video call and play minecraft together. The other side of that is all the advertising and tracking and addiction-fuelling. The particular combination of always with you, always notifying you, and turning the addiction-generators up to 11 that you get on a smartphone seems to be a whole other level though. I wanted to make another point but I've got a ping because someone has posted on discord, sorry brb.
- wolvesechoes 2y ago"Unless tech includes having a television in the living room." I mean, technology as such wasn't born together with the internet.
- AzzyHN 2y agoNot really, no. People have been talking about the "death of the third place" for a while, now.
- wussboy 2y agoCar-centric cities make allowing kids outside too dangerous.
- Foobar8568 2y agoTech as in TV? See Roald Dhal views on TV and kids. I remember growing up in the 80s and 90s, in a suburb with forest and playground in walking distance, there were less and less kids outside, or for shorter duration. TV, cable TV and video games just killed everything.
- logifail 2y ago> We need to provide spaces for kids to be kids, and safe. That sounds as though you believe spaces such as these no longer exist? (Full disclosure: have three kids, don't track their location, don't believe they are "unsafe" going to play outside)
- tgv 2y ago> because …, there is no longer any culture of letting kids go out and socialise Are you frakking kidding me? We can bring that back. That’s no reason to allow social media + mobile phones to poison society and youth.
- SaltyBackendGuy 2y ago> We can bring that back. I agree with all of your points. I am not 100% sure how to do this (if anyone has guidance I would appreciate the insight). My personal anecdote is that my 8yo goes to school with other children who's parents have a low understanding of the impact social media is having on them and their children. I was shocked when my daughter came home and told me that her best friend had an iPhone and a Tiktok account. I spoke with her friend's Mom about it and she said that it's fine because she follows her and sees everything that she's doing on it. I respectfully disagreed but this is very real. I expect that over the next couple of years the majority of her friend's socializing will move into messaging apps. I am terrified.
- KaiserPro 2y agoI was a freerange when I was a kid. from about the age of 6 I was left in the garden/scrubland out the back, to be feral with about 4-12 other kids that lived on houses that backed onto the same scrubland. My wife is and was horrified by this. She was shuttled to other kids houses, and never allowed to go off on their own until deep into her teens. Objectively kids are much much safer now, however they are not allowed freedom outside. Most of this is because of safety (where are they, are they being abused, have they been run over, are they in a gang, etc etc) So _you_ as a parent need to entertain them Giving your kid "the internet" shuts them up, and means you can do other things. However that comes with a bunch of risks that most parents aren't aware of.
- dbbk 2y agoI don't have kids yet but I would certainly want them to be free-range. I guess now we have tech like Find My, it should give parents more peace of mind?
- rapind 2y agoJust need to ban (make it criminal) to advertise to and track kids. Eliminate the incentives and solve nearly all social media problems with kids overnight (along with most garbage mobile games).