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Why ban social media when ad-supported media is the culprit? Remove the incentive (to get users to doom scroll, to polarize, to impulse buy…) and you change the

• killingtime74 10mo ago
  Socialising != Social media. Teens can still use messenger, WhatsApp, phonecalls, text or even....face to face!
  • baby 10mo ago
    That's true. I'll say this though: my social life skyrocketed thanks to Facebook when I was ~18. Not sure what kind of impact it would have had earlier, I was def. more of a kid and social medias were not a thing anyway. Makes sense to me to have an age limit considering cyber bullying and teen suicides and all.
    • kahmeal 10mo ago
      Facebook then wasn't what facebook is today. The social media of the early internet was largely a digital expansion of otherwise healthy social norms. Then the internet blew up. Now it's more akin to the drug dealers DARE warned us about. Still waiting on _those_ free drugs, tbh.
    • jsphweid 10mo ago
      What year was it when you were 18? Facebook was enormous for me when I was 18, in 2008, for similar reasons. However, these days facebook is mostly just ads and generic modern feed garbage content in general.
    • rhines 10mo ago
      Social media is no longer social - it's just media. At least for most people anyway. The average user, and probably kids even more so, are just scrolling through. If you're posting as well, or at least commenting on stuff and having discussions with people you know (even if you just know them online), I think that's fine. Like forums, or being in group chats with friends on Facebook, or sharing photos you take with a specific community. It's when you're only consuming (like scrolling TikTok or Instagram), or when your comments are written for the algorithm rather than for actual discussion (like on Reddit, or even Hackernews to an extent), that social media is an issue.
      • Tom1380 10mo ago
        What is meant by writing comments for the algorithm?
        • rhines 10mo ago
          Or upvotes might be a better example, at least for Reddit/Hackernews. But the idea being that the comments are sorted based on some algorithm, whether than be popularity or something else, and commenters are trying to optimize for that. In traditional forums where comments are sorted linearly and it's more about having a discussion with others, but when comments are surfaced by other metrics then it's less about the discussion and more about gaming those metrics.
    • gffrd 10mo ago
      It’s possible your social life would have exploded without Facebook. If you found a community on Facebook, you’d likely have found it regardless without it.
    • globular-toast 10mo ago
      Yeah because all your peers were on it. It wouldn't have skyrocketed if they weren't.
• barbazoo 10mo ago
  How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health? The algorithms create the engagement, the engagement lures in the ads, not the other way around, at least that's what I think right now.
  • yifanl 10mo ago
    Well arguably TV did destroy people's brains, just a lot slower and less efficiently. And in fairness, dosage is the difference between a painkiller an a heroin addiction.
    • safety1st 10mo ago
      It's worth noting that this was a pretty active debate as TVs were going from one in the household to one in every room. "We don't want to put a TV in our kids' room, it'll rot their brains." And there was research to back up that it had a negative effect to some degree. So why are we surprised that when we put a TV in the kids' hands things got even worse? Meta testified on the stand recently that they're not a social media company anymore, they're now all about video. Tiktok is the new TV. Every app wants to Tiktokify. The money from TV, just pushing an endless stream of video to someone, is very good.
      • ncruces 10mo ago
        I pretty much agree with this. We were able to go back to one TV in the house (at least I was), and even avoid a big chunk of the ads when watching TV (by paying for Netflix/etc) and even radio (Spotify/etc). Except we now we put a garbage TV in every hand. It's a terrible idea because it's a tiny screen; because it's not a shared experience, but an isolating one; because it's been proven that it's bad for eyesight/myopia. But most of all, it's terrible because the content is crap. Spending hours watching a never ending sequence of low effort 2min videos that need to deliver on the first 30s (or they're skipped) is not the way to make anyone smarter/saner.
    • mckirk 10mo ago
      "Do you or a loved one suffer from an abundance of brain cells? Speak to your doctor today about whether The Jersey Shore might be right for you!"
• safety1st 10mo ago
  I don't think it's just the ads, I mean we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as these were adopted. Then we got the one-two punch of social media apps on phones, and everywhere we saw these get adopted, we saw depression and anxiety increase en masse. My own theory is that if you have to pick one thing it's the phone, because screen time/attention skyrockets when you get one of those, and they can have you freaking out about whatever clickbait they're feeding you pretty much 24/7. When I grew up there was just a computer in the den and when I wasn't in the den, whatever I'd viewed on it was out of sight, mostly out of mind.
  • Xelbair 10mo ago
    The previous static ads of the past are completely different beast compared to targeted advertising and attention driven design(leading to doomscrolling etc).
  • fainpul 10mo ago
    > we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as these were adopted That is not true. Distorted body perception, anorexia etc. due to omnipresent photoshopped models in magazines and poster ads where a thing decades ago. Things escalated with social media, but there were issues long before that.
    • insane_dreamer 10mo ago
      > Things escalated with social media, but there were issues long before that. The escalation, the ubiquitousness, is the problem. It's like the difference to your health between having a can of coke week and drinking a 2 L bottle of coke every day.
  • squigz 10mo ago
    My own theory is that kids are rightfully anxious and depressed as they can now easily see the state of the world and the direction it's going. This is the world they have to enter soon, and they can do almost nothing to change it, so of course they're more anxious/depressed.
• Simulacra 10mo ago
  I remember when Facebook required a university address. That made it..unique to me. Perhaps there are ways to have a permitting process for kids through their parents and guardians that only access sites with that permit. Idk. South Korea has those internet license which I chaff at but.. It's a hard problem.
• nick238 10mo ago
  Decades ago, there was less competition for eyeballs, much more high-quality content (vs. slop), and investors were a bit willing to just build an audience without seeking immediate returns. Early social media was aspirin: a useful drug, but not addictive. Now it's super-cocaine and hyper-meth trying to keep the user high. Also, what's an 'ad' is an extreme spectrum nowadays with free stuff given out in exchange for a post, people trying to act like paid influencers to fake it until they make it, paid influencers, and listicle affiliate link slop.
• TimByte 10mo ago
  Yeah, ad-driven feeds definitely pushed platforms into the doom-scrolling feedback loop. But for better or worse, governments don't really know how to regulate "the business model" without blowing up the whole internet economy
• awillowingmind 10mo ago
  I despise ads. I take any chance I can to pay for my content rather than support ad-based revenue. But you can’t solve that issue with policy. It’s a cultural issue. People are not willing to pay for the content they consume (with money). Not to mention you would collapse the US economy (I’m not sure if you’re US based, just speaking from my perspective), and likely others, if you applied a blanket ban on ad-supported media.
• riversflow 10mo ago
  I long thought this way, but I’ve realized ad-supported social media/internet is an objectively egalitarian funding path that has allowed the open web to thrive and flourish. If you have a way of funding the internet that doesn’t shut out literally Billions because they cant afford it, I’m all ears. Complaining about ads is kinda like complaining about homeless people. You are just servicing your own annoyance without actually engaging in critical thought. It is selfish behavior.
• naravara 10mo ago
  I think 70-80% of it is the business model, but the other 20-30% might just be baked into how it is. Jonathan Haidt talks about how once social media usage became ubiquitous among teenagers around 2015 mental health problems began to skyrocket. And a big part of this was the algorithm serving up content designed to make people feel bad, but another part around feelings of being bullied turned out to largely be kids seeing their friends hanging out with each other without inviting them and this provoking feelings of alienation. That’s inevitable, I felt bad when I found out about parties or hang-outs I didn’t get invited to at that age as well. But I didn’t even know about 90% of them, and those I did I heard about through passing references rather than a stream of pictures and albums about how much fun everyone was having without me. I think some level of a sense of isolation is inevitable under those circumstances, though I’m not sure that by itself would rise to the level of banning it outright. At least not before trying other interventions like addressing Meta’s “19 strikes before banning you for CSAM” rule. Kids are just the canaries in the coal mine here. Whatever these services are doing that is cooking developing brains is still turning up the heat on adult brains too, we can’t try to pretend we can be psychologically healthy engaging with something that we know is spiking depression and anxiety in our kids. The culture of interacting just changed as more people got online and more tools became available to expand access to things. You used to just be able to have an unsecured comment section where anyone could come to your website and directly modify the page’s HTML and most of the time nothing would happen. You ought to have sanitized your inputs but there just wasn’t this background miasma that was going to flood your comment section full of spam, scans, and injecting malware into the page if you left an open text-entry box on the internet. Once it hit a certain scale and there was a certain amount of money in it then a lot of mess came with them.
  • ethin 10mo ago
    Jonathan Haidt is someone who nobody should take seriously. Pretty much all of the data he cites is cherry-picked and the vast majority of people in trust and safety and similar will tell you that he is probably one of the least reliable authorities on this subject. He's aiming to sell fear, not to actually solve the problem.
    • 10mo ago
• amrocha 10mo ago
  Oh, alright, I guess we just need to overthrow capitalism and install a different economic system Alright Australian lawmakers, you heard the man, chop chop!
• amarant 10mo ago
  I'm not sure social media was ever sane. I distinctly remember thinking it wasn't back in my highschool days, so around 2007-2009, which was pretty much when Facebook completely took over the market in Sweden where I lived. Before then I used to use lunarstorm. Was that the sane period of social media? Maybe, my memory is fuzzy: it's been a while.
  • Wojtkie 10mo ago
    Yeah it wasn't ever sane. It was just harder to onboard and you were still interacting mostly with people you knew. Now it's worse because you'll hardly ever interact with people you know.
    • Gigachad 10mo ago
      Now days you just get a feed of LLM content or foreign psyop accounts. Your actual friends are on IM apps.
  • swiftcoder 10mo ago
    At least with early Facebook one was mostly interacting with one's pretty close peers. Back when I joined, you still needed a .edu email address to signup, and there was no real discovery mechanism, so you mostly only friended people who you had met IRL.
• snarf21 10mo ago
  The ad supported is just the reason to make it addictive. Get rid of all likes/thumbs/follower(counts)/notifications and it loses the endorphins and stops being the problem it is today.
  • kahmeal 10mo ago
    You're not wrong. Even simple "page hit counters" became a target of manipulation once they were common. Human nature is tough at scale.
  • halapro 10mo ago
    You might not have opened any social media app lately. You need 10 seconds before you're sucked into the feed. Likes are a thing of the past, they just gather your interests by your reaction time on any content they show you. Hey you spent 500ms looking at this pretty girl dancing, how about some ass now? I get straight up PORN ads on Facebook too. Twitter at some point showed me porn as well, even if I had specifically curated it to show JavaScript content.
• andrewinardeer 10mo ago
  It's crazy that social media is banned but kids are still subject to gambling ads prior to or after watching the footy on free to air TV.
  • wiredpancake 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • immibis 10mo ago
    Can they gamble?
    • erfgh 10mo ago
      Supposedly no but they will soon be able to.
• insane_dreamer 10mo ago
  I do agree that banning advertising would be good (though not the only problem). However, you don't need social media to socialize online (text messaging, messaging groups, etc. all still exist).
• random9749832 10mo ago
  A lot of exploitation is not even about money. Some of these platforms don't even make profit. It is about politics.