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Surprised to see this seemingly presented positively on HN. Social media "feels" like it should be uniquely bad for children but the evidence is low-quality an

by eli 9mo ago

Surprised to see this seemingly presented positively on HN. Social media "feels" like it should be uniquely bad for children but the evidence is low-quality and contradictory. For example, high social media use is associated with anxiety and depression, but which direction does that relationship run? Meanwhile there are documented benefits especially for youth who are members of marginalized groups (e.g. LGBTQ). Don't get me wrong, I think there are a lot of problems with the big social media companies. I just think they affect adults too and that we should address them directly. But setting that aside, the practical implications of age gate laws are terrible. The options are basically to have an LLM guess your age based on your face, or uploading sensitive identity documents to multiple sites and hope they are stored and processed securely and not reused for other purposes. But OK let's assume social media is always bad for kids and also that someone invents a perfect age gate... kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse?

B56b 9mo ago
Social media being bad for mental health in childhood is one of the most robust theories I've ever seen for these kind of society-wide problems. You can peruse the After Babel Substack for the evidence if you're not convinced, but Jonathan Haidt has consistently done incredible work here.
- eli 9mo ago
  All due respect, I do not think the substack of one of the world's leading proponents of the theory that screen time is harmful is a good source for evidence that runs contrary to that narrative. Here's Nature reviewing his book: > Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers > These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2
  - jamespo 9mo ago
    Even the author of your link says "considerable reforms to these platforms are required, given how much time young people spend on them" whilst stopping short of a ban. The problem is these "considerable reforms" will always be half arsed.
    - eli 9mo ago
      I think considerable reforms are needed too! There are a lot of problems with the way these platforms treat adults too. I think an age gate is the wrong solution and in many ways it doesn't go far enough.
  - B56b 9mo ago
    I actually do think that Dr. Haidt is a good source for getting a fair understanding of both sides of the issue. If you've read or listened to him you'll know that it's a huge part of his ethos. Here's his rebuttal to that article: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epidemic https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi.... I think you'd struggle to find someone more earnestly trying to get an unbiased understanding of the reality of this topic.
  - confounder 9mo ago
    And Haidt forcefully refuted this a couple years ago: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epidemic https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
    - eli 9mo ago
      I’m not sure highlighting studies that seem to agree with his thesis is a particularly strong defense against the charge that the totality of the evidence is mixed and inconclusive. He’s a good writer though. Why did one study in Spain find an association with the rollout of high speed internet, but a much larger international study specifically looking at Facebook usage did not? Seems like that one should even more directly measure what’s alleged to be occurring.
everdrive 9mo ago
Do you think there is a more compelling explanation for the mental health decline in teenage girls?
- logicchains 9mo ago
  Yes, it's the culture going to shit; the same decline hasn't been observed in e.g. Asian countries.
ngruhn 9mo ago
> kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse? Some will. But I bet a lot of kids "have to be" on Instagram/TikTok/etc because everyone else is. I don't think they all gonna flock to 4chan because they got locked out of the big platforms.
- lm28469 9mo ago
  I'd argue even the darkest corners of 4chans aren't as bad as the average daily dose of brain rot delivered to hundreds of millions of people through infinite scroll algorithms on TikTok &co. And once you remove the sickening parts of 4chan I'd say it's overall a much more pleasant place than most other social medias, it's one of the last mainstream website that still somewhat feels like the golden age of internet
  - dyauspitr 9mo ago
    4chan is categorically bad. The combination of humor + racism/misogyny is like crack at brainwashing kids.
    - decremental 9mo ago
      [dead]
    - asdff 9mo ago
      It isn't so black and white as people paint it to be. /g/ is probably the best place on the internet today to discuss technology even with occasional dumb jokes. The crassness of the site and reflexive reaction from you and others has turned out to be a great wall to prevent the corporate enshittification that affected the rest of the internet.
      - dyauspitr 9mo ago
        I’ll take harmless enshitification over genocidal racism
dyauspitr 9mo ago
This is not surprising at all. HN’s perspective seems to generally go further with banning under 18 year olds from having smartphones in general.
tzs 9mo ago
> But setting that aside, the practical implications of age gate laws are terrible. The options are basically to have an LLM guess your age based on your face, or uploading sensitive identity documents to multiple sites and hope they are stored and processed securely and not reused for other purposes. Those aren't the only options. See the comments on almost any of the many other discussions of age verification on HN for details of ways to do it that do not involve giving any sensitive information to sites (other than what you explicitly trying to give to them, like your age being above their threshold) and do not involve guessing your age via LLM or any other means.
- ivan_gammel 9mo ago
  I‘m starting thinking that those alternatives are deliberately ignored by the anti-verification crowd. It’s hard to explain otherwise why the most logical way to solve the problem is not in the spotlight.
  - protocolture 9mo ago
    Its crazy that people are discussing the actual implementations instead of a commenters fantasy I dont understand it.
    - tzs 9mo ago
      There are actual implementations that do not compromise privacy and anonymity. For example the EU is currently doing large scale field tests in several countries of such a system. It involves your government issuing you a signed digital copy of your ID documents which gets cryptographically bound to the security hardware in your smart phone (support for other hardware security devices is planned for later). To verify your age to a site your phone and the site use a protocol based on zero-knowledge proofs to demonstrate to the site that your phone has a bound ID document signed by your government that says your age is above the site's threshold, without disclosing anything else from your ID document to the site. This demonstration requires the use of a key that was generated in the security hardware when the ID was bound, which shows that the site is talking to your phone and that the security hardware is unlocked, which is sufficient evidence that you have authorized this verification to satisfy the law. Note that your government is not involved beyond the initial installation of the bound ID document on the phone. They get no information on what sites you later age verify for or when you do any age verifications.
asdff 9mo ago
Put it this way: is it good for a child to spend an appreciable fraction of their day browsing social media? Did children previously just have free hours at hand to burn on this? The answer is of course no, there are not more hours in the day after the creation of social media, so its usage comes at the cost of something else in that child's life, usually their precious little downtime where they might plan and think about their own life. Or maybe at the cost of other activities that might be more engaging physically or mentally.
- eli 9mo ago
  In the 1940s that was pretty much the same argument deployed against the moral panic of that time: comic books.
  - asdff 9mo ago
    The difference is children back then actually did see their day expand as they were removed from the workforce, making comic book consumption "free" essentially in terms of what it might have replaced just a generation previous.
    - eli 9mo ago
      That feels like a stretch. In the 1850s it was pulp novels and in the 1990s it was video games.
    - AngryData 9mo ago
      More so in the cities, not as much in more rural areas where tons of kids were still doing farm work with 10 brothers and sisters along with them in the 40s-60s. After that farms had dropped quite a bit but it was still until the late 70s that farms and farm labor lost enough need for labor that caused most rural kids to completely exist the agricultural sector minus the direct sons and daughters of farmers.
  - Aerroon 9mo ago
    And later you had the satanic D&D. Every generation seems to pick their moral panic and then engages in "unintentional concern trolling" over it. The people mean well, but low quality evidence shouldn't be good enough to condemn things.
casey2 9mo ago
People likely need a fairly large shared set of beliefs to operate without constant friction. Hence national identities. Either let people freely associate into these communities or force algorithms to be "shared" in a sense between couples or families. I think couples' X could be interesting. But I'd prefer free association (possibly VR?)
fc417fc802 9mo ago
> uploading sensitive identity documents to multiple sites and hope Go to local liquor store. Present ID. Purchase $1 anonymous age verification card. Problem solved. (Card implementation left to reader.) > kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse? We used to have to visit a separate forum per community/topic/whatever. There was no realtime feed shoving posts in your face. No algorithm optimizing for engagement. How was that not better?
- camillomiller 9mo ago
  This is actually a great idea. It is even compatible with having private companies run the system. The real issue is distribution (online code verification is trivial). Tbf I believe that a fully government-owned anonymous system should be the goal. The government knows you already, so creating a proof of age anonymous token should also be somewhat trivial. Truth is companies don’t want to forgo the potential profit in data mining, and governments don’t like the actual lack of control and full anonymity, otherwise we’d have this already worldwide
  - fc417fc802 9mo ago
    In theory I agree. In practice I have severe misgivings about directly incorporating government issued IDs into mundane online transactions. I don't want "papers please" to be normalized. If the smart ID can do anonymous attestation of age then it can presumably also share various details with a requesting party. Next thing you know Facespace 365 is requiring you to provide your (attested) full legal name in order to register an account. I find that to be a highly objectionable outcome. If things escalated beyond basic age checks that also adds hardware requirements. Would I find myself needing a smartcard reader to do anything online? The friction of needing to visit a bank in person seems like a feature to me. What doesn't bother me is age restricted content guarded by a low fence. The bare minimum required to blunt the impact of something that appears to be analogous to an epidemic.
    - munksbeer 9mo ago
JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
> evidence is low-quality and contradictory. For example, high social media use is associated with anxiety and depression, but which direction does that relationship run? The evidence from device bans is pretty damn compelling. I am less familiar with the social-media literature. But I believe we have decent efforts at disentangling causation, and to my knowledge all research not coming out of Meta and TikTok points one way. > kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe If they do this isn’t great policy. If they don’t, it is. Let’s let this natural experiment play out.
TuringNYC 9mo ago
Similarly surprised to see this seemingly presented positively on HN. This is just a means to force logins and identity verification on every site.
lukeasrodgers 9mo ago
Evidence is often contradictory, especially in the social sciences--that is not a terribly damning charge in this case. Additionally, there is evidence that relationship between social media use and anxiety/depression is not just an association, see Meta's own internal research from 2019: https://metasinternalresearch.org/#block-2e15def2e67a803a83ece37f6cd35c9f https://metasinternalresearch.org/#block-2e15def2e67a803a83e.... "Meta’s own researchers found — in an experiment they believed was better designed than any external study done thus far — that reducing time on their platforms improved mental health and well-being, specifically depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison."
ropable 9mo ago
> But OK let's assume social media is always bad for kids and also that someone invents a perfect age gate... kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. Straw man argument, much? Might as well argue "We can't make any changes, ever, just in case something else happens! We'll address the next issue when/if it happens, same as always.
MagicMoonlight 9mo ago
I’ve seen children be groomed to produce child pornography on Snapchat. The offender wouldn’t have access to these random children if he couldn’t simply look them up. And more importantly, his access is anonymous, so it’s much harder to stop.
techblueberry 9mo ago
> kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse? I actually disagree with you. This was the internet when I was a kid, and part of the point was you had more agency. This may seem counter-intuitive, but I might prefer my kid hang out on 4chan than tik tok all day long, because at least the former feels like they’re making an intentional choice, and there’s not a multi billion dollar algorithm getting them addicted. This is part of the point. Kids need more unregulated spaces. Your youthTM brought to you by Mark Zuckerberg is dystopian.
NalNezumi 9mo ago
>Meanwhile there are documented benefits especially for youth who are members of marginalized groups (e.g. LGBTQ). This is a thin veiled propaganda that the likes of Zuckerberg quote all the time but is misattributed. Those marginalized group of people had benefits in finding like-minded people online, mostly through forums etc. (side point: same benefit exist for marginalized group such as white supremacist) But that's social NETWORK, and not social MEDIA. Almost all benefit people that defend social media spout is simply a social NETWORK benefit. The only advantage social MEDIA have is personalized ad, for people that like that. Everything else you get by reimplementing old, boring social network without "the algorithm".

by eli 9mo ago

B56b 9mo ago

Social media being bad for mental health in childhood is one of the most robust theories I've ever seen for these kind of society-wide problems. You can peruse the After Babel Substack for the evidence if you're not convinced, but Jonathan Haidt has consistently done incredible work here.

eli 9mo ago
All due respect, I do not think the substack of one of the world's leading proponents of the theory that screen time is harmful is a good source for evidence that runs contrary to that narrative. Here's Nature reviewing his book: > Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers > These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2
- jamespo 9mo ago
  Even the author of your link says "considerable reforms to these platforms are required, given how much time young people spend on them" whilst stopping short of a ban. The problem is these "considerable reforms" will always be half arsed.
  - eli 9mo ago
    I think considerable reforms are needed too! There are a lot of problems with the way these platforms treat adults too. I think an age gate is the wrong solution and in many ways it doesn't go far enough.
- B56b 9mo ago
  I actually do think that Dr. Haidt is a good source for getting a fair understanding of both sides of the issue. If you've read or listened to him you'll know that it's a huge part of his ethos. Here's his rebuttal to that article: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epidemic https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi.... I think you'd struggle to find someone more earnestly trying to get an unbiased understanding of the reality of this topic.
- confounder 9mo ago
  And Haidt forcefully refuted this a couple years ago: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epidemic https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
  - eli 9mo ago
    I’m not sure highlighting studies that seem to agree with his thesis is a particularly strong defense against the charge that the totality of the evidence is mixed and inconclusive. He’s a good writer though. Why did one study in Spain find an association with the rollout of high speed internet, but a much larger international study specifically looking at Facebook usage did not? Seems like that one should even more directly measure what’s alleged to be occurring.

everdrive 9mo ago

Do you think there is a more compelling explanation for the mental health decline in teenage girls?

logicchains 9mo ago
Yes, it's the culture going to shit; the same decline hasn't been observed in e.g. Asian countries.

ngruhn 9mo ago

> kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse? Some will. But I bet a lot of kids "have to be" on Instagram/TikTok/etc because everyone else is. I don't think they all gonna flock to 4chan because they got locked out of the big platforms.

lm28469 9mo ago
I'd argue even the darkest corners of 4chans aren't as bad as the average daily dose of brain rot delivered to hundreds of millions of people through infinite scroll algorithms on TikTok &co. And once you remove the sickening parts of 4chan I'd say it's overall a much more pleasant place than most other social medias, it's one of the last mainstream website that still somewhat feels like the golden age of internet
- dyauspitr 9mo ago
  4chan is categorically bad. The combination of humor + racism/misogyny is like crack at brainwashing kids.
  - decremental 9mo ago
    [dead]
  - asdff 9mo ago
    It isn't so black and white as people paint it to be. /g/ is probably the best place on the internet today to discuss technology even with occasional dumb jokes. The crassness of the site and reflexive reaction from you and others has turned out to be a great wall to prevent the corporate enshittification that affected the rest of the internet.
    - dyauspitr 9mo ago
      I’ll take harmless enshitification over genocidal racism

dyauspitr 9mo ago

This is not surprising at all. HN’s perspective seems to generally go further with banning under 18 year olds from having smartphones in general.

tzs 9mo ago

> But setting that aside, the practical implications of age gate laws are terrible. The options are basically to have an LLM guess your age based on your face, or uploading sensitive identity documents to multiple sites and hope they are stored and processed securely and not reused for other purposes. Those aren't the only options. See the comments on almost any of the many other discussions of age verification on HN for details of ways to do it that do not involve giving any sensitive information to sites (other than what you explicitly trying to give to them, like your age being above their threshold) and do not involve guessing your age via LLM or any other means.

ivan_gammel 9mo ago
I‘m starting thinking that those alternatives are deliberately ignored by the anti-verification crowd. It’s hard to explain otherwise why the most logical way to solve the problem is not in the spotlight.
- protocolture 9mo ago
  Its crazy that people are discussing the actual implementations instead of a commenters fantasy I dont understand it.
  - tzs 9mo ago
    There are actual implementations that do not compromise privacy and anonymity. For example the EU is currently doing large scale field tests in several countries of such a system. It involves your government issuing you a signed digital copy of your ID documents which gets cryptographically bound to the security hardware in your smart phone (support for other hardware security devices is planned for later). To verify your age to a site your phone and the site use a protocol based on zero-knowledge proofs to demonstrate to the site that your phone has a bound ID document signed by your government that says your age is above the site's threshold, without disclosing anything else from your ID document to the site. This demonstration requires the use of a key that was generated in the security hardware when the ID was bound, which shows that the site is talking to your phone and that the security hardware is unlocked, which is sufficient evidence that you have authorized this verification to satisfy the law. Note that your government is not involved beyond the initial installation of the bound ID document on the phone. They get no information on what sites you later age verify for or when you do any age verifications.

asdff 9mo ago

Put it this way: is it good for a child to spend an appreciable fraction of their day browsing social media? Did children previously just have free hours at hand to burn on this? The answer is of course no, there are not more hours in the day after the creation of social media, so its usage comes at the cost of something else in that child's life, usually their precious little downtime where they might plan and think about their own life. Or maybe at the cost of other activities that might be more engaging physically or mentally.

eli 9mo ago
In the 1940s that was pretty much the same argument deployed against the moral panic of that time: comic books.
- asdff 9mo ago
  The difference is children back then actually did see their day expand as they were removed from the workforce, making comic book consumption "free" essentially in terms of what it might have replaced just a generation previous.
  - eli 9mo ago
    That feels like a stretch. In the 1850s it was pulp novels and in the 1990s it was video games.
  - AngryData 9mo ago
    More so in the cities, not as much in more rural areas where tons of kids were still doing farm work with 10 brothers and sisters along with them in the 40s-60s. After that farms had dropped quite a bit but it was still until the late 70s that farms and farm labor lost enough need for labor that caused most rural kids to completely exist the agricultural sector minus the direct sons and daughters of farmers.
- Aerroon 9mo ago
  And later you had the satanic D&D. Every generation seems to pick their moral panic and then engages in "unintentional concern trolling" over it. The people mean well, but low quality evidence shouldn't be good enough to condemn things.

casey2 9mo ago

People likely need a fairly large shared set of beliefs to operate without constant friction. Hence national identities. Either let people freely associate into these communities or force algorithms to be "shared" in a sense between couples or families. I think couples' X could be interesting. But I'd prefer free association (possibly VR?)

fc417fc802 9mo ago

> uploading sensitive identity documents to multiple sites and hope Go to local liquor store. Present ID. Purchase $1 anonymous age verification card. Problem solved. (Card implementation left to reader.) > kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse? We used to have to visit a separate forum per community/topic/whatever. There was no realtime feed shoving posts in your face. No algorithm optimizing for engagement. How was that not better?

camillomiller 9mo ago
This is actually a great idea. It is even compatible with having private companies run the system. The real issue is distribution (online code verification is trivial). Tbf I believe that a fully government-owned anonymous system should be the goal. The government knows you already, so creating a proof of age anonymous token should also be somewhat trivial. Truth is companies don’t want to forgo the potential profit in data mining, and governments don’t like the actual lack of control and full anonymity, otherwise we’d have this already worldwide
- fc417fc802 9mo ago
  In theory I agree. In practice I have severe misgivings about directly incorporating government issued IDs into mundane online transactions. I don't want "papers please" to be normalized. If the smart ID can do anonymous attestation of age then it can presumably also share various details with a requesting party. Next thing you know Facespace 365 is requiring you to provide your (attested) full legal name in order to register an account. I find that to be a highly objectionable outcome. If things escalated beyond basic age checks that also adds hardware requirements. Would I find myself needing a smartcard reader to do anything online? The friction of needing to visit a bank in person seems like a feature to me. What doesn't bother me is age restricted content guarded by a low fence. The bare minimum required to blunt the impact of something that appears to be analogous to an epidemic.
  - munksbeer 9mo ago

JumpCrisscross 9mo ago

> evidence is low-quality and contradictory. For example, high social media use is associated with anxiety and depression, but which direction does that relationship run? The evidence from device bans is pretty damn compelling. I am less familiar with the social-media literature. But I believe we have decent efforts at disentangling causation, and to my knowledge all research not coming out of Meta and TikTok points one way. > kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe If they do this isn’t great policy. If they don’t, it is. Let’s let this natural experiment play out.

TuringNYC 9mo ago

Similarly surprised to see this seemingly presented positively on HN. This is just a means to force logins and identity verification on every site.

lukeasrodgers 9mo ago

Evidence is often contradictory, especially in the social sciences--that is not a terribly damning charge in this case. Additionally, there is evidence that relationship between social media use and anxiety/depression is not just an association, see Meta's own internal research from 2019: https://metasinternalresearch.org/#block-2e15def2e67a803a83ece37f6cd35c9f https://metasinternalresearch.org/#block-2e15def2e67a803a83e.... "Meta’s own researchers found — in an experiment they believed was better designed than any external study done thus far — that reducing time on their platforms improved mental health and well-being, specifically depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison."

ropable 9mo ago

> But OK let's assume social media is always bad for kids and also that someone invents a perfect age gate... kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. Straw man argument, much? Might as well argue "We can't make any changes, ever, just in case something else happens! We'll address the next issue when/if it happens, same as always.

MagicMoonlight 9mo ago

I’ve seen children be groomed to produce child pornography on Snapchat. The offender wouldn’t have access to these random children if he couldn’t simply look them up. And more importantly, his access is anonymous, so it’s much harder to stop.

techblueberry 9mo ago

> kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse? I actually disagree with you. This was the internet when I was a kid, and part of the point was you had more agency. This may seem counter-intuitive, but I might prefer my kid hang out on 4chan than tik tok all day long, because at least the former feels like they’re making an intentional choice, and there’s not a multi billion dollar algorithm getting them addicted. This is part of the point. Kids need more unregulated spaces. Your youthTM brought to you by Mark Zuckerberg is dystopian.

NalNezumi 9mo ago

>Meanwhile there are documented benefits especially for youth who are members of marginalized groups (e.g. LGBTQ). This is a thin veiled propaganda that the likes of Zuckerberg quote all the time but is misattributed. Those marginalized group of people had benefits in finding like-minded people online, mostly through forums etc. (side point: same benefit exist for marginalized group such as white supremacist) But that's social NETWORK, and not social MEDIA. Almost all benefit people that defend social media spout is simply a social NETWORK benefit. The only advantage social MEDIA have is personalized ad, for people that like that. Everything else you get by reimplementing old, boring social network without "the algorithm".