6 ms·

Teen Social Media Bans Miss the Point

67 points by eustoria 15d ago

techblueberry 15d ago
“ But less than a year in, it suggests the ban is failing: A state-sponsored survey of parents indicated that seven in 10 teens are still using social media, while academic research has reported even lower rates of compliance.” Failure? Or 30% improvement. “While social media can be weaponized for bullying or hate, over half of all teens turn to social media as a source of social and emotional support.” Teens also turn to drugs as a source of of social and emotional support. “ Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults.” Ironically the thesis of this article. In fact I would say by banning teens from social media, we may be implicitly increasing their agency, since they’ll have to figure out how to interface with a set of technolgies that are not optimized for them. There’s something really dystopian to me about “designing for teens in mind” and I think maybe the unintended consequence of this kind of thinking is just - the continued marketable capture of segments. What this person is basically advocating for is a new way for tech companies to extract more value from our youth. The whole point of being a teenager is to generate your own ways to rebel against the fact that the adult world isn’t quite built for you. This “facebook but for teenagers” is just another opiate for the masses.
kubb 15d ago
“It failed now please don’t try anymore, see it can’t be done, trust the kidz.” Someone’s nervous.
- trallnag 15d ago
  lol
bakugo 15d ago
On the contrary, I think social media bans are poised to accomplish exactly what they're intended to: provide a convenient justification for forced identity verification across all websites.
- mitxela 15d ago
  That's just a means of banning social media for everyone, which is even better than banning it for teens.
  - TheOtherHobbes 15d ago
    No, it's a means of removing anonymity so promoters of ideologically unsound sentiment can be identified.
    - mitxela 14d ago
      Promoting it on billionaire owned platforms was always a losing battle - it makes you controlled opposition. When those platforms fall, we can have true ideological competition.
  - bakugo 15d ago
    How so? Do you believe the average person will think twice when TikTok asks them to submit a picture of their ID? No, they'll do it without a second thought so they can go back to mindlessly scrolling through the slop. The ones who will think twice are exactly the sort of people these laws are intended to punish: the dissenters, the wrong-thinkers, those who must be silenced. Either they choose not to verify and cease to use social media (successfully silenced), or they allow their wrong thoughts to be tied to their identity, such that they can be identified and punished accordingly.
    - fyredge 14d ago
      True as that may be, I find it unconvincing as it is the same argument that is used against teen bans. Do you believe the average parent will think twice when allowing their children to use social media? No, they'll do it without a second thought so they their children will stop pestering them about it. The ones who will think twice will have to see their children ostracized because all the cools are on it except themselves. I lean towards teen bans. We already have the same framework for cigarettes and alcohol. They didn't prevent teenage consumption 100% anyways but they did their job
sega_sai 15d ago
"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims." -- I am sorry, but how is this not true, when companies like Meta are in full control of their algorithms, tuning them to maximum addiction. One can indeed argue what is the best way to deal with the problem of kids and social media, but I think the article is misrepresenting the situation.
- vrganj 15d ago
  Yup. All this talk of personal responsibility in these types of situations is nothing but a perfidious form of victim blaming. "The crack addict should've known better, it's not the dealer's fault they came back for more!"
  - howunfortunate 15d ago
    I think personal responsibility does play into these situations to some extent, but even so, that doesn't imply there should be zero regulation. Both for crack addicts and teens using social media, they not only hurt themselves, but also hurt those around them. The studies on teen mental health largely suggest that mostly it's not about using a lot of social media yourself, but living in an area where social media is the coin of the realm. It's the toxic culture SM generates rather than direct use that's hurting teen mental health.
  - talon8635 15d ago
    I actually thinks it’s far more applicable in the crack scenario than the social media scenario. There are lots of people who don’t use crack. The vast majority of humanity. What percentage of teens don’t use social media? I don’t know the answer, and would adjust my thinking if incorrect, but my assumption is “a small minority” Personal responsibility IS a factor that can’t be ignored when it comes to addiction. I say this as a multi substance addict who’s been clean for over a decade. Tech is a whole new beast though, because we are often forced to use it. It’s closer to food addiction than crack addiction, which, IMO, is the most brutal addiction of all (food). No one neeeds crack to survive, so stopping it is one thing. Stopping (junk) food addiction, or severe over eating, or whatever you want to call it… man, that must be brutal. I don’t use social media, but I’m an old fogie. I’d imagine you kids can not very easily “just not use it” if they want to have any semblance of social life and to find a high paying job after college
Apreche 15d ago
Don’t ban it for kids. Ban the doomscrolling algorithmic feeds for everyone. Make them only show people posts from accounts they opt-in to following, and nothing else.
- mitxela 15d ago
  It's already banned for everyone who doesn't want to send their ID documents to Persona.
  - gjsman-1000 15d ago
    Persona already has the ability to access your ID, or they would otherwise not be able to determine if the ID you sent was genuine.
    - mitxela 14d ago
      Have you tried sending them a fake ID? As I understand, these companies are verifying the format of the ID, not the exact details on it. Including all the subtle format details like the checksum of the OCR section. If it looks good, they add it (and the site you were trying to access, and the timestamp) to their database.
- petcat 15d ago
  > Ban the doomscrolling algorithmic feeds for everyone. HN itself will get banned under this criteria.
  - walthamstow 15d ago
    I don't think so. Everyone sees the same feed. It's more like the New York Times homepage than it is Facebook.
  - adrianN 15d ago
    I’d celebrate the revival of the ca 2000‘s blogosphere.
  - 14d ago
theodric 15d ago
Teen welfare is just the excuse. The teens are collateral damage along the path to mandating identification and de-anonymizing the Internet. The teens aren't enfranchised, so they can't meaningfully complain, and once they can vote, their problem is over, so why would they fight?
- Canuckjaywalkin 15d ago
  [dead]
- deltoidmaximus 14d ago
  Yes, no one is trying to fix the problem here. Otherwise we'd ban algorithmic feeds and let the client decide what they see.
gjsman-1000 15d ago
"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims." "In scary headlines like these, the adult man in the white van is the subject, and the child is the passive victim. The child can obviously be trained to identify that adult mans talking to them in white vans may require distance even if not every person doing so is a killer."
- happymellon 15d ago
  "The solution imposed is to ban the child from going anywhere where a white van may also exist."
  - mitxela 14d ago
    it's not anywhere a white van may exist, it's the inside of the white van
deleted 15d ago
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giantg2 15d ago
The reason social media bans miss yhe point is because they will be replaced by other addictive/predatory technology, such as gaming. It's wack-a-mole - ban one thing and another pops up. Parental involvement and school education about addiction in all its forms is the best (not perfect) solution. The goal is to allow adolescents to grow into knowledge and responsible adults. Infantilizing them and delaying their exposure to the world only delays that development. And most age verification tech just undermines privacy.
- ricardobeat 15d ago
  It’s easy to say, but do you want a teenage mind to compete against an army of thousands of marketers and engineers, with billions of dollars on the line, to see who wins that battle? It’s not a level playing field.
  - TomGarden 15d ago
    This. To be fair, adults should not be subject to this dynamic either. The lawmakers have failed to legislate around social media, and this is a weak fallback option.
- watwut 15d ago
  Facebook measured "sentiment" and then shown weight loss influencers bullshit ads to teenagers deemed "more insecure about their looks". Yes it feeds directly into anorexia. And yes, it had that effect. Education wont counteract these effects, not when the company can put staggering amount of money into A/B testing for maximal impact.
  - giantg2 14d ago
    What education will do is show that to the world. Then we might legislate privacy mechanisms that would make this sort of abuse illegal and less likely to occur for all people.
- zeroonetwothree 15d ago
  Gaming is much healthier than social media.
ricardobeat 15d ago
> Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces The article is missing the point entirely. The conversation is not about “regulated spaces”, but removing them from spaces created entirely to drive advertisement, mindless engagement and consumption. If they find other spaces to join without that, perfect - it worked!
ButlerianJihad 15d ago
For the record, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has fostered world-class research and development in fields such as A.I., X Windows (Athena Widgets, Kerberos security (adopted by Microsoft in SMB and Windows Server, etc. GNU (Richard M. Stallman))) Emacs and elisp, as well as glibc and gcc compiler tool suite.
iLoveOncall 15d ago
They don't care about social media bans, they care about linking users to their government ID. It's baffling to me that anyone has still not realized that.
- howunfortunate 15d ago
  Who is "they"? I care about social media bans.
  - iLoveOncall 15d ago
    The people introducing those laws and the people financing them. Meta is the biggest lobbyist in the US for this, why do you think that is?
    - mitxela 14d ago
      Because it removes their liability for intentionally pushing addiction on teenagers?
jl6 15d ago
Maybe it’s because tech people are prone to binary thinking, but there seems to be the idea that if you can’t prevent a bad thing entirely, then you shouldn’t try to prevent it at all. Or maybe the other way around: if you can’t achieve a good thing completely, then why even bother trying?
- StevenWaterman 15d ago
  While I think you're right that this is a real problem, there's also real costs to a partial solution. It encourages people to see it as a solved problem, disincentivising further reform and giving the impression you don't need to keep an eye on your kid's internet use because the state is handling it for you
deleted 15d ago
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pastaepatate 15d ago
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MomsAVoxell 15d ago
It is the operating systems vendors who created this scenario by creating single-user walled-garden platforms which abrogate a parents rights and agency over their children’s lives. I should be able to give my 8 year old a mobile phone for their uses, pair it with my phone, and at any time of day be able to observe their activity on that phone - just as if I were watching what they were up to at the park, or while experimenting with matches in the garden, or riding their bikes on the street for the first time. But there is a distinct desire by the operating system vendors to serve their true masters - ad agencies - and abrogate responsibilities of the users. “Filesystem, what filesystem?” The idea of having a parent/child relationship encoded in the functions of the operating system is not in alignment with the idea that the true operators of the platform are faceless corporations, hell bent on harvesting every bit of data from every human being using their platforms. With one simple trick, operating systems can change this equation entirely: give parents their rights and duties and responsibilities back. Let me see what my 8-year old is doing, in a fair and open and equitable fashion, so that I can - as a parent - fulfill my responsibilities to keep my children safe. A phone is no less dangerous than a sharp kitchen knife. I’m perfectly fine with my 8 year old learning to use a kitchen knife properly - to gain their own agency over it as a tool - as long as I am able to observe their use of it. And before anyone tries to make the argument “parents don’t do that, oh my god, you’re violating your child’s right to privacy” - no, that is not what I mean. A child should have privacy and they should learn to have agency over that privacy - but a parent is not absolved of the issue if that child falls of a cliff because of their negligence. Let the OS provide privacy - but let it also provide a means of review by the parents - who are the ones ultimately responsible for the child in the first place. This needs to be an OS feature. Parents and children should, through the OS, be able to establish a strong, positive relationship with each other over this issue, with agency returned to the family unit. Otherwise, we are creating totalitarian systems of control and putting them in the hands of people we simply cannot trust. The degradation of agency within the family unit is a function of commercial desire to exploit that lack of agency. Operating systems, instead of serving ad agency masters, can go a long, long way to provide parents and children the right tools to solve this problem. They do, however, need to stop suckling at the teat of the nameless corporations who see the family unit as a nut that has to be cracked in order to extract the juice.
- 15d ago
tomjen3 15d ago
There is nothing wrong with social media; if anything, we need more social media. What we need less of are the attention-maximizing, eldritch-horror things that have stolen social media and now walk around wearing the skins of the entity that summoned it. Facebook is not social media — if you don't believe me, go on Facebook and count how many posts are from people you had mutual interactions with and actively choosen to follow and how many are everything else (not including native ads, I understand the platforms have to make moeny). It's the same issue, if not worse, on X/Twitter. I wouldn't know the status of TikTok for the same reason I don't know what the current status of street drugs, but as I understand it you can't even meaningfully follow people on TikTok — it's just mindless consumption from people you don't know. How can it be social media if there's no social component? Email is social media; chatting with your guild members in World of Warcraft is social media. Until at least a few months ago, commenting on a pull request on GitHub was more social media than Twitter was. The first step in dealing with the world is to look at things as they actually are, not as they were twenty years ago.
- augment_me 15d ago
  Well we live in a global informational network. Instagram actually did try to not fully attentionmaxx their reels algos back in 2014 when TikTok came up, and this led to them losing 60% of the market to this. You can't regulate the whole world, if you won't make something addictive, someone in China will and you will lose the market to them. Next best thing is ban because regulations in software are stale the day they get released due to legal processes being slower than technological ones.
- techblueberry 15d ago
  I can agree with this. And I’m not sure how these bans are scoped but maybe they should be scoped specifically around algorithmic feeds. The biggest problem to me isn’t the content or posting on a friends timeline. It’s that choices are pushed to the user rather than pulled. Change that one dynamic and I may not care as much that YouTube has content I consider toxic. Add a little friction my teen has to go actively discover content he’s curious about, not pushed an algorithmic feed. I think the problem is though - the tech companies are incentivized to make this about _content_ “ I can’t ban Andrew Tate because it’s not my job to tell people what they can and can’t watch, first amendment, blah blah blah. And Zuckerberg isn’t wrong here exactly, but per above the real argument I think is less about content and more about form. But the reality is these companies don’t actually make their money from the content they make it from the form. So Zuckerberg can’t concede “oh you’re right, making the newsfeed less adddictive doesn’t violate first amendment rights, at least we’re not banning Trump, because he doesn’t care about banning Trump except for the heat he gets from republicans, he cares about you messing with the money printer. The thing we may all be able to agree they should do is the thing they’ll push back much harder against doing.
zeroonetwothree 15d ago
Why not “Teen Cigarette Bans Miss the Point”? Just because compliance isn’t 100% doesn’t mean there’s no benefit. Also these things can take time to work, but we do have evidence that bans reduce usage to an extent.
- happymellon 15d ago
  You are conflating cigarette damage with social media damage. Social media doesn't have to be toxic, just toxic behaviour is rewarded. This is more like "sniper in park causes ban for under 18s". You are keeping the bad things but age gating it. It would be better to remove the sniper in the park.
pona-a 15d ago
Are people seriously routinely experiencing serious harm from social media use, comparable with alcohol or gambling addiction? The discussion may have suffered from much unnecessarily hyperbole in comparing YouTube to heroin, in how a single use guarantees unavoidable long term consequences with little redeeming qualities. I'm a college age gen Z, and don't really think you can fix much with a social media ban alone, even ignoring all the implications if it's enforcement. People don't get dysmorphia because some computer program told them so. The "influencers" are just other victims of a fundamentally toxic culture, or leaches on that insecurity. You could say it used to be better before the internet, and maybe you'd be right. But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. As long as there are humans communicating through any medium, there will be a culture that can harbor these destructive tendencies, and the bigger more sparse that culture is, the more extreme its ideas can get. Chronological feeds or more civic accountability for any algorithmic feeds (like forcing companies to share data with researchers to study their effects) could be a generally great initiative, but simply banning social media for anyone won't do as much as you'd hope. Looksmaxing, the latest of these strange internet-induced mental illnesses, literally began on a phpBB forum.
- techblueberry 15d ago
  “ But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. ” Isn’t one of the big complaints about social media that only like 1% or .1% of users get promoted? I think the problem is your last paragraph buries the lede. - the social media companies want to make this about content, because algorithmic feeds are what make meta a trillion dollar company instead of a 50 billion dollar company. I do think there would be a fair bit of agreement with your thesis if your minor caveat at the end wasn’t the big huge problem. I think most of these bans are because no one has figured out how to ban the algorithmic feed and SV isn’t self-regulating. There would still be plenty of moral panics about the content, but I think the bans are picking up speed because of the form. I don’t care that my kid wants to join a satanic death cult I care that Meta has figured out how to monetize satanic death cult membership in the algorithm.
- AaronAPU 15d ago
  Having lived many years prior to social media, it feels very clear that social media fundamentally warps people in a way they weren’t before. If you have only lived within it, it makes sense to underestimate the impact.
nekusar 15d ago
The big problem with these "social media child bans", is that the capitalistic extreme-addictive experience IS harming everyone. Not just children. What should have been was what Cory Doctorow has pushed - forced open API integration. From there you can make your own clients, only see friends, de-gamify, chronological algorithm, etc. But banning children? That's a fools game. But easy for the votes, cause politicians are attacking a population who can't vote, and are disenfranchised by default.
zer00eyz 14d ago
Im barely in the back half of Gen X. My oldest kids are grown now, but grew up with iPhones in their hands. I am reminded of all the ridiculousness of the 1980s/1990s - "Its 10pm do you know where your kids are?" "I learned it by watching you dad!" Lawsuits around backwards message in music (Later PMRC), that Bevis and Butthead caused the child to burn down the trailer (fire! fire!)... My kids hate social media for the most part - and are much more free range than their peers. Why? Because we did the hard work of parenting them! We were involved in their lives, from their grades to their social lives, to talking about the tech in their hand and the problems it can create. We need to have a conversation about kids - about them being able to be outside, roaming, unattended without parents being arrested. About them having third spaces, about severe restrictions on their "freedom" in the world if we want to get to the heart of the issue. They are breaking this law because social media has become their "third space" that is parent free where they can explore and figure out the world.
fyredge 14d ago
A disingenuous article. The 30% reduction of teen use is touted as a failure. If this was applied to cigarettes and alcohol, the solution would be stronger enforcement, but this is then labelled as doubling down. It is not. The sources provided shows that the remaining 70% of teenagers that remain on the platforms are due to lack of enforcement from the platforms, not purposeful skirting of restrictions by the teenagers (VPN etc.). The article further labels the teenage bans as a fight between adults and teenagers, as if the laws will breed resentment from children towards their parents. As far as I'm aware, that's not how teenagers view the issue of tobacco and alcohol bans around the world. 30% reduction is a successful start in the first year. I foresee further reduction in the coming years when less teenagers slip through the lack of enforcement and more of them pass the 16 year old threshold.
EPWN3D 14d ago
I don't see anything wrong with a social media ban for teens in concept. In execution, it'll be difficult to do effectively though. What I would like to see is changes to the tax code to disincentivize the social media business model and the advertising industry generally. For example... 1. Tax the crap out of advertising revenue on social media platforms 2. Stratify the ads and ban the existence of paid tiers which include advertising. If you pay for something, you don't see ads, period 3. Ban the use of trackers and fingerprinting on any paid service without explicit opt-in 4. Create a tort for data leaks that travels with any company which handled the data. If anyone in the chain leaks it, you can take an action against all of them, and the penalties are individually assessed 5. Ban the collection and sale of profiling data for anyone under 18 6. Ban the ad-supported tier for anyone under 18 This heavily disincentivizes algorithms generally and makes paid tiers more appealing, which is much easier for parents to control. The problem with social media and teens is that teens can even sign up in the first place. Make them use a credit card, and you suddenly have a much higher barrier to entry. If I tried to subscribe my parents to HBO as a kid, it wouldn't have worked, and this is why. It wasn't because the government banned 14 year olds from seeing HBO.
kelseyfrog 14d ago
TFA: "Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces." The Study TFA references: "The most common reason children still had their social media accounts was that they had not yet been asked by the platform to verify their age." So, basically the first quote is an attempt to manipulate people by appealing to a cliche. Who would have thought?
ElProlactin 14d ago
What a surprise! Researchers who have a good grift going studying how young people use social media don't want it banned outright. Instead, they want some unspecified conversation in which they have a role deciding how technology can be "better shaped", which coincidentally allows their grift to keep going. > The companion narrative to technological determinism is something I’d call adult saviorism. Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults. In this narrative, teens lack the media literacy or judgment to save themselves. The conclusion to this line of thinking, when it comes to regulation, is that teens need not be involved, since they themselves are compromised. This totally devalues the long-accepted wisdom that adults are responsible for raising children and sometimes have to make decisions that children don't like but that are necessary and beneficial for their well-being. In the author's narrative, teens who have no meaningful context in which to understand how their brains are being manipulated by multi-billion dollar companies for profit are somehow supposed to participate in proposing regulations that protect them from said companies. > While adult saviorism is, in many ways, well-intentioned, often coming from a place of concern about child safety, it fails to recognize teens’ expertise and creativity in using technology. Most teens are skeptical that their parents and policymakers know better than they do about the good and bad of the online world, and for good reason. Consider the U.S. congressional hearing held in 2021, in which Facebook’s then global head of safety was asked by Senator Richard Blumenthal, “Will you commit to ending Finsta?” Needless to say, such embarrassing lines of questioning — which neither began nor ended with Blumenthal — should inspire very little confidence. Teens think they know more than their elders?!? What an astonishing revelation! This is such a straw man argument. Arguing that some geezer in Congress saying "Finsta" is evidence that adults are incapable of making sensible decisions about protections for children is a bad look for anyone associated with an institution of higher learning.
lapestenoire 14d ago
What is everyone so worked up about? All parents have to do to stop the harm Meta is inflicting on children is to have their “high school students get together to hash out a national AI policy for schools.”
scotty79 14d ago
> there should be a focus on supporting positive online engagement I feel like this is the key for fighting all negative behaviors. Fill the time, burn the energy, with better stuff so that nobody has any left for the bad stuff.
- smcg 14d ago
  I'm not sure that most people have a concept for what positive online engagement is.

67 points by eustoria 15d ago

“ But less than a year in, it suggests the ban is failing: A state-sponsored survey of parents indicated that seven in 10 teens are still using social media, while academic research has reported even lower rates of compliance.” Failure? Or 30% improvement. “While social media can be weaponized for bullying or hate, over half of all teens turn to social media as a source of social and emotional support.” Teens also turn to drugs as a source of of social and emotional support. “ Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults.” Ironically the thesis of this article. In fact I would say by banning teens from social media, we may be implicitly increasing their agency, since they’ll have to figure out how to interface with a set of technolgies that are not optimized for them. There’s something really dystopian to me about “designing for teens in mind” and I think maybe the unintended consequence of this kind of thinking is just - the continued marketable capture of segments. What this person is basically advocating for is a new way for tech companies to extract more value from our youth. The whole point of being a teenager is to generate your own ways to rebel against the fact that the adult world isn’t quite built for you. This “facebook but for teenagers” is just another opiate for the masses.

kubb 15d ago

“It failed now please don’t try anymore, see it can’t be done, trust the kidz.” Someone’s nervous.

trallnag 15d ago
lol

bakugo 15d ago

On the contrary, I think social media bans are poised to accomplish exactly what they're intended to: provide a convenient justification for forced identity verification across all websites.

mitxela 15d ago
That's just a means of banning social media for everyone, which is even better than banning it for teens.
- TheOtherHobbes 15d ago
  No, it's a means of removing anonymity so promoters of ideologically unsound sentiment can be identified.
  - mitxela 14d ago
    Promoting it on billionaire owned platforms was always a losing battle - it makes you controlled opposition. When those platforms fall, we can have true ideological competition.
- bakugo 15d ago
  How so? Do you believe the average person will think twice when TikTok asks them to submit a picture of their ID? No, they'll do it without a second thought so they can go back to mindlessly scrolling through the slop. The ones who will think twice are exactly the sort of people these laws are intended to punish: the dissenters, the wrong-thinkers, those who must be silenced. Either they choose not to verify and cease to use social media (successfully silenced), or they allow their wrong thoughts to be tied to their identity, such that they can be identified and punished accordingly.
  - fyredge 14d ago
    True as that may be, I find it unconvincing as it is the same argument that is used against teen bans. Do you believe the average parent will think twice when allowing their children to use social media? No, they'll do it without a second thought so they their children will stop pestering them about it. The ones who will think twice will have to see their children ostracized because all the cools are on it except themselves. I lean towards teen bans. We already have the same framework for cigarettes and alcohol. They didn't prevent teenage consumption 100% anyways but they did their job

sega_sai 15d ago

"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims." -- I am sorry, but how is this not true, when companies like Meta are in full control of their algorithms, tuning them to maximum addiction. One can indeed argue what is the best way to deal with the problem of kids and social media, but I think the article is misrepresenting the situation.

vrganj 15d ago
Yup. All this talk of personal responsibility in these types of situations is nothing but a perfidious form of victim blaming. "The crack addict should've known better, it's not the dealer's fault they came back for more!"
- howunfortunate 15d ago
  I think personal responsibility does play into these situations to some extent, but even so, that doesn't imply there should be zero regulation. Both for crack addicts and teens using social media, they not only hurt themselves, but also hurt those around them. The studies on teen mental health largely suggest that mostly it's not about using a lot of social media yourself, but living in an area where social media is the coin of the realm. It's the toxic culture SM generates rather than direct use that's hurting teen mental health.
- talon8635 15d ago
  I actually thinks it’s far more applicable in the crack scenario than the social media scenario. There are lots of people who don’t use crack. The vast majority of humanity. What percentage of teens don’t use social media? I don’t know the answer, and would adjust my thinking if incorrect, but my assumption is “a small minority” Personal responsibility IS a factor that can’t be ignored when it comes to addiction. I say this as a multi substance addict who’s been clean for over a decade. Tech is a whole new beast though, because we are often forced to use it. It’s closer to food addiction than crack addiction, which, IMO, is the most brutal addiction of all (food). No one neeeds crack to survive, so stopping it is one thing. Stopping (junk) food addiction, or severe over eating, or whatever you want to call it… man, that must be brutal. I don’t use social media, but I’m an old fogie. I’d imagine you kids can not very easily “just not use it” if they want to have any semblance of social life and to find a high paying job after college

Apreche 15d ago

Don’t ban it for kids. Ban the doomscrolling algorithmic feeds for everyone. Make them only show people posts from accounts they opt-in to following, and nothing else.

mitxela 15d ago
It's already banned for everyone who doesn't want to send their ID documents to Persona.
- gjsman-1000 15d ago
  Persona already has the ability to access your ID, or they would otherwise not be able to determine if the ID you sent was genuine.
  - mitxela 14d ago
    Have you tried sending them a fake ID? As I understand, these companies are verifying the format of the ID, not the exact details on it. Including all the subtle format details like the checksum of the OCR section. If it looks good, they add it (and the site you were trying to access, and the timestamp) to their database.
petcat 15d ago
> Ban the doomscrolling algorithmic feeds for everyone. HN itself will get banned under this criteria.
- walthamstow 15d ago
  I don't think so. Everyone sees the same feed. It's more like the New York Times homepage than it is Facebook.
- adrianN 15d ago
  I’d celebrate the revival of the ca 2000‘s blogosphere.
- 14d ago

theodric 15d ago

Teen welfare is just the excuse. The teens are collateral damage along the path to mandating identification and de-anonymizing the Internet. The teens aren't enfranchised, so they can't meaningfully complain, and once they can vote, their problem is over, so why would they fight?

Canuckjaywalkin 15d ago
[dead]
deltoidmaximus 14d ago
Yes, no one is trying to fix the problem here. Otherwise we'd ban algorithmic feeds and let the client decide what they see.

gjsman-1000 15d ago

"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims." "In scary headlines like these, the adult man in the white van is the subject, and the child is the passive victim. The child can obviously be trained to identify that adult mans talking to them in white vans may require distance even if not every person doing so is a killer."

happymellon 15d ago
"The solution imposed is to ban the child from going anywhere where a white van may also exist."
- mitxela 14d ago
  it's not anywhere a white van may exist, it's the inside of the white van

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giantg2 15d ago

The reason social media bans miss yhe point is because they will be replaced by other addictive/predatory technology, such as gaming. It's wack-a-mole - ban one thing and another pops up. Parental involvement and school education about addiction in all its forms is the best (not perfect) solution. The goal is to allow adolescents to grow into knowledge and responsible adults. Infantilizing them and delaying their exposure to the world only delays that development. And most age verification tech just undermines privacy.

ricardobeat 15d ago
It’s easy to say, but do you want a teenage mind to compete against an army of thousands of marketers and engineers, with billions of dollars on the line, to see who wins that battle? It’s not a level playing field.
- TomGarden 15d ago
  This. To be fair, adults should not be subject to this dynamic either. The lawmakers have failed to legislate around social media, and this is a weak fallback option.
watwut 15d ago
Facebook measured "sentiment" and then shown weight loss influencers bullshit ads to teenagers deemed "more insecure about their looks". Yes it feeds directly into anorexia. And yes, it had that effect. Education wont counteract these effects, not when the company can put staggering amount of money into A/B testing for maximal impact.
- giantg2 14d ago
  What education will do is show that to the world. Then we might legislate privacy mechanisms that would make this sort of abuse illegal and less likely to occur for all people.
zeroonetwothree 15d ago
Gaming is much healthier than social media.

ricardobeat 15d ago

> Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces The article is missing the point entirely. The conversation is not about “regulated spaces”, but removing them from spaces created entirely to drive advertisement, mindless engagement and consumption. If they find other spaces to join without that, perfect - it worked!

ButlerianJihad 15d ago

For the record, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has fostered world-class research and development in fields such as A.I., X Windows (Athena Widgets, Kerberos security (adopted by Microsoft in SMB and Windows Server, etc. GNU (Richard M. Stallman))) Emacs and elisp, as well as glibc and gcc compiler tool suite.

iLoveOncall 15d ago

They don't care about social media bans, they care about linking users to their government ID. It's baffling to me that anyone has still not realized that.

howunfortunate 15d ago
Who is "they"? I care about social media bans.
- iLoveOncall 15d ago
  The people introducing those laws and the people financing them. Meta is the biggest lobbyist in the US for this, why do you think that is?
  - mitxela 14d ago
    Because it removes their liability for intentionally pushing addiction on teenagers?

jl6 15d ago

Maybe it’s because tech people are prone to binary thinking, but there seems to be the idea that if you can’t prevent a bad thing entirely, then you shouldn’t try to prevent it at all. Or maybe the other way around: if you can’t achieve a good thing completely, then why even bother trying?

StevenWaterman 15d ago
While I think you're right that this is a real problem, there's also real costs to a partial solution. It encourages people to see it as a solved problem, disincentivising further reform and giving the impression you don't need to keep an eye on your kid's internet use because the state is handling it for you

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pastaepatate 15d ago

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MomsAVoxell 15d ago

It is the operating systems vendors who created this scenario by creating single-user walled-garden platforms which abrogate a parents rights and agency over their children’s lives. I should be able to give my 8 year old a mobile phone for their uses, pair it with my phone, and at any time of day be able to observe their activity on that phone - just as if I were watching what they were up to at the park, or while experimenting with matches in the garden, or riding their bikes on the street for the first time. But there is a distinct desire by the operating system vendors to serve their true masters - ad agencies - and abrogate responsibilities of the users. “Filesystem, what filesystem?” The idea of having a parent/child relationship encoded in the functions of the operating system is not in alignment with the idea that the true operators of the platform are faceless corporations, hell bent on harvesting every bit of data from every human being using their platforms. With one simple trick, operating systems can change this equation entirely: give parents their rights and duties and responsibilities back. Let me see what my 8-year old is doing, in a fair and open and equitable fashion, so that I can - as a parent - fulfill my responsibilities to keep my children safe. A phone is no less dangerous than a sharp kitchen knife. I’m perfectly fine with my 8 year old learning to use a kitchen knife properly - to gain their own agency over it as a tool - as long as I am able to observe their use of it. And before anyone tries to make the argument “parents don’t do that, oh my god, you’re violating your child’s right to privacy” - no, that is not what I mean. A child should have privacy and they should learn to have agency over that privacy - but a parent is not absolved of the issue if that child falls of a cliff because of their negligence. Let the OS provide privacy - but let it also provide a means of review by the parents - who are the ones ultimately responsible for the child in the first place. This needs to be an OS feature. Parents and children should, through the OS, be able to establish a strong, positive relationship with each other over this issue, with agency returned to the family unit. Otherwise, we are creating totalitarian systems of control and putting them in the hands of people we simply cannot trust. The degradation of agency within the family unit is a function of commercial desire to exploit that lack of agency. Operating systems, instead of serving ad agency masters, can go a long, long way to provide parents and children the right tools to solve this problem. They do, however, need to stop suckling at the teat of the nameless corporations who see the family unit as a nut that has to be cracked in order to extract the juice.

15d ago

tomjen3 15d ago

There is nothing wrong with social media; if anything, we need more social media. What we need less of are the attention-maximizing, eldritch-horror things that have stolen social media and now walk around wearing the skins of the entity that summoned it. Facebook is not social media — if you don't believe me, go on Facebook and count how many posts are from people you had mutual interactions with and actively choosen to follow and how many are everything else (not including native ads, I understand the platforms have to make moeny). It's the same issue, if not worse, on X/Twitter. I wouldn't know the status of TikTok for the same reason I don't know what the current status of street drugs, but as I understand it you can't even meaningfully follow people on TikTok — it's just mindless consumption from people you don't know. How can it be social media if there's no social component? Email is social media; chatting with your guild members in World of Warcraft is social media. Until at least a few months ago, commenting on a pull request on GitHub was more social media than Twitter was. The first step in dealing with the world is to look at things as they actually are, not as they were twenty years ago.

augment_me 15d ago
Well we live in a global informational network. Instagram actually did try to not fully attentionmaxx their reels algos back in 2014 when TikTok came up, and this led to them losing 60% of the market to this. You can't regulate the whole world, if you won't make something addictive, someone in China will and you will lose the market to them. Next best thing is ban because regulations in software are stale the day they get released due to legal processes being slower than technological ones.
techblueberry 15d ago
I can agree with this. And I’m not sure how these bans are scoped but maybe they should be scoped specifically around algorithmic feeds. The biggest problem to me isn’t the content or posting on a friends timeline. It’s that choices are pushed to the user rather than pulled. Change that one dynamic and I may not care as much that YouTube has content I consider toxic. Add a little friction my teen has to go actively discover content he’s curious about, not pushed an algorithmic feed. I think the problem is though - the tech companies are incentivized to make this about _content_ “ I can’t ban Andrew Tate because it’s not my job to tell people what they can and can’t watch, first amendment, blah blah blah. And Zuckerberg isn’t wrong here exactly, but per above the real argument I think is less about content and more about form. But the reality is these companies don’t actually make their money from the content they make it from the form. So Zuckerberg can’t concede “oh you’re right, making the newsfeed less adddictive doesn’t violate first amendment rights, at least we’re not banning Trump, because he doesn’t care about banning Trump except for the heat he gets from republicans, he cares about you messing with the money printer. The thing we may all be able to agree they should do is the thing they’ll push back much harder against doing.

zeroonetwothree 15d ago

Why not “Teen Cigarette Bans Miss the Point”? Just because compliance isn’t 100% doesn’t mean there’s no benefit. Also these things can take time to work, but we do have evidence that bans reduce usage to an extent.

happymellon 15d ago
You are conflating cigarette damage with social media damage. Social media doesn't have to be toxic, just toxic behaviour is rewarded. This is more like "sniper in park causes ban for under 18s". You are keeping the bad things but age gating it. It would be better to remove the sniper in the park.

pona-a 15d ago

Are people seriously routinely experiencing serious harm from social media use, comparable with alcohol or gambling addiction? The discussion may have suffered from much unnecessarily hyperbole in comparing YouTube to heroin, in how a single use guarantees unavoidable long term consequences with little redeeming qualities. I'm a college age gen Z, and don't really think you can fix much with a social media ban alone, even ignoring all the implications if it's enforcement. People don't get dysmorphia because some computer program told them so. The "influencers" are just other victims of a fundamentally toxic culture, or leaches on that insecurity. You could say it used to be better before the internet, and maybe you'd be right. But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. As long as there are humans communicating through any medium, there will be a culture that can harbor these destructive tendencies, and the bigger more sparse that culture is, the more extreme its ideas can get. Chronological feeds or more civic accountability for any algorithmic feeds (like forcing companies to share data with researchers to study their effects) could be a generally great initiative, but simply banning social media for anyone won't do as much as you'd hope. Looksmaxing, the latest of these strange internet-induced mental illnesses, literally began on a phpBB forum.

techblueberry 15d ago
“ But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. ” Isn’t one of the big complaints about social media that only like 1% or .1% of users get promoted? I think the problem is your last paragraph buries the lede. - the social media companies want to make this about content, because algorithmic feeds are what make meta a trillion dollar company instead of a 50 billion dollar company. I do think there would be a fair bit of agreement with your thesis if your minor caveat at the end wasn’t the big huge problem. I think most of these bans are because no one has figured out how to ban the algorithmic feed and SV isn’t self-regulating. There would still be plenty of moral panics about the content, but I think the bans are picking up speed because of the form. I don’t care that my kid wants to join a satanic death cult I care that Meta has figured out how to monetize satanic death cult membership in the algorithm.
AaronAPU 15d ago
Having lived many years prior to social media, it feels very clear that social media fundamentally warps people in a way they weren’t before. If you have only lived within it, it makes sense to underestimate the impact.

nekusar 15d ago

The big problem with these "social media child bans", is that the capitalistic extreme-addictive experience IS harming everyone. Not just children. What should have been was what Cory Doctorow has pushed - forced open API integration. From there you can make your own clients, only see friends, de-gamify, chronological algorithm, etc. But banning children? That's a fools game. But easy for the votes, cause politicians are attacking a population who can't vote, and are disenfranchised by default.

zer00eyz 14d ago

Im barely in the back half of Gen X. My oldest kids are grown now, but grew up with iPhones in their hands. I am reminded of all the ridiculousness of the 1980s/1990s - "Its 10pm do you know where your kids are?" "I learned it by watching you dad!" Lawsuits around backwards message in music (Later PMRC), that Bevis and Butthead caused the child to burn down the trailer (fire! fire!)... My kids hate social media for the most part - and are much more free range than their peers. Why? Because we did the hard work of parenting them! We were involved in their lives, from their grades to their social lives, to talking about the tech in their hand and the problems it can create. We need to have a conversation about kids - about them being able to be outside, roaming, unattended without parents being arrested. About them having third spaces, about severe restrictions on their "freedom" in the world if we want to get to the heart of the issue. They are breaking this law because social media has become their "third space" that is parent free where they can explore and figure out the world.

fyredge 14d ago

A disingenuous article. The 30% reduction of teen use is touted as a failure. If this was applied to cigarettes and alcohol, the solution would be stronger enforcement, but this is then labelled as doubling down. It is not. The sources provided shows that the remaining 70% of teenagers that remain on the platforms are due to lack of enforcement from the platforms, not purposeful skirting of restrictions by the teenagers (VPN etc.). The article further labels the teenage bans as a fight between adults and teenagers, as if the laws will breed resentment from children towards their parents. As far as I'm aware, that's not how teenagers view the issue of tobacco and alcohol bans around the world. 30% reduction is a successful start in the first year. I foresee further reduction in the coming years when less teenagers slip through the lack of enforcement and more of them pass the 16 year old threshold.

EPWN3D 14d ago

I don't see anything wrong with a social media ban for teens in concept. In execution, it'll be difficult to do effectively though. What I would like to see is changes to the tax code to disincentivize the social media business model and the advertising industry generally. For example... 1. Tax the crap out of advertising revenue on social media platforms 2. Stratify the ads and ban the existence of paid tiers which include advertising. If you pay for something, you don't see ads, period 3. Ban the use of trackers and fingerprinting on any paid service without explicit opt-in 4. Create a tort for data leaks that travels with any company which handled the data. If anyone in the chain leaks it, you can take an action against all of them, and the penalties are individually assessed 5. Ban the collection and sale of profiling data for anyone under 18 6. Ban the ad-supported tier for anyone under 18 This heavily disincentivizes algorithms generally and makes paid tiers more appealing, which is much easier for parents to control. The problem with social media and teens is that teens can even sign up in the first place. Make them use a credit card, and you suddenly have a much higher barrier to entry. If I tried to subscribe my parents to HBO as a kid, it wouldn't have worked, and this is why. It wasn't because the government banned 14 year olds from seeing HBO.

kelseyfrog 14d ago

TFA: "Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces." The Study TFA references: "The most common reason children still had their social media accounts was that they had not yet been asked by the platform to verify their age." So, basically the first quote is an attempt to manipulate people by appealing to a cliche. Who would have thought?

ElProlactin 14d ago

What a surprise! Researchers who have a good grift going studying how young people use social media don't want it banned outright. Instead, they want some unspecified conversation in which they have a role deciding how technology can be "better shaped", which coincidentally allows their grift to keep going. > The companion narrative to technological determinism is something I’d call adult saviorism. Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults. In this narrative, teens lack the media literacy or judgment to save themselves. The conclusion to this line of thinking, when it comes to regulation, is that teens need not be involved, since they themselves are compromised. This totally devalues the long-accepted wisdom that adults are responsible for raising children and sometimes have to make decisions that children don't like but that are necessary and beneficial for their well-being. In the author's narrative, teens who have no meaningful context in which to understand how their brains are being manipulated by multi-billion dollar companies for profit are somehow supposed to participate in proposing regulations that protect them from said companies. > While adult saviorism is, in many ways, well-intentioned, often coming from a place of concern about child safety, it fails to recognize teens’ expertise and creativity in using technology. Most teens are skeptical that their parents and policymakers know better than they do about the good and bad of the online world, and for good reason. Consider the U.S. congressional hearing held in 2021, in which Facebook’s then global head of safety was asked by Senator Richard Blumenthal, “Will you commit to ending Finsta?” Needless to say, such embarrassing lines of questioning — which neither began nor ended with Blumenthal — should inspire very little confidence. Teens think they know more than their elders?!? What an astonishing revelation! This is such a straw man argument. Arguing that some geezer in Congress saying "Finsta" is evidence that adults are incapable of making sensible decisions about protections for children is a bad look for anyone associated with an institution of higher learning.

lapestenoire 14d ago

What is everyone so worked up about? All parents have to do to stop the harm Meta is inflicting on children is to have their “high school students get together to hash out a national AI policy for schools.”

scotty79 14d ago

> there should be a focus on supporting positive online engagement I feel like this is the key for fighting all negative behaviors. Fill the time, burn the energy, with better stuff so that nobody has any left for the bad stuff.

smcg 14d ago
I'm not sure that most people have a concept for what positive online engagement is.