Parents can’t control the social landscape their children are born into. Sure, you can try to block the apps and socially isolate them if you care more about making a statement than their emotional wellbeing.
Alternatively we can admit that there is an issue with the amount of power and influence given to a few companies who have privatized all normal communication, especially for the younger generation. There is a reality of psychological and sociological harm that can’t be mitigated by taking your children fishing and giving them a few stern lectures. Full grown adults can’t even fight being manipulated by these apps.
Parents have been trying to outlaw things “for the children” all the way from rock n roll to rap music to video games
Companies have not “privatized communication” besides “Facebook is for old people”. Are we going to have the government legislate the algorithms companies use? I bet politicians would love to say that companies must prioritize whatever speech they are in favor of.
There's a balance. We don't let 13 year old kids drink alcohol, have sex, take drugs, drive cars, own guns, vote etc. Gradual exposure to responsibility, or harmful / addictive experiences isn't "sheltered", it's "responsible parenting". Jeez, I wouldn't even let my friend smoke "the strong weed" and he's 46.
"Doom scrolling" didn't exist when I was a kid and I'm glad it didn't. I would never have developed a love of computers. The closest thing I had in the 80s was TV. 6 channels, and they all shut down at midnight and displayed a test signal. When they were "on" the content was mostly shit.
Infinite scroll on social media is designed to be addictive. What chance does a 13 year old have when most adults (who have outgrown their teenage desperation for social acceptance) can't control that addiction?
What happens when your kids is sent home from school because they assaulted someone or vandalized the school because it's a new cool thing on TikTok?
Next they're yelling that the you're a bigot based on some obscure heuristic that doesn't even make sense?
Ever tried using logic with someone who is 100% certain you're the bad guy because they've been brainwashed for 8 hours a day on an app?
What was the big "social contagion" when you were growing up? For me it was music, slang and haircuts. These days it's self harm, coordinated vandalism, pornified ideas of bodies and sex. I know a lady who has a 16yo daughter who is bulimic... so are her whole clique.
Why does a 13 years old have access to social media?
As you mention, we don't let kids drink alcohol at 13.
My kids can call me a bigot and hate me as much as they want, it won't change the fact I am the parent and I decide what's right for them until they're of age.
When I was growing up there was already vandalism, porn, unrealistic body image (bodybuilders for guys, anorexic models for girls), heavy underage drinking and goth cutting themselves.
The only difference in today's world is that we celebrate people with mental illnesses for political purposes.
Teaching your kids what the media say is mostly biased BS and forbidding them from using social media is not too hard.
> Teaching your kids what the media say is mostly biased BS and forbidding them from using social media is not too hard.
1. Adults have pretty bad impulse control.
2. But kids or teenagers have even worse impulse control.
3. The prefrontal cortex, in charge of risk evaluation and decision making, matures when you're 25 years old (+/-).
4. These huge companies are built around addiction and getting network effects to set it. They have huge marketing budgets and a lot of money to lobby governments.
What's I'm saying is: good luck getting the average kid to break a habit even many adults can't. And when the human brain, on average, fails ("don't drink and drive!"), we introduce laws to fix that. Personal responsibility only takes us so far, because we're human and fallible.
The war on drugs have done much more harm than good - at least in the “inner city”. When drug use started spiking in “rural America” - despite laws that make it damn near impossible for me to get enough psuedophredrine for my family - it started being treated “as a disease”.
“Effective”, or “perfect”? Because almost everything every government does, good and ill, is not the second but it is the first. Totally ineffective bans certainly exist, but they are much rarer — even in the case of drugs, unless your pharmacy is currently selling cocaine 'Toothache Drops', or heroin or morphine cough syrup.
Almost everything the government does is “effective”? Have you been paying attention to the government? I can’t find it right now, but there was a survey done that no matter which side is in power, the policies that the government want is rarely aligned to the policies that most people want.
“Effective” is a separate axis to “what J. Average wants”.
For example, a government may want to circumvent encryption: if they tried to do this by requiring the SQL tables to be mauve “because that has the most RAM”, that would be ineffective; conversely if they passed a law requiring backdoors in everything, while this would be bad for many reasons, it would definitely have an effect.
That's the point. those are all not allowed, some kids do it anyway. Hard restrictions don't actually protect kids but make them more curious.
>Ever tried using logic with someone who is 100% certain you're the bad guy because they've been brainwashed for 8 hours a day on an app?
it sucks yea. But if it wasn't facebook, it'd be any other form of ad made in the past century. including "news" channels
>What was the big "social contagion" when you were growing up?
TV and Video games were the new hotness, but all those were common too. cutting yourself as some perverted idea of "goth culture", body image issues from magazine and mannequins, graffiti, and yes, sex (that's a factor as old as time).
> We don't let 13 year old kids drink alcohol, have sex, take drugs,
Yes because we passed laws, we stopped drug use and alcohol use by children and they aren’t having sex…
> What happens when your kids is sent home from school because they assaulted someone or vandalized the school because it's a new cool thing on TikTok?
Yes because fighting in school and vandalizing property was never a thing before TikTok.
> What was the big "social contagion" when you were growing up?
Yes because before the internet there wasn’t mass hysteria like the Salem witch trials or within my parents lifetime @running all of the Black people out of the city to protect our wome
You are presumably an adult. Are your friends only within one year of age? Unlikely. That this happens for children is a consequence of our morally-bankrupt "education" system which isolates children away from the community and only with people the same age for socialization (of which teenagers are known to be poor at). The same way you can't blame an individual for not walking places in, say, Atlanta, because the path between two locations is interrupted by a highway; or you stop all fires from burning in a forest which has had fires for thousands of years then wonder why the fires are so intense; it's silly to point to social media being the primary issue why teens are bad at socializing when it's a direct consequence of your society to concentrate together people with wild hormones without a moderating influence.
You realize peer pressure has always been a thing right? We should have a “War on Social Media”, have the First Lady head a “Just Say No” campaign, and have commercials about “this is your brain on FaceBook”. Because that worked so well last time.
So let children make a choice around fire or knives? I guess evolution will weed out the stupid ones right?
Good parenting is partly about guiding our children to make good choices. This thread is discussing how we do that, and what good choices might look like.
What about the model where _society_ is responsible for children ?
Imagine your kids play down the street, they’re about to go in an area with a lot of cars and a stranger passing by tells them its dangerous and go to the park ?
Or your kids receive a ton of ads for gambling apps on youtube and you have recourse to make it stop instead of cutting your kids from the only viable video platform outside of tiktok ?
Society is literally dead without children, why can’t it be safer for them in general ?
I agree, but this stuff is like crack-cocaine. Until you've tried to
separate kids from deliberately addictive tech it feels easy to just
say "parents should take responsibility". They should. And as a
parent I do. But parents need help.
I watched a documentary about China where they have technology
addiction boot camps. I supposed it would be biased toward "see what
fascists the Chinese are...locking up kids for gaming too much", but
within 5 minutes I changed my mind and could see a very different
side.
If parents give their kids smartphones and let them go wild on social
media - because they feel unable to help their children against highly
addictive behaviours - then they need societal backup and education to
be better parents. It's hard enough just clothing and feeding those
little ones.
This stuff is destroying the lives of young people. And we made it!
In my opinion, social media (and always-on smartphone culture) is bad
for _everyone_ and should be treated as a public health issue like
tobacco and alcohol. That way, governments can take a... like you
know... _ACTUAL_ _MORAL_ position on it.
Schools can be funded to message kids early and proprietors can feel
emboldened to ban people from using technology in places (as in the UK
where some pubs and gyms ban phones). We can get doctors and
counsellors on board and fund public health awareness.
The _real_ problem is governments are conflicted. They want social
media. It's a useful surveillance and control mechanism. And to some
degree a suppressant. I wrote a fair bit about here [1]
> In my opinion, social media (and always-on smartphone culture) is bad for _everyone_ and should be treated as a public health issue like tobacco and alcohol
I personally wouldn’t go that far but agree with your logic. If we come to the conclusion that something is bad for every member of our society, the course of action shouldn’t be to shield children from it but to straight regulate at a seller level.
For lighter approaches, I think there should be higher barriers to pay money virtual goods in game, and dark patterns should have more protection (automatic refunds on proven bad behaviors of an app could be a thing for instance)
Tobacco regulation worked exactly the way govs wanted it to work: keep making money while putting the blame on the buyers.
On alcohol, I think current policies are decently balanced. There could be more education on its effects and work around the driving part, but we’re in an better place than when there was no gov. intervention at all I think.
Looking it up, 60% having "at least one drink" by 18 (33% by 15) seems surprisingly low. It probably explodes in the 18-20 range because of college, however.
Doesn’t every single bad law trying to regulate media whether it be to ban rap music because four guys in LA release an album with “F%^%* the Police” on it or because a video game “induces violence” start with “think about the children”?
You are free as a parent to try to shelter your children from harm.
Political slogans are famously the opposite of what they claim. We get “Save Our Green Earth” polluting bills, “Freedom and Peace” wider incarceration bills, and as you point out “Think about the children” mantra thrown around for anything and everything, with nothing in it actually about children.
Also if we really think that video games induce violence, it’s interesting to think about why we want them played by 20+ yo grow ups who can cause actual harm at a non trivial scale.
Looking around at the “society” in the south where I live, I would rather them not be responsible for my kids.
This is the same “society” that routinely post messages to NextDoor because my son “looks suspicious” walking in our neighborhood in the burbs and walking into our house.
- If they aren't old enough to not wander off, they shouldn't be playing in the street without supervision.
- Use adblock. But even with it I wouldn't let my children use Youtube or Tiktok. They shouldn't be spending that time behind a screen.
I've seen acquaintances use iPads as nannies for their children ("have to do the dishes, here's mum's iPad") and I find that grossly irresponsible. Why would you want your kids to have access to an online video platform anyway? Until they capable of discerning what's worth their time I don't think it's healthy for them to have access. And I have to admit that I'm still having a hard time discerning what's worth my time.
> If they aren't old enough to not wander off, they shouldn't be playing in the street without supervision.
This has truth in it, but in my opinion the pendulum swung way too far on one side.
We live in times were the cops will bring back a kid that is found to be playing alone in a park. Or whole services cutting off 13- yo from their platform (yes I know, COPPA and everything) because they can’t be bothered and nobody blames them for that.
A lot of people have I think an ideal of kids raised in a cocoon by their parents until they’re 13 or 18, and by the magic of their age kids can now freely roam and become full member of our society overnight. That’s now how it works, or I’d say that’s a horrible way to raise future members of society.
> They shouldn't be spending that time behind a screen.
A century and half ago, I think people would tell their kids to close their books and play outside. My parents were telling me to turn of my video games and play outside. Current parents are told to shut off screens, keep their kids off the street, and “supervise” them. Or are parents all supposed to hire actual human nannies ?
As a society, do we really want kids ? I think that’s how we’re telling people to not have kids.
Did kids back in the day not have access to TVs and those “violent video games”? Every generation has their own “think about the children” fear mongering.
> The only thing that the EU has done is make web browsing worse by forcing a damn cookie popup on every damn website.
No, GDPR requires consent. How it can be obtained is at the site administrator's decision.
The GDPR even states that a lack of action (consent or refusal) cannot block further use of the site/app.
Don't blame the EU for "cookie popups" because the whole situation is the fault of the site owners - they are implementing the requirements incorrectly.
> The only thing that the EU has done is make web browsing worse by forcing a damn cookie popup on every damn website.
GitHub doesn’t have one. HackerNews doesn’t have one. The requirement is to get consent for unnecessary data processing, and most of the popups don’t even meet the requirements of GDPR to be non-coercive.
That tells you SO is doing not-strictly-necessary data analytics.
Which it admits directly when you click the cookie banner button labeled “Customise settings”: you are presented with four yes-no toggles, the first of which is labelled “Strictly Necessary” and which can’t be disabled.
IANAL but from what I’ve been told the SO banner isn’t even GDPR compliant because it makes it harder to reject unnecessary cookies than to accept all of them.
The customise settings popup has an always-on item literally labelled “Strictly Necessary”.
If they apply that as on and everything else in that popup as off, they are in compliance with GDPR without having to show the popup.
Unless that setting is misleading, but then they are not in compliance even despite showing the popup, even if they fix the problem I raised previously.
The only thing that the EU has done is make web browsing worse by forcing a damn cookie popup on every damn website.