17 ms·

The kids with phones are alright

272 points by JumpCrisscross 4mo ago

mortar 4mo ago
https://archive.is/poWGm https://archive.is/poWGm
- wffurr 4mo ago
  Why do you need an archive link for this?
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    Why don't you? Everything should be archived.
  - mortar 4mo ago
    The site reported an error at the time of viewing citing consumption
retube 4mo ago
Conflates a whole load of othogonal issues that really have nothing to do with each other
- FeteCommuniste 4mo ago
  Interesting reversal of the "think of the kids" argument, though: think of the kids who could have used their phones to document their mistreatment at the hands of alcoholic perverts.
  - j45 4mo ago
    Age 16-17 is very different than Ages 5-10 for kids to carry a device. The former is no issue. I just don't think the author's take is nuanced as they think. Kids (Age 5-13) safety is of ultimate importance. Devices, independently are also a major issue in schools. Social media use of bullying also is a major issue. To the point they are banned.
    - nrabulinski 4mo ago
      Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue. I’ve been bullied before social media was mainstream. A little later in life, when internet as a whole was majorly taking off, it helped me actually socialize. I met people some of whom I’m friends to this day, but more importantly - I could meet people to go out with, to talk to. Should we ban schools then? Because school grounds are famously place where the most bullying, especially kids 5-13 (which you highlighted yourself), is happening. Or maybe ban real life interactions? Because you can meet someone who will bully you or be of bad influence? We both know that’s not the right way, just like banning social media is not solving any problems. It’s just a convenient argument to introduce internet-wide surveillance, as well as to take away any autonomy or rights kids may have. Instead of investing in moderation, and actually scrutinizing big tech, which is the real cause of more bullying, shorter attention spans, and whatever else people say is wrong with the kids these days.
      - j45 4mo ago
        Technologies when not learned by the people to use in proper ways, too often can be used against people by people with vested financial interests. Social Media worked out that way. So did device addiction. It's great to find ways to socialize, and those ways existed before, and will also exist after. The exclusion of current forms of social media and connectivity as default doesn't mean better solutions don't step up. I'm not really sure of the tying of schools to phone bans in schools. Schools aren't perfect, but they have a legal liability to keep kids safe (or safer). Devices and social media don't. A large part of this is life coming at parents faster than they can keep up, let alone stay one season ahead of their childs growth. This would probably be a way. Societally, rules and laws, including public health are a social contract and agreement on how to live together in a tight place. Inside the home, though, is the opportunity for parents to learn and expose as they wish. Solving today's social media can solve a ton of problems, or at least provide an impetus for it to improve. Schools are supposed to be safe places for kids, right? And the entire unfiltered outside world was coming into it via device. For example, one solution is parents getting literate in tech enough to know how to lead young people before this even becomes a conversation. One way to do this is to offer unlimited screen time for creating, and much less for passive consuming. The generation that wants to experience the real world through a little screen has it backwards, and that's coming form the people who built the little digital world too. I'm not anti-technology for young people at all. I'm anti-addiction and anti-manipultion by unlimited people and parties interested in reaching eyeballs. Parents, legally, are required to provide a safe and growing environment.
  - puchatek 4mo ago
    Reminds me of the "good guys with guns" narrative tbh. Being able to document such transgressions is not enough of an argument to do a mass rollout of ad display technology IMHO.
    - pjc50 4mo ago
      The ability to film people on their phone is not the same as the ad display technology. I think the argument upthread about "conflation" has a point, but .. it's social media itself that forces the conflation. You can't just have a social network that lets you communicate with your community, it has to get tied up with international politics and exploitative advertising.
    - Barrin92 4mo ago
      the even more direct analogy is the Arab Spring, where social media and phones were widely advertised as a means to bring evil dictators down, as a democratic, youth empowering anti evil old pervert technology. The tech industry obviously jumped onto it because it's a rhetorically powerful argument but it tells you very little what the systemic consequences are ten years down the road.
      - mcmoor 4mo ago
        It's still funny how much it's celebrated because it brings down establishments, not realizing it'll also bring down their own. Reminds me of why no one should start biological warfare.
        marysol5 4mo ago
        MAD is another one, the concept of firing your nuke means you lost. So you have to spend a lot of money to have said nuke and keep it available, just so you DON'T use it...
    - thesmtsolver2 4mo ago
      What do you think about legalizing drugs?
  - pjc50 4mo ago
    I'm reminded of the way that universally carried high resolution cameras made UFOs and crop circles disappear, but police suddenly became a lot less trustworthy. The abuse question .. well, "social justice" is a term that starts fights, but there have been a lot of people who've been able to get some sort of justice only because they raised their cause on social media, having been ignored by the authorities. #MeToo is probably the big example, culminating in the Epstein revelations.
    - marysol5 4mo ago
      UFO's are still somehow always captured on the single dirtiest worst image sensor every produced by humans.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ClumsyPilot 4mo ago
    Why are we conflating having a camera with social media that is addictive?
    - marysol5 4mo ago
      Because the article is nefarious
  - ceayo 4mo ago
    at the hands of alcoholic perverts who push this legislation onto them
- nyeah 4mo ago
  I agree that there are several different issues at work. Can you show an example of how TFA conflates some of them? You may disagree with the author's conclusions, but that doesn't make the article nonsense.
  - titanomachy 4mo ago
    Not who you’re responding to, but I also don’t really think the article makes any kind of sensible argument that I can follow. Yes, it’s bad that a creepy drunk man used his phone to take pictures of teenage girls. Yes, it’s commendable that bystanders called him out. Yes, some countries are thinking of curtailing social media access for teenagers. I’m not sure what any of these things have to do with each other but the author presents them as somehow related, without drawing a coherent thread through them.
    - nyeah 4mo ago
      The article explains very clearly what these issues have to do with each other in this particular case.
      - titanomachy 4mo ago
        I don’t agree. Whether or not these girls had phones, or social media, was irrelevant in this case. And I’ve never heard anyone seriously argue that 16-year-olds shouldn’t have phones, or that 16-year-old girls are at fault when an old man secretly makes videos of them. Both these groups seem like imagined bogeymen that the article is railing against.
        nyeah 4mo ago
        >Whether or not these girls had phones, or social media, was irrelevant The article explains why that was not irrelevant.
        cmoski 4mo ago
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
j45 4mo ago
It's important to define kids. The article mentions 15-16 years of age. The best practice is to keep kids off smartphones with full internet, full social media, touchscreen and scrolling at least until 13. It doesn't mean they can't have other kinds of devices. This is a wide open market category.
- roundabout-host 4mo ago
  So force parents to give them devices running an even more nonfree, even more crippled OS. At least on a smartphone you can run GNU/Linux.
  - marysol5 4mo ago
    Huh? That's not defined in any legislation. Also vast majority of devices run a Linux kernel....
    - roundabout-host 3mo ago
      GNU/Linux, not just Linux.
api 4mo ago
The problem is not phones. Phones are fine. The problem is specific apps that make use of addiction engineering. These are bad on desktops too but the extreme portability of phones makes them a hundred times more potent. Like all risks it doesn’t affect all kids equally either. Some are less vulnerable for various cognitive reasons just like some are less prone to chemical addiction. Kids with wealthier and/or more engaged parents or parents with more free time are also less vulnerable. Wealthier kids have more activities available and can often afford to have one parent stay home. Lastly kids in healthier communities or suburbs or safe urban settings where they can roam free are less vulnerable. They children of the poor, those with ADD or ASD conditions, and those with less third spaces or other activities are most vulnerable to becoming addicted to endless stupefying doom scrolling and addictive games that pre-train them for future gambling addiction. It’s not just kids either. The elderly and the isolated become addicted to this stuff. Addiction engineering is the problem, whether it’s via a phone, a web site, or a chemical. IMO if you intentionally and knowingly engineer something for addiction you are committing a form of assault.
- Lerc 4mo ago
  Would it not be a better approach to remove any incentive to provide an addictive product. Companies don't do that just to be evil. Evil is just the byproduct of money. Make it illegal to advertise to anyone under the age of 18. Make it illegal to trade data about anyone under the age of 18. What incentive would then remain? I don't think they will do it for the long term gains of training behaviour for when they are old enough to exploit. Companies that engage in behaviour like this are notoriously immune to long term ideas.
  - api 4mo ago
    At the very least I think we should seriously consider taxing advertising. It’d be almost impossible to pick and choose so just tax all of it. I think the knock on effects would be positive. It’s an almost unmitigated vice at this point and is the main engine behind this stuff.
  - ozgrakkurt 4mo ago
    > I don't think they will do it for the long term gains of training behaviour for when they are old enough to exploit. They would definitely do that. It is a pretty basic idea to advertise to kids so there will be a customer base in later years. There was related emails leaked too
semiquaver 4mo ago
HN title automangler automangled this title. It references a specific song: “The kids are alright”, and removing the “The” reduces the impact of the reference. Edit: now fixed, thanks mods
RIMR 4mo ago
This whole article just boils down to the argument "If badly-behaved adults are allowed to have cameras, why shouldn't well-behaved children have access to for-profit social media platforms designed to addict them and feed them misinformation?" It's complete nonsense. The conversation in the UK right now isn't about whether or not teenagers should be allowed to own cell phones; it's about whether they should be allowed to have access to the myriad of addictive and harmful apps and services available on those devices, often maliciously targeted at them. The drunk pervert filming them on the train has nothing to do with this argument. He's using his phone like a camera. Teenagers are allowed to have cameras, and assuredly every one of the girls he was filming had a camera of some sort on them of their own. Nobody was on uneven ground in this situation technologically. If people actually were worried about perverted adults preying on children, they would take a look at the countless examples of perverted adults preying on children via their social media accounts and devices. It's been open season on children online for the past decade. If people actually cared about accountability, they would stop pushing for age-verification laws, and start penalizing social media companies for their laissez faire attitude towards inappropriate sexual conduct, because currently, sites like Instagram and TikTok cater directly to pedophiles and do absolutely nothing about the predatory behavior coming from their user base towards children that are clearly too young to legally use social media in most parts of the world (<13 in the USA). We need to reframe this whole conversation. It's not about keeping kids away from social media. It's about keeping trillion-dollar businesses from profiting off of children while actively doing harm to them with addictive algorithms, misinformation, and exposure to malicious actors.
- flumpcakes 4mo ago
  I agree with your sentiment completely. I think there's nuance that a lot of people don't bother with because of tribalism but your take is the one I most align with in this instance. Children do need protecting, I grew up with the Internet and it made me partly who I am today, but I also recognise it is completely different now. Gore/shock/NSFL websites being linked between friends as pranks are no longer a thing (thankfully), but we have replaced that with garden walls (Facebook, Reddit, YT, etc.) that are much more insidious and have mechanised the harm to children and young people to an unbelievable scale.
- 4mo ago
goalieca 4mo ago
Personally, I don’t even think adults with phones are alright.
- Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
  Yeah, age and maturity are two different things entirely. One of the bigger issues / trends right now is immature adults with power.
  - vinaigrette 4mo ago
    Maybe the problem is power
- lotsofpulp 4mo ago
  Remove the phones and the problem will remain, which is people’s desire to consume detrimental content, or content in detrimental amounts. Before phones/computers/internet, it was garbage on television channels. Propaganda on 24/7 “news” channels, “reality” tv shows, etc.
  - __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
    So it's not propagandists that are the problem, but rather the people they target? That's an odd take. Maybe we should've shown a little more spine when they asked us to build a medium for the strong would use to prey on the weak. Maybe we're the problem.
    - squigz 4mo ago
      It's not that odd of a take to recognize that the people abusing their power and those eating it up are both part of the problem in their own ways.
  - ColdStream 4mo ago
    While that is true, the friction to access has been made far too easy. Adding in some inconvenience may actually be a good thing. It also helped that in the print/radio/television period, you couldn't hyper focus content at a specific individual. What was broadcast was free for all to see and critique. I'm not advocating for a return to that, but that was one of the highlights of the era.
ashu1461 4mo ago
What’s easier: waiting until your child is mature enough before giving them a smartphone, or trying to regulate social media companies and every addictive website?
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  Let’s do both.
- conductr 4mo ago
  The irony of this is the phone is an easy button for parenting. For that reason, I don’t think we should try to optimize around easy.
- tartuffe78 4mo ago
  Wait until they are 26?
- xboxnolifes 4mo ago
  The latter.
- throwaway_19sz 4mo ago
  That is a glaring false dichotomy.
jimbokun 4mo ago
> These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, People who are not yet ready to have full agency of their own lives is more or less the definition of children. Does she also expect children to have full time jobs, pay taxes, pay all their own bills and rent, etc etc?
- nyeah 4mo ago
  In TFA, the author says "agency" not "full agency." I also can't find all these other issues (jobs, etc) in TFA. Where are you getting this?
  - jimbokun 4mo ago
    Is there a point you’re trying to make?
    - albedoa 4mo ago
      The point is very clear to the rest of us. You inserted the word "full" where the author was not talking about full agency. It's hard to believe that you don't follow.
      - DangitBobby 4mo ago
        We are arguing over how much agency children should have. The article argues they should have more, the comment you originally responded to said practically definitionally we limit the agency of children. The obvious implied point is that it's not unreasonable to think their phone use may be part of the agency that they are denied, and that would not be a departure from how children are treated.
  - NoPicklez 4mo ago
    Well that's the question isn't it, agency but to what extent. It makes sense to allow teenagers to have more agency over themselves than a 10 year old, but clearly there is an argument for limiting their agency on social media platforms. Just because there are adults that abuse their agency of the use of alcohol (alcoholism) doesn't mean we should remove restrictions on young people. Just because there are adults with full agency who drive recklessly doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds to drive cars.
Papazsazsa 4mo ago
The focus on children needing their phones controlled is the correct instinct, incorrectly applied to a too-narrow group. Smartphones are fomes peccati.
- RetroTechie 4mo ago
  > Smartphones are fomes peccati. Smartphones aren't, some apps on them are. (besides being unneeded or a nuisance in some situations)
  - ColdStream 4mo ago
    I have said it for a long time. Look at the original iPhone release. It was a hyper focused device that was designed to consolidate devices, make using a phone easier so that you could get on with your day. Once the app store and opened the gate for social media to wonder in, that is when these things got turned into potential addiction machines.
    - cubefox 4mo ago
      It already had a browser. You don't need an app when you have a browser. The addiction is built-in as a latent capability.
      - roundabout-host 4mo ago
        The browser itself is not the problem, but the way the platforms design themselves to be very addictive.
        exodust 4mo ago
        > very addictive The "addictive" insisting by 2 new ones in short time? Getting bot vibes. "We need to classify social media as an addictive substance" more or less. Is that from someone's e-safety commissioner? Or someone wanting back-pay compo right back to MySpace addiction. An absurd idea. "Some people can't control themselves around video games therefore video games bad", that's what social media has copped. "Addictive" might mean a bloody well designed user interface that users like. Making buttons easy to access and responsive feedback and just the right amount of visual cues and spicy labels, all in harmony as designed and delivered via well engineered mechanisms. "Too addictive, you must now jump through regulatory hoops". No!
fumeux_fume 4mo ago
So this is the new hot take? That kids need unfettered access to smart phones and the internet to toughen them up? Absolutely cringe.
- nyeah 4mo ago
  TFA gives an example where kids are at risk and an old person is misusing a phone. It is clearly not advocating for this scenario to occur more often. Can you show anything else to indicate that the conclusion is "toughen them up"?
  - fumeux_fume 4mo ago
    > Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday.
    - nyeah 4mo ago
      Ok fair.
jonstewart 4mo ago
This essay extends one anecdote involving 16+ year old teenagers to the unsupported conclusion that kids should have phones and those who wish to restrict that are all wealthy 1% right wing authoritarians. Then with the personal note it seems clear that the core of the essay stems from the author's own personal trauma/experience. I don't disagree that big adtech's reliance on dopamine-driven addictive behavior is real evil, but regulations that at least wall kids off from that makes sense and there's all kinds of research to suggest as much, in contrast to a personal essay about a video online.
- marysol5 4mo ago
  The extra irony in this is that it's Labour and not the Tories that are implementing these policies, but not the policies that are cited here because they're made up.
fantunes 4mo ago
He was only caught because he was on his phone and someone could see his screen. No one would stand up for the girls if he was wearing one of those meta glasses taking the same pics.
- Nursie 4mo ago
  And this is why we need to continue to shame "glassholes" whenever we encounter them.
- marysol5 4mo ago
  I mean they would, but of course he would get a level of plausible deniability.
StingyJelly 4mo ago
Kids with phones are alright. Attention economy of social media is not. As did tabaco companies, they (soc. media tech giants) push proposals to regulate phone use based on age in hopes that the their information asymmetry advantage and addictive dark patterns that are the problem in the first place won't be regulated and they can keep exploiting the public held in their trap by network effect.
- aaron695 4mo ago
  [dead]
- novia 4mo ago
  FTA: "essentially punishing them for the sins of Big Tech"
- ColdStream 4mo ago
  All popular systems with negative impacts will always have a claim to virtue. An extreme example, all genocides are done by people who want to set the world right. It just how they see right is warped.
  - ceayo 4mo ago
    > all genocides are done by people who want to set the world right heh. no.
- Kiro 4mo ago
  Attention economy is a red herring. HN shows that you don't need to do much to be more addictive than TikTok. It's human nature.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    You just need easy access to an unpredictable reward. Humans or other animals will pull the lever as much as possible to try to catch a high reward.
mcv 4mo ago
Do people want to restrict 16 year olds with phones? That seems like a really bad idea. For 10 year olds it makes sense, but 16 is nearly adult; they need to really learn this responsibility. And of course they need a phone when they go out like these girls. A bit of a weird tangent from what apparently is harassment in a train or something like that? I admit it's hard to follow what is going on.
- testing22321 4mo ago
  Do people really want to restrict 16 year olds with alcohol? 16 is nearly adult, they need to learn responsibility
  - mirashii 4mo ago
    This metaphor, while it seems intended to challenge the OP, kinda reinforces it. Many countries and cultures give some limited access to alcohol at a younger age, and the result is generally that they end up having fewer instances of problematic binge drinking when they come of age. A little bit of exposure instead of complete abstention helps people learn to have a healthier relationship than letting them hit 21 and dropping them into the deep end unrestricted.
  - skhr0680 4mo ago
    Teenagers learning how to have a couple of beers with a meal would be an improvement on them turning 18/20/21 and going and getting hammered on shots
    - socalgal2 4mo ago
      It's interesting how many conclusions are being assumed here In many countries cultures, strict parents/laws are seen as loving and protecting. Being told "don't drink untl you're at least 20" isn't seen as "forbidden fruit" you're being denied.
      - Dylan16807 4mo ago
noopprod 4mo ago
[dead]
NoPicklez 4mo ago
My question to these sorts of articles is, okay so what do we do then? What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids. Its not good for their attention spans or mental health to a much greater degree than other forms of media. Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones, but they should be able to use them without being engulfed in social media content that has been shown to have a negative impact on them. Whether its algorithmic feeds targeting particular age groups or short form video content that is reducing attention spans and the ability to concentrate. I have no idea how an adult filming young girls on a train has anything to do with social media bans. The Senior Legal Officer is absolutely entitled to having a phone, but absolutely not to use it however he means. The teenagers are entitled to having a phone, but potentially may have limits to how they can use those devices. Just because there are adults with full agency that do the wrong thing, doesn't mean we should remove protections on young people. Just because adults with full agency drive recklessly, doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds the ability to drive.
- fragmede 4mo ago
  > Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones I'll say it. Kids shouldn't have phones until the age of 16.
  - pmg101 4mo ago
    The smartphone free childhood movement is explicitly saying children shouldn't have phones (until 14). I'm broadly with them although with nuance.
  - burnt-resistor 4mo ago
    Limited, locked-down smart watches is what most kids need.
    - quickthrowman 4mo ago
      That is the solution my sister and brother-in-law chose for my 10 yo nephew. He can call home and a few family members and do whatever other limited things an Apple Watch can do. I wear a regular mechanical watch and have never used an Apple Watch so I’m not exactly sure what else it can do, lol. F2P games with dopamine drip loot boxes and things of that nature seem super unhealthy for kids, I can’t even imagine what it’s doing to their impulse control. I am unable to tolerate games like that myself, probably because I grew up with regular video games that didn’t use psychological tricks and pay to win ecosystems to induce people to spend money. If I had grown up playing them I probably wouldn’t know any different, like the fish asking “what the hell is water” when asked “how is the water this morning?” By an older fish.
avaer 4mo ago
I think most reasonable people can agree social media/internet can be a dangerous place where your images will be taken and posted to others without your consent. This isn't a matter of age. Except this is exactly what Heather Burns is doing. Not this guy, who (I had to check) was apparently following the law(?) and the article even admits this: > as far as policymakers are concerned, it’s the senior legal officer with the phone who is rightfully entitled to have the phone and use it any way he pleases (if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article) It's just a strange argument to say we should loosen the regulations when you have people like Heather exhibiting the problematic behavior that these laws are supposed to protect people from.
- trueno 4mo ago
  > was apparently following the law i feel like there's a time and a place to split hairs on whether or not legality clears moral wrong doing, and this is certainly not that time nor place. in what universe are these even remotely equivalent without broad abstractions? * elite boomer filming underage girls for his own gratification * bystanders filming a perpetrator mid-act heather touches on those willing to get hung up on this stretch of an inconsistency and even links her other Darnella test post. > (if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article) that is literally the article. she's a tech policy writer critiquing the policy framework. in general the weird undertones of your comment feel like you're asserting heather is like morally compromised or something and that the article is worth dismissing. if there was some discussion about the actual stuff she's talking about in this article i'd be singing a different tune right now, you know about whether or not under 16 bans punish young people for stinky perf perpetrator behavior... but since there isn't it feels even crazier that you're dotting this with your assessment that heather is somehow being the problematic one here. wat
- marysol5 4mo ago
  If we assume this guy was taking photos for his own private collection, there's a hilarious irony that the person who took the video, and then posted it onto Twitter. Managed to expose the victims photos that he took, AND ALSO many other photos of their faces to the world. But then the rest of the article is a load of nonsense about legislation that doesn't even exist.
Alan_Writer 4mo ago
Sadly, this happens all the time. But the main point here is that a guy was taking pics of some teens "secretly". Right? The controversy about teens' rights to use cellphones and how to use them is quite debatable since it implies modern cultural behavior on tech and social media.
simplyluke 4mo ago
The article spends a long time conflating actual proposed policy in the UK with things that aren't being proposed and sound much worse. I did some googling, the UK's gone a bit further than the US in proposing that < 16 year olds can't use social media with real age verification instead of current "I promise I'm over 13" approaches, curfews on social media specifically for 16-17 year olds that are opt-out, and smart phones must be put away at school. No one's proposing banning teenagers from owning smart phones entirely. I would agree that not allowing 17 year old girls going out to have phones on trains would be bad policy, if that was actually a thing anyone was suggesting. It's unclear how any of the teens in the anecdote at the start of the story would be affected by the proposed legislation at all. > It’s watching precisely why young adults need phones, the agency to use them, and the life skills to make their ways in the world with their phones in their pockets. The link between creepy old men being called out and documented on a train and whether or not 14 year olds should be spending 8+ hours a day scrolling tiktok is unclear to the point of feeling like I'm missing something in the article. I guess the idea is that teens are being punished? And we should be holding our leaders accountable instead of restricting the teens? The counter argument to this would be "holding our leaders accountable" looks a lot like "passing regulations to keep children from being harmed by digital nicotine" > Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday This is the same reason I think we should give 13 year olds a couple of cigarettes a week, just enough for them to still feel sick from the nicotine and start to figure out how to integrate into adult society. We've long accepted that certain activities carry enough harm that people under a certain age lack the development for it to be fair to expect them to engage with it in a healthy manner. Does it deny 14 year olds some agency that we don't allow them to ride motorcycles? Yes. Is it sound policy? I think so. We have plenty of evidence for real harms in teenagers with regards to social media, a fact that took me a long time to accept while I worked in the industry, but is plainly obvious in the data and studies done on it over the past decade.
- roundabout-host 4mo ago
  The harm mainly comes from the addictive, manipulative algorithm designed to provoke the user, and not from the ability to communicate.
travisgriggs 4mo ago
Tax social media and other forms of attention products. Time users spend on these products is time taken away from earning revenue that can be taxed. Balance must be restored. If viewers’ available time/ability is harvested so that they have less taxable income, transfer the tax to where the wealth generation is being transferred to. Same for AI.
- ColdStream 4mo ago
  While I wish it wasn't framed in a 'lost revenue' sense, it isn't a bad idea. Would be funny if they were taxed based on how long people use it. At even $0.10 an hour of use, some of these companies would find the costs involved far too high to justify.
BrenBarn 4mo ago
This is a weird take. I don't understand how what this guy did or didn't do with his phone has any relevance for whether kids should have phones or do certain things with them. About the most I could say is that I would agree that many of the problems with phones are problems for adults as well as kids.
mumin00 4mo ago
We need limits though and that's the whole point. The effect of doom scrolling on the young brain is something we can't just turn a blind eye to. Add to it bad people trying to hurt the young ones and using them
- ColdStream 4mo ago
  I joking argue that we should cap computer speed at 486 level's. You can still do office stuff, some graphics and audio but you are not running a doom scrolling setup with that kind of limited hardware. You are barely running Doom! I think smart phones are really cool when they aren't in the attention economy. But high performance but low power draw chips and media accelerators unintentionally allowed for these kind of social media setups to be viable.
  - cryptonym 4mo ago
    You don't need much client-side power to implement addictive UX.
  - marysol5 4mo ago
    I agree, but in that our constant drive for MORE and MORE compute is the real negative. We've gone back to heavy CPU burning applications rather than nimble and efficient. Not to mention the amount of background processing for tracking. Even Microsoft was once sued for how much energy they wasted with nonsense.
curtisblaine 4mo ago
> the cultural values that a detached elite wish to impose on their offspring for life have been transposed into law, policy, and regulation, and from there, into the personal lives of young people Isn't this what happens in Islamic countries all the time though?
jzer0cool 4mo ago
Who is recording? Who is watching? Who controls the data? All compounded issues when data is hardly ephemeral and is long-lived.
p1necone 4mo ago
"The kids are alright" is evergreen. So much of the <insert current generation who are teenagers> are doomed rhetoric is pure nonsense, a lot of that rhetoric is on here.
- throwaway27448 4mo ago
  Even if the kids ARE illiterate, society will adjust to cater to them. Everything will be fine.
  - amelius 4mo ago
    They will be dominated by smarter kids, maybe from other countries.
- alt227 4mo ago
  Phones and social media are a completely new type of pacifying and attention stealing threat which we have only just begun to discover the effects of. This is not your standard 'kids are doomed' rhetoric.
  - karahime 4mo ago
    No, they're not, and yes, it is. I sincerely hope we do not take phones and other computers from future generations. That would be a terrible thing to do to them.
    - alt227 4mo ago
      I very much hope we continue to bring our children up outside of a digital world, encouraging them to interact and learn physically before introducing them to digital devices later in life when they can treat them sensibly as a small part of a healthy and full life. Giving addictive and attention stealing tech to children from a young age is like giving drugs to rats, they will continue to hit the feeder bar until they effectively kill themselves.
      - 4mo ago
Nursie 4mo ago
I'm with the "This whole article is a non-sequitur" crowd. The old pervert using his camera shouldn't be doing that. His behaviour was not OK. Nobody is talking about keeping kids off social media because their behaviour is not OK. They're talking about keeping kids off social media because they believe it's harmful to them, and that the companies designing the products know it's harmful and addictive. We can disagree about whether or not that's true, or what actions might be helpful (or not), but there is no common thread with the example given.
- marysol5 4mo ago
  I find it interesting too how the problem was "taking pictures of kids", and yet we have an edited, but not-anonymised video, that has LOTS of shots of the same kids, including the shots the man took. There's substantially more in this video than what the man did. And also the article they link to, went to the effort to black out their faces.
camgunz 4mo ago
Fine, let em have little video recorders then
throwaway27448 4mo ago
> This runs against the grain of 2026 tech policy, which decrees that it’s young people who need their behavior censored and constrained, in ways that punish them for the actions of the perpetrator. I mean social media is simply misanthropic. If humanity had any balls it'd burn these places down. Calling banishment from social media a punishment is a stretch. The point of these decrees has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with persecuting adults for behaving in ways the state doesn't like. The author's read is just weird
iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago
Here is something I am not seeing anyone else addressing. Some yonks ago I was going to work by train and I stopped partially as a result of an incident on that train that involved someone recording my rather candid political conversation with a colleague. It is not the social media; tech etiquette needs to be seriously adjusted and while I am willing to give grace as we are trying to figure out proper balance as a society, I am not willing to have my life examined on the interwebz for everyone's amusement. The kids in that sense, are just a convenient vessel for an argument; the same way they function for the author of that article.
rimeice 4mo ago
> the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. This is insane.
cloudie78 4mo ago
[dead]
watutalkinbout 4mo ago
We don't allow kids to smoke, presumably that's also something to do with limiting their agency?
avazhi 4mo ago
Documenting offences? What offences would those be? It isn’t an offence to record somebody on a train or else the person who recorded the video of the guy also committed an offence (and neither that person nor the guy did). Didn’t read past that part. Mindless outrage culture is neither intellectually interesting nor healthy to be around.
graemep 4mo ago
The political analysis there is completely wrong. How can she blame the "Tatler/Telegraph/Times set" for legislation passed by a Labour government? The opposition to this sort of legislation (e.g. the OSA) has largely come from the right. > These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. Really? I would have said the opposite. Part of the problem is she lumps the affluent and the wealthy together. The affluent professional class go out of their way to encourage independence. They are the people who take gap years to travel, who are pushed to go away to university rather than a local one while living at home (a Scottish "policy wonk" should notice that the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews are full of affluent kids from the South of England). The story is powerful and i agree with some of the conclusions, but forcing the conclusions to fit narrative that all bad things are the other sides fault is terrible.
- zahlman 4mo ago
  Indeed. More than enough reason to flag the submission, in my view. (It's remarkable how many of the top-level comments are pointing out this sort of problem with the article content.)
- marysol5 4mo ago
  Technically the OSA was passed by the last Tory gov and was implemented after they were ousted.
kraf 4mo ago
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deleted 4mo ago
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kraf 4mo ago
[flagged]
jgalt212 4mo ago
So this woman is angry at a man with mental illness / alcoholism who happens to look like her ex husband? Am I missing something?
chrisjj 4mo ago
> a four-minute long documentary masterclass in bystander action, documenting offenses I read the whole article to find these offences. Found none.
yowo 4mo ago
I don't have a particular opinion about smartphone/social media ban for minors, but the argument made here is at best a strawman fallacy, there is no law that prevents minors from having a digital camera that can be used to collect evidence or document malicious actions, and they aren't more expensive than phones.
kmitz 4mo ago
I say this is a click bait article. The guy is taking a contrarian view on smartphone use by young people, with weak and very subjective arguments. > the impetus for the most authoritarian internet regulation in the UK, including the <16s ban, has come from the affluent/wealthy/1% elite on the political right wing Very strong take with no justification at all. What we observe is that many developped countries with different political orientations are currently taking action against harm caused by social media and more generally by excessive screen time. This is not about political right wing. >It’s easy to understand why: the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. They never have. And they never did themselves, Really sounds like a frustrated person that projects his own problems on the rest of the world. And totally not relevant to the debate about the impact of social media on teenagers.
- 3848484894 4mo ago
  he's just mad he can't groom kids on his dicord as easily anymore
abc42 4mo ago
This is a great example of a thing that's 99% harmful being 1% very useful. So which should we choose as society, removing the 99% harm or keep the 1% usefulness? Also we should note that the children in this example were 16 and 17 years old, so above the age of many of the suggested restrictions.
sedatk 4mo ago
[dead]
marysol5 4mo ago
I love the irony in posting the edited, but not anonymised video showing CLEARLY identifiable images of the girls. Meanwhile the article you link to, blacks out their faces.
big_paps 4mo ago
I would say spending everyday hours on your phone especially on social media is way more harmful then being filmed by someone. That aside: This over-the-top behaviour is really damaging. That i sit here in Berlin and can watch how someone in Scottland is called out as a pervert over a minor event is modern lynch mob behaviour, and i am quite sure the intention of the people who spread this is less to protect the kids then just to feel moralic superior.

272 points by JumpCrisscross 4mo ago

mortar 4mo ago

https://archive.is/poWGm https://archive.is/poWGm

wffurr 4mo ago
Why do you need an archive link for this?
- inigyou 4mo ago
  Why don't you? Everything should be archived.
- mortar 4mo ago
  The site reported an error at the time of viewing citing consumption

retube 4mo ago

Conflates a whole load of othogonal issues that really have nothing to do with each other

FeteCommuniste 4mo ago
Interesting reversal of the "think of the kids" argument, though: think of the kids who could have used their phones to document their mistreatment at the hands of alcoholic perverts.
- j45 4mo ago
  Age 16-17 is very different than Ages 5-10 for kids to carry a device. The former is no issue. I just don't think the author's take is nuanced as they think. Kids (Age 5-13) safety is of ultimate importance. Devices, independently are also a major issue in schools. Social media use of bullying also is a major issue. To the point they are banned.
  - nrabulinski 4mo ago
    Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue. I’ve been bullied before social media was mainstream. A little later in life, when internet as a whole was majorly taking off, it helped me actually socialize. I met people some of whom I’m friends to this day, but more importantly - I could meet people to go out with, to talk to. Should we ban schools then? Because school grounds are famously place where the most bullying, especially kids 5-13 (which you highlighted yourself), is happening. Or maybe ban real life interactions? Because you can meet someone who will bully you or be of bad influence? We both know that’s not the right way, just like banning social media is not solving any problems. It’s just a convenient argument to introduce internet-wide surveillance, as well as to take away any autonomy or rights kids may have. Instead of investing in moderation, and actually scrutinizing big tech, which is the real cause of more bullying, shorter attention spans, and whatever else people say is wrong with the kids these days.
    - j45 4mo ago
      Technologies when not learned by the people to use in proper ways, too often can be used against people by people with vested financial interests. Social Media worked out that way. So did device addiction. It's great to find ways to socialize, and those ways existed before, and will also exist after. The exclusion of current forms of social media and connectivity as default doesn't mean better solutions don't step up. I'm not really sure of the tying of schools to phone bans in schools. Schools aren't perfect, but they have a legal liability to keep kids safe (or safer). Devices and social media don't. A large part of this is life coming at parents faster than they can keep up, let alone stay one season ahead of their childs growth. This would probably be a way. Societally, rules and laws, including public health are a social contract and agreement on how to live together in a tight place. Inside the home, though, is the opportunity for parents to learn and expose as they wish. Solving today's social media can solve a ton of problems, or at least provide an impetus for it to improve. Schools are supposed to be safe places for kids, right? And the entire unfiltered outside world was coming into it via device. For example, one solution is parents getting literate in tech enough to know how to lead young people before this even becomes a conversation. One way to do this is to offer unlimited screen time for creating, and much less for passive consuming. The generation that wants to experience the real world through a little screen has it backwards, and that's coming form the people who built the little digital world too. I'm not anti-technology for young people at all. I'm anti-addiction and anti-manipultion by unlimited people and parties interested in reaching eyeballs. Parents, legally, are required to provide a safe and growing environment.
- puchatek 4mo ago
  Reminds me of the "good guys with guns" narrative tbh. Being able to document such transgressions is not enough of an argument to do a mass rollout of ad display technology IMHO.
  - pjc50 4mo ago
    The ability to film people on their phone is not the same as the ad display technology. I think the argument upthread about "conflation" has a point, but .. it's social media itself that forces the conflation. You can't just have a social network that lets you communicate with your community, it has to get tied up with international politics and exploitative advertising.
  - Barrin92 4mo ago
    the even more direct analogy is the Arab Spring, where social media and phones were widely advertised as a means to bring evil dictators down, as a democratic, youth empowering anti evil old pervert technology. The tech industry obviously jumped onto it because it's a rhetorically powerful argument but it tells you very little what the systemic consequences are ten years down the road.
    - mcmoor 4mo ago
      It's still funny how much it's celebrated because it brings down establishments, not realizing it'll also bring down their own. Reminds me of why no one should start biological warfare.
      - marysol5 4mo ago
        MAD is another one, the concept of firing your nuke means you lost. So you have to spend a lot of money to have said nuke and keep it available, just so you DON'T use it...
  - thesmtsolver2 4mo ago
    What do you think about legalizing drugs?
- pjc50 4mo ago
  I'm reminded of the way that universally carried high resolution cameras made UFOs and crop circles disappear, but police suddenly became a lot less trustworthy. The abuse question .. well, "social justice" is a term that starts fights, but there have been a lot of people who've been able to get some sort of justice only because they raised their cause on social media, having been ignored by the authorities. #MeToo is probably the big example, culminating in the Epstein revelations.
  - marysol5 4mo ago
    UFO's are still somehow always captured on the single dirtiest worst image sensor every produced by humans.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- ClumsyPilot 4mo ago
  Why are we conflating having a camera with social media that is addictive?
  - marysol5 4mo ago
    Because the article is nefarious
- ceayo 4mo ago
  at the hands of alcoholic perverts who push this legislation onto them
nyeah 4mo ago
I agree that there are several different issues at work. Can you show an example of how TFA conflates some of them? You may disagree with the author's conclusions, but that doesn't make the article nonsense.
- titanomachy 4mo ago
  Not who you’re responding to, but I also don’t really think the article makes any kind of sensible argument that I can follow. Yes, it’s bad that a creepy drunk man used his phone to take pictures of teenage girls. Yes, it’s commendable that bystanders called him out. Yes, some countries are thinking of curtailing social media access for teenagers. I’m not sure what any of these things have to do with each other but the author presents them as somehow related, without drawing a coherent thread through them.
  - nyeah 4mo ago
    The article explains very clearly what these issues have to do with each other in this particular case.
    - titanomachy 4mo ago
      I don’t agree. Whether or not these girls had phones, or social media, was irrelevant in this case. And I’ve never heard anyone seriously argue that 16-year-olds shouldn’t have phones, or that 16-year-old girls are at fault when an old man secretly makes videos of them. Both these groups seem like imagined bogeymen that the article is railing against.
      - nyeah 4mo ago
        >Whether or not these girls had phones, or social media, was irrelevant The article explains why that was not irrelevant.
        cmoski 4mo ago
deleted 4mo ago
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j45 4mo ago

It's important to define kids. The article mentions 15-16 years of age. The best practice is to keep kids off smartphones with full internet, full social media, touchscreen and scrolling at least until 13. It doesn't mean they can't have other kinds of devices. This is a wide open market category.

roundabout-host 4mo ago
So force parents to give them devices running an even more nonfree, even more crippled OS. At least on a smartphone you can run GNU/Linux.
- marysol5 4mo ago
  Huh? That's not defined in any legislation. Also vast majority of devices run a Linux kernel....
  - roundabout-host 3mo ago
    GNU/Linux, not just Linux.

api 4mo ago

The problem is not phones. Phones are fine. The problem is specific apps that make use of addiction engineering. These are bad on desktops too but the extreme portability of phones makes them a hundred times more potent. Like all risks it doesn’t affect all kids equally either. Some are less vulnerable for various cognitive reasons just like some are less prone to chemical addiction. Kids with wealthier and/or more engaged parents or parents with more free time are also less vulnerable. Wealthier kids have more activities available and can often afford to have one parent stay home. Lastly kids in healthier communities or suburbs or safe urban settings where they can roam free are less vulnerable. They children of the poor, those with ADD or ASD conditions, and those with less third spaces or other activities are most vulnerable to becoming addicted to endless stupefying doom scrolling and addictive games that pre-train them for future gambling addiction. It’s not just kids either. The elderly and the isolated become addicted to this stuff. Addiction engineering is the problem, whether it’s via a phone, a web site, or a chemical. IMO if you intentionally and knowingly engineer something for addiction you are committing a form of assault.

Lerc 4mo ago
Would it not be a better approach to remove any incentive to provide an addictive product. Companies don't do that just to be evil. Evil is just the byproduct of money. Make it illegal to advertise to anyone under the age of 18. Make it illegal to trade data about anyone under the age of 18. What incentive would then remain? I don't think they will do it for the long term gains of training behaviour for when they are old enough to exploit. Companies that engage in behaviour like this are notoriously immune to long term ideas.
- api 4mo ago
  At the very least I think we should seriously consider taxing advertising. It’d be almost impossible to pick and choose so just tax all of it. I think the knock on effects would be positive. It’s an almost unmitigated vice at this point and is the main engine behind this stuff.
- ozgrakkurt 4mo ago
  > I don't think they will do it for the long term gains of training behaviour for when they are old enough to exploit. They would definitely do that. It is a pretty basic idea to advertise to kids so there will be a customer base in later years. There was related emails leaked too

semiquaver 4mo ago

HN title automangler automangled this title. It references a specific song: “The kids are alright”, and removing the “The” reduces the impact of the reference. Edit: now fixed, thanks mods

RIMR 4mo ago

This whole article just boils down to the argument "If badly-behaved adults are allowed to have cameras, why shouldn't well-behaved children have access to for-profit social media platforms designed to addict them and feed them misinformation?" It's complete nonsense. The conversation in the UK right now isn't about whether or not teenagers should be allowed to own cell phones; it's about whether they should be allowed to have access to the myriad of addictive and harmful apps and services available on those devices, often maliciously targeted at them. The drunk pervert filming them on the train has nothing to do with this argument. He's using his phone like a camera. Teenagers are allowed to have cameras, and assuredly every one of the girls he was filming had a camera of some sort on them of their own. Nobody was on uneven ground in this situation technologically. If people actually were worried about perverted adults preying on children, they would take a look at the countless examples of perverted adults preying on children via their social media accounts and devices. It's been open season on children online for the past decade. If people actually cared about accountability, they would stop pushing for age-verification laws, and start penalizing social media companies for their laissez faire attitude towards inappropriate sexual conduct, because currently, sites like Instagram and TikTok cater directly to pedophiles and do absolutely nothing about the predatory behavior coming from their user base towards children that are clearly too young to legally use social media in most parts of the world (<13 in the USA). We need to reframe this whole conversation. It's not about keeping kids away from social media. It's about keeping trillion-dollar businesses from profiting off of children while actively doing harm to them with addictive algorithms, misinformation, and exposure to malicious actors.

flumpcakes 4mo ago
I agree with your sentiment completely. I think there's nuance that a lot of people don't bother with because of tribalism but your take is the one I most align with in this instance. Children do need protecting, I grew up with the Internet and it made me partly who I am today, but I also recognise it is completely different now. Gore/shock/NSFL websites being linked between friends as pranks are no longer a thing (thankfully), but we have replaced that with garden walls (Facebook, Reddit, YT, etc.) that are much more insidious and have mechanised the harm to children and young people to an unbelievable scale.
4mo ago

goalieca 4mo ago

Personally, I don’t even think adults with phones are alright.

Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
Yeah, age and maturity are two different things entirely. One of the bigger issues / trends right now is immature adults with power.
- vinaigrette 4mo ago
  Maybe the problem is power
lotsofpulp 4mo ago
Remove the phones and the problem will remain, which is people’s desire to consume detrimental content, or content in detrimental amounts. Before phones/computers/internet, it was garbage on television channels. Propaganda on 24/7 “news” channels, “reality” tv shows, etc.
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
  So it's not propagandists that are the problem, but rather the people they target? That's an odd take. Maybe we should've shown a little more spine when they asked us to build a medium for the strong would use to prey on the weak. Maybe we're the problem.
  - squigz 4mo ago
    It's not that odd of a take to recognize that the people abusing their power and those eating it up are both part of the problem in their own ways.
- ColdStream 4mo ago
  While that is true, the friction to access has been made far too easy. Adding in some inconvenience may actually be a good thing. It also helped that in the print/radio/television period, you couldn't hyper focus content at a specific individual. What was broadcast was free for all to see and critique. I'm not advocating for a return to that, but that was one of the highlights of the era.

ashu1461 4mo ago

What’s easier: waiting until your child is mature enough before giving them a smartphone, or trying to regulate social media companies and every addictive website?

jimbokun 4mo ago
Let’s do both.
conductr 4mo ago
The irony of this is the phone is an easy button for parenting. For that reason, I don’t think we should try to optimize around easy.
tartuffe78 4mo ago
Wait until they are 26?
xboxnolifes 4mo ago
The latter.
throwaway_19sz 4mo ago
That is a glaring false dichotomy.

jimbokun 4mo ago

> These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, People who are not yet ready to have full agency of their own lives is more or less the definition of children. Does she also expect children to have full time jobs, pay taxes, pay all their own bills and rent, etc etc?

nyeah 4mo ago
In TFA, the author says "agency" not "full agency." I also can't find all these other issues (jobs, etc) in TFA. Where are you getting this?
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  Is there a point you’re trying to make?
  - albedoa 4mo ago
    The point is very clear to the rest of us. You inserted the word "full" where the author was not talking about full agency. It's hard to believe that you don't follow.
    - DangitBobby 4mo ago
      We are arguing over how much agency children should have. The article argues they should have more, the comment you originally responded to said practically definitionally we limit the agency of children. The obvious implied point is that it's not unreasonable to think their phone use may be part of the agency that they are denied, and that would not be a departure from how children are treated.
- NoPicklez 4mo ago
  Well that's the question isn't it, agency but to what extent. It makes sense to allow teenagers to have more agency over themselves than a 10 year old, but clearly there is an argument for limiting their agency on social media platforms. Just because there are adults that abuse their agency of the use of alcohol (alcoholism) doesn't mean we should remove restrictions on young people. Just because there are adults with full agency who drive recklessly doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds to drive cars.

Papazsazsa 4mo ago

The focus on children needing their phones controlled is the correct instinct, incorrectly applied to a too-narrow group. Smartphones are fomes peccati.

RetroTechie 4mo ago
> Smartphones are fomes peccati. Smartphones aren't, some apps on them are. (besides being unneeded or a nuisance in some situations)
- ColdStream 4mo ago
  I have said it for a long time. Look at the original iPhone release. It was a hyper focused device that was designed to consolidate devices, make using a phone easier so that you could get on with your day. Once the app store and opened the gate for social media to wonder in, that is when these things got turned into potential addiction machines.
  - cubefox 4mo ago
    It already had a browser. You don't need an app when you have a browser. The addiction is built-in as a latent capability.
    - roundabout-host 4mo ago
      The browser itself is not the problem, but the way the platforms design themselves to be very addictive.
      - exodust 4mo ago
        > very addictive The "addictive" insisting by 2 new ones in short time? Getting bot vibes. "We need to classify social media as an addictive substance" more or less. Is that from someone's e-safety commissioner? Or someone wanting back-pay compo right back to MySpace addiction. An absurd idea. "Some people can't control themselves around video games therefore video games bad", that's what social media has copped. "Addictive" might mean a bloody well designed user interface that users like. Making buttons easy to access and responsive feedback and just the right amount of visual cues and spicy labels, all in harmony as designed and delivered via well engineered mechanisms. "Too addictive, you must now jump through regulatory hoops". No!

fumeux_fume 4mo ago

So this is the new hot take? That kids need unfettered access to smart phones and the internet to toughen them up? Absolutely cringe.

nyeah 4mo ago
TFA gives an example where kids are at risk and an old person is misusing a phone. It is clearly not advocating for this scenario to occur more often. Can you show anything else to indicate that the conclusion is "toughen them up"?
- fumeux_fume 4mo ago
  > Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday.
  - nyeah 4mo ago
    Ok fair.

jonstewart 4mo ago

This essay extends one anecdote involving 16+ year old teenagers to the unsupported conclusion that kids should have phones and those who wish to restrict that are all wealthy 1% right wing authoritarians. Then with the personal note it seems clear that the core of the essay stems from the author's own personal trauma/experience. I don't disagree that big adtech's reliance on dopamine-driven addictive behavior is real evil, but regulations that at least wall kids off from that makes sense and there's all kinds of research to suggest as much, in contrast to a personal essay about a video online.

marysol5 4mo ago
The extra irony in this is that it's Labour and not the Tories that are implementing these policies, but not the policies that are cited here because they're made up.

fantunes 4mo ago

He was only caught because he was on his phone and someone could see his screen. No one would stand up for the girls if he was wearing one of those meta glasses taking the same pics.

Nursie 4mo ago
And this is why we need to continue to shame "glassholes" whenever we encounter them.
marysol5 4mo ago
I mean they would, but of course he would get a level of plausible deniability.

StingyJelly 4mo ago

Kids with phones are alright. Attention economy of social media is not. As did tabaco companies, they (soc. media tech giants) push proposals to regulate phone use based on age in hopes that the their information asymmetry advantage and addictive dark patterns that are the problem in the first place won't be regulated and they can keep exploiting the public held in their trap by network effect.

aaron695 4mo ago
[dead]
novia 4mo ago
FTA: "essentially punishing them for the sins of Big Tech"
ColdStream 4mo ago
All popular systems with negative impacts will always have a claim to virtue. An extreme example, all genocides are done by people who want to set the world right. It just how they see right is warped.
- ceayo 4mo ago
  > all genocides are done by people who want to set the world right heh. no.
Kiro 4mo ago
Attention economy is a red herring. HN shows that you don't need to do much to be more addictive than TikTok. It's human nature.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  You just need easy access to an unpredictable reward. Humans or other animals will pull the lever as much as possible to try to catch a high reward.

mcv 4mo ago

Do people want to restrict 16 year olds with phones? That seems like a really bad idea. For 10 year olds it makes sense, but 16 is nearly adult; they need to really learn this responsibility. And of course they need a phone when they go out like these girls. A bit of a weird tangent from what apparently is harassment in a train or something like that? I admit it's hard to follow what is going on.

testing22321 4mo ago
Do people really want to restrict 16 year olds with alcohol? 16 is nearly adult, they need to learn responsibility
- mirashii 4mo ago
  This metaphor, while it seems intended to challenge the OP, kinda reinforces it. Many countries and cultures give some limited access to alcohol at a younger age, and the result is generally that they end up having fewer instances of problematic binge drinking when they come of age. A little bit of exposure instead of complete abstention helps people learn to have a healthier relationship than letting them hit 21 and dropping them into the deep end unrestricted.
- skhr0680 4mo ago
  Teenagers learning how to have a couple of beers with a meal would be an improvement on them turning 18/20/21 and going and getting hammered on shots
  - socalgal2 4mo ago
    It's interesting how many conclusions are being assumed here In many countries cultures, strict parents/laws are seen as loving and protecting. Being told "don't drink untl you're at least 20" isn't seen as "forbidden fruit" you're being denied.
    - Dylan16807 4mo ago

noopprod 4mo ago

[dead]

NoPicklez 4mo ago

My question to these sorts of articles is, okay so what do we do then? What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids. Its not good for their attention spans or mental health to a much greater degree than other forms of media. Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones, but they should be able to use them without being engulfed in social media content that has been shown to have a negative impact on them. Whether its algorithmic feeds targeting particular age groups or short form video content that is reducing attention spans and the ability to concentrate. I have no idea how an adult filming young girls on a train has anything to do with social media bans. The Senior Legal Officer is absolutely entitled to having a phone, but absolutely not to use it however he means. The teenagers are entitled to having a phone, but potentially may have limits to how they can use those devices. Just because there are adults with full agency that do the wrong thing, doesn't mean we should remove protections on young people. Just because adults with full agency drive recklessly, doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds the ability to drive.

fragmede 4mo ago
> Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones I'll say it. Kids shouldn't have phones until the age of 16.
- pmg101 4mo ago
  The smartphone free childhood movement is explicitly saying children shouldn't have phones (until 14). I'm broadly with them although with nuance.
- burnt-resistor 4mo ago
  Limited, locked-down smart watches is what most kids need.
  - quickthrowman 4mo ago
    That is the solution my sister and brother-in-law chose for my 10 yo nephew. He can call home and a few family members and do whatever other limited things an Apple Watch can do. I wear a regular mechanical watch and have never used an Apple Watch so I’m not exactly sure what else it can do, lol. F2P games with dopamine drip loot boxes and things of that nature seem super unhealthy for kids, I can’t even imagine what it’s doing to their impulse control. I am unable to tolerate games like that myself, probably because I grew up with regular video games that didn’t use psychological tricks and pay to win ecosystems to induce people to spend money. If I had grown up playing them I probably wouldn’t know any different, like the fish asking “what the hell is water” when asked “how is the water this morning?” By an older fish.

avaer 4mo ago

I think most reasonable people can agree social media/internet can be a dangerous place where your images will be taken and posted to others without your consent. This isn't a matter of age. Except this is exactly what Heather Burns is doing. Not this guy, who (I had to check) was apparently following the law(?) and the article even admits this: > as far as policymakers are concerned, it’s the senior legal officer with the phone who is rightfully entitled to have the phone and use it any way he pleases (if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article) It's just a strange argument to say we should loosen the regulations when you have people like Heather exhibiting the problematic behavior that these laws are supposed to protect people from.

trueno 4mo ago
> was apparently following the law i feel like there's a time and a place to split hairs on whether or not legality clears moral wrong doing, and this is certainly not that time nor place. in what universe are these even remotely equivalent without broad abstractions? * elite boomer filming underage girls for his own gratification * bystanders filming a perpetrator mid-act heather touches on those willing to get hung up on this stretch of an inconsistency and even links her other Darnella test post. > (if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article) that is literally the article. she's a tech policy writer critiquing the policy framework. in general the weird undertones of your comment feel like you're asserting heather is like morally compromised or something and that the article is worth dismissing. if there was some discussion about the actual stuff she's talking about in this article i'd be singing a different tune right now, you know about whether or not under 16 bans punish young people for stinky perf perpetrator behavior... but since there isn't it feels even crazier that you're dotting this with your assessment that heather is somehow being the problematic one here. wat
marysol5 4mo ago
If we assume this guy was taking photos for his own private collection, there's a hilarious irony that the person who took the video, and then posted it onto Twitter. Managed to expose the victims photos that he took, AND ALSO many other photos of their faces to the world. But then the rest of the article is a load of nonsense about legislation that doesn't even exist.

Alan_Writer 4mo ago

Sadly, this happens all the time. But the main point here is that a guy was taking pics of some teens "secretly". Right? The controversy about teens' rights to use cellphones and how to use them is quite debatable since it implies modern cultural behavior on tech and social media.

simplyluke 4mo ago

The article spends a long time conflating actual proposed policy in the UK with things that aren't being proposed and sound much worse. I did some googling, the UK's gone a bit further than the US in proposing that < 16 year olds can't use social media with real age verification instead of current "I promise I'm over 13" approaches, curfews on social media specifically for 16-17 year olds that are opt-out, and smart phones must be put away at school. No one's proposing banning teenagers from owning smart phones entirely. I would agree that not allowing 17 year old girls going out to have phones on trains would be bad policy, if that was actually a thing anyone was suggesting. It's unclear how any of the teens in the anecdote at the start of the story would be affected by the proposed legislation at all. > It’s watching precisely why young adults need phones, the agency to use them, and the life skills to make their ways in the world with their phones in their pockets. The link between creepy old men being called out and documented on a train and whether or not 14 year olds should be spending 8+ hours a day scrolling tiktok is unclear to the point of feeling like I'm missing something in the article. I guess the idea is that teens are being punished? And we should be holding our leaders accountable instead of restricting the teens? The counter argument to this would be "holding our leaders accountable" looks a lot like "passing regulations to keep children from being harmed by digital nicotine" > Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday This is the same reason I think we should give 13 year olds a couple of cigarettes a week, just enough for them to still feel sick from the nicotine and start to figure out how to integrate into adult society. We've long accepted that certain activities carry enough harm that people under a certain age lack the development for it to be fair to expect them to engage with it in a healthy manner. Does it deny 14 year olds some agency that we don't allow them to ride motorcycles? Yes. Is it sound policy? I think so. We have plenty of evidence for real harms in teenagers with regards to social media, a fact that took me a long time to accept while I worked in the industry, but is plainly obvious in the data and studies done on it over the past decade.

roundabout-host 4mo ago
The harm mainly comes from the addictive, manipulative algorithm designed to provoke the user, and not from the ability to communicate.

travisgriggs 4mo ago

Tax social media and other forms of attention products. Time users spend on these products is time taken away from earning revenue that can be taxed. Balance must be restored. If viewers’ available time/ability is harvested so that they have less taxable income, transfer the tax to where the wealth generation is being transferred to. Same for AI.

ColdStream 4mo ago
While I wish it wasn't framed in a 'lost revenue' sense, it isn't a bad idea. Would be funny if they were taxed based on how long people use it. At even $0.10 an hour of use, some of these companies would find the costs involved far too high to justify.

BrenBarn 4mo ago

This is a weird take. I don't understand how what this guy did or didn't do with his phone has any relevance for whether kids should have phones or do certain things with them. About the most I could say is that I would agree that many of the problems with phones are problems for adults as well as kids.

mumin00 4mo ago

We need limits though and that's the whole point. The effect of doom scrolling on the young brain is something we can't just turn a blind eye to. Add to it bad people trying to hurt the young ones and using them

ColdStream 4mo ago
I joking argue that we should cap computer speed at 486 level's. You can still do office stuff, some graphics and audio but you are not running a doom scrolling setup with that kind of limited hardware. You are barely running Doom! I think smart phones are really cool when they aren't in the attention economy. But high performance but low power draw chips and media accelerators unintentionally allowed for these kind of social media setups to be viable.
- cryptonym 4mo ago
  You don't need much client-side power to implement addictive UX.
- marysol5 4mo ago
  I agree, but in that our constant drive for MORE and MORE compute is the real negative. We've gone back to heavy CPU burning applications rather than nimble and efficient. Not to mention the amount of background processing for tracking. Even Microsoft was once sued for how much energy they wasted with nonsense.

curtisblaine 4mo ago

> the cultural values that a detached elite wish to impose on their offspring for life have been transposed into law, policy, and regulation, and from there, into the personal lives of young people Isn't this what happens in Islamic countries all the time though?

jzer0cool 4mo ago

Who is recording? Who is watching? Who controls the data? All compounded issues when data is hardly ephemeral and is long-lived.

p1necone 4mo ago

"The kids are alright" is evergreen. So much of the <insert current generation who are teenagers> are doomed rhetoric is pure nonsense, a lot of that rhetoric is on here.

throwaway27448 4mo ago
Even if the kids ARE illiterate, society will adjust to cater to them. Everything will be fine.
- amelius 4mo ago
  They will be dominated by smarter kids, maybe from other countries.
alt227 4mo ago
Phones and social media are a completely new type of pacifying and attention stealing threat which we have only just begun to discover the effects of. This is not your standard 'kids are doomed' rhetoric.
- karahime 4mo ago
  No, they're not, and yes, it is. I sincerely hope we do not take phones and other computers from future generations. That would be a terrible thing to do to them.
  - alt227 4mo ago
    I very much hope we continue to bring our children up outside of a digital world, encouraging them to interact and learn physically before introducing them to digital devices later in life when they can treat them sensibly as a small part of a healthy and full life. Giving addictive and attention stealing tech to children from a young age is like giving drugs to rats, they will continue to hit the feeder bar until they effectively kill themselves.
    - 4mo ago

Nursie 4mo ago

I'm with the "This whole article is a non-sequitur" crowd. The old pervert using his camera shouldn't be doing that. His behaviour was not OK. Nobody is talking about keeping kids off social media because their behaviour is not OK. They're talking about keeping kids off social media because they believe it's harmful to them, and that the companies designing the products know it's harmful and addictive. We can disagree about whether or not that's true, or what actions might be helpful (or not), but there is no common thread with the example given.

marysol5 4mo ago
I find it interesting too how the problem was "taking pictures of kids", and yet we have an edited, but not-anonymised video, that has LOTS of shots of the same kids, including the shots the man took. There's substantially more in this video than what the man did. And also the article they link to, went to the effort to black out their faces.

camgunz 4mo ago

Fine, let em have little video recorders then

throwaway27448 4mo ago

> This runs against the grain of 2026 tech policy, which decrees that it’s young people who need their behavior censored and constrained, in ways that punish them for the actions of the perpetrator. I mean social media is simply misanthropic. If humanity had any balls it'd burn these places down. Calling banishment from social media a punishment is a stretch. The point of these decrees has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with persecuting adults for behaving in ways the state doesn't like. The author's read is just weird

iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago

Here is something I am not seeing anyone else addressing. Some yonks ago I was going to work by train and I stopped partially as a result of an incident on that train that involved someone recording my rather candid political conversation with a colleague. It is not the social media; tech etiquette needs to be seriously adjusted and while I am willing to give grace as we are trying to figure out proper balance as a society, I am not willing to have my life examined on the interwebz for everyone's amusement. The kids in that sense, are just a convenient vessel for an argument; the same way they function for the author of that article.

rimeice 4mo ago

> the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. This is insane.

cloudie78 4mo ago

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watutalkinbout 4mo ago

We don't allow kids to smoke, presumably that's also something to do with limiting their agency?

avazhi 4mo ago

Documenting offences? What offences would those be? It isn’t an offence to record somebody on a train or else the person who recorded the video of the guy also committed an offence (and neither that person nor the guy did). Didn’t read past that part. Mindless outrage culture is neither intellectually interesting nor healthy to be around.

graemep 4mo ago

The political analysis there is completely wrong. How can she blame the "Tatler/Telegraph/Times set" for legislation passed by a Labour government? The opposition to this sort of legislation (e.g. the OSA) has largely come from the right. > These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. Really? I would have said the opposite. Part of the problem is she lumps the affluent and the wealthy together. The affluent professional class go out of their way to encourage independence. They are the people who take gap years to travel, who are pushed to go away to university rather than a local one while living at home (a Scottish "policy wonk" should notice that the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews are full of affluent kids from the South of England). The story is powerful and i agree with some of the conclusions, but forcing the conclusions to fit narrative that all bad things are the other sides fault is terrible.

zahlman 4mo ago
Indeed. More than enough reason to flag the submission, in my view. (It's remarkable how many of the top-level comments are pointing out this sort of problem with the article content.)
marysol5 4mo ago
Technically the OSA was passed by the last Tory gov and was implemented after they were ousted.

kraf 4mo ago

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deleted 4mo ago

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kraf 4mo ago

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jgalt212 4mo ago

So this woman is angry at a man with mental illness / alcoholism who happens to look like her ex husband? Am I missing something?

chrisjj 4mo ago

> a four-minute long documentary masterclass in bystander action, documenting offenses I read the whole article to find these offences. Found none.

yowo 4mo ago

I don't have a particular opinion about smartphone/social media ban for minors, but the argument made here is at best a strawman fallacy, there is no law that prevents minors from having a digital camera that can be used to collect evidence or document malicious actions, and they aren't more expensive than phones.

kmitz 4mo ago

I say this is a click bait article. The guy is taking a contrarian view on smartphone use by young people, with weak and very subjective arguments. > the impetus for the most authoritarian internet regulation in the UK, including the <16s ban, has come from the affluent/wealthy/1% elite on the political right wing Very strong take with no justification at all. What we observe is that many developped countries with different political orientations are currently taking action against harm caused by social media and more generally by excessive screen time. This is not about political right wing. >It’s easy to understand why: the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. They never have. And they never did themselves, Really sounds like a frustrated person that projects his own problems on the rest of the world. And totally not relevant to the debate about the impact of social media on teenagers.

3848484894 4mo ago
he's just mad he can't groom kids on his dicord as easily anymore

abc42 4mo ago

This is a great example of a thing that's 99% harmful being 1% very useful. So which should we choose as society, removing the 99% harm or keep the 1% usefulness? Also we should note that the children in this example were 16 and 17 years old, so above the age of many of the suggested restrictions.

sedatk 4mo ago

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marysol5 4mo ago

I love the irony in posting the edited, but not anonymised video showing CLEARLY identifiable images of the girls. Meanwhile the article you link to, blacks out their faces.

big_paps 4mo ago

I would say spending everyday hours on your phone especially on social media is way more harmful then being filmed by someone. That aside: This over-the-top behaviour is really damaging. That i sit here in Berlin and can watch how someone in Scottland is called out as a pervert over a minor event is modern lynch mob behaviour, and i am quite sure the intention of the people who spread this is less to protect the kids then just to feel moralic superior.