The author had it right in the first paragraph. In the 90s version of this hysteria, Congress passed a law that would have prevented access to education medical information, dirty curse words, and other filth from being published on the internet to protect the children. The federal government fought a case all the way to the Supreme Court to enforce it. If they had won that case, the internet would look very different today. But the Supreme Court got it right when they said it would squelch free speech.
You may not like FB, IG, TikTok, etc.. I certainly don't care for any of these products. But these are communications platforms. Restricting the right to free speech does have negative consequences... from the development of critical thinking skills; development of technical skills; and limiting of educational information. Being exposed to shit on the internet teaches you there's bullshit on the internet, and not to believe everything you see.
And just like the Supreme Court wrote 30 years ago, the answer is the same today: if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them. Restrict your children's access to these platforms.
I certainly dont believe anyone should be forced to use these platforms. I don't use any of these products, and havent since they launched. That's a freedom you and everyone else can take advantage of also. But those who advocate censorship aren't advocating for freedom... they're advocating for their personal parental decisions to the be decisions of the entire nation.
It's really not that simple. The products have become so widespread and influential that they change the very culture of our society for the worse. It doesn't matter whether you abstain from using Instagram or not, some of your friends will still be more or less subtly influenced by its existence in your social interactions.
There's a nice quote from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, which IMO hasn't aged at all in 60 years: "Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind... The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance."
I don't understand the point you're trying to make.
I for one deleted all of those platforms and my life is definitely better (I'm way less distracted for once, but the list is longer).
What do I care what others do?
If you have children or niblings, you’ll realize how ostracized from the community one gets if they have no access to social media. It would work if parents banded together and nobody in school would get access, but otherwise it just becomes a “there’s a giant club and you’re not a part of it”. As a child, that really hurts.
When I was in high school, Facebook was just opening up access to everyone. I remember literally everyone getting on it, and swapping between messages in MSN, and some posts on FB. We had whole school wide conversations, planning and etc. on social media, and on days when I didn’t get in front of the computer to check things, I remember feeling left out. It’s just so much worse now, because every kid expects every other kid to be on the loop of things 24/7. I think that’s where we screwed up. Having just casual access without mobile phones was the sweet spot, in my opinion.
But why do you make it sound like it’s not an option to teach kids to not have fear of missing out and having meaningful ways of spending their time in the real, offline world? I guarantee you that there is nothing of value that other teens are saying that your own children need to be updated 24/7
I also guarantee you that a teen who is not in the loop is much more likely to be ostracized and bullied in the offline world.
So, yes you might try teaching your kid that they're not missing out that they can find more meaningful way to spend their time in the real offline world but, the fact is, they go to schools with kid who overwhelmingly are not taught that and who will dislike your kid for being different. Your kid doesn't live in isolation, he lives in society and, during school years is when social pressure to conform to the group norm is strongest.
I'm speaking from experience here, I've been bullied as a teen, I definitely would rather avoid my son going through a similar experience.
Eh, that’s not necessarily true. Other kids might bully your child for having a healthy set of offline interests and for not being like them who are all plugged in online, but I don’t see how it’s not an option to teach your kids to have a strong sense of identity and not give in to peer pressure while also assuring them that you’ve always got their back.
What you’re describing doesn’t sound like parenting to me, it’s giving in to peer pressure. From kids. And you’re supposed to be an adult who already knows what’s right and wrong. If your kid’s peers all gain a liking for drugs or gambling or some other vice and they bully your child for not partaking, are you going to tell your child to participate? No, what you should do is show them the right way and to what’s good for them in the long term, even if it’s difficult for them to see it now because of their youth.
I had a strong sense of identity, I had good results, a good family life, my parents had my back, etc.. That didn't stop me from being bullied or pissed on while being held down by fucking assholes. So, I'd say, you either don't know what bullying is like or you're overly naive. And by the way, having my parents having my back and telling my teachers about the bullying just made things worse. It only improved when I changed school and punched the first guy who namecalled me.
Anyway, to respond to your points:
What I'm describing is knowing how society works and planning around it. It doesn't mean that I would give unrestricted access to social medias, it also doesn't mean that I would not be there to guide my child about how to use them, what the dangers are etc...
I'm saying that straight up abstinence is not a good idea and doesn't work if your child lives in a society that doesn't abstain. There are also perverse effects whereby preventing your child from completely accessing social medias, you end up with a child who just hides it from you.
I'd probably consider switching my child to a different school.
I was about to say teach your child self-defense and how to fight, and the last sentence of that same paragraph just proved my point.
Look, as a parent, your goal should not be to teach your child how to avoid bullying. That's not within your control, nor your child, and in the real world, even once your child is grown up, there's always some moron out there in the world who's going to bully you or want to beat you up, sometimes for no reason, sometimes for not being like them. That's not an excuse to teach your child to be like other children just for the sake of conformity because that is the wrong thing to teach. You teach them how to fight back when people beat them up for being the way that they are. None of your other points matter against that.
Fair point but I'd argue that self defense and knowing how to fight helps but I was a year younger than everyone else (skipped a grade) and was fairly small for my age until I hit a growth spurt (which coincided with when I changed school by graduating middle school and went to high school). I'm not sure I would have been half as successful when I first was bullied.
The thing too is that I'm also not convinced abstinence on something that's part of society and that your kid will have when they grow up is that useful anyway. Social media is unfortunately needed to function in society so learning to use it reasonably (and not in an addictive manner) has value too.
That said, yes I absolutely will teach my son to fight back, violence in some circumstances is a useful tool to have.
No, wrong again. It’s not necessary to function and there already are secure messaging apps through which kids and adults can communicate. You don’t have to have a Facebook page. You don’t need an IG profile of portraits where you pose like a model. You don’t need to make funny Tiktok videos.
This entire issue is being murkied by adults who are projecting their deep-seated bullying issues as value judgments on how to raise children when evidently they haven’t sorted themselves out and they are already having kids.
fwiw fighting is the only thing that mitigated bullying for me too
Surely being a good parent and having your kid's back is very important when the kid is being bullied.
I have been bullied by losers the whole school time, because of something as simple as my name and being smarter. I managed to develop a strong resistance to certain things and learned to go my own way, questioning the mainstream, including dealing with network effect and peer pressure to do things I do not want to participate in. For children in primary school it can be terrible.
However, I can easily imagine, what can happen, if a parent does not support their child as much as my parents did support me. I think except for exceptionally strong independent children, there needs to be a balance in children's lives. If almost everyone in their social circles is basically telling them, that they suck, because they are out of the loop, then it needs parents to support them and make them feel that they do not suck.
You're missing the point. This is not peer pressure over what brand of jeans or shoes your kids wear.
It's at the heart of socialization itself, which is an important part of growing up healthy.
The analogies with drugs and gambling are also misplaced, because these things are illegal and/or generally frowned upon by parents, the legal system, and society as a whole. In other words, the exact opposite of what's happening here.
And, those things are illegal/frowned-upon for reasons you respect enough to use them as examples. That fact should actually help you see the point?
> What you’re describing doesn’t sound like parenting to me, it’s giving in to peer pressure. From kids.
Are you a parent yourself? Just wondering.
I’d recommend listening to the Hard Fork podcast to answer some of these questions. In particular the March 22nd and 29th episodes.
Parent, after an age, has very small influence in what kids do. Kids will be spending most of their time with peers, not with you.
Because people will not invite you if you are not in the group chat. Unfortunately, people have forgotten how to call and are afraid of receiving calls.
This is more prominent among people who grew up with social media everywhere compared to ones who did not.
That's unnecessarily reductionist. Calling is less convenient and takes longer.
No, I don't think so. The time for me to ring you, tell you this in voice would be far quicker than typing.
Calling conveys so much more than text ever can.
A call can take seconds, "hey mate, want to go to the cinema tomorrow? Ill text you the time" "yeah cool, see ya".
Voice expresses emotion, you can pick up the mood of your buddy if they're up, down, need cheering up.
Its real, you hear a voice and you know it's your mate. Text, you assume. Text leaves you on edge waiting for confirmation.
The only inconvenience is that you could be interrupting something and even if so, then send a text.
The post you I was responding to was talking about "group chat". How long would it take for you to call 6 people? How long would it take for you to text 6 people?
I'm all for calls from one person to another person, if you know that person doesn't mind voice calls. Text and group chats are great for coordination of groups.
Apologies. I meant when you are the only person who is not in the group chat or messaging platform, then people won't call you to invite. It is much higher friction.
Then apologies, I didn't clock on to that the discussion was regarding to group chats.
I don't like calling because it's not like it used to be. Everything is so damned asynchronous these days even voice calls where it's supposed to be synchronous. When conversations were over copper/analog, yes I was younger, I enjoyed talking on the phone much more. Back then it felt like whether it was one person or three on the line there was actual presence and you could have two people talking on top of each other no problem.
Now, every conversation, whether it's by phone or zoom, feels like a struggle of who's going to take up the air time, trying not to talk over one another, dealing with delay, etc... It doesn't feel natural at all and there's little to no presence. Having smart phones makes it so much easier to tune out on a call and scroll reddit, check headlines or play a game. I agree that it's less convenient and takes too long for most things. I'd rather check in once a day with someone via text than have one longer phone conversation once a week.
If a friend is going to leave you out of an event purely because you do not use their preferred BigTech-facilitated chat tool, then I have some bad news for you: that person might not actually be your friend. Friends don’t treat each other that way.
For adults, sure. We're talking about children/teenagers, they're all insecure and self-conscious and don't want to hang around with the weird kid because they then become a weird kid by proxy. And the smallest unusualness makes you weird.
Something that causes some friction might absolutely lead to people treating others this way. Like if coworkers stop by your desk to invite you to lunch but you are in a meeting so they go without you. Should they have left a message? Track you down in the meeting? Waste their lunch time waiting for you? Friction matters in a social context.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that people plan things in real life over the internet. Conversations started online continue IRL, and vice-versa.
Social media can be really bad, and maybe it's actually mostly bad, but it does facilitate real life interactions and good things.
Imagine your child going to school but not being allowed to play with other kids in recess. Lots of bullying and physical violence can happen during recess, after all. Would you use that as an opportunity to teach them the dangers of FOMO, and to just read a book?
It’s the perfect opportunity to teach them the lack of value of FOMO, especially when it’s validation from people who would bully you that you seek. I don’t see why what you’re recommending is a healthy response.
Ever tried teaching anything to teenagers where their peers and society in general promote the opposite? Good luck with that...
I agree with you. It feels like some people here never interact with kids. It really is a very difficult problem to solve. You ban your kids from participating in social media, and you might end up hurting them much more by isolating them and getting them ostracized. In the end your cure ends up doing more damage than the illness would've. I absolutely agree that we should do something, and I'm trying my best. However, as long as a critical mass of young people are partaking, I cannot in good conscience force kids to stay off, because I know how bad that would make their life. So it's all about education and drilling the dangers into them as much as I can. Ultimately, this is a new world, with new rules and new dangers. The generation of millenials, boomers, etc - we are on the way out. We can advise the new generation, but they will have to find their own way to handle the dangers.
Not to mention the kids over-compensating for your restrictions, and doubling down on the things you forbid/discourage them from - whether covertly behind your back, or after they grow up.
Like a strict parent whose kids end up doing drugs and partying as soon as they can leave the house, or even the opposite, some "hippie" all-too-liberal parent whose kind grow up and seek strictness and discipline, and e.g. turn religious or join a cult, or find some abusive partner who gives that to them.
You haven't been around teenagers, or even humans in general much, huh?
Teaching another person, even an eager one, how to change their behaviour and mental patterns concerning validation and FOMO is a really hard task. It's not knowledge like math or something that you can just pass onto them. It can take months or even years even for pros (psychitrists etc.) to do that. Combine that with the fact that teenagers brains are wired differently (their need to fit it is greater than that of an adult) and their "natural resistance" to adults' teaching and it becomes almost impossible task.
I don't want children nor do I work with children, so haven't put any serious thought into how I would practically do it - I just don't think there's an objectively superior way to go about this. I won't judge anyone (parents nor teenagers) for surrendering to the peer pressure of social media, because it's so pervasive.
I’m sorry for sounding so harsh, but have you been through public or private school where you’re some sort of a group of at least 50+ children? Sense of belonging is so natural, especially at that age, that you can’t tell a kid that it doesn’t matter.
If your child just tells you “yeah I don’t care about others’ opinions”, then I’ll have a hard time to believe as well. As we age, and grow up, sure those things matter less. But come on, we’ve all been children, we’ve all wanted to be a part of some group. Some of us got bullied, some of us got ostracized, but we always wanted to belong.
This usually means "my close friends and peers have same opinions as I do and nobody else matter to us".
example from real life:
My local musicians community decided to use only FB to communicate their gigs dates. I refuse to use FB. I no longer know when or where is the gig. I don't see my fellows anymore.
Maybe text or call a couple friends in the community once a week?
Been there, done that... "it's all on the page, just check it mate". And suddenly you're that annoying weirdo that refuses to do things like everybody else.
Maybe try explaining why you don’t use Facebook, and why it is not an appropriate, inclusive way to organize the group. Or, maybe Facebook has some kind of E-mail gateway that can notify people who are not on it (I have no idea, I’m not on Facebook either). You’re just one person, but if the group sees more people not participating because of their bizarre insistence on use of social media, maybe they can eventually be convinced to change.
This seems so weird to me. I help organize some local groups centered around hobbies and games, and none of them use Facebook because we know not everyone will be there, and we don’t want to exclude people. Sorry, but that musician group seems pretty poorly run.
I'm a meetup organizer and sometimes get this but the other way. People insist that our current platform is not appropriate or inclusive because it requires an email signup, or the group chat is on a Meta-owned platform, or whatever. Who are you to say that your opinion on what's inclusive or not is correct? Choose something other than Facebook and you'll get others saying you're not inclusive because you're not there.
No one has "bizarre insistence" on use of social media, they're just there and it's the easiest option for all parties. People like you and me are the ones who are perceived as the ones bizarrely insistent on not being on social media. This doesn't make it wrong, and it's luckily slowly becoming more and more accepted, but it is important to keep in mind.
You are right that ideally groups like these should cater to all audiences but that's a lot of effort, and many organizers do it on a voluntary basis, not as a job. In my case, I know that 98% of people are included in the media that I use for my audience, and catering to the last 2% would double my workload. Not happening.
Since as far as I know, an E-mail address is required in order to sign up for Facebook and other social media, E-mail users must be a strict superset of Facebook users. It is clearly more inclusive of people.
As far as workload goes, we have not found anything lighter weight and less maintenance than an E-mail list.
You need an email and a phone number, so that makes it a no go for a lot of people.
You (and I) are right. Now for others to realize... it can be a long road.
To those people you are the weirdo refusing to use the convenient platform that everyone else is on. This stuff just does not enter their brains because it has become utterly normalised. To them it's not bizarre to insist on using social media, it's bizarre to insist on not using it.
This is accurate. disdain for social media is such a norm here that people don't realize it's the opposite almost everywhere else.
Again: been there, done that. Good for you (and others, even if they don't know) that it worked, but in my case it didn't. Part of the reason is that FB is also the place where events get promoted. The integration is so tight that any other solution is an inconvenience to the normies, ie. the 99%. You have your events, your communication tools and your audience, all in one place, it's effective. FB is eating the world really... convenience for the masses.
Luckily, I have other hobbies that are less prone to this, mostly because they don't involve much event promotion if any at all and don't need any audience to exist. Example: my local shooting range uses a mailing list for communication and you can always hang with fellows at the club-house.
Ugh, that's what I was afraid of. Was a time folks were happy to get a call from a friend regardless of topic. No going back I guess.
How hard is it to discuss this topic with other people that have access to fb when you meet them around the city ? Honest question. Sure, it require more involvement than opening the Facebook tap and getting everything instantly, but at the end of the day, isn't your goal to getting involved in the community ? This will require some energy.
You are out of touch. Scenes and events really are that reliant on facebook. "Hey man, when/where's the next show?" "We dunno yet, but we'll post an event about it for sure."
There are some small, insular scenes where everybody knows everybody and word gets around, but those are getting fewer every day.
See above
That is very similar to why I use FB. It is what people use.
I even admin and moderate FB groups.
In my case it is home education in the UK. It is what everyone else uses, so its where you can discuss things or ask questions. I just asked about parking at the exam centre where my daughter is doing her GCSEs (UK exams typically taken at 16). It is where I found a GCSE classical civilisation tutor for her. It is where I can use my experience to help others. It is where I can find out about local events and activities.It is where people find resources and courses and can discuss them with others. It is where discussion of approaches and how to do things happens.
not using FB would mean giving up all that.
Bite the bullet, I guess.
The commenter is arguing from a broad "what's good for society" sense, not on strict individuality. While I disagree with the whole idea of legislating access to social media/internet services in any way (RIP anonymity), I do think there can be valid places and times for regulation that seeks to change society itself, not just individuals.
Maybe anonymity has had a good run and is actually at the root of the issue in many contexts. After all, people don't (generally) walk around IRL wearing ski masks so they can say crazy shit or troll people without consequence. And we also get the courtesy of knowing who the people we're talking to actually are.
And if you say, "yeah but doxxing and death threats" or "my employer might fire me", etc then maybe these are the actual problems that need to be addressed.
And, yes, I realize that's coming from someone who's IRL neither Uncle Buck or Buc Nasty, as his handle might imply. But, obviously that's where we currently are, which is the point.
IRL nobody is running facial recognition tech and uniquely identifying you. And, despite what your teachers told you, no one is keeping a permanent record of the minutia of your life. So I know my neighbor is "George", but I don't know anything about his political opinions, where he shops, how he treats waiters, or what kind of porn he watches. Thus he's not anonymous, but his daily activities are generally private and ephemeral.
The internet flips this on its head because pseudonymous handles can be linked to reams of online activity that's retained effectively forever but can't be connected to a specific person. This is why "doxxing" is such a big deal online.
If online activity was like IRL activity and ephemeral, I might agree with you. But the internet never forgets.
Edit: By the way, this is not universally defined:
"Crazy shit" is very culturally and contextually dependent. If I condemn China's treatment of Uyghurs, that's fine in North America but considered "crazy shit" and can land you in jail in China. That's an extreme example, but there are plenty of other more banal differences in culture and what's acceptable globally.
First, it's useful to separate things like watching porn and other explicitly private activity from actual speech and interaction, which are deliberate forms of engagement.
The anonymity we're talking about here is WRT the latter.
With that in mind, my point is that it's a social problem that people have to worry about death threats for expressing political opinions. It's not solved by people becoming anonymous at scale to offer up their opinions. In fact, this adds to the problem, in that anonymity tends to lead to increasingly offensive forms of expression (absent the social governor and accountability that are present IRL). Anonymity can change the motivation for engaging and remove constraints that have social utility.
It also makes it easy for bad actors to do their work.
Put simply, if people don't feel comfortable offering an opinion in person, then maybe it's not a good thing to give them an opportunity to offer it anonymously at-scale.
No. I'm speaking WRT the context of our discussion. That is, saying things anonymously online that one would not say in-person for understood social (or legal) reasons. e.g. threatening people, being overtly snarky, trolling, etc.
Maybe this is true in some places. In big cities in Europe and the Americas this is definitely the case. It's done by law enforcement, commercial retail, and private security. It's more or less trivial nowadays to buy a cheap IP camera and collect an database of faces across your camera network.
My guess is that there's more of this going on, but I'm only listing stuff I have personal knowledge of.
Anonymity is not to blame here, but rather proximity. People with real real identities tied to their online avatars are just as bad if not worse than anyone else on the internet. ie, they're not anonymous. Internet hostility is more analogous to road rage.
So-called "edge lords" and people for whom provocativeness is their brand, perhaps.
But, I don't think that's true for the average person at all. I think we all know this intuitively / empirically, but there have also been studies that bear it out. [0]
No. Road rage is a function of losing one's temper and acting outside of one's self in the moment. Distinctly different from purposely shedding one's identity to engage socially.
Besides that, we're not just talking about hostility, but an overall disposition when one is acting without the social constraints of identity and accountability.
[0]https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/who-is-that-th...
For people who live in oppressive regimes where certain political speech is illegal, like China or the UK, anonymity is a powerful tool. I would not want to take that away from them.
I’ve done the same, but it’s not without cost:
- Two hobbies I’m involved with have large local communities on Facebook. I’m not in the loop, and sometimes miss out on events and catchups.
- I’m not on Twitter, and there’s a massive amount of chat about my field (realtime collaborative editing & local first software) that takes place there. I miss out on what’s going on, and I’m reliant on other people to promote my work for me.
Im happier. But it’s you really are cut off from a lot of society - especially in the tech world - if you aren’t on social media.
You can join those communities and discussions with "work" accounts. Instead of creating a personal twitter or meta account, you could create one that is only used to join those specific groups and discussion.
Yes you can. But then, you have an account. Most people that dont have an account on social medias just don’t want to accept the TOS.
Also worth noting that it sounds like meta thinks like they already have all earth population in their products because new accounts are really easily banned for no reason. Any temporary account I made to access some information have been blocked minutes or hours after creation.
Those sites are designed to exploit you psychologically in various ways (ads, order of display, design, gamified interaction etcetera). The purpose of your account does not matter if you cannot access and consume the information in a reasonable and healthy way.
Twitter is also where the discussion about my field takes place. What's not to like? I find Twitter's recommendation algorithm does a great job of honing the content down to just the relevant information I need and then I can go back to carrying on with life.
Before Twitter, you had to go to the coffee shop and listen to people ramble on with their inane political rants and conspiracy theories just to get at the occasional tidbit of useful field-related information. That was depressing.
I left Twitter after it started showing me posts from people I don’t follow that I found annoying and in one case just straight up racist. I replied and he was as surprise as I was. He asked “why are you in my replies?”. I didn’t know why I was there either. I deleted the app and haven’t been back.
The algorithm has definitely improved – or at least has been able to collect more information to provide better results. It wasn't always so well honed, granted.
Of course, we know enough about these algorithms to know that they are based on your action, not what you claim. Pretending that you find something annoying, but then contradictorily dedicating your attention to it is going to tell the algorithm to give you more of the same. If you don't want to learn the truth about yourself, I can see why you'd want to steer clear.
While a perfectly fine rule of thumb in general, I think you might find the sticking to "I don't care what other people do" as an overriding principle doesn't hold water in a substantial number of edge cases. One such case is where someone is willfully influencing others to act against their best interests, or against the best interest of society as a whole. That's when one needs to make a judgement call on a case by case basis. Is this such a case? Not sure. I just wanted to point out that "I don't care what other people do" can't be your guiding light, always.
I might have expressed myself poorly.
I "don't care" what others do in the strict sense that I don't let it influence me.
But I can tell you that me quitting socials did impact relatives and friends to quit those too, and thus I absolutely do not relate with his statement:
I'm glad that you were able to convince all your meaningful friends and family to change their social media / internet behavior according to your values - but please don't assume that it's a viable option for everyone, with no downsides.
Do you live or work with others? Do you have a family or children? Do you interact in meaningful ways with people online? I ask seriously (but no need to reply, this is to aid understanding) as many here on HN do not have all of these so the range of examples may be narrowed for some people.
I would however imagine you have some relationships of some kind that you care about. Can you imagine your relationships changing if these others you cared about changed their behaviours? Then extend this imaginary possibility to the relationships of these others. It's a network we are in we are not operating entirely alone.
Care of the other is wanting what is good for the other.
Sometimes this care is not forcing the other to change, sometimes it's encouraging them to change to benefit them as it benefited you.
How is this not the OP's exact point? If you're not forcing people to change - by banning things with the violence of government - then you're simply making an argument to people and hoping they listen, just as we ever have to.
My life is also better, overall. However, I do miss out on important life updates from my friends because I'm not on Instagram. I could be a hardliner and say "well they don't care about me enough to share 1-on-1, so they're not real friends", but that's... stupid. I feel sad for missing out on opportunities to take part in their lives and life updates that way, and I know for a fact that there are rich connections/conversations that would happen if I were able to use these in a healthy way.
What do you talk about with your friends if the important life events don't come up?
Perhaps I just have boring friends that we resort to sometimes talking about what is going on in our lives. I also wouldn't feel like less of a friend if they didn't tell me something, but important life events in their lives are usually important to them, which means that they ultimately end up talking about them in some way or another.
Because we live in a society?
Would you care if everyone around you was smoking crack, sociopathic or seriously mentally ill?
This is libertarian virtue signalling that simply does not stand up to reality.
If you don't live in a society but in some remote wilderness and hunt for your food, then you don't need to care what others do.
If you do live in a society, you do need to care, as "what others do" affects society in general, including you in the end. Affects how they behave, how they vote, what causes they support, their mental health, and tons of other things, all of which end up also affecting those who don't use those apps.
I agree. Same here. The only social media I have is mastodon and usenet. Yes, I live and work with others and email and phone is sufficient. If people try to get me to use slck I refuse. If I cannot refuse, I deploy my slck2email bridge and reply once every 24 hours and usually colleagues stop chatting with me when they realize they won't get an answer until 24 hours, or they drop by my desk, email or call me on the phone if it is urgent.
I think a lot of the complaints from people who "cannot stop" is just laziness. They need the government to construct an excuse so they won't have to man up and take control of their own lives.
That is also sad, because it means those people will never grow up but will be constant children in the eyes of the state.
Then I would say there are the 0.01% who do have psychological problems and they need to see a doctor.
> It doesn't matter whether you abstain from using Instagram or not
Yep. The other problem is that not having social media and mobile devices can be alienating and ostracizing, especially for teenagers.
Avoiding the problems of social media requires skills and restraint that even most adults don’t have.
It is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
That's true. We restrict access to Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, FB, they can use WhatsApp, YT, iMessage, Phone and Pinterest. I'm fucking annoyed by other parents that don't set boundaries that way. I have so much discussions about other platforms. Pushing them to physically meet is hard too.
We grew up at a time where SMS was a thing when I became 16. I know that keeping up is cool, but social media is a disease. The amount of dumb and uneducated people that couldn't even listen to expert advice during a fucking pandemic is driving me up the wall.
I'm annoyed mainly because people around me make bad decisions that have an influence on my own life.
If you stay home and others don't, it doesn't affect you. If you're isolated and safe, why would you care if others go out and do what they want?
A commenter in a sibling thread asked why "people are so nitpicky" and "why people are so hostile to each other". This comment is why. It's exemplary even. You should look inward and figure out if you're part of the problem.
That's a fine stance if staying home is an option for you, but many people are not that fortunate with their logistical and financial situation.
Meanwhile, it transpires that the outside world is full of people who I am sure are upstanding and willing to self-sacrifice for their fellow man in theory, but will point blank refuse to bear the mild inconvenience of a piece of cloth over their face in shared spaces for the comfort of those around them in practice.
I mean, it's not news; most humans have never cared much about the welfare of strangers; people doing what they want and ignoring the externalities happens all the time - smoking in public spaces, drink driving... the pandemic simply served to viscerally ram home just how self-centered we all are.
And thus we come full circle to the start of the thread. Hell is other people. The more we interact with other people, the more obvious this becomes. As our world becomes more connected, no room is left for illusions on the subject; it's little wonder teens end up holing up in their rooms avoiding everyone.
I think this view sucks. A core part of being a functioning human being is being able to interact with others whose views differ from your own.
The core problem is the ostracization of opinion on social media. It also doesn't play very well when social isolation has had other consequences, such as the proliferation of viruses and the broad economic impact. Plus, COVID is now integrated in our society, thus giving more ammunition to those who thought that social isolation was pointless (even if it wasn't at the time).
We need to move on from the isolationism and vitriol of others with differing opinions.
Personally, I think gp's "If you stay home and others don't, it doesn't affect you" sucks, but YMMV.
You're responding to GP.
i think THIS view sucks. some things are objectively true. why should we have to tolerate people who literally don’t understand basic statistics and harm reduction? at all?
Brandolini's Law also comes to mind. Countering bullshit takes more effort than creating it. It's an understandable self-defense mechanism for an individual or even a community to just isolate and quarantine the source of a problem than to engage with them in earnest discourse. Trolling, astroturfing, and propaganda are real things, no amount of engagement will sway the opinion of bad-faith actors.
People should not go out when they are sick. That they do so because of a logistical and financial situation, trading other peoples health for economical gain, is a very bad situation for everyone involved. A piece of cloth over their face may be a symbol for "better than nothing" solution, but it is a very problematic starting point for a discussion regarding pandemics.
The best solution to this problem in general is social welfare. One such choice that countries did during the pandemic was to encourage or force work-from-home, and reducing the economical friction of sick leave. When the situation is so bad that people have to choose between externalities and major negative personal impact, society can help by stepping in by pushing the right choice while at the same time reducing that negative personal impact. It is a social solution to a social issue.
People as a group can be good and evil, just as an individual. Society can choose to ignore citizens logistical and financial problems while at the same time expect people to act altruistic. A major reason for that will coincidental also be the logistical and financial situation of that country, so they may as an alternative choose an better than nothing solution to it. Sub-optimal as it is.
It does, because the hospital is overloaded and I cant get access for unrelated health condition.
It does, because there are places I have to go to and I am at higher risk there.
Because they'll get sick and fill up the emergency room. If I have a heart attack or stroke at home, that's a problem for me now.
It seems you are a good example of what they were talking about. Not understanding cause and effect such as using up medical resources that could otherwise be used for regular emergencies.
One of the criteria I used when choosing my son's school is that mobile phones are not allowed at all in school. It's a primary school (until 12 years old) so you wouldn't think that mobile phones would be that common at that age but from what I've heard of other parents, smart phones are common already this early.
I don't believe in completely forbidding access to everything when my son is older but there's a time to introducing things like this and it's not this young.
Elsagate videos got many tens (hundreds?) of millions of views at the time. If you know where to look you can see the cumulative engagement of babies in front of their tablets.
There's this old stat about video games, oft quoted a decade or more ago in context of Zynga, etc., that one of the largest game market is casual games, and the players are predominantly working-age women.
There's also this hypothesis I saw the other day, that the above is a misattribution: it's not the working-age women who somehow have time to play so much, but rather babies and kids playing on their mothers' devices.
I also wonder what the breakdown of Netflix streaming hours is. I suspect a huge chunk of it is just toddlers and pre-schoolers watching the same episodes of Cocomelon over and over again.
This sounds like a really good way of approaching it. From what I understand the argument against is clear but enforcing it in the face of peer pressure a little more complicated!
My nephews school allows basic 'dumb' phones but not smart phones which seems a fair compromise.
Yes, the peer pressure is exactly the point. The older your child is, the more his peers will influence his behavior. I hope by the time he goes to middle school, I'll find a school with this kind of restrictions.
Dumb phones is definitely a smart compromise...
You mean that "expert advice" which is increasingly questioned with passing time, and happened to change every Monday and Saturday? That expert advice which at least for Germany is now revealed to have been ordered by political forces, not based on scientific evidence? C'mon. Waving about with the pandemic as a good example is getting hilarious.
This sounds like post-facto justification for following rumors and disinformation during the pandemic.
Yes, expert opinions do change as new data comes in, and yes, public policy is as much influenced by politics as by science. But during the beginning of the pandemic, the OP is absolutely correct that a shocking number of people showed very poor judgment based on social media.
And this has not changed. Social media continues to be a cesspool of conspiracy theorists and deliberately provocative content that increases "engagement". Please don't dismiss this point by putting "expert advice" in quotes.
I would agree with your take if we had a solution for the "who watches the watchers" problem. Since we don't, blanket criticism of critical thinking doesn't go down with me since I watched the pandemic unfold. Our state-controlled local media said 3 days after the first lockdown that we are supposed to only listen to them, and ignore every other media outlet because they are going to lie. This in a democratic country. I was schocked, and what followed didn't make me any more trusting in the powers that be. We tell our kids if they keep lying, nobody will believe them. This is what happened during the pandemic. And claiming experts are cool just because, doesn't make that deeply rooted distrust go away. We tell our kids they are not supposed to lie because after a while, nobody will believe them. But if we're being subjected to improsionment at home based on vague "scientific" experts who turn out to have followed orders from politiccians, we are supposed to forget all about it and more on? Nope, sorry. Trust has eroded, and just saying so will not reestablish it.
Replacing "watchers the watchers" by the sociopaths that knowingly spew lies and made up crap just to get what they want is not exactly a win.
A problem is people who are confidently wrong and hide behind science as a religion. If we were to admit a level of, I don't know, this is the best we've got right now, there would be more trust in expert advice. During the pandemic, this expert advice was abused to exercise control over some and not others which helped cast doubt over all information. For instance, political leaders hanging out in public restaurants without masks while others were directed to huddle in their homes made some wonder if this thing was as bad as those 'leaders' claimed.
Except that nothing has been revealed. The blackened protocols of the crisis meetings of the Roland-Koch-Institut (the public health organization funded by the FRG) are incomplete and the alleged political meddling is an insinuation by "alternative facts" journalists. Let's wait and see what happens when the full protocols are released. IIRC, there is a review board for Corona measures anyway and the journalists are sueing for a full release, too.
It is shameful that citizens had to sue for the release of the partial protocols in the first place, for sure, but the conclusions are more than hasty. Anyhow, you seem to have made up your mind, so I'm leaving you to it.
The amount of dumb, educated people that blindly accepted everything that was fed to them during the fucking pandemic is driving me up the wall.
"Just two weeks to flatten the curve!"
So, like smoking in restaurants?
People tend to agree with expert advice when that advice align with their own personal views and values. Sadly both smart and dumb, educated and uneducated people falls for this and the pandemic demonstrated this in waves and continues to do so.
Take this study (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0?error=coo...). How many people on HN will agree with the ranking of those interventions? Early restrictions on travel and preventing people from gathering are the most effective measure to prevent an pandemic, but what people want to form sides around are the discussion around masks. Shutting down airports and imposing general self isolation are not in alignment of what either smart and dumb people believes in.
Sorry, I see this a lot but: oh well? They'll get over it. Social media on the other hand gets its hooks in deep.
If every teenager were guzzling gallons of soda everyday and telling them to stop "alienated and ostracized" them, I'd still do it for the good of their health.
Alienation and ostracization is not something to be taken lightly.
I mean back up for second…
We know that kids on social media are suffering depression and etc.
So… if you keep your kid off of that drug, you are saying they’re not going to be accepted by the addicts and peers that are suffering?
Ok? Good?
We know what conformity to the group of damaged friends can do to a kid.
I’ll be okay raising the social outcast if the society is this damaged.
We know it raises likelihood, that doesn't mean they're all depressed and anxious across the board, and those afflictions are on a gradient. Younger generations appear to be optimizing for it more effectively.
It doesn't make sense to cast society at large as "suffering and addicted". Downstream from that, the downsides of sheltering your children from society loom larger than their being socialized among peers who use social media.
You do that.
You don't hear really about Amish kids killing themselves. Maybe there's something there.
Eh, no they won't really get over it. I interact with plenty of people in their thirties and fourties who still have a chip on their shoulder because they were "losers" in highschool.
Florida has banned social media for under 14's starting Jan, 2025. Generally I am against government overreach and sometimes they make very odd decisions like campaigning to ban lab engineered meat in the state but on this I very much agree. Just remove social media as an option for those that are very young.
Its easy to say, that's the parents responsibility and that is a correct statement but most families require 2 working parents these days, most of whom are not tech savvy enough to understand how to limit social media or access to questionable sites.
Social media is an addictive, mind altering poison by design. Through the pervasiveness of echo chambers and intentionally addictive features such as endless scrolling and recommendations it seeks to do nothing except turn its users into revenue by keeping them online and seeing / clicking ads.
I lost my sister to it as she became so wrapped in the political side of it that any belief besides hers and those she followed meant you were a borderline nazi.
If you run against convention too much, even when convention is wrong, you become the zealot guardian, which conjures a family situation with its own distinct pathologies.
The parent commenter propose that you can not escape the negative consequences of social media, even if you fully restrain yourself, as you have the second order effects from your friends using it.
The parent commenter says that this is not an individual problem and cannot be solved on an individual level. It is a macro issue.
Just like you stopping eating meat will not really make a dent on global warming.
I think that is very insightful.
if thats the case, then surely it would be reflected in the studies? (assuming that the studies are reproducible....)
And then there are also those companies/institutions/orgs/news/shops that make you left behind from otherwise useful information or services by not being on social media platforms.
It really annoys me how many services - even sometimes public services like our local police - are Facebook first, with all other mediums as an afterthought.
I completely agree, but one thing that bothered me since 2020 - local municipality posted some news on their website, and people on our neighbourhood group were genuinely complaining why they did not post it on Facebook, since that’s what the “internet is” for a significant (dare I say, majority?” of people. Unfortunately, we are in a minority in this situation.
People are ignorant. Companies are greedy. That's why we need regulation.
Children don't need social media, just as they don't need tobacco or alcohol. As long as all your friends are off social media, you'll be fine. It's when there's a choice that you get the FOMO situation that makes it more or less impossible for parents to dissuade their children from using social media.
I’d aggressively support legislation against this.
Luckily with Elon doing crazy things to X, NYC has divorced a bunch of public services from it.
But not enough
Perhaps worse, in the places I’ve lived the main communications from emergency services and law enforcement are posted on Twitter.
And then there's Therapist who keep saying everyone should be in therapy and drug companies with the latest in psychopharmacology.
Histeria (and the virbrator), ice pick lobotomies, electro shock therapy, Quaalude, Benzodiazepines (valium) as mothers little helpers, MAOI's, SRRI's (PSSD), Benzodiazepines again (Xanax, klonipin). <<< (Hint all of these things turned out to be DEEPLY fucked up)
And for good measure a few variations of adrenal Ritalin and other methamphetamines.
Maybe, just maybe, and hear me out on this, we have more people with mental health issues because "self diagnosis" and "self identifications" can get you a prescription. Maybe, just maybe more people have mental health issues because there is a whole fucking industry designed to profit off of problems that have a "diagnostic criteria" and not a "test". Maybe just maybe we should remember that the "reproducibility crisis" has some of its worst offenders in psychiatry and psychology.
Or you know blame social media, like we did for books, radio, tv, Elvis and rock, rap and metal, video games, 4chan and now....
Your tirade against an almost ridiculously broad spectrum of drugs isn’t at all similar to what’s being discussed here, and reeks of a hidden agenda or bias. Many, if not all, of the medications you listed have been a net benefit for the individual and the world.
ice pick lobotomies: Do I need to argue about this being bad?
electro shock therapy: were still doing this, there isnt good research to support it at all.
Quaalude addictive, banned in USA since 1984
Benzodiazepines, Valium, Xanax, Kolinapin: Addictive, withdrawal from these are brutal: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=benzodiazepines+suicide
MAOI: so well studied that we let them out in the public and then realized that taking them and eating leftovers could kill you.
SRRI: This is an entire class of drugs that is getting ripped apart by current research. There are studies that show they dont have greater benefit than placebo with therapy. There is new research that says they may be damaging in their own right and have massive withdrawal symptoms.
The term "replication crisis" started with psychology. And, though it has shown its face across much of academia, psychology on the whole looks particularly blighted. Modern research is having no problem turning over much of the last 30 or so years of drugs and research.
It. Is. Damming.
The only medication I mentioned with a leg left to stand on anywhere is the SSRI group:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jul/no-evidence-depression-c...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3130402/
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0... (hey better that we figure this out AFTER it has been on the market for 30 years right?)
To summarize all those links: A study that says serotonin isn't involved in depression. Another that is a meta analysis of SSRI research that says "no better than placebo" and the last one that says SSRI's have some gnarly withdrawal and you should taper off them (a multi month process).
So no I did not have a tirade against a broad spectrum of drugs. I had a tirade against the "treatments" that have, or are, turning out to be worse than the diseases they were treating.
Why not both? Pharma and Social Media profit from depressed people. Nothing ever has a single root cause. There are always multiple causes often working together in a vicious cycle. Also, what's wrong with vibrators?
This is a real everyday pain that anyone with social media accounts can’t fathom.
Most (like 90%) businesses don’t have a website or when they have, it’s a static website. All the news are on social medias behind nag screens.
Teenagers are so judgy about the color of the text message bubbles they receive, imagine how judgy they would be if one didn't participate at all in some digital platform most of them use.
Not around these parts!
They all use Discord and/or Snapchat here in Australia. No one I've every asked about this cares about Android vs iPhone. No one.
No one apart from the Parents uses the built in messaging and SMS.
But then the Parent groups all use Facebook Messenger for most group comms.
The whole green / blue bubble thing is either over played by the Press or purley a US Phenomenon.
But given the marketshare of the iPhone with teenagers in the US, it seems it's possibly less of an issue its made out to be due to the fact that most people have iPhones anyway!
I think you missed the entire point of the comment above. It's not about iOS vs Android but about not being included socially, regardless of the platform. Imagine in your example where one kid in a group didn't use Discord, they'd be effectively cut off.
They wouldn't necessarily tell if they did though...
This is more like "I asked 100 men if they worry their D is small, and nobody said yes".
It's less about the color and more about the lack of feature parity. If one person joins it can downgrade the experience for everyone. This isn't the teenagers fault, they're just responding to product behavior.
When I was a teenager, I responded to shitty product behavior by switching products. But that was an era where you had a half dozen competing desktop messengers as well as third party client options for most of them. We need to make adversarial interoperability possible again so users are not at the mercy of tech companies and their marketing teams.
You could say the same thing about the Bible, or Harry Potter, or any number of things too
The Bible, I absolutely would, the negative impact of dogmatic Christianity has been pretty bad on society IMO. Harry Potter, not so much, but still some yes. I still have to argue with some of my friends that the books have some dubious morals that I wouldn't be comfortable ingraining in my children (if I had any).
The scale, extent and addictiveness of these two things are nothing compared to algorithmic social media though.
That’s an interesting thought. I wonder how detrimental Christianity’s impact on society has been compared to social media? It kind of makes the argument pointless when you frame it that way.
Tangent: Children's literacy (and that of some adults for that matter) skyrocketed under the HP phenomenon, in profound ways that activists/scholars are typically grateful for. I wish I could find the studies done, sorry that I don't have them on hand.
I guess I'm saying that it was worth it, dubious morals aside.
And you would say it as well about party/designer drugs
except it is, because law is dumb, stupid, and slow-witted. if you ban facebook specifically, the next day it will think that means mailing lists should also be banned. btw ive witnessed lots of mailing list and then web forum addicted deadbeats before social media came out but whatever
the legal solution is nothing (i realize not all of you have asked for the legal solution yet but thats essentially the only point of this thread that is brought up routinely on places like HN)
teh fact that every techie and his mom seems to think the law will work out in his favor when it backfires each time (or they just ignores that downsides) is no different than how people keep thinking you can put a web server in every embedded device and they oh so surprisingly have the same RCE vulns as the 90s, every single time.
It's baffling to me, that despite how famous McLuhan still is today, that people somehow do not follow the implications of his criticism (and that of Ellul, Debord, Kaczinsky ;), ...). Technology, in and of itself, the actual physical _thing_, shapes the world, our dispositions, our aspirations, in its own image, and does so in absence of our judgement.
I remember when they taught mcLuhan in highschool - 1970s - in order to make us more aware of media manipulation.
I wonder if they still do. Ironically, this was in Florida - probably be considered too woke by Desantis.
I suspect that a lot of the anxiety about how difficult it would be to quit is the mind's way of rationalizing a psychological addiction, like saying you can't stop smoking because things are just so crazy right now.
I quit social networks in 2008, it wasn't hard at the time and it's not been hard to stay away. Yes, there are consequences of being the one guy in the friend group who doesn't use whatever app everyone else is using, but to call those consequences meaningful is an overstatement. A minor annoyance, easy for everyone to adapt to.
You're right that other people are still influenced by social networks. Speaking from the outside, I wouldn't even use the word 'subtle' to describe its effects. But, I don't know that that really matters. You surround yourself with people you like, despite their flaws. You hope the good things about them grow, and that they work through their flaws. That's just having friends.
See also The Medium is the Massage, a very illuminating book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-medium-is-the-massage-revis...
If TV turned everything into entertainment, including discourse, then social media has turned every discourse into being an influencer. I frequently see people at a coffeeshop set up cameras like they are filming a TV show to talk about their latte or muffin for Instagram. This happens everywhere in all walks of life. Any hobby, no matter how esoteric, will be molded into the shape of good for instagram.
It's funny .. earlier today there was a front page HN post about the federal government mandating safer circular saws. It seemed like the majority of users in the thread were in favor of the federal government mandating technology changes to prevent harm from being done to the population.
Now for this issue, there's harm being done to children, and the majority of users in the thread seem to be against government intervention; you say: "well if you don't like it, if you think it's negative, just don't use it, don't let your kids use it".
Kind of a random parallel to draw between the two stories, but it's funny the same logic doesn't seem to apply in both cases. Why wasn't for circular saws the response "if you think they're dangerous, don't use them" or "just keep your kids away from them"?
While both paternalism. Requiring safety features on a saw does not restrict free speech. It's more akin to seatbelt laws. It's also made to protect everyone who uses a table saw and not just children.
Imo, I do think social media needs to be reeled in by policy. But I can see why it makes people uncomfortable and why there is a difference with the saw.
How does not having social media restrict free speech? Do you think free speech didn't exist before social media?
Arguably, the presence of social media homogenizes the speech we're allowed to have.
It restricts free speech in the most direct, literal sense - by... restricting your ability to freely speak.
The historical existence is simply irrelevant. Just like existence of pre-TV/newspaper speech is not a relevant factor in determining whether banning all TV/newspapers in 1950 restricts free speech
Making publication easy on social media has certainly had an impact on public speech, but private platforms do not offer free speech by design.
Naomi Klein went into this in No Logo with shopping malls replacing public spaces where you also don’t have a right to free speech and can be evicted arbitrarily at the owners discretion.
You’ll find virtually all of social media platforms have moderation, usage policies and user banning practices that go well beyond allowing the fully legally protected free speech you are afforded in a public space (in many countries).
It (practically) doesn't matter what the moderation policies are, a legal ban on social networks will still be a restriction on free speech
If all spaces that attract the majority of people are private and have homogenous terms of use, then free speech ends in all ways except on this technicality.
Edit: removed unnecessarily inflammatory phrasing.
The restriction that this freedom is supposed to save you from is that of prosecution. Nobody is promising everyone a megaphone.
And this whole conversation is about laws mandating something and the resulting prosecution with comparisons to safety standards in saws, not your made up megaphone
This is a telling argument. Newspapers and television broadcasts, while geared towards broad public consumption, were never wholly democratized platforms and that didn't run afoul of the first amendment. It stands to reason that management of content on social media platforms or outright banning the same wouldn't either.
What access to tools or avenues for speech should fall under the first amendment then?
How does banning an individual from printing books restrict free speech? Do you think free speech didn't exist before the printing press?
How is access to a wholly privately owned walled garden in any way relate to printing books? Private networks are by definition not public domain and thus are totally irrelevant to any discussion of free speech.
I would agree if it weren't for the complete transition to privately owned communication platforms. The answer to your question is actually quite simple: because communication via privately owned walled gardens is humanity's primary means of mass communication, just as it used to be printed media.
It would be as if printing presses were so complicated and expensive that the barrier to entry was so high as to price out everyone but a few select publishers. I wouldn't try to over-extend that metaphor though.
That folks have opted to interact (or been manipulated into it if we're really honest) with modes of communication that are outside of 1st amendment protections doesn't change either the spirit or the letter of the law. That would be like saying that if folks suddenly decided to communicate over transcontinental distances via morse code utilizing geophones and large explosions as the transmission mechanism so now the first amendment demands semtex should be broadly accessible to the public.
I guess if it's only specific individuals/groups that can't print books, it's restricting free speech, if nobody can, it's not.
Not really the same, because the article is not calling for banning any source of social media. How would you even classify social media? We are taking about ad infested hellholes with no incentives other than maximizing revenue, regardless of the content pushed.
The proper analogy would be banning books with certain content, which we already do. You can't distribute a book calling for a specific person to be killed or doxxing them. Doing this on social media in Ethiopia is encouraged, as it drives engagement and has lead to actual deaths of people I know. They have a policy not to moderate this content despite having the resources. Just like they have a policy to make the apps as addictive as possible.
More importantly, Facebook is not a "printed book", it is the printing press. It owns the internet. It's not remotely comparable. And that's why it is a threat to free speech
good point.
a lot of ppl got reeled into the narrative that social media can democratize (free) publication of conversations and ideas, thou it is dominated by monetary incentives that mandate propaganda/advertising and in turn moderation and censorship.
I wonder how many would be for seatbelt laws if the addition of seatbelts say doubled the price of car.
I think this confuses cause and effect.
Seatbelts are brought up so often precisely because they are an intervention with a huge benefit-to-cost ratio. Seatbelt laws were made long after the fact - seat belts for cars started to appear in the 1950s, with the common three-point variant in 1955; the first seatbelt law appeared in 1970 (in Australia). The US started introducing seatbelt laws for cars in the 1980s (though as far as I know, some organizations/insurers required them earlier for employees driving for business).
Which of Haidt's 4 suggestions restricts free speech? Is free speech (for adolescents) more important than the well-being of those same adolescents? Has American jurisprudence aligned on the notion that adolescents have an inviolable right to free speech?
Because it is the parents responsibility to set boundaries for their children. It can be complicated at times, granted. But that doesn't make it less of their job. Heck, I got my first CD player with 14. Yes, I felt left out at school, but... guess what, I didn't die. Children need to learn that there are rules, and someone else dictates them. Throwing tantrums is a typical reaction that needs to be weeded out as a part of growing up.
Besides, the "somebody has to think about the children" meme is slowly but surely getting old and tiresome. Not somebody... Their PARENTS. If you dont feel like setting boundaries for your children, please, with sugar on top, dont have any.
As is pointed out in the article, a huge factor is the collective action trap. An individual set of parents can do very little to deal with mental health if they are the only ones.
I totally doubt this is true. Its a nice excuse though.
Tell us you don't have kids without telling us you don't have kids. Short of totally unplugging your children from broader society via homeschooling, joining a commune, or similar extremes, children are exposed to whatever other children's parents permit through nothing more complicated than their interactions with other kids. An example from pre-digital times would be that one kid who's dad kept a stash of nudie mags unsecured which invariably lead to hushed giggling in the back of the bus.
I was that kid (I mean one with boundaries set, with parents that acted against all of this, just to be clear) and now a father, with my second kid on her way. Still very young, so I can't claim to have much experience. But I am getting ready to stand against all of this, and I do intend to delay their exposure to social networks, mass information, etc. as much as possible.
At least until their character is formed and they have developed essential human traits like being able to read a book, being able to be patient, being able to communicate in person, and to hand-write. You know, that sort of ancient wisdom.
Edit for clarification.
Brace yourself for the day your kid comes home armed will rickrolls and starts muttering "deez nuts" under their breath. It's coming way WAY sooner than you think. ;)
No, they can do quite a lot, it's just VERY hard, for both the parents and the kids.
But if properly done, it can work. I was/have been the kid in this scenario, and now I'm being the parent and bracing for it.
Social pressure might be a tidal wave, you can either give up, or you can try to stand against it.
You can say it should be on the parents here and reason why, but for a lot of things it is not just on the parents (children are not allowed to vote, drive a car, buy guns, go to bar and drink alcohol, gamble, ... - it is a long list).
Such bans are not clear and are contentious, and often leave room for parental discretion.
In most countries whether children drink alcohol at home is up to their parents. In some countries an adult can buy teenagers a drink (in the UK they increased the required age from 14 to 16 - and I think its a bad thing).
There are people who think 16 year olds should be allowed to vote.
Kids cannot buy guns, but can use them. I did a bit of rife shooting at school.
Is it really contentious if 10 year old children cannot on their own buy liquor or guns, for example? I would not have put that high on the list of contentious issues.
There is a difference in being granted unsupervised abilities vs supervised ones.
As we make parenting harder and harder in lots of creative and sadistic ways, more and more people are taking your advice. That’s got its own problems, it turns out.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222535/
I never saw myself as capable of withstanding the stress of parenting and so I never even really thought about having kids. I thought I was a far outlier, but, given trends in fertility, I think I may have just been early in realizing this.
I was one of the last people in my class to get a phone, which taught me that not having the cool new thing was not nearly as bad as I had thought.
It was about table saws, not circular saws. There’s a big difference between the two. Table saw accidents often result in losing fingers and it’s not that difficult to mess up while using one.
There’s a well known, proven, easy solution to table saw accidents called SawStop. It’s basically as obvious to use as a seat belt is if you want to be safe. The only problem is those table saws are very expensive.
Social media doesn’t have an existing and obvious solution (besides not using it).
Isn't SawStop patent encumbered? AFAIK the three point seat belt design's patent was made open by Volvo at the time, so the patent didn't hold back adoption.
Yes - in fact the whole company was started by a patent attorney.
SawStop says they'll release one patent (which is about to expire anyway) but they've got a huge portfolio of other ones, and companies like Grizzly say that SawStop is unwilling to engage with them in good faith on licensing their technology.
Bosch released a saw with similar tech, except unlike SawStop it didn't use overpriced consumables every time it triggered. SawStop sued the product off of the market.
The company founder also serves as an expert witness when people shove their hands into moving saw blades, then sue the saw makers - testifying that the makers should be held liable because they haven't licensed his invention.
Of course, I'm sure for SawStop getting all their competitors banned will be a highly profitable decision; it's no surprise they're lobbying for it.
Sawstop did sue Bosch, but then changed their mind and gave them a free license immediately after the case was won. It was boschs decision not to release their product in the US for whatever reason.
The CEO committed to releasing the one remaining patent to the public domain earlier this year.
SawStop has publicly pledged to dedicate their patents to the public if this becomes mandated.
I think this could be aptly summarized as "you can't accidentally slip and become depressed" using social media. You can absolutely slip and lose one or several fingers or your entire hand using a table saw.
The more pertinent comparison would be alcohol IMO: none of the people who want "something" done about social media seem to have a problem with the widespread, massive use of alcohol within society and the incredible amounts of continuous and ongoing damage it does.
I think the point is exactly that you can.
So, if there's not an easy solution, we should de-emphasize the problem?
The reason I am against government intervention is the fact that governments seem to not be competent enough to solve problems like this and they would use content controls for their own purposes. It is vastly different and more complex than regulating saws. The comparison falls short by a huge margin and a false conclusion that any federal legislation would be desirable just because it is the case for saws.
Some suggest it would be the "hate" on the net that is causing the issues and we see legislation that penalizes some content already, but I heavily doubt it to be the source of any problem.
Might be something similar, perhaps the strong indignations some statements on the net seem to get to some people, although these can be as politely stated as any frivolous statement can be. And the resulting expectations on opinions you are allowed to harbor.
Irrespective of where people fall on this particular issue, I find it odd how the people who are so distrustful of government would allow things that are overtly dangerous, as long as it prevents government from...governing.
It's like we have this generation of people who believe government overreach is a) inevitably the outcome in every scenario; b) present in every situation; c) always the worst possible thing that could happen. As in, literally worse than mass sickness and death.
Not only that, but they assume that corporations, free of government regulation, will simply act in everyone’s best interest, with responsibility and accountability.
At least in theory, my government representatives are accountable to me. To whom is Facebook accountable?
Exactly. People who want to disempower democratic government are just disempowering themselves. But, they seem to think the power held by the government would simply evaporate.
They don't realize it's really a question of who will rule over them, and whether there's any chance it will be themselves.
Sure, our democracy has been crippled, but the solution is to fix it, not dismantle it.
And ironically the people who are crippling it (Citizens United, lobbying, regulatory capture, etc) are the same who would rule over us if it were completely abolished. That is, essentially, their project.
The government is never a passive actor. So non-intervention is also active policy. You can only choose what the policy is. The active policy for the last 15 years has been to consolidate a social media oligopoly with very few restrictions. Users are being tracked, advertisement laws are being skirted and are less restrictive than in other mediums, data is being sold, dark patterns are used to keep people from making their own choices. The algorithms are actively promoting bad content because the social media companies are not held liable for their part in promoting false content.
Depending on where you live it is not true that there are no restrictions on false advertising and accountability for commercial content.
That said, a government can be passive and not regulate a field and non-intervention stays non-intervention, be it conscious or not. But that is besides the point. A government that tries to regulate all aspects of life is usually connected to totalitarianism, an that isn't only a libertarian position.
This is a silly comparison. The table saw was not designed to be addictive, turn its users into a highly lucrative commodity, or push algorithmically driven agendas. Social media was. The dangers being compared here are very different.
You mean to say, with a saw the intent is for it to be a useful tool and the danger is an unintended side effect, while for social media the danger is the intent and it being a useful tool is an unintended side effect.
That seems to reinforce GP's argument, though?
Because people don't think the government should always prioritize protection over freedom, nor do people think the government should always prioritize freedom over protection.
It's like asking, if people are okay with the government restricting the sale of bombs to private citizens, why aren't they okay with restricting steak knives? They're also dangerous weapons.
People judge the cost and benefit of each situation.
Playing the devils advocate: Isn't social media much more a "bomb" than circular saws?
hes actually trying to say, "that's stupid". HN and reddit would be so much easier if negative posting were allowed.
your argument is dumb too, it doesn't even deserve acknowledgment, but we are little babies here and have to politely explain to everyone why they're wrong, to the point that the insane people just always win and get their dumb ideas into law because nobody cares anymore and are tired of explaining common sense over and over. having safety controls on hardware is not anything remotely equivalent to the hypothetical problem the article pitches. there is not any world where regulating social media makes sense, and i say this as someone who has never used social media in my life. the entire issue at hand here is like a bear shitting in the woods and someone happens to step on it once in a thousand years, almost none of these so called people who get addicted to social media would have any better off chance at life without it, they would just get addicted to one of the millions of other things one can get addicted to. the remaining one in a million people who actually had their life ruined by social media is like the bear shitting in the woods, its just life.
Yeah funny as a one-legged rabbit hopping in neat little circles. If I were still on social media I wouldn't want to take a long look at the quality of my interactions or the costs associated with them either.
Regulating a physical product being sold within the country, like a circular saw, is obviously materially different from enforcing age restrictions or other regulations to a website probably owned by a multinational company.
Personally, I don't have much of an opinion around circular saws, but I don't want my government to build a framework where they can choose to hide certain parts of the Internet. I also think the issue isn't social media, per se, but algorithms that promote negative content, personal data harvesting, etc. Banning tiktok et al isn't going to solve those problems. They'll still exist because other types of sites are implementing them.
Everyone has the ability to exercise personal accountability for how much they gamble, smoke, eat junk food, play video games, use social media etc. However, if these consumer products become so addictive, or are designed to be so engaging and as a result people are by and large struggling to exercise personal accountability and it is causing adverse health outcomes.
Then the government should step in, either should forceful action or through promoting healthier alternatives or shining a light on its damaging effects.
So, why are alcohol (and nicotine) still legal then? Maybe there is a 100 year old lesson hidden somewhere...
And maybe that lesson is hiding in ellipsis or maybe it's not. Who knows...
I wasn't expecting a reference to Prohibition to be that cryptic to some.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition#Effects
Um. They are heavily regulated? Isn't that what is being argued for for social media?
I don't disagree with your answer but... Kids cannot buy alcohol and kids cannot buy cigarettes. It's kinda the whole point of TFA.
The conclusion of TFA aren't to outlaw social media: it's preventing kids from accessing these mediocre piece of shit websites/apps before 16.
This is actually the classic example of where personal accountability fails, which is what cigarette companies would lobby for. Which is the root of this post
As a result governments have stepped in and now there are age restrictions on both smoking and alcohol, blood alcohol limits for driving, lockout laws, no advertisement of cigarettes in supermarkets, additional taxes on cigarettes, plain packaging on cigarettes.
Making something immediately completely illegal isn’t necessarily the correct course of action. But governments have stepped in to try and help people exercise personal accountability.
Disclaimer: the examples are from within Australia
Except "struggle" is entirely subjective. In fact, outside of a few things that causes physical dependence (which vary in length except they all, eventually at least, end), the concept of addiction as used by the government does not necessarily match up to how those in the particular field of research would. Government makes laws and laws prefer bright line rules. Something like "did you, without authorization, use the credit card given to you by your company to make purchases unrelated to your work", for example, have concrete, definable, and answerable elements that are universal and more or less binary, provided that the statute has a definition section that makes sense. But "so addictive" or "designed to be so engaging and as a result people are by and large struggling to exercise personal accountability and it is causing adverse health outcomes" is pretty much the antithesis of that. The government would need to define "addictive", "designed" would need to have an intent element (one designs the software, sure, but you're asking for not what the software itself does but one step further - what its impact is on the population at large). How does the government prove that intent, especially since criminal law tends to define intent as intent to act which combined with the act itself, creates the crime. What counts as "so engaging" or even "engaging"? Does it require active engagement? Plenty of platforms do not require any active engagement to partake in the conventional sense, unless reading is engagement. How many people counts as "by large" (I assume that's what you mean, feel free to correct)? How would the government show that the product and any struggle is causatively linked and not merely correlative? How does one define struggle to exercise personal accountability? Where did the duty of exercising personal accountability even come from as to establish liability and would that criminalize those who are disabled or injured as to being unable to exercise such responsibility writ large? And what counts for adverse health outcomes? All these need to be worked out in legislation and likely argued over in court. Every single element needs to be worked on as to not to be overly inclusive or exclusive. And since it's the government, the consequences for violation is without question enormous, and therefore, anything that can be misconstrued can result in the ruin of a company or persons in a variety of ways, but do you really want to have the government determine who is an edge case that doesn't count? Because the government have done that based on assumptions of potential harm and it has caused what today would be considered horrific abuses of human rights and very little positives beyond enriching those whose income derives from the enforcement of the government's scheme.
Laws are lagging indicators but they also last a long time. the CFAA was passed before the advent of the WWW and it took until 2021 to even set a basic check on the part of the Supreme Court that effective set the ground rule that to access what amounts to a computer linked to some network beyond authorization, an authorization scheme needs to exist in the first place. Before that, one can easily be charged and even sent to prison or be assessed massive fines when there's no meaningful distinction between what is authorized and unauthorized space. These were not problems in the early to mid 80s but when problems did arise, it still took a quarter century to resolve. To have one future-proof goldilocks solution is already next to impossible, but you're asking for five or six stringed together in order to have a sensible law that is well tailored enough so that it is effective without being oppressive. Not to mention that unless the behavior is generally abandoned by users, it creates black markets that are simply illegible to the state. The government then effectively loses control over what it purports to control to those with means, leaving only those without subject to the full force of the legislation.
That of course all predicates on the premise that there can be commonly agreed and sensible ways to define all those, and it is in the best interest of the government to do so and passes Constitutional muster not just on speech grounds but a host of other potential issues, like, is this a purely civil matter or a purely criminal matter or both? The federal government can treat this explicitly, or kick it off to an agency as part of its mandate, but which one? Do we need a new one? Are there checks and balances that would provide some sort of agility that keeps up with the times? What if new research comes out that shows the lack of a link, but by legislating it, you've effectively frozen the relevant conclusion in time. Enforcement creates constituencies who do not care about science or potential upsides. The DEA is on the record in the federal register that patient access to legitimate medication is secondary and effectively an afterthought to enforcement of supply, because the agency's mandate presupposes that substances need controls and are presumed harmful and that enforcement, with the teeth provided for by the DOJ, will trump any study the FDA or our academic institutions can ever show. By the time that particular moral panic was given a name, the US government had been attempting repeatedly to use prohibition as a way of imposing a specific set of social mores that at first was a pretext to target specific racial minorities and when that became socially unacceptable (legally it was unacceptable under the 14th Amendment anyway, but they effectively smuggled the laws in through the Treasury Department and protectionist regimes by taxing the goods into oblivion, and avoiding the tax obviously is also a violation of the law).
In that sense, the government operates very much like a machine, whereas given a concrete goal to achieve and it can likely achieve it, but the manner by which it achieves it may create additional problems and convoluted interpretations that ripples through history in ways unimaginable. The loudest voices in the room, or those with existing financial resources or interests, can use the rent-seeking system known as lobbying to shape the laws to begin with. And where does the fines end up? Certainly in most cases they are not given back to the community, but end up enriching the enforcement agencies. Go to a police auction and see how much they're raising from the sale of "proceeds of crime", except not all of it are crimes that are proven in court, and much of it are crimes without specific victims and so, it becomes a regime of appropriation of private property to enrich a few in the public sector.
There's usually an annoying gap between concept and reality. In isolation you want a policy that can solve problems in a targeted and fair way. In reality it almost never happens.
Addiction is well defined in research and it certainly does not preclude things that don't cause "physical dependence" by which I assume you use to mean psychoactive drugs.
Wikipedia has a better definition right at the top than I can offer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction
The crucial point is it is characterised by neurological changes that lead to short circuited reward pathways. The idea of addiction to social media a perfectly consistent with its action and moreover, consistent with the notion that its effect can be enhanced by design.
Everything that's enjoyable in life can meet that definition. For practical purposes, we only consider severe cases to be addiction, but it's not well-defined. The article you linked says:
I don't think the DSM-5 has any principled reason for recognizing gambling addictions but not video game addiction or shopping addiction, other than gambling addiction being particularly harmful.
The critical sentence in the Wikipedia intro is "despite substantial harm and other negative consequences".
Exactly, completely agree.
And whilst many things in life can have this property and need to such that we get enjoyment out of particular aspects of life.
There are particular things which short circuit reward pathways to a greater degree. Such as drugs, alcohol, gambling, video games, smartphone addiction.
Smart phone/video games are designed to constantly reward us as much as possible
The simply binary of government or individual choice eliminates the middle ground where almost all change happens: the collective aggregate result of cultural change within the community. We don’t have to pick one extreme to change the world!
happened, past tense. That cultural layer, to a large extent enforced by various religious traditions both in the literal and civic sense, sometimes for better or worse is pretty much gone. Nowadays it largely is a binary question of legal action on the one hand or individual choice on the other.
If you tell people they need to make change within their community 90% are going to ask you, what community? Community with a capital C where people collectively enforce binding rules, rather than occasionally go bowling isn't much of a thing.
Community need not be tight for change to occur. A random stranger calling you out on your shit is just as effective. Maybe even more effective as it doesn't always hit so hard when someone you are comfortable with says it.
I never said it was binary, but we’re talking about governments stepping in to help. The government cannot and will have the capacity to come in and solely fix the problem.
Collective change is required and that could include the help of Government, but currently the Government isn’t doing anything, which is the premise of this post. Should they step in and if so, to what degree and how much can they really do.
I explain to our kids that it is normal for them to have difficulties with stopping playing or looking at a stream from a social media platform.
My explanation is that they are fighting against a team of PhDs optimizing everything to make them addicted.
Luckily they all do a lot of sport and have this way disconnected time everyday.
Just want to say I love how simple yet effective this explanation is. Can I ask what age range your kids are in and do they understand this perspective enough that they are aware of it and take steps to avoid it?
US citizens have the right to free speech.
US companies have a qualified right to free speech https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/freedom-of-speec...
How about AI? If it is an algorithm that is talking to you, does it have the right to do all the things that are protected by 'free speech'?
And does it matter if the AI is commercial, or a home hobby project effort?
Somebody has bought or rented the computer that this AI runs on, somebody has launched it as a piece of code or an API call.
This somebody is using his right to free speech, AI is just a tool.
Can you clarify, is your "somebody" a person or a company?
What is the explicit difference between 1 person and 10 persons when it comes to their rights?
Explicit, I want to know what rights we lose as soon as "I" transforms into "we".
None.
In this case a company isn't "we". It is usually the owner.
Awesome, I'm glad that rights do not change between 1 to 1 billion, let's not assert that these rights disappear in conditions that make no difference in quality.
This “somebody” is part of the wealthy ruling class who makes the laws through billions of dollars spent on bribes(“lobbying”) and propaganda.
Praxeology 2.0
I have heard similar arguments about corporations hehe
Very Rothbardian, Mises and Say would be proud too
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8550560/
How a corporation can have an opinion?
I can give you that an AI trained to make a mixin of a lot of input texts and output a mashup of those texts, the output might not be the same of their creators. That said, it's known that AI creators/trainers can make their AI lean towards certain "opinions", as we saw recently with the case of Gemini and their understanding of diversity (https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/21/24079371/google-ai-gemini...).
Corporations can't do that. Corporations don't ask for everybody's in the corporation opinion and then do an aggregate with all of them to write a press release. They have some people choosing what to say in the press release that goes in the interest of the corporation.
Who are these people? Are they people or something that are not people?
There doesn't even seem to be much speech of the companies running the platforms on their own platforms. All they do is quote their users.
In my country, India, these platforms are used less for free speech and more for brainwashing and spreading hate and misinformation. Most of these posts are in Hindi, a major language around here, and call for all kinds of hate such as suppression of a specific religion, call for genocide, invading and acquiring neighboring countries etc.
I've tried reporting such posts multiple times but hate filled posts are neither removed, nor restricted. If a platform cannot provide adequate moderation, it should stop operating in my country and be held responsible for providing a platform for spreading hate pseudo-anonmously.
How is this example any different than what the parent has said? If people feel these platforms are negatively impacting them, they should stop using them. Or do you believe others or the government has a right to disallow what people want to watch via their own choices? You may call it brainwashing but others may disagree.
The problem is how to stop the mob attacking you from using them.
An American equivalent might be if social media existed a 100 years ago and was being used to encourage lynchings. Yes, it really is that bad in some places.
The problem is that FB does moderate things relevant to the US but ignores the rest of the world. They will remove white supremacist material in the US, but not the equivalent elsewhere.
The solution is in the problem, network effects. If everyone stopped using them due to deleterious effects, the problem is would solve itself.
Why do you think a lynch mob would stop using social media when they are excellent tools for them to use to organise lynchings?
Notice how the government made lynchings illegal, not the method of communicating such actions.
Yes, but how do you get "everyone" to stop using the? I use FB purely because of network effects. I hate it, but there would be a real cost to not using it.
Yes. As an extreme example: watching cheese pizza is not allowed by governments. We have collectively also come together to consider murder as socially and legally unacceptable. We can and should regulate social media if posts read as follows:
- we should invade and bomb that country to bits - we should destroy all places of worship belonging to XYZ religion - we should vote for XYZ because only he is going to save our religion from PQR - and much worse which I can't type here as moderation team of HN would omit those
IMHO: give the current form of social media another few decades and it will come out shinning bright just like opioids did in the USA.
These same social media platforms, when required by law, become very effective in moderation but there's next to no moderation in my country and most of the hate and abuse is counted as just another engagement metrics.
Watching CP and murdering people is in no way comparable to any of those bullet points you made. Generally in the US at least, uniquely among many nations, the principle and constitutional right of the freedom of speech reigns supreme over many, many others, so there is no chance that any of those bullet points would (or should, given such a principle) be regulated.
One can and should be able to espouse those beliefs, regardless of whether they are true or not, because the alternative is much worse, where the rights of such exposition are severely curtailed. Hell, someone got arrested for taunting the Queen in the UK, something that legally cannot happen in the US had a similar person taunted a government official.
Hate speech and incitements to violence against the Rohingya precipitated for years on Facebook. Deleting the app would not have saved the Rohingya from getting genocided.
I have seen some of the same with Sri Lankan posts. Loathsome stuff in Sinhala. Not calling for genocide, but definitely encouraging persecution and bigotry. One group that was particularly poisonous was removed after a campaign by many people. One person complaining gets nowhere. I am sure there is more similar material elsewhere.
I think the underlying issue is that American companies view everything through the lens of American culture and if its not a problem in the US, then it is not offensive.
I once reported a racist comment on FB. Someone said that people of their race should not "interbreed" with people of another race because the latter are evil. FB said it did not violate their community standards.
IMO it was probably because it was a comment by a black person (probably American) about white people. That is not the major problem is the US so its fine.
Relevant bit from the essay:
"But much of my book is about the collective action traps that entire communities of adolescents fall into when they move their social lives onto these platforms, such that it becomes costly to abstain. It is at that point that collective mental health declines most sharply, and the individuals who try to quit find that they are socially isolated. The skeptics do not consider the ways that these network or group-level effects may obscure individual-level effects, and may be much larger than the individual-level effects."
An excellent point. Abstention = social isolation, which for young people is far worse than exposure. Restricting your children's access is not an option (lets' be real, they'll find a way to circumvent your efforts anyway) and moving the burden of restriction from society to individuals is not fair.
So as a society do we let unrestrained exposure or do we take collective action? I lean on the second option, but I'm not sure what this action might be.
I'm on the internet ~30 years, I loved the total anarchy of the early web, the unrestrained access to all kinds of information - good, bad and evil. It's very hard for me to get behind heavy-handed regulation. But honestly, I feel oversaturated by the modern cataclysm of information. My bullshit filters are clogged, my defense mechanisms are failing to the point I let information flow through me without an ounce of critical thinking. I can't imagine what the effect is on young untrained minds.
"Everybody else is doing it" has never been, and still is not, a valid reason for anything. If other parents choose to let their kids ingest mental poison, that does not mean that one should allow their children to do the same. Abstention is not only an option, it is something which absolutely should be enforced by any parent who cares about their child's well being.
I'm not talking about kids, I'm talking about adolescents (as is the quoted paragraph). I strongly believe that an adolescent's well being is tightly coupled with social interactions. If a restriction is not protecting them from life threatening situations, then alienating them from their peers is probably worse.
So the choice is between social-media-induced mental illness and alienation/isolation? No wonder kids are so screwed up today: there is no winning move!
Overall, I think the internet has basically been weaponised (intentionally or not) by big tech. People of every generation are being manipulated at a scale that has never before been possible, and what’s more is that the algorithms for targeting and engagement make it trivial to do this, either through propaganda, disinformation, or advertising in a way that skirts regulations on traditional media.
Will it change? I doubt it - Google and Facebook are likely too big to fail now, Twitter is still around as a bona-fide hate platform, TikTok is unlikely to go anywhere until something else replaces it…
The term "Too Big To Fail" is probably inappropriate here (was it ever appropriate actually? banks should have been allowed to fail in 2008), indeed Facebook may well be replaced at some point (is Gen Z even on Facebook?), and AI might well replace Google's killer product: its search engine.
This said, I tend to agree with you, the power law exists and has to be maintained by big tech to control the content because a captive audience is soooo profitable.
Same feeling here, I loved the early internet, it played a huge part in who i am actually! This said, this is not the early internet anymore, where content was mechanically regulated by a sort of egalitarian rule. Social Media applies a power law to content, so that 80% of the viewers are aware of the 20% that's available and human nature being what it is, lowest common denominator content gets pushed to the forefront.
Hence all the attention seekers on FacebInstaTok...
This is further compounded by the pervert effects generated by these platforms one of them being the mimetism and the general wolfpack behaviour that can surge out of the madness of crowds. Online Bullying is real.
My kids (11 and 14) are stuck on feature phones for now and i'd like, as much as possible to keep them off smartphones and their constant Notifications for the foreseeable future, until they are not kids.
If they find a workaround, they will still be unable to sit there around the clock, which is decent reduction of consumption. Also there won't be many, just like smoking schoolkids, so no social pressure. You can ban it completely or you can have your lovely bookface 1 hour per day, why not, it's dangerous when they spend there 10 hours per day.
30 years ago, you didn't live vicariously through the published perception of the world you friends held 24/7. Social interactions stopped when you put down the phone or went home for the day. If your friends went on a trip, while you couldn't, you'd only hear about their stories when they got back.
30 years ago, unrestrained access was still constrained to a desktop computer hooked to dial-up. Your access was constrained to a physical location.
Today, the big issue is the lure of having 24/7 mobile access to the Internet. At any moment, you can amend your own crafted online digital identity, meshing it with your real life, as you publish your location via Snapchat, Instagram or WhatsApp with your friends. Meanwhile, you can't but be confronted with notifications telling you where your friends are and what they are up to with who ("X has posted a photo, Y is currently at Z").
On a surface level, that lure has created a host of totally new social conventions and etiquette over the past 18 years, basically since the release of the iPhone. Social conventions to which one has to conform unless you don't want to lose out on social connections.
For instance, seeing whether a recipient of a PM has "read" a message and then "leaving you on read". Having that rather unrealistic expectation that one ought to respond instantly once a message has been read. At worst, friendships are put on tenterhooks as one ties value to the time between that "read" notice, and the moment a response follows.
In reality, the world 30 years ago wasn't more beautiful and people weren't more kind then they are today. In fact, if you weren't asked by your friends to hang out, or were left out when they went to a party and had all these in-group stories to tell, you felt socially isolated either way. That's not really new.
What's new is that this new lure of 24/7 connectivity creates a potential to be confronted with those feelings pretty much every waking hour. It must be anxiety inducing to scroll through your feed, not knowing if your friends did or didn't hang out last night without asking you.
To my mind, the answer isn't outright banning social media, or mobile devices. The answer is to keep having that difficult discussion about the value of the affordances - or lack thereof - the offer to foster healthy human relationships. It's about finding better ways to teach and empower young people on how to approach these tools, built by commercial enterprises, in healthy ways. And it's about being willing to properly publicly invest in aspects ranging from education to mental health support to enforcement and so on.
They meet their society in meat at school every day, how is that isolation? Also ban smartphones at school.
> then don't use them
This assumes that humans are rational agents. I think that drug addiction, wars in Israel and Ukraine, conspiracy theorists, and free-climbers sufficiently prove that this is not the case.
If only life were so easy, we would not even need to have this discussion.
It's the country's role or more specifically, the role of education to equip citizens with skills that will help them navigate virtual, deceiving and fake internet space.
No, it's not. Where does it say so?
Educational goals focus on broader set of skills and competences including critical and logical thinking. You can find this in most national and federal documents. That's because the education in its traditional sense is a country investing in its own working force. Normally, a country would want a healthy, educated and productive workforce, but if this is not the case then we have a different problem.
Sure, but there are so many skills to focus on, that one can hardly expect people to stay off drugs because one lesson was spent on how bad it is.
Companies are constantly inventing new ways to get people hooked on their platforms (or products), and it's a pretty tough race for teachers.
Note also the difference in salaries for high school teachers and developers at Meta.
The point is not to have a one shitty lesson on it, probably by someone who doesn't even know what cookies are. The point is, that alongside learning math, biology and history, you should also come out of educational system emotionally mature and equipped with skills to survive in modern world. Not all skills are acquired through a deliberate lesson, the role of school is not only to teach but to upbring a generation(s).
If Huberman can teach you a basics of nutrition so can a formal educational process. The problem with relying on youtube educators is then that it is down to luck if someone will come across it.
You are focusing too much on formalities. It doesn't say so specifically, but a collateral of education, or maybe it's equally important as knowledge itself, is the ability of critical thinking.
I was being sarcastic, sorry for that. Critical thinking might work for a few people in higher education, but it surely doesn't work for all of us.
That is certainly an opinion and a higher goal we could hold ourselves to, but education is generally just a way to ensure kids grow up to be good citizens - and today good tends to mean productive, contributing to the economy.
See my reply to the other comment of my same opinion :)
One could make that exact argument of cigarettes too. And see why it doesn't work in the real world.
Cigarettes aren't speech. I don't understand why anyone would argue otherwise.
No, but there the issue is bodily autonomy. Which arguably is much more important a right than free speech.
Is bodily autonomy a recognized right in any sense? Is there a society that actually respects the right to bodily autonomy legally or in practice - meaning, using any drugs at will, the right to suicide, to agree to being eaten by a friendly cannibal, and so on? I don't think there is, and nobody is pushing for it.
The Okapa District, pre missionary, pre kiaps .. you were good to go until the mid 1950s at least .. and then colonizers spread their values.
They had standards though, you'd have to work to gain the respect for anyone to want to eat you as a mortuary ritual.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FK5N_ObFeQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fore_people
Are you making the argument that restricting cigarette sales by age does not work?
Quite the opposite
Thank you to clarify. I agree with your point. The reduction in underage people smoking in rich countries has plumetted in the last 30 years. Much of that is due to stricter enforcement of retail and advertising rules.
Tobacco regulation is actually something I don't see people talked often. Some seem to have restricted it and succeed, or failed. Some seems to let it go and succeed, or failed. It's seemingly less sexy than either alcohol or marijuana, maybe because USA is one example where they just let cigarettes go and succeed anyway.
My country is an example where it failed anyway. Whether we are considered to have tried regulating it or not is a bit complicated.
There are two kinds of freedom [0].
What we are missing in our society today is some essential negative freedoms.
Most of us follow J.S. Mill's idea on restricting the influence of the state. See the many comments in this thread decrying government intervention to ban social media. That's a negative freedom, from tyranny.
Mostly, we tend to emphasise positive freedoms, freedom to; run a business, share speech, own technology. And that is good.
But there are negative freedoms, freedom from; coercion, the scourge of drugs, poverty, censorship. Obviously many positive freedoms can be expressed as negative ones, but how that logic is formulated in law really matters.
Now the controversial bit:
What we are missing is laws that give people freedom from technology The supposed "choice" to participate is not enough.
Like others here I've been a non participant in social media and smartphones. I'm not a Luddite, I'm a computer scientist, but I twigged this problem very early having dealt with addiction and recognising how abuse is mediated by technology. I even wrote a book about it [1].
The problem is, life is made very difficult for those who want to exercise choice. Presently one must live as a second class citizen, in what feels like racism and prejudice of technological snobbery. It is utterly unnecessary.
Governments do not need to ban smartphones or social media for kids or for anyone. Making this only about kids is a cop-out. It's leveraging emotional messaging to side-step a bigger problem nobody wants to face - that our whole society is under siege from technology overuse. The more general problem is that we've entered a period of technological over-reach. Kids don't just feel peer pressure to get a smartphone and social media, they live in a society that wants to mandate it.
Whether for kids or adults, we need to strongly protect the rights of those who want a less technologically mediated (and encumbered - yes it's not all "convenience") lifestyle. This needs us to maintain plurality of access;
Governments can ensure negative freedoms without just banning stuff.[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative...
[1] https://digitalvegan.net/
Very well written
I wish this were a movement, I feel very strongly about this.
Whatever would we call a movement like that?
"The freedom from the scourge of drugs" is why I can't buy an asthma inhaler without paying out the nose to see a specialist that will prescribe it to me. As a result I don't have an asthma inhaler. I feel very free when breathing gets hard.
This is a snarky comment, but this is the consequence of this "negative freedom".
I do think that there's some merit to these ideas, but I think it would always leave the choice to the individual. But we also have to realize that some things you just can't opt out of, eg electromagnetic radiation from cell towers.
I'd really like to understand your comment better Aerroon.
Is this something to do with the US healthcare system? Can you elaborate please?
(BTW if it is, one of my friends who is a type-1 diabetic was involved in the very political "humanitarian airdrop" of insulin to the USA. - so I kind of get it)
You dont have kids, do you. Seeing them being pushed out of entire school community due to higher principles is heartbreaking to say at least, this is place from which teen suicides come from. Parents usually cave in the pressure.
I would go and even claim I would ban all current social media platforms below 18. Ther are simply not enough protections, consistently, its place ripe for abuse and tons abuse is happening every day as we speak. I know we will keep our own kids off this for as long as possible, but eventually harm from absence will be greater.
Parents shouldnt be choosing lesser evil like that, just that some meta employees can cash half a million and think what a great addition to mankind they are, when reality is closer to definition of cancer.
Just like porn? Do you think kids would find a way around it?
Not if we implement mandatory ID internet use and social tracking system. We could introduce it with Elmo, Kermit, and Fozzie, and call it "Sesame Credit"… waka waka!
some would, obviously, but only those that really wanted to, just as some end up buying cigarettes or alcohol.
But that would be a fraction of what it is now
Parents have to get together for common rules on these kind of things. You can't push the responsibility onto somebody else.
That is not really possible. In the US you are required to send your children into public education unless you can afford private education. That public education requires students to use the internet. So you can't just opt out
Social media is not the Internet, but I think you are raising an important point. Schools are run by uninformed people, who introduce absurd policies, when it comes to prerequisites of usage of online services. It is hard for parents to get to their right of not having to participate in these disservices.
I imagine in the US there could be cases, where parents with the required pocket change can sue the school or something, to get it done, but if I think about my own home country, I have my doubts, whether anything would be resolved, before the time of a child in that school is over and in addition to that, there is no accountability for abysmal tech decisions in institutions such as schools. No one is losing their job for forcing children to use social media, unfortunately, even though every adult, especially one to work with children, should know by now, that this cannot be conforming with data protection laws. We simply punish incapable reckless behavior way too rarely.
I think you meant "way too rarely" in your last sentence.
Thank you, fixed within edit time!
While technically true, this is a gross misrepresentation. Calling these sites and apps "communications platforms" makes them sound like they're just a mail service or a telephone. This is akin to referring to a casino as "the town square".
This "can" is only true in a strict legal sense, of course.
I see the "town square" analogy used a lot, but it's ignoring the actual purpose: it's an advertising platform, run by advertisers for advertisers. The presumed function of communication (something it certainly was started for) is purely for keeping the attention of users to sell to advertisers.
As a town square, it's more akin to Times Square.
I dislike the town square analogy as well. What town square requires membership and provides anonymity? What town square do people routinely share dissenting opinions? The fact people feel free enough to routinely share dissent on these platforms shows that it's the opposite of a town square. The very act of sharing dissent in the town square used to be provocative in itself. What's provocative about grieving on Twitter?
The town square analogy couldn't be further from reality.
They’re communication platforms in only a very roundabout sense: like a newspaper’s “Letters to the Editor” section, but quicker. You send your message to Facebook, it decides (algorithmically, not through human editors) whether or not to publish it and to whom, and then Facebook sends that message onward.
I am into wildlife & nature in general. In my country, public institutions in charge with wildlife & nature have started for some time posting interesting videos, projects and images on facebook. They don't post them anywhere else, if you can believe it.
Here, everyone has facebook, from your grandma to your little cousin. My family is spread all over the country and you can keep in touch via text, phone but seeing what they are doing with pictures on facebook is very convenient and helpful.
Yes, the older/younger crowd do eat up conspiracies on facebook, sadly. They also don't read news sites, all the news is from facebook and TV maybe (older crowd).
Still, you are missing out a lot if you don't have it here. For example like meeting new people even. That "friends of friends" feature is immense. Kind of a social proof that you are normal/not a creep/have friends.
In the end it comes down to education. The first 7 years at home are ridiculously important. Then you have primary school for another 8 years, which is almost as important.
The social side of things is very difficult to work around.
Public institutions, however, should not be restricting information dispersal to third-party private companies who force even a casual viewer to agree to extensive legal contracts.
They are mostly advertisement platforms coupled to recommendation engines. The "communication platform" is just side business at this point. And it's being used to wave around as "free speech" when anyone dares to question the detrimental effect of the big mass mind control machine it actually is.
Any corporately run platform needs to be financed. In this case it seems the advertising model works best. Many platforms have tried subscription options but people prefer to not pay and become the product.
Hang on in there mate. If not now, eventually they will be grateful.
if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them. Restrict your children's access to these platforms.
If it was only this simple. It's similar to the green bubble problem. Disallowing your kids to use these platforms leads to social isolation. All the other kids are on these platforms and a lot of the talk is about what happened on these platforms (it's similar with games like Roblox for a certain age bracket). Excluding them is also going to teenage mental illness due to exclusion.
It's only going to work if all parents would restrict access to these platforms, but that's not going to happen. A lot of parents do not see the issue or do not want to be the first mover.
In general, I agree with you, and for the record, I'm in favor of general restrictions or limitations on social media for children. At the same, I want to add that I was not allowed to watch violent cartoons or play violent video games as a kid in the 90s. I felt left out on the playground when I didn't know how to play X-Men or Power Rangers or whatever. But in retrospect it was fine. I'm not sure the social isolation factor in particular is as dire as you claim.
You’re conflating these tech platforms with freedom of speech. It might be helpful to the debate to separate out the addictive algorithm and user base from people’s right to think and speak freely.
As always the real takeaway is to repeal Citizen’s United
And have a severally impacted/constrained social life?
People with all kinds of hobbies use those platforms to organize group activities. You are either on there or you miss out.
I dance tango socially. The tango community, world wide, has settled on FB. Or rather: if you are a dancer, teacher, organizer or DJ, you better be on FB or else you won't know where and when to dance, how to find students, get people to attend your event or get booked. I.e. even if you decided you didn't like FB, you have no choice but to join it and thus help cement their monopoly on how people with this hobby organize themselves.
There is a major difference between banning curse words, medical info, porn etc, and banning social media. The former is banning a type of content, the latter is banning the presentation of content; and it is the presentation that is so harmful.
Banning social media optimised for “engagement” at the expense of childrens (and adults) mental health does not remove any content from the internet that could not be expressed in a less toxic way.
The finesse is in defining social media in a way more complex than “this list of companies”, and I agree that (likely) no government would choose a definition that does not either have ramifications for free speech or is inadequate.
Your argument is convincing if you ignore the studies cited by this author, or the fact these two phenomena (video games and social media) are entirely different and have social as well as individual impact.
I also disagree with the notion that limiting certain addictive communications tools from minors is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech.
Arguments of this form are...not good
This is a social problem, not a parental one. When you allow for-profit companies (or anyone) to create addictive products that intermediate the social experience of an entire generation, how is a parent supposed to stand against that?
It's how kids interact and it defines their entire social experience. Disallowing them access is like sending your kids to school and not allowing them to talk to anyone.
We don't allow our kids to have access to alcohol or cigarettes because it's bad for them. How is this any different, when we know it's doing harm at scale?
Because "it's speech"? That doesn't hold up. Pornography is also generally considered protected speech, but no one lobbies for unfettered access for kids.
Beyond that, restricting social media does not infringe on free speech. That assertion is so obviously wrong on so many levels that it feels silly and pedantic to start itemizing them.
100% my reply to any critic of teenage social media, but the parents' stance is always "but then my kid is going to FOMO and feel left out".
That's not true. Those things are limited in bubbles like the one of the rationalists as well, so free speech has nothing to do with why people don't develop these things. It's a matter of character; and obedience to a system that establishes the rules that evaluate social, academic and economic status.
The Supreme Court was capable of distinguishing between free speech and moron speech but the Party was too convincing.
Most of the parents of these kids don't have the required flow of information to handle their kids consumption. And more importantly, their stress levels are too damn high already. Which is also the result of the Party's long term strategy.
And if all the other parents say it's normal and the same for their kids, even those parents where it is not the case, which are those that know that's why their kids will be better off while everything collapses (vs making sure their kids are better off while nothing collapses), then there is no way but super-rationality to identify a problem and then there's the willpower to go against the accusations and the time required for researching strategies to deal with the problem while the rest of the world, and school, and one's own life keep working as they always did.
If there's bait, the untrained puppy bites. Unless the untrained puppy was trained to bite and puke it out afterwards to find hints at who put the bait right in the path of all those innocent puppies.
What are your feelings on production and propagation of "foods" rich in refined sugar?
To be clear, I find your thoughts interesting and worth understanding, but if you also believe that the government has zero business in public health decisions involving refined sugars, then we just fundamentally disagree about what good governance is. (nevermind the social media element, which is new and evolving and a higher-dimensional problem space)
And that's ok. I will likely vote and conspire against the interests of people like this (with that view of government) until I the day I die (or my mind is changed), and cultivate communities that openly resist building the world based on those assumptions.
Sorry to seem glib, but by this same token we should be lift all restrictions we place on youth including smoking, drinking, etc.
There's a very clear causal relationship between IG and mental health that goes beyond a moral choice and ideals of free speech
That’s why we allow children to purchase cigarettes and alcohol and if parents don’t want their kids partaking they can just restrict their access, right?
Maybe it taught you that, but there are plenty of people that grow up on the Internet who do not learn these lessons. Take a look at any conspiracy message board, group, etc.
Akin to saying something like, "let it happen, that'll teach 'em"
Unfortunately, not everything works itself out.
I take issue with the argument that promoting these social media platforms is tantamount to fostering free speech and denouncing them amounts to eroding this right. No one should expect technology assisted broad cast abilities as part of a doctrine of governments and the State not restricting speech.
You don't have kids do you?
That's not going to fix the echo chambers, divisive conspiracy groups, anti semitic posts and generally all the other terrible uses for online platforms that contribute to the destabilization of our society.
You can't make a social problem go away by telling individuals "if you don't like this problem please avoid it". Similarly, you can't expect to tell people "the effects of methamphetamine are negative for our entire society so please don't partake". For problems that become a state, country or even world problem, something else is needed.
you have many ways you can solve the issues without ristricting free speach.
you can ristrict how you can monitize a product - I think the problem would be much smaller if you have to pay a price congruent to the value you get. Only a few people would pay for Facebook.
you can make the platforms resposinsible for what is published on them and enforce that. they would never scale this much.
We have already collectively agreed that this is not an argument. That is why there are agencies like the FDA, etc.
If you think of them as communication platforms, you’re missing a big part of the picture.
These systems are the next step in the evolution of media. Media is a complex beast with tentacles into culture and politics and individual society. We’ve known this for a long time. What’s applicable here is Marshal McLuhan, media theory, and heck David Foster Wallace. A lot of this stuff was way ahead of its time, but that time has arrived.
“The medium is the message” was a genius insight. Extending it to algorithmic media has all sorts of (disquieting) implications.
Why stop there? Why not drop all laws prohibiting sales of tobacco and alcohol to minors? Why should these producers have their right to sell impinged upon by scared parents pushing a bunch of laws through congress?
After all, you're free to use or not to use tobacco and alcohol, right? So it should be every kid's choice.
In fact, why stop there? Why not allow fentanyl pills at the counter of every convenience store for anyone who wants them? You have the freedom to choose to use or not to use them, so there's no problem, right?
It is important to remember that freedom of speech is more important than having a functioning society of a healthy populace.
Haidt argues these are a leading cause of an ongoing mental illness epidemic. Such a drastic claim deserves a thorough medical review and if true, these platforms must be regulated just like the Tobacco industry was.
Don't believe freedom of speech / freedom to information overrides the concern of Humanity collectively and progressively going ill, anymore than freedom to self-defense warrants the use of nuclear weapons for personal use.
That said, the burden of proof is on Haidt. It isn't uncommon for the older generation to be pessimistic or doomsdaying about the next one.
That sounds exactly wrong. I think they want their "personal parental" decisions to not be the decisions of the entire nation, but "personal" and private to themselves and to be free from judgement for wanting this thing.
This is pretty important to me:
Abusive parents deny their children access to communication platforms.
I believe these problems cause problems for the child if the child is already lacking support, but they also represent a way to escape that abuse, so I feel strongly that controlling access to asking-for-help is not okay;
This should not be a personal decision good people can make for themselves in their homes for their own kids, because they should be able to understand that "bad" people are actually using laws and rules like this to hurt children.
I think you're using one right now: Hacker news is absolutely a communications platform.
Nah. They're advocating for an obvious and well-documented societal harm vector be regulated into a less harmful configuration. This is similar in concept to regulating pollution or disease vectors.
That may have been true once upon a time (i.e. back in the day when your FB feed was chronological and random posts from unrelated/unwanted crazies would not show up on your device unless a friend forwarded it to you).
Now they are psychological manipulators (remember https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every... ?) in a quest for advertising dollars at the expense of everything else.
Note that the reforms suggested by the author are primarily normative, not legislative:
""" More specifically, we’d try to implement these four norms as widely as possible:
1. No smartphones before high school (as a norm, not a law; parents can just give younger kids flip phones, basic phones, or phone watches).
2. No social media before 16 (as a norm, but one that would be much more effective if supported by laws such as the proposed update to COPPA, the Kids Online Safety Act, state-level age-appropriate design codes, and new social media bills like the bipartisan Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, or like the state level bills passed in Utah last year and in Florida last month).
3. Phone-free schools (use phone lockers or Yondr pouches for the whole school day, so that students can pay attention to their teachers and to each other)
4. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. """
https://www.afterbabel.com/i/143412349/what-now
sure, but not everywhere is America and some places seem to manage without slippery-sloping to eternal damnation.
You are not given a choice to opt out. You are included in an ever-increasing dragnet of surveillance. The incentives are set up for it.
You either play the sisyphean game of personally blocking a billion dollar company from including you. Or you reach for the long arm of the law.
We all know FAANG gave us no choice but to use government ruling.
I think of it as: in 50 years it will be obvious to everyone that these things fall in the category of "health problems", because they are, similar to junk food, and we'll have a way of societally regulating the danger that is aligned with our ethics.
But we're presently in the middle of the long transition in which not everyone has figured that out yet, and in which we don't have a widely-agreed-upon moral stance on the subject that reconciles the need to do something about it with our existing value systems.
We're going to have to find it one way or the other, so the question is "when", not "if".
No doubt in 2174 we will have a bunch of new issues that are at different places in the pipeline. We'll probably be debating the ethics of mind-control implants or something. But in the meantime this one will solved.
What's the secret to doing that? No really. How do I unsubscribe from the tracking that these platforms do on the web and in my apps?
That's the rub! I can't not use (or be used) by these platforms -- no one can!
All you wrote doesn't address the elephant in the room: that social media is responsible for an epidemy of teen mental illness (which may or may not be true).
If that's true, the suggested measures: no phone before high-school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, ... do not seem crazy.
Kids cannot drink, cannot smoke, cannot have sex with adults, cannot buy firearms, etc.
There's a shitload of things kids cannot do: is it really an attack on free speech to have kids not have phones at school and wait until 16 before they can use these mediocre piece of shit social media platforms?
is the problem social media or the greedy privacy invading algorithms behind it?
Is speech "free" if you're being manipulated? Someone goes on "social" media to look for political information on an upcoming election and finds themself drawn in to cult-level manipulation of facts all for engagement, is what they say after that truly "free" speech?
Just don't smoke! Just don't drink alcohol! Just don't eat junk food! Just go to the gym!
That's exactly what the article suggests should happen, plus some protections for children enshrined in law. You can find these suggestions at the end of the post, in the section "What now?"
This is naive. Not using any of these platforms means that for a great degree you are isolating yourself socially.
Big tech already plays a alrge part in how our society is shaped and defending them means they don't have to face their responsibilities. Boiling this down a mere question of "free speech" is a very amerocentric point of view.
Do you feel the same about legalizing guns, alcohol, cigarettes and heroin for children?
I don’t think this is a stupid comparison, as I believe these platforms can be very harmful to children.