The case for banning children from social media | Hacker News Reader

The case for banning children from social media

newyorker.com

352 pointscocacola1573 comments

I just don't see any alternatives to banning social media, perhaps even up to the age of 18. The dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs and social media is just as addictive.

It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff - especially in our highly polarised political climate. The right will immediately target "wokeness", and the left will immediately target "hate speech". And the kids will be totally forgotten about.

That's why I think, don't bother trying to regulate social media. Just ban it for under 18s when they're most vulnerable.

I don't relish this solution either. When I was 13, I was on forums making online friends. I loved it. But it was clearly different back then, before smartphones, before content-creators, when the internet was mostly nerds.

(I don't use social media, but I do use YouTube. I was amazed how quickly, after watching one fitness video, it immediately started showing videos of the most ripped, steroid-abusing bodybuilders, and how I could achieve their "amazing" physiques. Then videos started popping up about all types of performance-enhancing drugs. SARMs, trenbolone - it was crazy how quickly it devolved to this)

As noted by another poster[1]: how are you going to enforce it?

The idea of banning people from seeking things they want to do to themselves is incredibly stupid with the "War on Drugs" and it's equally stupid here with all the same consequences: a sudden explosion of either unregulated social media alternatives (back in the day Napster had a chat function even), or suspiciously immature "18 year olds" on Facebook and Tiktok.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35447990

> As noted by another poster[1]: how are you going to enforce it?

The number of comments here that haven’t realized that any regulations would require huge privacy intrusions for everyone is weird to see.

It’s like people are imaging some magical set of rules that would only apply to kids but wouldn’t impact themselves negatively.

Totally, that's why I figured it's easier to just ban it for under 18s, then leave it alone for over 18s. I'm an adult - I don't want to be told what I can and can't see.

(Obviously, "banning it" is not so clear-cut. Are you going to force Instagram to require that everyone uploads an ID to verify their age?)

To me, it seems the only way to enforce this is to invoke some sort of KYC mandate for social media sites. Obviously, in practice this would only target legitimate companies. So yeah, I think you would simply need to require that people verify their accounts in the same manner that say a Cryptocurrency exchange verifies a person. In such a universe Elon Musk might finally gets all his users to buy a blue mark.

Such regulations would drive me to use only foreign-owned shady companies who do not care about US law. I'd be sure to spread the word to my fellow citizens.

> Totally, that's why I figured it's easier to just ban it for under 18s, then leave it alone for over 18s.

There is no such thing as "leave it alone for over 18s".

If you institute strict age requirements, those have to be enforced for every user account. So yes, that means every site you use would require you to go through something like a KYC process.

Privacy on the internet would be gone. You can't enforce age restrictions if you allow users to remain private.

Not sure how viable this is in the US due to reasons but a centralized auth service could in theory not provide any PII back to the service requesting an age verification, and the auth provider wouldn't necessarily have to be get data back from the service except for the first time a user registers an account.

[Muffled screaming]

Much of the EU uses centralized auth services for critical services like banking, taxes, applying for schools, applying for loans. It's pretty great honestly. There are also APIs for integrating into these where the user chooses what pii they want to share with the service.

I know it's a controversial topic but the argument that age verification and auth services must remove privacy and inevitably leads to mass surveillance is a false narrative which I find kind of funny as if anybody should know these technical realities it's users on hn.

Best way to enforce it is to do what the Fed's doing currently: crash the economy, dry up the advertising dollars, and make the advertising platforms wither on the vine.

Let's just hope they don't take too many banks down with 'em in the process.

That's a really good point. And a case in point - I remember when I was 12, joining forums, there was always a prompt asking me if I was over the age of 13. Obviously I clicked yes and registered anyway!

But part of the danger is the ubiquity of it I think. Every teenager has social media, so there's this massive peer-pressure. If you don't have it, you get picked on. I wonder if banning it would reduce the numbers at least enough to reduce this effect.

I'm definitely not saying this is some silver bullet... But I think we have to do something, and maybe this is a reasonable starting point.

Its weird how far modern society just assumes laws are code that is run flawlessly on flawless hardware.

I think this is pretty silly arguments.

People love to say that the war on drugs didn't work, but I for one haven't consumed illegal drugs even though I have been curious at times. Since I haven't spent time with people who regularly break the law I have not been introduced to any element where I could have had access to illegal drugs. So war on drugs has worked at least on me and I live under to illusion that I am somehow unique.

Yes. Of course addicts will addict. If we ban social medias tomorrow some people will still use them or build new ones, but putting any kind of barrier for entry does have an effect. This is why we complain when something is opt-out instead of opt-in since people do the default thing and if default thing is that social medias are illegal then that will deter many if not even most people from using them.

I reiterate my first question: how are you going to enforce it?

Because the war on drugs has a very specific enforcement mechanism: people who take drugs are given criminal records, locked up in prison, and have their future opportunities permanently curtailed.

Is this your plan for an under-18 accessing social media? Do you think a policy of "we're going to help teens with their mental health" is going to accomplish that goal by specifically and overtly destroying it?

And if that's not your plan, then what is it?

Of course it would be the parents getting criminal records and being locked up, not the kids (or whoever enabled access)

Require by law that everyone on social media authenticates their age (maybe also their names, this would be good way to get rid of bots as well). This can be done with government ID or with via your bank or even with requiring social security number when creating an account. Or government can just make a new digital ID system that you have to go and register at whatever place is suitable for this and you can use that ID for anything and everything you need.

And if that doesn't seem to work just fine social media companies say a million dollars per minor per day that minor uses the service. You see enforcement go up fast AF.

Banning all social media is even simpler.

I think anonymous users might call you a slur, but the worst harassment I've seen online has come from people who proudly show their names and faces.

If there was central way to tie together online identities you could ignore/mute them from all platforms at once

1. How would such verification work on foreigners, who have no social security number?

2. How would "social media" be defined if you want to ban it?

1. Who cares, you cant pass laws on foreign countries anyway

2. Anything where you can post based on this "conversation"

Social media is unlike drugs in that if you abstain while your peers use you're in some ways worse off. I wonder if there's a narrower ban to be had, either on image usage or especially on filters

Drugs also have this property- although I think it’s probably more true in the case of drugs than it is for social media.

How are you worse off? Also, do we count whatsapp as social media?

Missing invites to parties, social gatherings etc.

Even for not having an iphone I suffer from this, and would miss out on tons more if not for Facebook for event invites, Snapchat/Instagram stories, etc.

Green bubble/blue bubble issue?

Yes. Apparently it downgrades the group chat experience if a non iOS user is added

> How are you worse off?

Everyone in my middle school used social media to know when to submit assignments, class schedules etc. Without social media you're going to be left out.

Sounds like the kind of info you would get from your teacher. I assume the teachers didn't publish it on social media. So why did you need that info from social media?

> Social media is unlike drugs in that if you abstain while your peers use you're in some ways worse off.

I submit that this is not unlike drugs (incl. alcohol), or even golf.

Not drinking in social settings will make you worse off by a lot. People feel uneasy and judged if someone refuses to drink alcohol with them, so unless you're very strong-willed, this coerces most people into drinking.

This isn't as easy as it sounds at first.

> People feel uneasy and judged if someone refuses to drink alcohol with them

I always read this on HN but I've never cared, or met any adult that seemed to care, when only a few of us drink beer in a group. Is this a US/Anglosphere thing maybe?

In the UK, it's definitely a thing.

Being teetotal excludes you from a lot of social events, and even somewhat unrelated events. We have hiking/fitness groups that typically end the training session with a round at the pub. Many workplaces go to the pub together after work.

Not engaging with this can set you back socially and professionally, because drinking is hugely ingrained in the British population. Most people drink multiple times per week. The people I work with genuinely struggle with "Dry January" and other such abstention events.

Going along to these events and not drinking gets you interrogated, and it becomes a thing to try to get you to drink / get drunk. It's probably an inferiority complex thing on the side of the people drinking because seeing somebody not drinking makes them feel bad about it (even though they needn't feel that way).

For every one person like you that doesn't care, there's many who really want to investigate it and get to the bottom of it. Telling these people you just don't like drinking isn't the solution they're looking for out of their investigation.

My 2 pennies as a lifelong teetotal.

I was a teetotal until I was 25 and I still drink maybe 2x a year. You're right that some people don't really know what to do with that. I've taken to blaming my meds when really I'm just not a big drinker.

That's because you've never been in the reverse situation. Think about not drinking at weddings, your birthday, Christmas, family gatherings in general, milestone celebration at work, and lots of other occasions where people typically drink.

I can assure you someone will ask if you're okay, urge you to drink "at least one", or "just a glass of Champaign, it's a special one".

That may be true of illegal drugs, but if you abstain from alcohol you may well be missing out on some social opportunities, and depending on your profession, that could extend to professional opportunities (though admittedly less now than in decades past). Cigarettes for a long time also had this quality, though that's mostly done.

> but I do use YouTube

I don't have Google auth cookies on my primary browser and every Google property has cookie autodeletion when the last tab is closed. Every time I start YouTube fresh, I get a new profile that I have to mold back to the content I prefer. On a fresh window I'm constantly bombarded with superficial crap I never click on. I'm also perplexed by the amount of T&A clickbait that gets offered in the shorts specifically. I have to spend time clicking animal videos to steer that to something less obnoxious.

Whenever I visit YouTube or Reddit on a new browser where I haven't logged in it's like I'm seeing an entirely different site it's so jarring. Instead of seeing a page off mostly educational and technical content they're filled with click bait. I'm embarrassed to even tell others I use them for fear they don't understand the extent to which the experiences can be curated.

I'm not familiar with how cookies work these days, but could you build up your base profile, then back up the cookie and overwrite with it periodically to maintain a certain balance?

I never found youtube particularly addictive. I'm guessing that's because (1) I don't have the app installed on my phone and (2) out of habit I only use it in a webbrowser in a new Incognito/Private tab, so the default recommendations tends to crap.

Why ban at all? Enforcing it is an issue. Privacy-intrusion is a given for everyone, not just kids. It probably would not work, similarly to any related bans. Again, why ban at all? Let the parents do the parenting... I guess? Or ban having sex without the use of contraceptives if you are so keen on banning.

It's incredibly hard for parents to intervene. Even if you ban your child from using it, since every other kid is using it, the harmful effects are still there.

The best you can do is try to explain and contextualise everything your kid might be seeing, which is very hard to do.

Also, not all parents are engaged with their kids as well as they should be. Having bad parents doesn't mean you're not worth protecting.

> Or ban having sex without the use of contraceptives if you are so keen on banning.

I'm not sure what that means.

Who else would it be if not parents, the Government? How would that really go? Would we really have to provide our ID to Facebook and such? That would suck.

The government checks or disallows many things, i.e. drugs.

Individualism is strong in the US, but if parents sucks kids suffer.

The disallowing of drugs has not fared any better than disallowing alcohol did.

Yes, the war on drugs has been really successful. I certainly want governments doing more of that!

Libertarians hate to hear this but the government actually regulate lots of things, not just drugs. Many of these regulations are very successful.

There's a difference between regulating and banning, or outright fighting a "war" on something. The latter causing far worse societal problems.

> I just don't see any alternatives to banning social media, perhaps even up to the age of 18. The dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs and social media is just as addictive.

Ok. Now, how do we counter this very same argument against tv and video games?

I would say that the main difference is that most modern social media apps use adaptive learning algorithms to curate an intentionally addictive feed. Traditional TV is not personally adaptive and video games with lootboxes have a comparable dopamine impact and have been seeing (justifiable) regulation.

Video games nowadays are just as bad.

Children don't really watch TV (anecdotally). They watch YouTube, which is just as bad.

The key difference between television and video games of yore is the feedback loop. TV and video games were one shot deployed and then ratings were gathered after, averaging across the entire audience.

Now YT and video games don't have end states - same thing as social media. While you often won't have individual-centric recommendation algorithms in a video game, you have dark patterns and gambling mechanics in all the most popular games which is just as bad.

The argument really isn't that we need to ban children from social media, we need to guard their dopaminergic regulation the way we guard their physical and mental health... oh wait.

Ultimately its the responsibility of the parent (at least in the US). Parents who are aware of the pitfalls of high-dopamine-low-effort activities, poor diet, and low physical activity are going to guard against these things. The ones who don't will likely suffer later in life.

> Video games nowadays are just as bad.

They're more boring than ever. Games people tend to be most addicted to appear to be glorified network social platforms, i.e. MMORPGs/LoL and the massive online communities extending them.

In what world is LoL a social network platform? It's literally a pvp moba

> and the massive online communities extending them.

As I said, the most addicting draw is the social component surrounding the games. The co-operative/team-based format means there's a baseline level of coordination in the background.

Something can be said about competition itself, but games that are by design 1-vs-1 are nowhere near as popular. As goes for actual sports.

>>Video games nowadays are just as bad

I literally don't understand how anyone can say that - there are more games of any genre than ever before. Yes if you only play CoD and nothing else it's all monetised and algorithm driven to hell. But for every CoD there are literally thousands of games that tell incredible and beautifully crafted stories. Thousands more where the focus is on gameplay. Endless remakes and reimaginings of older games with all their good and bad parts. Video games aren't just the top 3 best selling titles and it's weird to judge the whole industry that way. It's like saying that all movies are the same nowadays because Marvel films have turned into a more-of-the-same gloop.

You are arguing a strawman. GP did not claim that all games were bad, but that the situation is as bad as with social media. That there are many high value games is irrelevant if what gets the most play time are the skinner boxes with psychologist on staff whose job it is to make the game as addicting as possible so that people end up spending more on "micro" transactions.

Now go to Steamcharts, find first game that isn't a game-as-a-service and calculate ratio of its hours played in relation to everything above it. Then do that for the second and third - see if the ratio grows or shrinks further.

The fact that non-predatory games do exist is hardly relevant if what people are actually playing most of the time are indeed endless, dark pattern ridden grinds if not outright no-win casinos of which mobile gaming consists almost exclusively.

Whole industry needn't be banned, but a lot of its practices absolutely have to be at least regulated.

> While you often won't have individual-centric recommendation algorithms in a video game, you have dark patterns and gambling mechanics in all the most popular games which is just as bad.

Matchmaking in multi-player games and level scaling in single-player games are somewhat like an individual-centric recommendation algorithm providing you with a constant stream of games that are just hard enough to be engaging and keep you hooked, or at least trying to.

We don't. Ban the business model, not the speech. Advertiser-supported television was basically proto-proto-proto-Tiktok. The desire to create an audience that passively consumes out of habit was always there; it was just less optimised. The TV and video games that wouldn't survive having advertiser-driven or quasi-gambling business models taken away aren't worth saving.

That argument has always been there. Growing up my parents and most of my friends parents never let their kids just go 24/7 playing games and watching tv. We all go forced outside and had limits on exposure. Nowadays, it's just acceptable to sit your toddler down on an ipad all day long and let them do whatever they want.

> The dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs and social media is just as addictive.

I'm sorry, this sentence doesn't explain to me why banning social media is necessary. What are "dopaminergic" effects? Why is it so awful that social media is addictive?

"Please explain everything to me from scratch so I can summarily dismiss anything you say."

The phrase “the dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs and social media is just as addictive” is very unclear.

Very few people know what dopaminergic means. It might not be a real word.

“Is not dissimilar from” is a stock phrase used in an academia and by people trying to sound very smart.

The poster included just enough technobabble and stock phrasing to imply they are a specialist. But specialists know when speaking to non-specialists you should avoid technical language and stock phrasing.

So it really just seems the poster was signaling “I am very smart and possibly have a degree in something related and a current on research.”

"Dopaminergic effects" clearly means something along the lines of 'activity of dopamine within the human brain'. I just think we need more than an analogy to reach the conclusion that social media needs to be banned. The sentence "the dopaminergic effects of exercise are not dissimilar to drugs" is equally as true. Clearly dopaminergic effects alone aren't enough to ban something.

When I read that the top comment thought banning social media was clearly necessary I was flabbergasted. I read the comment multiple times looking for a compelling argument. I read the article multiple times looking for a compelling argument too. I'm still struggling on this.

I would really like to read a concise logical argument for why we should ban social media.

If you're interested in the topic, Jonathan Haidt has written a fair bit on this.

He's got a number of articles if you Google his name, and he's also appeared in a few podcasts (eg Lex Fridman's).

I'm not a specialist and I'm not in academia. I just sometimes listen to Andrew Huberman's podcast.

Dopaminergic literally means "related to dopamine". It's the first Google result.

And how is the word "dissimilar" academic technobabble?

Let's have good-faith discussions in future as I think this is a really interesting topic :)

> It might not be a real word.

It is a real word though.

Do you think it’s okay to allow children to gamble?

I dont have a problem with it

Some gambling is fine. Many playground games have gambling elements. Physical trading cards have a gambling element. Kids need to learn about risk and reward, and a little loss in the real or virtual world is a good way to do it.

It's not hard to find 'kid steals parent's credit card, spends thousands of dollars on loot boxes' stories. These losses are neither little nor virtual.

> But it was clearly different back then

If you go back far enough. I think in part we see forums through rose-tinted glasses. Moderation was looser than people are accustomed to now, and I've seen several taken over by conspiracy nuts. Some still make friends online almost the exact same way, using discord or whatever. I've been a part of communities, but never made "friends" online. The idea is a farce to me.

I was an "always-online" teenager. That was a mistake, but I didn't know then, Neither did parents. Just as no one knew that frequently watching pornography could lead to problems. Internet access and culture led to a brave new world.

You can pin certain issues more specifically to modern social media (e.g. endless scroll), but it's deeper than that. Most of what is identified as addicting content is an extension of what existed before, but with a far larger pool people accessing it.

At any rate - banning is redundant. Parents are apparently receptive to to the idea that it could pose a problem, to a neurotic level for some. This is a new idea. Let them do their jobs.

The idea of making "friends" on the internet, on forums, Facebook, or Discord, has always been ludicrous.

Unless you reach a stage where you meet up in real life and share human experiences, you're basically just talking with the equivalent of an AI chatbot.

There's a semantic problem, because we have no other word for it. There's certainly some value to what people deem online friendship, by virtue that they experience it, but that does not mean it's a replacement or substitute for in-person friendship and interaction. Even that argument can get a strong reaction sometimes which I suspect is a defense-mechanism.

I owe my career to friends made online. Online friends are no substitute for in-person interaction but it's perfectly possible to have a meaningful relationship with a person over the internet.

Forcing social media companies to charge for accounts would be my first approach.

Either by taxing it so much that they have to, or by explicitly requiring payment. I'm not sure how you'd define "social media" vs say, HN (or is HN social media?).

Taxing advertising revenue at a higher rate could also do it (hmm, thinking about this, this might solve a lot more problems too).

For countries that don't do credit cards, there are other means - usually through the telco that provides mobile access.

Anyway - making users pay for it would associate the account with a credit card, and kids would have to do the same thing they do with mobile games and other paid-for stuff online - negotiate with their parents to get access. At least their parents would be aware.

I'd happily pay ~$3 a month for HN or other social media; I already pay way more on average per creator on Patreon and I frequently don't get a monthly benefit from that.

HN is social media. So are old-school forums. Hell, Usenet and IRC qualify in my opinion.

Which means, a more detailed naming is necessary. Like, "personalized media" or something like that, to distinguish it from classical media where the user is not the target of engagement fishing.

> Forcing social media companies to charge for accounts would be my first approach.

It may work at first, but it will devolve into a stratified system of people who can afford it, and those who can't.

Something Awful are charging $10 for an account and it's basically just trolls. :-)

18.. hell I’m close to 40 and I have trouble self regulating.

YouTube needs an option to disable shorts. It’s just not healthy.

TikTok I won’t even touch it. It’s virtualized crack.

It's your (our) generation who built all this stuff. We thought it would be "neat".

We thought it would be lucrative.

We thought we had no alternative because if we didn't do it, someone else would, and they'd eat our lunch.

It's a very small subset of our generation that built all this stuff.

It gives me very big Ariel signing the contract with Ursula vibes.

We signed away our integrity for validation and money.

Millennials blame Boomers for the economy, housing now Gen Z will blame Millennials for inventing social media. :D

> YouTube needs an option to disable shorts. It’s just not healthy.

I have disabled them along with suggestions with a browser extension, but the temp station is always there to enable again even briefly. Shorts are particularly addictive and must play hell with our dopamine receptors.

Install a userscripts extension in your browser and with that install a userscript such as Focused YouTube [1]. I did and never looked back! I want nothing to do with TikTok or YouTube shorts. I watch long-form videos on science, math, and engineering topics for the most part.

[1] https://github.com/KervynH/Focused-YouTube

Does this work for mobile?

Firefox started supporting userscripts through Tampermonkey a couple of months ago.

if the dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs, and evidently just as bad, why not ban them for adults as well?

Agreed we should!

HackerNews included?

It does seem like a reasonable solution. A rewind back to the age when it had been just the newsgroups. Without +1 algorithms that result in the algorithm making a choice what users see and not the opposite.

Certainly a better solution, if compared to forcing everyone to show their Real Id, just to verify their age to access the Internet.

With HN and other sites with a non-personalized feed, at least what you see is the same as what everyone else sees. And if there's voting, which isn't perfect, it's based on community feedback.

How hard is it to add "upvotes" to TikTok and fake that it is based on community feedback? How do you know that HN isn't personalized for you?

Well, you can go ahead and independently verify something like that pretty easily. Kind of weird to veer towards lies and malice at the drop of a hat here

>Kind of weird to veer towards lies and malice at the drop of a hat here

What? To me it is extremely naive to think that social media services wont try to use every single loop hole.

Also, cant help but notice you didnt actually answer the question - just dismissed it.

I'm not doing your homework for you - if you think HN is personalized it should be trivial to show it.

There is just no response I can make that wouldn't be an insult, but couple of points:

- if you make a claim then burden of proof is on you

- I never actually claimed that HN was tailored, just pointed out that you can't tell if that was the case

I won't be reading more from you

As someone 8 years sober from social media, I’m convinced the benefits of banning it would far outweigh the cost.

Out of interest, what's your definition of social media? Because mine is a site / app whose value is derived from its users, where users are all of (roughly) equal importance. Which puts forums / reddit / hacker news into that category.

You can quibble about definitions, but I'd say it's got a lot to do with being personalized. So anything where you need to know something about the viewer in order to optimise what to show each individual. That can be for anything from the content itself to the advertisements, if you need to know something about who is watching, it's what we currently think of as social media.

FB, Instagram, TikTok, but also Google search, and every ad supported site.

Not WhatsApp or the chat services, interestingly.

Sounds a lot like, "I stopped drinking because it became a problem, so everyone else should too."

Drinking causes severe societal ills and is unhealthy in any amount. Everyone should indeed stop drinking. We should tax alcohol until it is unaffordable for the vast majority.

I'm glad the vast majority of people disagree with you. I will continue to drink when I want to. Everyone should not stop drinking.

The world would be better off without widespread use of alcohol. It's not even a question, everything else similar, a society that chooses not to drink alcohol would have a social, economical, and psychological edge over one which does. Individuals are better off if they don't drink, it's just not good.

I wouldn't advocate for a ban on alcohol, it's much too ingrained in culture and too easy to make, but I hope that society some day gets to the point that it rejects it, much like we reject huffing shoe polish.

I’d ban photos, pictures, video and sound. Leave text only. Greatly reduces deepfake potential, manipulation options by state actors, dopamine hits from looking at pretty cat pictures too.

I don’t want to say IRC was fine but it was better than Instagram.

> if the dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs

I highly doubt the implied semantics of this statement. We don't know everything there is to know about "dopaminergic effects". The pharmacology of smoking weed is probably very different than from say, scrolling through memes.

Pharmacology, yes. But we can compare social media and other addictions in terms of social harm, health harm, psychological and emotional harm, withdrawal symptoms, financial consequences, impairment to decision-making, procrastination and distraction impacting attainability of personal goal, prerogatives and decreasing motivation, relationship harm (it is difficult to form relationships with those "terminally online" for example), cognitive/executive function impairments, self-esteem harm, sleep hygiene harm, personal hygiene harm (difficult topic for some addicted people to talk about but in my opinion, it is related to internet addiction as much as alcohol or drug addictions), harm on enjoyment of life, and many others.

The effects of dopamine bombing yourself with on line content are not very dissimilar to effects of drugs. I would argue they are more similar than dissimilar.

In my experience you don't become terminally online unless there's something else going on in your life. People talking about the ills of social media seem to forget that children nowadays are: institutionalized for 8 hours of their day, raised on diets of processed garbage, etc. Like, a well adjusted kid isn't going to treat social media as more important than their friends unless they think they can make a living from it or have no friends.

I think "dopamine bombing" is not what it sounds. See discussions on dopamine fasting for what I mean. The relationship between the things you do and dopamine are complex, probably more complex than the relationship of what you physically consume and dopamine.

> In my experience you don't become terminally online unless there's something else going on in your life

That's true, but it's also true for other addictions.

> a well adjusted kid isn't going to treat social media as more important than their friends unless they think they can make a living from it or have no friends.

Probably mostly true, but also a lot of friendships are moving online.

> I think "dopamine bombing" is not what it sounds

Can you elaborate? I think it sounds like abusing the dopamine hits you get when scrolling through SM, for example.

It implies a direct connection with neurochemistry that's much less direct than drugs (and even moreso diet), which can directly stimulate the release of dopamine. For example if I'm feeling tired of scrolling through memes, I can just put my phone away. I can't stop caffeine from stimulating my neurons, or ignore a macronutrient deficiency in my body.

It might be that this is an unimportant distinction in the end, but I'm not sure we know.

Quite many people can't just put their phone away, even when they try to concentrate on something else. The behaviour seems to be very similar to other addictions.

Because banning drugs has worked so well...

The effects on developing versus developed brains is different for most things, including drugs and other psychological/psychosomatic stimuli.

Also, we give adults the freedom to fuck themselves up to a great extent that probably most people think it would be unethical with children.

Because we live in a society (that mostly) allows adults to make choices for themselves. Just because a few adults can't handle themselves doesn't mean that all adults should be punished for it. You can say the same thing about gambling, smoking, drinking, eating sweets etc.

Also, the effects on undeveloped brains are far greater. Our job is to teach kids and raise them. Not be their friends and just let them do whatever adults do.

What I propose is the banning of algorithms-powered social media. There's a huge difference between a moderated age-appropriate forum and TikTok.

Not only is it the most effective thing that doesn't require an invasion of privacy, it would increase privacy and user autonomy.

But how on earth do we start a political movement around it? Difficulty: needs a 10-second blurb that does not rely on the word "algorithm".

"See what you want to see, not what's being pushed at you" is the best I can come up with.

I doubt there is a unified campaign that can attract both poles of US society, they’d need to be targeted at each individually.

Addressing center-left, middle-class women (like myself): "Worried about your son being sucked into the incel movement because he watched some video game playthroughs? Concerned that your daughter's depression is being driven by the unrealistic standards of femininity that influencers are pushing into her Instagram feed? Is your kid a zombie after spending more than a few minutes on TikTok? Did your mother become irrationally scared of trans people after she started spending too much time on Facebook? Is your husband getting into stupid arguments with people he doesn't know and doesn't follow on Twitter? Did you miss your kid's school snow-day announcement because you were trying to scroll past all the crazy right-wing conspiracy garbage that keeps coming up on Facebook?"

"Our attention should belong to us, not to advertisers and influencers."

Whoa whoa whoa, you had me until the husband part. You can't just go letting people be WRONG on the Internet without stepping up and doing something about it.

https://xkcd.com/386/

But what if arguing with strangers on the internet is a hobby that you derive much enjoyment and fulfilment from?

Third-party apps that pick comments from randos who follow politicians you can’t stand, I suppose… perhaps like the “freak” relationship from ca. 1999 Slashdot (“friends” of people you designated as “foes”)

Edited to add: but only randos who have indicated they want randos to argue with them :)

If we managed to do it with cigarettes, we can do it with this. I will defer to the experts, though.

If "If it's free, you're the product" wasn't slogan-y enough, then I doubt anything will.

> It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff

It's not hard. It just upsets vested interests.

Make it illegal to show ads to kids. You don't have to make "kid" identification airtight, because few people of any age want to opt into ads. The ad industry was very upset when the American Psychological Association proposed this back in 2004.[1]

This doesn't raise constitutional issues because ads are considered commerce rather than speech.

[1] https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/advertising-children

Great point about speech

No it's far far more complicated than that.

See for example: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2021/20-1029

The court upheld the City of Austin on prohibiting off-premises digital signs, even if some of what they displayed was non-commercial. So that's not a problem.

The court engaged in a complex analysis to determine the appropriate framework for analyzing this specific first amendment advertising case.

This shows there isn't a blanket exemption from first amendment scrutiny for advertising.

I didn't delve into the opinions but it seems like the decision relied on basic content-neutral doctrine. That's par for the course 1A stuff.

"par for the course 1A stuff" suggests that advertisements actually ARE first ammendment protected in the USA. Because... they are. Original commenter suggested they were not even considered "speech" and were not, which is not accurate description of the law.

(In fact, though, advertisements are not treated exactly the same way as other kinds of speech, say, political speech. The bar is different, and more regulation of advertisements is allowed than, say, political speech. Who knows if the current supreme court and other courts will change that though, they are changing a lot, often in favor of protections for commerce).

There's a fine line between free speech and fraud

"It's not hard. It just upsets vested interests."

Yeah, this is what makes regulating anything hard or pointless, if the "vested interests" are powerful enough.

This is primarily a problem in American where bribing politicians is seen as a fundamental freedom for corporations.

Do you really believe that doesn't happen in other countries?

If you forbid ads, then only political propaganda with bring funding to content creators. It’s not just because you hide money that it’s not there.

His point was to show ads only to adults.

I'd prefer not to see ads.

What are you talking about?

If there is no ad money, the only ones left will be those who pay for political influence.

That solution fails to sidestep the not minor issue of how do we determine it's a child online brought up by the article.

How's about we start testing for maturity, and despite a person being 45 years of age, their maturity tests to be 12 years of age, so no social media for them. That would actually be significantly better for everyone involved. But who can trust anyone with a "maturity test" and then who can be trusted to administer said test honestly? Perhaps our entire society is immature and nobody deserves social media?

Perhaps our entire society is immature...and it's time we grew tf up.

This is, in my opinion, a serious issue facing the human race today: we have a material number of flat out immature adults, and some of those immature idiots (looking at you Elon, and you Murdock, and many more) are far too powerful for their childish insatiable minds.

I don't disagree with that.

I just don't think banning people from the internet is the answer.

Who will test a maturity of maturity test developers? They will be kind of a shaping factor for a society.

My point was that such a test is impossible.

> how do we determine it's a child online

Why not use passport verification for any enough big social network? Anyway there is almost impossible to use them anonymously.

Not only can you tie all of your speech to a government-issued ID, you can do it for the low price of $160 and a piece of ID that forty-percent of Americans will have no other use for!

So use a government ID instead

Another problem is the definition of "ad". Is kid playing with fancy toys is an ad? Is product placement in movie an ad? How and who will determine if this is and ad or not?

"did the company selling the thing pay for any part of it" seems like a good enough place to start.

Even that isn't as clear-cut as it seems. It isn't just the company that you need to include.

Does your company produce ads for the company that produces Proprietary Toy and get money if they sell more products? Does your company supply batteries for Battery Operated Proprietary Toy? Does your store sell either Proprietary Toy?

And so on.

It really is though.

> Does your company produce ads

There it is, don't do that.

All these other questions are also just "yes." You're looking for nuance where there isn't any. Sponsorship is ads, product placement is ads, giving free product to influencer to review is ads. There are certainly edge cases some of them likely to be thorny but none of the things either of us has mentioned so far are them.

I think there’s absolutely nuance here and pretending “make it illegal for kids to see ads” is a simple or even attainable solution is a bit naive I think.

What about product placement? Nearly every movie in Hollywood from the past 40 years has some level of product placement, so under this new law we’ll either go back and edit it out or slap an R rating on it? How about arena ads or billboards? Special AR headsets for teens which will block ads from sight? It’s a silly hypothetical, of course, but you did just say that it’s a hypothetical without nuance.

I think it’s easier to imagine a world where advertising is outlaws entirely than one where we specifically shield it only for those underage.

On further reflection it may effectively ban advertising completely and this makes me like the idea even more.

I’d be on board with that!

Anytime someone exchanges cash, goods, or services to promote a product or service, and then repeat this inspection up the chain of shell companies!

> Is kid playing with fancy toys is an ad?

not enough context, maybe

> Is product placement in movie an ad?

yes, clearly

> How and who will determine if this is and ad or not?

Probably some corporate compliance drones and underfunded government stooges.

Doesn't that include most children-directed media, as it inevitably ends up being an ad for related merchandise?

Perhaps, and I'm fine with that. Children's media shouldn't be funded by corporate advertising directed at the children, period. I don't care what kind of sledgehammer that takes to the ad industry, I care about the children's well-being.

Next, let's ban all advertising, is what I'm thinking.

I like to play the Pokemon card game with my son. Yes - his interest in that corporate franchise leads us to some spending, but I don't find that excessive for the benefit we get from it, which goes beyond fun, as he learns strategy, focus, pattern application, counting etc. I don't think my son would be better off without that in his life. I also don't find it unreasonable for the corporation to profit of the product they provide.

How does banning advertising, even all advertising, prevent the company from making Pokemon card games? I assume you mean the mobile game, which is very predatory with microtransactions and such (check their recent price increases for shit you can use to win the game). I would be fine with that particular type of system ("freemium", "loot boxes", "pay to win") being banned and eliminated from existence. Pokemon existed long before all of the current bullshit and something similar will be around even without all the ad-driven nonsense.

I have to go to sleep, but I'm militant in my hate for advertising. I would burn the entire idea of advertising to cinders.

As I said earlier, almost all media directed at children aims to create a brand loyalty and will try to convince them to buy more. In this case I'm talking about the actual card game - it's good and features cute pretend animals, thus it makes children want related merchandise.

Moreover, Pokemon was never immune to that. The very first game already introduced the mechanic where you couldn't actually get all the creatures, which was one of the goals. In order to do that, you had to trade with friends that happened to buy a different color version. That's great, because it created engagement and communities around the game, but it's also clearly a marketing ploy.

If you fail to see this in that case, what about The Lego Movie? It's was made to make Lego relevant with the next generation of kids. It's also a good movie. And Lego sets are not bad toys to have.

It's simply not black and white and there's a big difference between Studio Ghibli selling Totoro merch and placing unhealthy snacks at a 5 year old eye level in a checkout aisle.

There is nuance to this, sure, but I’m open to blowing it all up and seeing what emerges. Good thing I’m not the dictatorial ruler of America, I guess.

I just realized that banning blatant advertisement may be one of the most effective measures to help slow down the reckless consumption of natural resources

Imagine if people didn't think they needed 27 hilarious t-shirts they'll never wear or wear once, a tool to cut an apple into slices (plus one for all the other fruits and veg), plastic bags for everything they pack for their kids, toys that will go on the pile of other toys, a new phone and car each year, 137 pairs of sneakers, etc.

Not to mention no longer getting ear-and-eye-fucked with billboards, pop-ups, required logins, and product placements in media! Oh man, I would (almost) give up my only kid to have this dream come to fruition!

Sounds like a utopia to me

you had me on your side, but then you came for a tool to cut apples and now you have mortal enemy. i will defend a right to ikea apple cutter with all my might and will soread the word about it as far as possible.

no, really. its a very convenient and often used tool in my home.

Well, let's meet in the middle and say they should make stronger apple cutters (apple core-ers?), with stainless steel or something, that could be passed down for generations, and doesn't shed microplastics in the trash when it breaks :)

> not enough context, maybe > Probably some corporate compliance drones and underfunded government stooges.

Youtube alone has 720,000 hours of fresh video content per day Tiktok must have less number of hours but more Videos per day. Add Instagram, facebook, Twitter and it's impossible for anyone to verify this manually so in the end how is the platform supposed to decide what to show and what not where the "not enough context, maybe" is the most common answer?

> Is product placement in movie an ad? > yes, clearly

not so clearly even in this case. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-x8DYTOv7w, a very nice recap of what an ad is.

That’s the platforms problem, not ours. If they can’t validate the content then they’ll have to scale back to an amount they can.

Aren't there already legal definitins for adverts? They're regulated today.

Edit: In the UK advertising regulations are handled by the Advertising Standards Authority who already have rules specific to advertising to children.

https://www.gov.uk/marketing-advertising-law/advertising-cod...

Problem with the ASA is that they can only react to advertising that's out there and by the time they do, the campaign is usually done.

I didn't mean to suggest the issues were already solved, only that there's already precedent for defining advertising in law as well as regulating adverts aimed at children.

Probably yes, so movies for kids should not have them I guess.

Not a problem. This question has already been asked and is settled.

Programmers tend get caught up with definitions and "loopholes". Laws don't care.

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1494:_Insurance

To be generous to the OP, they may not be looking for "hacks" or "loopholes" but rather clarity. Vague laws tend to be bad laws.

What problem does that fix? It’s not particularly the corporations that are a bad influence on the kids, it’s their own peer group.

Ah, the subtle aspect you're missing: it is the corporations that created and promote the environment in which the kids abuse one another. It's similar to creating a large park, and then not policing the situation when bullies take over the park, and probably also accepting payments of some kind from the bullies for their extraordinary access to the corporation's "park for people and kids".

But then the bullies park will let you kid in for free and then charge an adult fee for you to retrieve them or supervise them. They still make money either way, so the problem will still exist - an attractive park built for kids which disregards safety.

Ads have very little to do with the harmful effects on minors of social media use.

And besides, banning ads will not prevent social media from trying to lock minors in, either to already have them when they turn 18, or to benefit from peer network effects to rope in more of the 18+ audience.

But the ability to show ads is the only reason to allow the youth on the apps. Remove the commercial reason for brainwashing kids, and the rest will probably sort itself out (I guess is the logic)

Addicting kids to the platform such that you can show ads to them when they turn 18 seems to have obvious value.

To some degree. But addiction describes a range of behavioral symptoms with a variety of durations and dynamics. The expected return of designing platforms to entertain 17-year-olds will decrease a little, but the expected return of designing a platform to entertain 13-year-olds will decrease a lot. By the time the latter group is monetizeable, they might move to a competitor's platform — just as prescription painkiller addicts have an easy time substituting heroin when they find it's cheaper.

One thing that's particularly convenient for regulators in this case is the tendency of adolescents to deliberately change their behavior as they approach adulthood in order to reinforce a sense of personal growth. 18-year-old me didn't want much to do with games and movies for 13-year-olds.

The problem is what is an Ad? Is the Cryptobro shilling for the coin of the week an Ad? is the Influencer that "casually" is using her brand of Mascara while talking an Ad? Do creators need to have two versions of the same video (one with promotion, one without)? Most ads now are difficult to tell apart from content. Is this review really a review or content length ad?

All of those are quite obviously ads and must be clearly labelled as such already within the UK and most of the EU.

Ads have everything to do with because they are the incentives shaping social media.

> will not prevent....

While "first drugs are free" is not unheard of, e.g. "gratis" licenses for schools, I think you vastly overestimate the willingness for long term investment. E.g. if the law says "no ads for under 18", they might stomach the costs for 16, 17, but starting at 13? 5 years of "gratis, adfree"? No change at all? You think so?

There's way too much gray area here for an effective law to ever be defined.

How do you define what is considered an ad here? How is age verified online? What if I have Hulu on TV from my account while my kids is in the room? Are other forms of ads banned as well, like cable TV commercials or billboards? Cereal boxes only use cartoon mascots to advertise to children...so also illegal?

>> It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff

> It's not hard. It just upsets vested interests.

Vested interests are precisely why it is hard.

He probably meant "it's not complicated" because it really is not complicated, it's just hard, the same way e.g. weight-lifting is simple but hard.

Take a look at the Fortune 500 list, and you can see exactly why the US has the problems it does. The largest companies correlate to the shortcomings, e.g. oil & gas & cars vs. public transit, or all of the healthcare companies that are in the F50 vs. affordable healthcare.

Vested interests rule the US at this point.

So... I'm not sure that ads are the center of negative consequences... AND it's not actually true that advertisements aren't considered speech with first ammendment protections in the USA, it is (although it has LESS protections than some other speech, and can be regulated, probably including in this way)...

But on top of all of that... what is an "ad"? Is it an "influencer" who is getting paid to promote a product but doesn't actually disclose that? Which already violates FTC regulations, and we aren't even managing to enforce the regulations we've already got, cause this is pervasive.

There's too thin of a line between ads and algorithmic feeds.

Funnily enough with ChatGpt like language models available even without banning censorship will become very prevalent. Instead of banning your child from social media outright you will be able to get a bot to monitor their account and filter out what you feel is inappropriate. So instead of their social feed being controlled by a company it can be monitored and controlled by parents.

> So instead of their social feed being controlled by a company it can be monitored and controlled by parents.

Huge win for helicopter parents

I am not promoting this nor do I agree with it but I am predicting this will happen. The internet bubble people live in will go to the extreme.ie the chinese firewall available to every government, corporation or parent. Citizens of western countries are under the misconception that their governments do not try to hide information or topics they do they are just not that successful at it.

Computer games are also addictive. Back in my days soccer and basketball were addictive as well. I vividly remember my grandpa despising my uncle for having obsession with playing soccer and not spending more time on his homework.

It seems like a pattern, grown ups just don’t like the way youngsters are spending their time.

Maybe it’s totally normal in your teens to just spend aimlessly time in seemingly useless things ?

I didn't know any kids who were addicted to soccer in the sense of spending 15+ hours 365 days per year playing soccer. It's just not feasible physically.

Ok, fellow southern European and Latin American HN folks, help me out here.

I am Southern European by the way and I played more soccer than most kids. Even so, it wasn't possible for me to take soccer out of my pocket when I went to the toilet or when I was in bed and should be sleeping or when I was in class.

Football was practically the only sport we could play (anything can be a ball if it can be kicked) but you can only play at recess and after school outside. And most of the time is hanging out with kids learning social norms (you lose sometimes, somebody may be better than you, it is mostly a team effort, rules are for a reason,…). I’m glad I got to spend my childhood offline.

I’m not sure if you have children.

Soccer and basketball exist today. I don’t think you’ll find many parents who struggle with their kids’ habits with them relative to current video games like roblox. (Super Mario Kart doesn’t have the same addictive and predatory aspects)

Find a random parent and you’ll see for yourself. It’s not that parents are frustrated that their kids are playing too many video games. It’s that they are concerned their kids are becoming addicted before they turn 10.

Kids are as different from each other as adults can be, so there's not really a one size fits all solution. That said, we've found that setting limits works fine. At least for the ages under 10.

There's a limit in duration and time they can use a screen, both of which are easy to keep taps on. It's 5-10 minutes before leaving for school, if and only if they are all ready to leave. It encourages them to be done quicker and it's lost time anyway. The other block is while we're cooking. That started out as a way to keep overactive little kids busy and out of the kitchen, because the parent is busy and it's dangerous to be in the kitchen when cooking.

We also have limits on what they can do on the screen. They need to spend a minimum time on some educational apps, before they are free to do whatever the machine allows. They are on Android tablets restricted by Google Family Link, but things like YouTube (YT Kids for the youngest) are still available.

I feel that they do need some freedom in tech land to follow their curiosities. Even so, it's very limited because they als use it to just veg out. But one kid basically learned to count and spell in English from BBC videos, before they could do so in their native language. There is some advantage to just letting them go.

The time limits turned out to be pretty good motivators to learn to tell the time too. They are now pretty good at keeping taps on the time themselves.

We have changed the limits a bit over time. Mostly stretching them to new areas of interest. And kids are different, so what worked for the eldest sometimes didn't work for the youngest. They do like their tablets a bit more than I'd like, but I'm not worried about addiction. They're honestly using it far less than I watched TV in the age of cathode-ray tubes.

> I feel that they do need some freedom in tech land to follow their curiosities

I wish that was how it was used, however my own experience (and that of parents I speak to) is that the firehose is determined by the algorithm, not the individual which subsequently drives the habits and interests.

For example, my son will want to look up how to do something in Minecraft. Ace, he's using the resources available to him to research and learn how to do something.

Then he's effectively spammed with highly addictive content (relating to Minecraft), with sound effects, music, editing visual effects and voice over from some "creator" whose only goal is to monetise.

Now he sits watching endless (if I don't stop him) clips, and if I ask him what he's watched, he doesn't remember (and he's also highly irritated that I've stopped him consuming).

This stuff is, at least, just as addictive to a young mind as pleasure drugs, and worse, it's available without any barriers and pushed towards the consumer at great speed and volume.

At least with TV, someone somewhere made a decision about what to air. With the current technology, anyone chooses what they publish and the algorithm chooses what you'll consume (based on what will increase your addiction).

The time limits take pretty good care of that, here. I really don't mind them watching braindead stuff for a limited time. Especially so if that's the price for watching something interesting too.

It's also slightly curated, with age limits on videos provided by YouTube, but I mostly care about that to weed out shock videos and extreme violence.

Agree all kids are different. Our daughter is less affected than our son.

But in both cases, they are happier and more creative (as kids should be) when we remove devices altogether.

I’m not sure what curation you’re talking about. YouTube kids is just ads, for example. It’s not violent, but it’s also not … not ads.

YT Kids (the app at least) has a setting where only videos and channels are allowed that are whitelisted by the parent. We used to limit it to stuff from BBC Cbeebies, Numberblocks & Alphablocks, Sesame Street, Disney, and similar stuff in their own language and in English.

I think nowadays we just limit it to the age restrictions (<=4, 5-8, 9-12), so they don't see stuff that gives them nightmares. Everything else can be taken care of with the time limit.

It honestly sounds like you're circling around the idea that the internet just isn't a good place for children (or adults for that matter). Wouldn't an attempt to ban a specific problem of the internet just be dodging the real problem?

If the internet as we've made it over the last 20 years is a breeding ground for addictive content and advertising, why not just stop using it? If we're going to ban anything because of this problem it should be situations that effectively force us to use the internet or be left behind.

Kids shouldn't have to be online for school. Adults shouldn't have to be online to get a job. Banning those kinds of situations would at least leave the door open for individuals to decide if using the internet regularly is really worth it to them.

Because it isn’t the internet, it’s ad driven content services.

I used to be concerned about my kid's video game use a bit, though more Fortnite and Rocket League than Roblox, as we blocked the latter due to the abundance of user-created content and chatting with strangers (because why on earth would you have your 12 year old on the Internet with strangers? We blocked chat other than "quickchats" in the others.). Then he hit high school, and at this point, I miss the days where that was his computer use I was concerned with.

To be fair though, playing sports had a lot to do with breaking the video game cycle -- when you have 12 hour days between school and 2 sports teams, suddenly worrying about your "dailies" and other hooks these games have just stops being an option.

I spent my youth with my nose buried in books, and for a couple years it had become a problem. My parents would force me to stop reading books and spend some time talking to them, looking outside, doing anything as a kid. I would read a book at any chance I could get, I'd even sneak them into bed and use a dim flashlight to read, anything to get me out of where I was at that time. At the time I hated my parents and everything they did. In hindsight I was in a complicated phase of my life (for reasons besides this post) and I needed the kick to go out and get out of my own head. Should we ban books so kids can't get addicted? Parenting is hard.

With a book at least a parent knows what their child is consuming. I wouldn't mind if my child was consuming books (as long he stayed healthy with activity and social connection).

With the firehose of social media its whatever the providers algorithm decides it wants the user to consume.

My 11 year old son is limited to 30 mins of YouTube per day, 15 mins of Snapchat. TikTok is banned. Overall phone usage is limited to 3 hours per day, and PS5 is the same. And it's still not enough for him.

And yes, he uses these in conflict with the provider terms.

Without any exposure he lacks any commonality with his peers (who, as far as I can tell, have unfettered access to devices, apps and video games) however he will forego food, water, bathroom, hygiene if not forcibly limited.

And he agrees with statements like "I just can't stop myself" and "I feel like I've got to have it" and "I don't know what to do unless I have it". Which makes me very sad. When he goes to play with friends, he makes a bee line for those same devices and apps that he's limited from accessing at home.

He cannot self-limit his consumption and billion dollar companies are using his mind as a disposable fuel to make money for no better purpose than profit. I honestly don't know how the folk at those firms live with themselves (other than luxuriously).

I honestly wish these platforms did not exist at all, for the arguments they cause.

It's not only that. Books are not ads. There can be bad books filled with stupid ideas and garbage stories but the purpose of literature is not to advertise something.

Modern social media is just advertisement in disguise of entertainment. I am an adult, hopefully a rational one, and my buying habits (and desires!) have been heavily influenced by the social media, I can only imagine what it does to children's minds.

The social aspect of social media, ironically, is often barely present. Services like Youtube are parasocial at best.

That’s almost 7 hours or screen time, nearly a full time job. Does he go to school as well?

Social media is correlated with many negative issues. Like depression, suicide, etc. meanwhile playing sports is correlated with many positive outcomes.

It’ll take some time to prove causation. But I think we have enough evidence to know that curtailing social media will improve lives.

Cue the usual correlation and causation caveat. Also, playing sports is not all sunshine and roses. If you're an overweight kid, which is even more common these days, it's hard and can cause feelings of shame and inadequacy.

Being addicted to playing computer games and using social media are not the same as being obsessed with playing sports and exercising.

One has tangible benefits to your health, social life, boosts your confidence, gets you out in the fresh air and sun, and forms healthy lifestyle habits.

The other has you sitting staring at a screen for (sometimes as many as 10) hours per day, pretending to be an Italian plumber, or giving themselves depression from looking at fake lives on Instagram.

Computer games certainly slot into this. Soccer and basketball do not.

Biologically there’s just no comparison to the dopamine bath your brain takes when using social media or video games.

>It seems like a pattern, grown ups just don’t like the way youngsters are spending their time.

Thing is, people of all ages are using social media. Grownups recognize it as dangerous to themselves too.

I really think this is less of a rock and roll situation and more of a tobacco situation.

This is quantifiably not the same thing. If an entire generation was stressed out and killing themselves over Soccer we’d surely be doing something about it.

> That's why I think, don't bother trying to regulate social media. Just ban it for under 18s when they're most vulnerable.

> I don't relish this solution either. When I was 13, I was on forums making online friends. I loved it. But it was clearly different back then, before smartphones, before content-creators, when the internet was mostly nerds.

The main difference between forums like that (which still exist) and social media is monetization, which leads to optimizing for "engagement" and incentivizing addictive behavior.

So IMO the solution would be to ban corporate/for-profit social media.

I don't think you'd even have to ban for-profits. If someone wants to run a niche forum and try to make a small business around it there's nothing wrong with that.

https://diysolarforum.com comes to mind, Will runs a related informational site and YouTube channel. I don't know if he technically made a business for it but he could have, and if it continued to grow there could be good reason to hire a few employees.

I think the real difference between social media and forums is the algorithmic feed. We could likely codify a ban on algorithmic feeds of user generated content. That would go a long way and would be much easier to spell out in a law than a targeted ban on advertising, social media use by age, or certain types of business models.

That's not the only difference. Social media has a strong effect on the way kids talk to each other, treat each other, and most importantly: Bully each other. It's a vector for allowing petty childhood dramas go viral in dangerous ways that cause serious mental health issues up to and including suicide.

Advertising to kids is obviously a big part of the problem. But it's not the ONLY problem with social media – it's just one piece of a much bigger puzzle.

This fits with my theory that "woke" is actually "change I'm too old to deal with" and "hate speech" is "speech I hate". The worst part of either is having to fucking hear about the complaints about either, which I actually hear about, rather than the things they complain about, which may as well not exist for how much I see them.

Social media is a punishment for those to stupid to avoid it.

> It's not clear how you could effectively regulate this stuff - especially in our highly polarised political climate. The right will immediately target "wokeness", and the left will immediately target "hate speech". And the kids will be totally forgotten about.

A good start would be to ban feeds based on algorithms; instead your feed would be a chronological list of new posts from channels you've chosen to follow.

> A good start would be to ban feeds based on algorithms; instead your feed would be a chronological list of new posts from channels you've chosen to follow.

The replacement you've described for an algorithm is still an algorithm.

Stop being pedantic; you know what I mean.

So ban HN?

HN has no concept of following certain individuals, and is a niche website aimed at a particular audience. I mean in things like Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.

When I was 14, I too was chatting with strangers on the Internet, be it on IRC or AIM, or sites like Livejournal or independent forums.

That said, I've been contending with this situation having a 14 year old of my own at this point. The reality is, at that time, swatting was not a thing. Pictures on the Internet were like, something a minority of people had, because it involved taking a film picture and scanning it in (assuming you had access to a scanner). Video? Forget it.

Honestly I wouldn't have blamed my own parents for being more restrictive with me had they known how to, but the tech went entirely over their head. Seeing how far it's come in that time and just how much more damage can be VERY rapidly done, particularly with the more developed blackmail scams, or just kids making poor choices that result in some very real criminal charges, have me pretty okay with taking a much heavier hand on the matter than was taken with myself.

I suppose I'd liken it to "free range children" in farmland, vs. free range children in a gangland ghetto. While we can certainly lament the lack of a good environment for kids to run free, the alternative is an unsafe environment. Perhaps platforms can be made to bring back a corralled in space that would be sensible, but allowing them loose on what the modern Internet has turned into would be frankly irresponsible.

That all said, there's only so much we can do at the legislative level. Kids are already not allowed on many sites they get onto (now, just the same as back then). What I find most necessary as a parent is the ability to lock down devices so that I can allow my child access to specific resources without being forced into allowing access to others. iPhones are frankly AWFUL at this -- I'm happy to report my experience on Android has been much smoother, and Windows is quite a bit better than my initial expectations as well (though router-level configuration is handy for home devices as well). IF we must use the heavy hand of government to address the matter, requiring the availability of usable, effective parental control measures that engage in app-level (if not hardware level in the case of cameras) whitelisting would be where I think we'd have the most bang for our buck without too much in the way of collateral damage. Better still would be some market pressure, but unfortunately, most parents I talk to seem to just feel entirely helpless and don't even know what to look for, and just assume there's no choice but to let their kids get raised by the Internet.

If you're new to raising kids in this era, do yourself and your kid a favor -- familiarize yourself with tools available, and demand platforms that give you the ability to effectively administrate your devices.

Honestly I'm definitely within the "New Internet" age range (currently a teen), and my talking to internet strangers experience when I was 14 was not too different from what you've described- being effectively anonymous, sharing a photo/video of yourself would've been a pretty major faux pas, only difference being I wound up on Discord rather than forums/IRC.

Its anecdotal for sure (maybe I just got lucky? maybe I had more sense than the average kid? maybe the shift is US/Western Nation localised?), but I don't think the internet has gotten worse everywhere at once.

How to implement such a ban without opening the door for user tracking?

We can't track kids so instead we'll track every single internet user so that we can stop tracking kids. Nevermind you'll need to remember this is a kid in the browser session to show them the nerfed / non-tracking version anyway.

100% agree. Social media is as addictive as drugs but even more damaging with life long effects on that person.

A big part of going through teenage years is the development of one's own personality and finding YOUR OWN identity. Figuring out who you are and who you want to be, building real relationships with real people to learn about social contracts, trust, bonds, friendships, mistakes, and most importantly it is a key part of building a healthy amount of confidence and self-love which are important character traits that everyone should establish to some level in order to weather through tough times in life later on.

Social media makes all of the above impossible. Even worse, it makes this important development phase very toxic. It teaches teenagers and children the opposite of friendships, the algorithm is constantly looking to outrage children and to rattle their feelings in order to drive engagement. The algorithm is tuned to feed into young people's insecurities in order to drive clicks on ads and increase their ad revenue. This is why so many kids suffer from mental health issues, are immensely under confident, unhappy, feel alone and worthless.

It's shameful that policy makers are not acting fast enough. There is already a huge generation of damaged children who just turned or are turning into adults now and we already see the effects of that.

>but even more damaging with life long effects on that person.

I suspect heroin has led to considerably more felony convictions and fatal overdoses than any social media platform.

heroin would definitely lead social media in the "fatal overdoses" department...unless you categorize suicide as "fatal overdose".

About twice as many people die from drug overdoses as from suicide in the US. Not all of those ODs are heroin, but surely not all suicides are caused by social media.

> I suspect heroin has led

Well, what else are you gonna do when all your "friends" are more beautiful than you, than shoot up and forget about life for a while?

> just ban it

I don't disagree, but how do you propose we do that exactly?

Everyone must do an ID check when signing up to social media. If you are not an adult yet then your account will be locked until you become 18. This would also eliminate all the bots and fake people or double/triple anonymous accounts which are trying to game the algorithm to push for certain toxic agendas. Nobody should be anonymous on social media. Social media is to connect with humans, not with trolls or bots, so being anonymous is an oxymoron to being social in the sense of social media. Whistleblowers, which often get mentioned, don't need to be anonymous on social media. We have journalists and whistleblowers can already anonymously reach out to journalists and leak information so that journalists can publicise it under the protections of their profession.

  > Everyone must do an ID check when signing up to social media. If you are not an adult yet then your account will be locked until you become 18.

what is the definition of social media? does that include messaging apps?

  > This would also eliminate all the bots and fake people or double/triple anonymous accounts which are trying to game the algorithm to push for certain toxic agendas.

any places (countries) where this was instituted and worked out as you describe?

  > Whistleblowers, which often get mentioned, don't need to be anonymous on social media.

they dont?

  > We have journalists and whistleblowers can already anonymously reach out to journalists and leak information so that journalists can publicise it under the protections of their profession.

and what if you don't have access to a journalist....?

Well, at least this does the work of doxxing people we don't like for us.

that's my problem with social media bans for children. how the fuck do we do it?

"just id check" -- hey, what if i don't want my social media tied to my personal account for any reason? let's say i'm an atheist and my family is quite religious? or what if i'm gay and i don't want to show it to the world while expressing myself through social media?

> "just id check" -- hey, what if i don't want my social media tied to my personal account

Your ID (driving license or whatever) is not your personal account.

> let's say i'm an atheist and my family is quite religious

Ok, so what? LOL people have different beliefs, only because you are an atheist you don't have to troll your family members on social media. You wouldn't do that in real life with your family so why do you feel the need on social media? I don't understand the issue which you're trying to raise here. Just be an atheist, so what. Social media is not subdivided into religious cults so you can mingle happily amongst other people from other beliefs, no issue there!

> or what if i'm gay and i don't want to show it to the world while expressing myself through social media

Then don't? Again, I don't get the issue here. If you don't want to express your gayness publicly then just don't do it. It's your choice. Nobody forces you to upload your dirty videos with your partner to social media.

Social media is a platform for real people to connect, not for anonymous trolls to shout some bullshit into the void. If you don't like that then perhaps social media as it was originally intended is not a platform for you. It seems you want it to be something that it isn't. We have 4chan, Reddit and other things where you can probably much better exhibit these desires.

  > what is the definition of social media? does that include messaging apps?

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter & Co

It's not messaging apps, or HN or a pet forum. Yes some of the other apps/sites have similarities, but those similarities are not greater than the similarities between the Nike or Victoria Secret online shopping page for Brazilian bikinis and an adult site. If we can distinguish the latter than it's also possible for us to find an easy way to distinguish the former.

  > any places (countries) where this was instituted and worked out as you describe?

Any places (countries) where this was instituted and it didn't work out as I described?

  > they don't?

No, they don't. Whistleblowing has nothing to do with social media. You can already anonymously contact a journalist and leak information in a secure way, in fact using social media for whistleblowing would already be the dumbest way of doing it amongst all other ways of how someone could do it.

  > and what if you don't have access to a journalist....?

If you don't have access to a telephone or the internet and email then I guess you board the next ship which will fly to Earth and visit an internet cafe.

Young people should be driven to school and from school from parents. They should not have phones and all their movement should be controlled by parents all the time. Even better, they should be homeschool, so that you can exclude influence of peers in school.

I am sure they will turn out just fine after being released from constant surveillance and prison only after 18.

The main goal of raising children, after keeping them alive, is teaching them the skills they need to survive and (hopefully) thrive in their world. These skills have changed over time and vary based on environment, society.

Today, that means teaching kids how to cope with social media. It is in their world. It’s not going away. As a parent, I can understand the temptation to just want to ban it. I wish I could ban a lot of things I would rather my kids not have to deal with. But parenting just doesn’t work like that. They need to learn to deal with it, and it’s my job to try my best to help them do that.

Today that means teaching them how to cope with [nicotine | gambling | hand guns | fentanyl]. It is in their world. It is not going away. As a parent, I can understand the temptation to just want to ban it. I wish I could ban a lot of things I would rather my kids not have to deal with. But parenting just doesn’t work like that. They need to learn to deal with it, and it’s my job to try my best to help them do that.

Actually, we protect children from lots of things that they will need to confront as adults. My baby will need to learn how to safely navigate stairs eventually, but for now, the staircase is gated so she doesn't hurt herself before she's ready.

And as this comment explains[1], social media is hurting our children in real and profound ways.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35447798

> Today that means teaching them how to cope with [nicotine | gambling | hand guns | fentanyl]. It is in their world. It is not going away. As a parent, I can understand the temptation to just want to ban it. I wish I could ban a lot of things I would rather my kids not have to deal with. But parenting just doesn’t work like that. They need to learn to deal with it, and it’s my job to try my best to help them do that.

Well yes. Once your child turns 21, they’ll have legal access to all of these things. A parent is still obligated to educate their children to make good choices, regardless of what the legal age is.

> Actually, we protect children from lots of things that they will need to confront as adults. My baby will need to learn how to safely navigate stairs eventually, but for now, the staircase is gated so she doesn't hurt herself before she's ready.

Fortunately, the government does not ban the usage of stairs by minors in an attempt to “protect the children”.

Highly underrated opinion here!

Banning multi-billion dollar companies in a society dealing with regulatory capture, or help teach kids to deal with the world around them. One sure seems more easily attained than the other.

Banning it is a way of teaching them how to deal with it.

Snakes are part of the world, but you teach your kids that you don't let snakes into your house because they are toxic. You can apply the same analogy to social media.

You make social media inaccessible to your kids until they have developed into a confident young adult at which point they will have acquired the mental strength to navigate through the toxicity of social media themselves with a strong self identity which will make them immune to a lot of the online grift and attempts to feed off their insecurities.

That doesn't require a ban, it requires parents to be actively involved in their children's lives and to make the decision for how they want to raise their own kids.

Let's make Heroin, prostitution and assault rifles legal to under age kids, because after all if you are a good parent then you can be sure that your child will certainly not get access to those things via their friends or other avenues. Why have rules, laws or bans (just a form of law) for anything anywhere. All evil things in this world are just a matter of parenting. Gosh, you're so fecking clever how come nobody else ever was able to enlighten us before. We could have zero issues in the world this way.

Indeed, social interaction is, generally, addictive. But if you ban the kids from HN they aren't apt to give up social interaction cold turkey, they'll go interact with the neighbours instead to get their fix.

Is that actually a win? Emotionally, I can see why some hang onto the idea of talking face to face just like in the good old days, but at the same time you are trading for greatly reduced access to the world's most interesting people. The whole reason we're here and not talking to our neighbours is because we can seek out people of significance, not just who happens to move in next door.

I don't think HN falls into the category of social media in the sense that it is debated by lawmakers at the moment. Not every online community is social media just like not every shopping site that has girls posing in tight bikinis (Victoria Secret, Nike, etc.) is an adult site.

If HN isn't social media, I'm not sure what is. Perhaps you are referring to plain old media where there is no meaningful social interaction, rather one-way consumption of produced content?

Indeed, lawmakers do seem concerned about new entrants to the media space, like producers on TikTok, no doubt because they struggle to exert the same kind of control over the content like they used to be able to when there were only a small handful of regulated media companies. That's well beyond the topic of social media taking place here, though.

   > If HN isn't social media, I'm not sure what is.

You don't see significant measurable difference between Insta/TikTok and HN? Ouch!

In fact, I see a considerable difference. Instagram and TikTok, have no meaningful social component. It's just content producers producing content for consumption by consumers. They are effectively cable TV providers, only deviating from traditional cable TV in that there is no hard limit on the number of channels.

HN is social media. Active, two way conversation which emulates going outside to talk to your neighbour, except with people around the globe, is what attracts people here. The users here aren't here just to watch TV like they are on Instagram and TikTok.

Social interaction is addictive in the way food is addictive. A lot of the draw of social media/games/drugs is an attempt to fill the hole left by a lack of social interaction. Indeed, take away social media and people will hang out more often. I would argue that's exactly what we want as a society. Less social interaction mediated by big corporations is a win.

Just like the popular saying, "it's the economy, stupid!", when it comes to kids and social media we might as well say "it's the parents, stupid!"

> Like so many parents these days, my wife and I have ceded

So the parents are to blame here. "Ceded" to what exactly? To your kids unsupervised wishes? Most of the inadequate and harmful use of these addictive social networks is done at home, so, it's your jurisdiction, not the government's. Teach your kid how to use tech early on. Even if imperfect, put digital guard-rails and time limits and be on top of it at all times with discernment, commentary and openness.

> L.G.B.T.Q. child living in a household with disapproving parents might have fewer resources to find community and support because their parents would be able to look into their messages

Good argument. But, again, the disapproving parents are to blame here, not the kids. Educate the parents while giving children more channels and more people to talk to, so they don't need to go into dark digital alleys seeking relief.

You can blame polarization, the Chinese (TikTok), advertising, the Government or free-speech, but raising kids is a full-time job parents, not Uncle Sam, are supposed to do.

I'm learning it the hard way -- it's not easy being a parent of two, but the rewards are good when you are loving, persistent and listen to their needs. Trust me, if you put in the time and effort, your kids will beat addictive algorithms any time of day.

Show me a reliable way to set a time limit on social media, and I’ll concede the point.

You can set a time limit on particular paths to reach social media, but as I saw with trying to block youtube, it is effectively impossible without blocking it at router level for the whole household. Kids are so creative, and nothing is more fun than subverting digital locks.

I do agree to the point that talking and listening to your kid is key. Kids that don’t feel comfortable showing vulnerability to their parents are at risk in the digital world.

How old are your kids?

I've had no trouble just controlling the terminals. The tablets and laptop that can be used by them are stored in shared spaces. If they want to access them, they'll have to get past us.

But I can see that get more difficult when they need to have both more access and more privacy. I hope to have taught them enough by then that tripping up won't be a big issue. It's not far into the future, but I think they'll be fine.

I agree, but I also wonder how feasible that is for a lot of parents.

The older I get, the more astounded I am at the fact that nobody in my family has social media brain rot. Or political brainworms. My grandparent's generation is mostly dead, sadly, but there are 3 living generations ranging in age from 0 to 78 and dozens of people and we're all fine. This is regardless of educational level (ranging from HS dropouts to MDs), political affiliation (everything from center Dem to anarchists, socialists, and even some Christian conservatism for spice), or religion. If I had to pinpoint the difference, it's that we were all raised by and surrounded by adults that understood the interaction between technology and daily life. But most people becoming parents don't have that, the Internet just crashed into their life and upended a lot of what they thought they knew without leaving anything in its place.

I also question that it's solely based on the parents because the older I get (I'm in my mid 30s), the more I think access to non-parental adults with this ability is the key to our relative stability, particularly tech-knowledgable adults that openly disagree with each other. Kids do stupid shit, especially when they're adolescents. They will disobey their parents/ignore their advice because it's part of growing up and figuring out their own values and boundaries, but when an entire group of adults who don't agree on politics, religion, or worldview all agree that something is a bad idea, then that idea becomes a cultural taboo. I don't think my paternal cousins and I have ever voted for the same things and I'm the weirdo gay heretic socialist to their traditional Catholic, but both I and my cousins are going to agree on the important of things like basic op-sec and when to tell people what online. So even if their kids rebel hard, the rebellious adults are going to reaffirm 'don't put your hand on the stove/do things like delete metadata from photos'.

I don't know if there's enough cultural knowledge communicated to the parents for them to parent effectively even though I agree that's their job.

My idealistic, engineer self tells me that the State should reward parents that go through parenting training, workshops and "performance" reviews.

This is something that is normally done for social-serviced families already, but too late, when they are deep in the road to failure and despair. Such wide-spread public parenting-aid would be expensive, have flaws, generate political push-backs and there are not enough studies on effectiveness yet. OTOH, social/public financial support for families, including money stipends, tax breaks and plenty of paid vacation days help reduce parenting stress, which in turn tend to have a positive effect with kids at home -- something some countries are significantly better at than others.

The importance of parenting is underestimated in society.

I would love to see more such efforts, but I don't know if Americans could do that at this point. The question of who could make such a curriculum would immediately be hijacked by political and other interests. Our government doesn't (broadly speaking) have the knowledge necessary. The most powerful group that does have that knowledge is Big Tech itself, and handing people like Zuckerberg the ability to choose how to teach the parents just seems like a bad idea.

The 30% increase in teen suicide rates starting in 2011 shows that the parents need help.

If it's clear that social media is terrible for children (and I'd argue it's terrible for everyone), why can't we leave it up to parents to stop their kids from using it?

I'm not sure how realistic it would be to enforce ban on social media under a certain age. The ban would have to be enforced on social media companies but they'd likely only be held to doing a best effort solution. They already set a minimum age at 13 for creating a social media account but that hasn't stopped kids from getting into TikTok, Instagram, etc

I mean that’s the status quo already. Parents who understand the inherent risks, probably already stop their children from using it.

Legislation would benefit children who were born to parents who do not understand the risks.

If parents are okay with their kids using social media, I'm not sure that I should have the right to tell them otherwise.

How would a ban even work though, without ultimately depending on parent intervention? Companies could throw up a "are you over 18?" banner, but those don't work. They could go full KYC and require users to provide government issued IDs, but that feels like a drastic step away from privacy and data security and could still be dodged when a kid grabs a picture of their parent's ID.

If some parents are okay with their kids smoking and drinking and peddling drugs, are you still not sure that you (or rather, "the state") should have the right to tell them otherwise?

I'm not saying there's a clear path forward. And to be honest, I'm not even really advocating for a government ban. The cynic in me says, "Hey if I raise my kid better, it's just an opportunity for them to be better prepared than someone else's kid." (i.e. Less competition)

But the optimist in me says once a kid grows up, there's a ton of "past wrongs" that they can choose to right, given they have the proper self awareness.

There's also a chance I'm just flat-out wrong, but... I'm betting my child's future that I'm not.

I think social media are too useful to ban, even to children.

And while it is not clear how we are going to regulate them, or more generally deal with the negative effects, it is something we must figure out, a blanket ban is not the solution. You have to realize that even sites like Stack Overflow can be considered social media.

They certainly have addiction potential, maybe not dissimilar to drugs, but guess what, even some hard drugs like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine are not banned, they are regulated, because they have some use in medicine. Sugar is addictive too, and as of now, a serious health problem, but no one talks about banning sugar of course, instead calling for regulation.

It's interesting how all the overblown controversy around violent video games decades ago can now actually be applied to social media in its current state. It was like some of the pundits were correct in forecasting the potential behavioral motivators from massively popular media, but were incorrect in the degree of harm. Video games with blood and gore were not able to cause upticks in violence, but being exposed to millions of people in one network can cause kids to show up with bruises to school.

I think it's the human factor. People aren't going to empathize with an avatar or 3D model the same way they do with a real person filming themselves with a smartphone. It makes me think that the real bar for extreme content in video games is having a politically opinionated theme, not just subtext (which no AAA studio would ever risk producing) with sufficient realism.

If I were to ban social media for my children, I would ban specific sites like Facebook, Instagram, etc. I wouldn't ban niche forums.

Bring back the time-honored practice of teens lying about their age. If nothing else, it would force kids who circumvent the ban to pretend to be adults. Plus, "you type like a child" could become a legitimate reason to get annoying adults who type immaturely in trouble.

Dopamine addiction is a myth.

The dragnet spying that forms the core of social networks' business model ought simply be illegal. It's disgusting and tremendously dangerous. That'd help a lot—by destroying some of the companies, and removing many of their worst incentives.

Also, they shouldn't be able to launder responsibility for editorial choices by saying "an algorithm did it!" and hiding behind laws meant to protect email and IM providers and web hosting companies and ISPs and such.

I expect that combo'd fix a lot of problems.

> I just don't see any alternatives to banning social media, perhaps even up to the age of 18. The dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs and social media is just as addictive.

This is greatly exaggerated, if not outright false:

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2023/04/addicted-to-social...

Which is not to say social media isn't harmful, but let's refrain from imputing pseudoscientific explanations for the dangers.

I don’t know what “dopaminergic” is but processed sugar is like a drug to kids (pre-teen kids). And you would never be able to ban that (for pre-teens).

tasty, while I agree with your sentiment, I disagree with your characterization because it falls into a trap of giving legitimacy to groups that have no legitimacy or credibility.

Whenever you start talking about banning a specific group, your efforts are wasted because who decides the group. Someone at the top, and can they always be trusted to decide that? No.

If you need to talk about banning something outright, that's a far more approachable argument that doesn't add to the noise.

Also, it is known that the brain continues to develop after 18, there isn't some magic switch at 18 that says these people aren't still vulnerable.

Addiction and exploitation continue to happen regularly after that age, just look at gaming in general how many people are now in their 40s and spend more than 10 hours a week on gaming?

Some people are more equipped than others to deal with addiction than others, what that difference is between success outcomes and others should be promoted and studied.

Any system that can amplify or de-amplify a message runs into these problems. Its not just social media. Its algorithms too, and they are designed to exploit you and your psychology to get what they want which is profit or control in one way or another. That's what the humans who built these algorithms optimized for.

Banning everyone from social media is not possible, especially not based on whatever pseudoscience you're pretending to know about this week.

> These bills will likely face considerable constitutional challenges. Previous attempts to block minors from accessing Web sites via broad legislation, including the Child Online Protection Act, from 1998, have been struck down on First Amendment grounds.

You might get farther instead of banning children from social media, ban all ads to children on social media.

Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,000 fine.

If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site.

have fun uploading a copy of your passport every time you visit a new domain then.

Which will be very expensive for startups as well and ensure those with market dominance stay that way no matter how bad they get. This isn't sounding good.

Only startups that are based on advertising.

Or any startup that allows user-posted content, which could be an ad.

Hacker News would be gone. Or at least not allow open submissions and comments because they’d all have to be individually checked to confirm they aren’t ads.

I already plug my own birthday into all my kids accounts when I create them. A lot of sites wont even let you create an account for somebody less than 13

because of COPPA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...

> If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site.

Nah. The marginal cost of a cigarette is tiny compared to the lifetime revenue of an addict. The marginal cost of a some GBs is even lower than that of a cigarette, and the lifetime revenue of a social media addict is enormous.

I wonder what the lifetime value of the "average" HN participant is, if HN leads to YC backing just one company per year that eventually become a unicorn.

The majority of Instagram posts are ads, whether actual advertisements or not.

This would be almost impossible to enforce.

Actually, it would be quite simple.

- Record a social media site advertising to a user who is under XX years old. Complain to a portal.

- Fine $1000 x complaint received each month.

- Continue to do so until the service's accounts satisfy some sort of auditing standard.

Come on, we do this for all kinds of things like credit card information and other data certifications.

> Fine $1000 x complaint received each month.

Ahh yes, fine companies $1000 for each complaint received. Surely nothing will go wrong and nobody would ever think to do this to sink their competitors? Surely the government overhead of enforcing this would be cheap?

It’s so weird to read all of these HN comments that can’t take basic realities of the internet and regulation into account.

Suggesting automatic $1000 fines to companies for “complaints received” is the most obviously exploitable system, which is bizarre to see on a site that usually brainstorms ways something can be exploited.

Websites like Hacker News would disappear because they can’t risk $1000 every time someone complains or if someone posts something that might be an ad. Reddit gone, forums gone, Discord gone.

The internet would become a walled garden of pre-approved corporate content, viewable only after you verify your ID and add a credit card to confirm that you're an adult.

Or you prepare before launch to a provided set of standards. PCI hasn't sunk innovation, for example.

You're targeting this at the wrong end. Fine the advertisers for buying the ad space, not the platforms for showing it. Make disclosure of recipients of advertising expenditure mandatory for tax purposes. Hiding advertising expenditure? Fraud. Failure to disclose? Well, you don't get tax write-offs on undisclosed expenses, so nobody would do that.

This would require Nato++ cooperation between many, many agencies - and, at every stage. Unworkable.

Nah, let the tech companies figure it out while getting sued. It's a pressure on the market that gets the incentives aligned. Edge cases are a good thing here, as it leads to a desired outcome that age verification and permissioning are legit because you can be sued to pieces.

Can't run your social media without advertising or ad-funded content? Mission accomplished.

Hrm. I'm not a big fan of this proposal, but I think that implementation would be technically interesting.

Say we create a "this is a child" header, which would be sent with all HTTP requests and would mandate that the user not be tracked or advertised to. Great solution, except that everybody would immediately switch the header on because everybody hates ads. In effect, everybody wants to be a child.

So now online services fight back and say "okay, well, TikTok is only for adults anyway, you must be 18 to use it, so if this header is present, you can't use TikTok." So adults turn the header back off, and kids go back to lying about being 18.

Except for this to have teeth, we have to say that "a user's promise that they are an adult is insufficient to avoid the fine." So now we waltz into the realm of porn sites in the 1990s or Truth Social today: enter a valid credit card number to prove that you are an adult, or maybe take a photo of yourself holding your driver's license and submit it to TikTok for approval. Ick.

Okay, so let's go further. Let's say that there's a Government Identity office that, when you turn 18, grants you an Adult Citizen ID# security key that lets you verify your identity digitally. That has the upside of solving a bunch of identity problems. You could imagine using it for voting, banking, signing contracts digitally, proving eligibility to work and citizenship. But also lets you verify to websites that you're an adult. Downside: easier than ever for governments and everybody else to reliably track you and cross-reference you between databases. Less great.

But also, I'm not going to choose to "prove I'm an adult" to most of the Internet, just the sites I want to use. Proving I'm an adult is the same as telling them exactly who I am. Ain't no way I want to do that. Ads on random websites are dead. Google's dead overnight unless they require that I log in just to use it (which presumably they would, and I don't care for that at all). Now using the Internet in incognito mode becomes practically impossible.

YouTube has a lot of product placement. Is Mark Rober going to get fined if I show my kids his videos? On the other hand, Ryan and Blippi become illegal. Actually, I'm suddenly 100% on board with this.

The key can attest "the identity associated with this key is over 18" without leaking the identity

Why would the government do that, though?

we're so far in imaginary territory that the government doing something competently is hardly an objection.

It's the competence I'm afraid of! If they did it competently, they would make sure they had absolute surveillance of every american's internet history.

> Let's say that there's a Government Identity office that, when you turn 18, grants you an Adult Citizen ID# security key that lets you verify your identity digitally.

There's really no reason a non-SSN identification number couldn't be used for this. If SSNs weren't sensitive, you could just have a government endpoint that takes an SSN tells you whether the holder is over 18 (or "no, or the SSN is not valid).

The only challenge is knowing whether the number belongs the the person sitting in front of the computer. There's no way to stop a kid from using their parent's number. Which is sort of the whole problem with SSNs in the first place: their value largely comes from the fact that they're secret-ish. In effect, they're passwords.

There's also nothing stopping the service from remembering this hypothetical SSN equivalent (or a fingerprint of it), exchanging data with other service providers, and tracking you that way.

There are certainly cryptographic primitives that can be used to solve the privacy concerns but I have approximately zero confidence that they would even be considered for use by the current technically illiterate batch of legislators.

Maybe, if we're being idealistic, it needn't be particularly powerful. We could just say that every authority would get their own permutation of the ID, a hash of the real ID and the authority's ID or some such, just to make it fairly difficult for two companies to see if their respective IDs are identical. Not perfect, but simple and makes it harder to exploit.

> I'm not going to choose to "prove I'm an adult" to most of the Internet, just the sites I want to use.

Except for purchases and other business or government type interactions I flat out refuse to do this. I simply do not use web sites or services that require a real name. I only rarely use ones that require an email.

Yes, this means I don't use most commercial services and major websites. I honestly think I'm better off for it. But it's also a line in the sand and I feel much better for observing it.

HN doesn't require an email to sign up. If it did, I almost certainly would never have created an account here.

Right, but that's the problem with the "no advertising to kids" thing. It means that advertising probably can't be used on any site that doesn't require logins, and that means that most of the commercial sites that don't require logging in will go out of business overnight.

Surely you could have a trusted age verifier (perhaps a non-profit open source platform) that has the legal responsibility to verify age (via credit-card or photo or gov id or some other way). Then you can have something like an oauth flow, except the only piece of identity it exchanges is the is18? boolean field.

One has to realise that for social media their networks effects are both their biggest strengths and their biggest weaknesses. Unlike for things like gaming or porn where there is a relatively large problem (i.e. 20%) if you manage to block only 80% of illegitimate access, for social media if suddenly 80% of the network disappears, than the incentive for the remaining 20% to keep coming drastically decreases.

Eh, honestly, just go all the way and ban advertising altogether (I would be so happy if this happened, even though it obviously never will). Pretty willing to tank my karma to say this, I don't care, I think advertising is one of the biggest psychological pollutants in modern society and any possible benefit (??) is vastly outweighed by the cognitive waste incurred by all who are subjected to it.

I wholeheartedly agree with you here. It’s sad that I haven’t found a way to explain this view to others without sounding like a raving lunatic - which also speaks volumes about the state of the tracking/advertising industry.

Pihole via DoH plus uBlock has changed the internet so much for me, I literally can’t stand using other people’s devices. Let’s not even talk about watching TV, going to a sports bar is downright shocking.

My impression (after suggesting it elsewhere) is that a lot of HN generally agrees with banning adds.

(Except the ones who work for advertising brokers masquerading as technology companies of course)

I ran a similar thought experiment with a collegue the other day. We talked about how the world might change if internet ads were made illegal overnight. A lot of tech companies would lose value and I suspect a significant portion of the economy would become less productive, but I don't think it wouod be catastrophic for society. In fact, I think we'd maybe all slow down, not purchase as much andaybe even desire less.

As you said, it will never happen, but I too would be pleased if it did.

Many industries would become more productive.

Consider this: useful websited that don't cover half your phone screen with ads. Productive!

We'd most likely have to pay for it some other way. But I think it'd be worth it.

We're stuck in a local minimum of ad-financing.

How would you define advertising? If there were no advertisements how would people know about products? They would have to read discussions and recommendations but how would those discussions and recommendations not be considered advertisements?

I don't think that's difficult. If no one is being paid for posting it, it's not an advertisement.

Advertisements do not have to be paid

> How would you define advertising?

Showing unprompted information about a service/product. Not much thought went in to this definition, be charitable.

> If there were no advertisements how would people know about products?

There is word of mouth, reviews, catalogs...

> They would have to read discussions and recommendations but how would those discussions and recommendations not be considered advertisements?

It is not that complicated. If somebody is getting paid to recommend or participate in a discussion on a certain service/product then that is an advertisement.

You could say no unsolicited advertising. If you go looking for a list of cars it's fine to see a list of cars.

> If there were no advertisements how would people know about products?

Wouldn't it be terrible, won't someone think of the products? :'(

If they have a need, they can search for them.

Oh, yeah how would we possibly survive without advertisements to tell us what to buy?

I've never seen a single advertisement for any amateur radio equipment in my life, yet I have spent $thousands on gear, electronics components, kits etc. for this hobby, over the past year. Not a single advertisement was necessary for me to know what's out there. I know of vendors of certain equipment and browse their website. I talk with people I know. I browse forums, engage in social networks, watch videos, etc. ... at no time was paid advertising necessary (in fact, I consider it useless as I purchase products based on their verifiable merits, not how often I see them thrown at me by a marketing team).

This same experience applies to literally anything I purchase. I've never once bought a computer component (or been even remotely inclined to purchase one) based on an ad. Nor a vehicle, article of clothing, toothbrush, pair of shoes, yardwork tool, battery, food item or grocery, etc. etc... shall I go on? I aggressively block ads, mute devices that are playing them (if I cannot block/skip them), look away from them, and generally have a well-practiced skill of averting my conscious awareness away from any form of advertising.

Personal experience with products it not an advertisement unless the person is receiving compensation to provide that review/post/recommendation. It's quite easy to define, and also why the Federal Trade Commission in the US requires "influencers" to disclose that they are being compensated for their endorsements/reviews: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/disclosures-...

Banning ads, or at least most of them (maybe allow for some designated ads-only places) will probably be a net positive for most businesses as well by removing the rat race on ad spending.

> I think advertising is one of the biggest psychological pollutants in modern society and any possible benefit (??) is vastly outweighed by the cognitive waste incurred by all who are subjected to it.

I'm pretty sure ads paid for the vast majority of useful websites that have ever existed, including sites like youtube which just wouldn't exist without them.

I tend to think a vast proportion of the freely available information on the web would not have existed without ads and that information was worth the trade off of ads.

Nobody has ever come up with a funding model for websites that actually works better than ads.

If something can't exist in a usable non-destructive form then it simply shouldn't exist. "oh we'll never have routine international flight if we price in all externalities" yeah that kinda fucking sucks oh well RIP vacations to europe.

Same deal here basically. "without brain-melting ads that warp our deepest psychic desires into weapons against us we'd never have wikipedia" idk if that's true, doesn't feel true to me, if so though then RIP wikipedia sorry. This shit sucks, if we can't make it not suck we should make it not be.

This is exactly why ad funded businesses should be banned: it's an anticompetitive business practice that hugely distorts markets. It makes it impossible to even charge at cost for a service because your competition is permanently dumping all the way to zero (or even paying the customer) using money from their advertising business.

Separately, it incentivizes creating noise. All of the talk about the web becoming poisoned by AI isn't fundamentally about AI; it's about affiliate marketing that allows people to make money on something none of their "customers" would otherwise pay for. Creating content with zero or negative value becomes a viable business, and this drowns out the useful information. Ban affiliate programs and there's no reward for creating this noise anymore. Search engines become more useful. The cost to run them goes down because there's less noise to index and try to filter.

Slave plantations also lead to the construction and donation of a lot of public buildings in the UK. At the time these would have been a major improvement in the lives of those who benefited from them. However, it's not a strong argument for continuing the practice.

I'd honestly rather get rid of advertising. The industry has shown itself far too happy to promote addiction to increase revenue. The fact that some "good" tools have been funded by it

Psychological manipulation in general should be much more regulated than it is. Tobacco, gambling, and advertising are the first that come to mind but the food industry is often just as bad, if not worse.

Yes, who needs an economy.

> ban advertising altogether

Not going to happen in the U.S. What is possible though, is banning billboards. See Maine, Vermont, Hawaii, and Alaska. Billboards are visual pollution, and blanket bans (as opposed to content bans) are constitutional.

A start would be ban ads that target children, base the rules off the banning of cigarette ads targeted at children. Much easier to implement, I would think.

While I'd like this, the YouTube 'made for kids' debacle shows that neither legislators nor platform owners can be trusted to implement this in a sane fashion.

> If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site.

Absolutely not. Where do you think 18 year old users will come from? They will come from 17 year old users who turn 18. Therefore, social media sites will still have an incentive to corral kids onto the platform. Because they will one day turn 18 (or 16, or whatever the legislated age cutoff is) and become a source of revenue. Moreover, social media sites want network effects and want to be trendy among young people, even if these things don't directly lead to revenue.

From my experience it took very active moderation to even poorly enforce COPA style rules and that was with a small user base, not the mega-userbases of today's social media. Kids just sign up anyway and then the moderators wait for them to slip up and still are just making an educated guess.

The only way to make it more effective I feel is ID verification but then you are looking at collecting IDs from kids and that is a total non-starter in my opinion, not to mention they don't usually have a verifiable ID yet.

I don't have the solution, but if we look at other age prohibited activities they are usually restricted up until the age that you are considered an adult and as such ID is more reasonable to ask for.

> Kids just sign up anyway and then the moderators wait for them to slip up and still are just making an educated guess.

I’m baffled by all of these HN posts from people who seemingly forgot what being a kid is like. Kids are experts at circumventing the rules.

All of these suggestions about fining companies any time a kid manages to use the website are DOA. Kids will use the internet and steal their parents accounts, IDs, and credit cards. The harder you lock it down, the more terrible the internet is going to become for anyone trying to use it.

Meanwhile, every social website will just pick up and relocate to a country with sane laws overnight.

i mean really.. the site is called "Hacker News" and breaking established rules and restrictions is kind of the point.

The government or a bank or some other private or public trustworthy institution could be a limited identity provider which could authenticate that this guy is not really a kid.

The trustworthy part is going to be difficult though. It works in Europe for adults, but US folks seem to be allergic to the idea.

Sweet. New Social Engineering vector just dropped.

You would need an ID intermediate I agree, but there is not a single institution I trust to keep children's data safe. It is just better for it not to exist at all.

I am aware of government records of birth and medical records etc, but they exist as a tradeoff of necessity over security. Gaining access to a social network doesn't warrant the same tradeoff in my opinion, and it introduces much extra risk during the handoff and third party processing and storage. We could bikeshed technical solutions, but history tells us tech is fallible, and I think it's just not a road worth going down.

Always baffling to see suggestions like this on HN:

> Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,000 fine.

> If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site.

Do you really want to live in a world where every website forces you to log in and verify your state-issued ID?

I think some people see the words “social media” and assume it only applies to sites they don’t use, so they don’t care how unreasonable the demands are.

Yet everything from HN to Reddit to YouTube is a social media platform. Do you really want to go through the process of ID verification for every single site you sign up for? Put everything behind a paywall so the website can confirm you’re an adult?

It’s weird to see how quickly HN likes to jump to extreme government regulation of online spaces these days.

I'm so tired of this argument. HN and Reddit are not social media. Is your real name Pragmatic Pulp? Do you post pictures/videos of yourself here, or update us about your family? I could go on but I hope you get it.

"Social Media" is a really specific term and it doesnt mean any random forum.

>Is your real name Pragmatic Pulp? Do you post pictures/videos of yourself here, or update us about your family? I could go on but I hope you get it.

At least on wikipedia, the definition for "social media" doesn't include real names, or posting stuff about your life specifically.

>Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.[1][2] While challenges to the definition of social media arise[3][4] due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features:[2]

>1. Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.[2][5]

>2. User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions—is the lifeblood of social media.[2][5]

>3. Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.[2][6]

>4. Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.[2][6]

both, sure, are social media. people on hn, for instance, use their real names, put their emails in their bios, link to their website or linkedin, etc.

not everyone stays pseudonymous.

Everything you just said is grossly and obviously wrong.

> I'm so tired of this argument. HN and Reddit are not social media.

Reddit is very much a "social media". So is HN.

Removing photo posting or allowing people to use pseudonyms doesn't exempt a site from being social media.

If someone doesn't post photos to Facebook, does that make it not a social media for them?

If Facebook decided to allow pseudonyms, would it not be social media?

I don't go to HN or Reddit and get anxiety about all my friends posting about their awesome lives. I go for information only.

Forums, imageboards, and psuedonymous or anonymous places are not the same as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc

>If Facebook decided to allow pseudonyms, would it not be social media?

You can name your account anything on Instragram or TikTok, but even so most people will connect it to their real identity, add all their IRL friends, etc. Not the case on HN Reddit or any other forum

This sounds a lot like cope: let's ban stuff I don't like and keep what I do.

Addiction and status anxiety are arguably the worst things about social media, and they definitely exist here on HN.

Demonetize children has the making of a pretty good slogan.

There are billions of dollars waiting to shred any lawmaker to pieces for uttering this phrase off record and tens of billions when on record. Good phrase though.

No they won't. They'll keep the kids on as a loss leader. So much value add in indirect ways. Put up with a few years of not advertising to them so you have a user base later on. Keep the parents on-site under the delusion they are "spying" on their kid.

One way they might do so is to require government ID, like other countries do. If we want accountability then perhaps every account should be tied to a government ID.

I don't think that banning ads would make much difference.

TikTok doesn't even have that many ads.

And weirdly - TikTok ads are generally decent - they are short, to the point, kind of authentic, not creepy. It's actually something they've done well.

That's about as likely to happen as banning sugary cereal

The problem is that ads and content are blurred today. I'd say something approaching 50% of "content" is actually some sort of advertisement. It would be pretty much impossible to root advertisements out of user generated content. At least ads placed by the website are clearly labeled (well they're supposed to be by law at least).

> How you feel about all this will likely come down to whether you believe that social-media platforms are addictive products—like cigarettes—marketed to kids or that they are vital and intractable parts of the national conversation.

No that doesn't affect how I feel it about it at all.

I raised two daughters whose lives overlapped with the existence of social media, but who were well into their teens before everyone and their dog started using it. When they were young we asked our family to abstain from uploading pictures of them to the Internet because we wanted them to decide how much online presence they wanted for themselves when they were old enough.

I do sympathize with parents today, who have to deal with the fact that "all the other kids" are on SM and even some misguided teachers will undoubtedly ask that certain assignments be completed that require the use of SM.

But I still think this is 100% a matter for private households. Despite the fact that I would feel for my children if we subjected them to the "FOMO" of not being on SM, and despite the fact that I'm sure they'd find a way to get around our decrees if they really wanted to, it's just not the government (or anyone else's) place to parent my children for me and so people can (and should) do what they think is best for themselves and their families but can also fuck right the hell off if they want to impose any sort of parental decision on me with respects to media consumption or use of technology.

Just for clarity, do you extend this to the government's ban on cigarettes being sold to minors? I.e., if a parent thought cigarette smoking was an acceptable risk for their children, should those children should be allowed to smoke? Or are some risks unacceptable irrespective of the parents assessment?

If you do think some things are off the table regardless of the parent's opinion, where is that line drawn? (again, I'm not judging, just trying to understand your point better)

> I.e., if a parent thought cigarette smoking was an acceptable risk for their children, should those children should be allowed to smoke?

I think it's pretty common for parents to give their kids alcohol before they're 18/19/21. And many kids in my high school did smoke. Where/how they got the cigarettes is unknown, but it's not like they were rounded up and jailed for the act of smoking while underage.

Or are you referring to punishing the parents?

> Or are you referring to punishing the parents?

Generally these kinds of laws go after adults who sell, or otherwise enable access, to drugs, or pornography, or violent films, etc., to children.

In my jurisdiction, it's a crime for a store to sell cigarettes to children under 19. And failure of parents to take basic steps to prevent their younger kids (up to 14) from getting their hands on them, is considered child abuse/neglect, much like if you allowed a toddler to drink poison.

I'm not referring to punishment at all. I'm trying to understand the OP's point in terms of the roles of parents/governments in regards to making decisions that impact children.

For context my default position on all issues stems from my personal world view that the only justifiable role of government is to protect the rights of its citizens.

With respects to cigarettes, I am open to being persuaded by the fact that an enormous amount of empirical data underscores the risk to an individual's health posed by the consumption of cigarettes and, therefore, it can be argued that a parent allowing their children to smoke could potentially amount to child endangerment or abuse, depending on the context. That said, I remember my parents caught me smoking and had me smoke an entire pack to induce illness so that I would not want to smoke again. And it worked. So this is a topic more complicated than it first appears surface-level.

With respects to social media, if we were to apply the same standard as we do with cigarettes and physical child endangerment then we are opening ourselves to the possibility that information and tools of communication can be "harmful" in and of themselves. As the article points out, this puts freedom of speech directly under attack. Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right and therefore it is part of the government's very mandate and "raison d'etre" to protect and defend it. Moral busy bodies and their moral panics be damned, and I say that even though I despise social media and wish it didn't exist. But just because I don't like something doesn't mean that I think it should be illegal.

>> That said, I remember my parents caught me smoking and had me smoke an entire pack to induce illness so that I would not want to smoke again. And it worked. So this is a topic more complicated than it first appears surface-level.

This is child abuse, to be totally clear. I'm really sorry you were put through that.

Thanks for replying. This seems like a pretty reasonable position.

I'm assuming the "role of government is to protect the rights of its citizens" would extend to the rights of children as well as parents? Like you, I also don't believe people need to be protected from information (except in cases of extreme asymmetries of risk, e.g., national security). However, I think an important nuance is to distinguish between information and particularly nefarious methods of disseminating/collecting information.

As a potentially poorly thought-out example, the government protects our rights to self-defense. However, this right should not be conflated with assuming we have the right to any mechanism of self-defense. There are certain mechanisms of self-defense that the government puts limits on. E.g., I do not have an unchecked right to protect myself with a machine-gun or a nuclear arsenal. So while I agree with your fundamental principle, it still remains unclear to me where the limits of regulations/rights stand.

>the fact that an enormous amount of empirical data underscores the risk to an individual's health posed by the consumption of cigarettes and, therefore, it can be argued that a parent allowing their children to smoke could potentially amount to child endangerment or abuse

I think this is the exact point the article was poking at: to some, social media is viewed as such a risk as to be tantamount to being abusive. It sounds like you are at least acknowledging that as a potential valid perspective, even if you disagree about the risk assessment. As a corollary, though, I'm not sure there is the same preponderance of evidence of real or imminent danger in social media as in the cigarette example.

> an enormous amount of empirical data underscores the risk to an individual's health posed by the consumption of cigarettes and, therefore, it can be argued that a parent allowing their children to smoke could potentially amount to child endangerment or abuse, depending on the context.

1. Would you agree that reasonable people exist who, right or wrong, believe that the psychological toll of SM on children, while not in the same universe as the physical toll of cigarettes, still manages to cross the line of "this is sufficiently harmful that the government must make parenting decisions"?

2. Are you open to the possibility that, in a hypothetical future with sufficient empirical data, those beliefs might be shown to be accurate?

I don't have children / a horse in this race, I'm more exploring your position about the role of government.

1. I don't care what people believe. Human history is full of people who moved to restrict the rights of others because of their beliefs. Beliefs are irrelevant to me.

2. I'm open to the possibility that data could show this, but any proposed legislation would have to be weighed against fundamental human rights. There are a lot of "risky" activities that people, including children, can enter into and we don't legislate against that because people have the right (legally and morally IMO) to commit suicide by any means of their choosing.

Point taken on the fact that beliefs are subservient to data. But society is built on at least some shared beliefs. For example, based on your responses you may have some belief that there are certain inalienable rights endowed by nature/God/whatever. That's a shared belief that isn't necessarily rooted in data. We can't just hand-wave away the idea that some beliefs are necessary for society to function. We can, however, debate which beliefs need to be shared for society to function in a particular way.

> For example, based on your responses you may have some belief that there are certain inalienable rights endowed by nature/God/whatever.

I don't want to get into a philosophical debate here, but you can absolutely demonstrate that there are inalienable rights. I'm an atheist, I don't believe in any diety, but rights derive directly from your nature as a human being. That nature being what your requirements for survival are.

As a human you have the capacity to reason and this is your primary tool for survival. That's not a belief, that's an observable/demonstrable fact. As humans we can't fly, we can't run fast, we aren't particularly strong, we don't have venom ... but we can think rationally.

We also have material requirements. We must breathe, we must sleep, we must protect our body from the elements, we have temperature requirements, we are susceptible to viruses, we require nourishment etc.

The combination of our ability to reason with our material requirements for survival mean that in order to survive as a human being you need to think and you need to be able to act. I would argue that anyone that disputes those facts, or believes otherwise, is subscribing to a belief system not grounded in reality and reason.

Your rights, as a human being, are the direct corollary of those two facts of nature. The ability to think is a requirement of your survival and that is why you have the right to freedom of expression and freedom of conscience. Your material requirements for survival are the root from which your rights to acquire and own property, to associate and to travel derive.

Within a political context, these become moral sanctions on certain actions. But the "natural rights" theorists will point out that these are all things that are fundamental requirements for your survival even in an isolated context. You can't wish or "believe" these facts away.

Natural rights do not exist outside of the belief in a social contract. That social contract is also a fundamental part of human survival. They are an extension of human reason and do not exist a priori. History is rife with examples of how natural rights is a belief that can be eroded, unlike true natural laws. Besides that, human have the capacity for reason, but this should not be confused with saying humans are rational. That means we have irrational beliefs that can contribute to survival but do not, in fact, reflect reality. That in turn means "fitness for survival" is not a rational basis for determining facts.

> intractable parts of the national conversation

Lol. The "national conversation" you experience in a typical social media thread is a lot of name calling and implying that your political opponents are fascists, pedophiles, or both. SnR is extremely low even for minor, local political issues.

Political discussion on social media is a pure entertainment product.

There is a real public health issue here. Teen mental health really has fallen off a cliff in the last 10 years, in every measure available. Self-reported rates of depression and anxiety disorders have more than doubled. Suicides of 10-14 year olds have more than doubled. Suicides among 14-19 year olds have gone up ~50%. Hospital admissions for non-fatal self harm in girls 10-14 have ~tripled. It's not just an increase in diagnosis. [1]

The bulk of the evidence points to smartphones and social media as the primary cause. Specifically, the combination of smartphones video/image based social media causes kids to spend way less social time in person, and to make way more unfavorable social comparisons. Heavy social media use is unambiguously correlated with depression and anxiety. And the studies on causation all show that social media causes mental health issues, not the other way around [2]

Between 2003 and 2019 (pre-covid) the amount of time teens spend in person with friends dropped on average from ~144 minutes per day to ~41 minutes per day. How could that not have major health effects? [3]. The only plausible explanation for that drop at that time is smartphones.

There are major freedom of speech issues with this sort of regulation. And there are major technical and policy complications to actually implementing a ban. But the evidence is that social media is a public health crisis comparable to opioids. There is a real tradeoff that needs to be made between unlimited access to digital media and public health.

Lots of people on HN have a strong reaction against any attempt to regulate the internet. And there have been generations of moral panics about new technologies. But the available evidence show that this time is actually different, and we do need to have a real conversation about whether the health effects on teens are worth it.

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...

[2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

[3] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report, Figure 4

Worth calling out here: that "nearly double" rate is specifically for the 10-14 age range; the next group up is up 30–50%.

I say that not to minimize at all... if anything I'm more shocked by this steep rise in younger children.

Good point, updated my comment to make age/gender brackets clearer

> Lots of people on HN have a strong reaction against any attempt to regulate the internet, from generations of moral panics about new things.

No. That is absolutely not why and betrays precisely the lack of understanding about these things that causes such a response to begin with. Any time you find yourself dismissing widely held concerns you should take a step back and reevaluate if you haven't missed something. Perhaps your life experiences or priorities are different than these people who you encountered who had a "strong reaction"?

At least for myself, the primary reasons for such concerns are the frequency with which new regulations have historically resulted in dysfunction and abuse, proved entirely ineffective at solving the stated problem, or both.

> There are major freedom of speech issues, and there are lots of other technical and policy complications

Right here you acknowledge something which should be cause for very serious concern.

Also I think I'd object to your framing of "a public health crisis comparable to opioids". Much of that appears to be attributable to the side effects of the "war on drugs". At absolute minimum the vast majority of overdoses are clearly due to unreliable product quality which is simply not an issue for things purchased legally.

So really I'd like to avoid a second "war on drugs" type scenario that seeks to solve a social ill via government intervention, ultimately fails and makes the problem far worse in the process, creates various bureaucratic machinations that are incentivized to ensure future funding for themselves rather than outcomes that are actually beneficial to the general public, and erodes civil liberties in the process.

I didn't dismiss concerns about freedom of speech. I explicitly acknowledged them in paragraph 4. My point is that there is a tradeoff here, and reasonable people can disagree.

That's reasonable a reasonable complaint about how I talked about moral panics. Updated the wording to not say that's the reason for HN's strong reaction. Though I really do think that cultural history is a major factor.

> Also I think I'd object to your framing of "a public health crisis comparable to opioids". Much of that appears to be attributable to the side effects of the "war on drugs". At absolute minimum the vast majority of overdoses are clearly due to unreliable product quality which is simply not an issue for things purchased legally.

I really don't think this is true. The government didn't cause a generation of people to become addicted to Oxytocin. You can argue about the best way to help, and lots of municipalities are trying harm reduction programs, but I don't think you can pin people ODing on fentanyl on the government.

Smoking regulations worked. CFC regulations worked. Automobile safety regulations worked. Sanitary standard regulation worked. Mandatory vaccine campaigns worked. Food and drug safety regulations worked. The clean air act and clean water act mostly worked. Government intervention often goes wrong, but it also often leads to huge increases in well-being. Particularly for addictive things presented to minors.

There's one single problem. The addictive thing here is a dual use good. Most kids also use social media for keeping up with their classes and stuff. At this point you can miss an exam if you don't check your social media regularly. I don't know how do you go back from this point where social media is an integral part of our lives.

> Most kids also use social media for keeping up with their classes and stuff. At this point you can miss an exam if you don't check your social media regularly.

This was sure as shit not the case when I was at school, and is an abject failure of the school itself if that is true.

It’s not remotely a problem that needs to be accounted for - trivial solutions exist, ranging from putting information like the date and time of exams on a web page, or just giving them out in class and expecting people to be organised enough to show up, or fail - as usual, a “technology” problem can be solved by looking at how a process worked 70 years ago, where, presumably, people could show up for exams without needing a goddamn algorithmic feed to tell them about it.

Many schools in the UK have specialist apps for this, tied in to the school's data management infrastructure. It definitely is not the case that people require social media accounts to keep up with class timetables, homework schedules or school notices.

When did the right for a child to use a social media application become a thing?

> make way more unfavorable social comparisons

I wonder if this is a huge part of it.

Instead of only having to measure up to your local friend group, who are more likely than not to be close to you in living standards and upbringing, you have to measure up to people all around the world - and most of what’s posted on social media is carefully framed and selected, making things seem better than they are; you can’t even blame them for this as people who post are incentivise to do so to increase their chances to get noticed.

One could argue that traditional mass media has already made that a thing. But I feel traditional celebrities have an air of alien-ness to them, they are like Greek gods on Olympus, such that people are less likely to compare themselves to them or at least not do so as seriously.

Social media celebrities on the other hand often present themselves as the guy/gal next door. Someone you feel you can be friends with. The fact that they might even directly reply to you via social media further reinforces that perception. All this ratchet up the pressure to measure up and when you fail to, you feel bad.

As a parent, this matters more to me than the ads do. Vulnerable teenagers wrestle with their self identity, and cope by doomscrolling their peer’s highlight reels on social media. Even if a kid isn’t shown ads, there’s nothing to disincentivize such unhealthy behavior.

> Self-reported rates of depression and anxiety disorders have more than doubled

I wouldn't take this as seriously as you do. Self reporting this doesn't mean a whole lot, especially in a culture (among teens) where it's common, and a source of clout even, to assign labels like "trauma" "depression" and "disorder" to things that are not that.

> "The case for banning children from social media"

As a parent, I was looking forward to an article discussing reasons for banning children from social media.

What are the philosophical implications? Mental health? Psychosocial?

Rather, it seems the article begged that particular question and then discussed legal obstacles and consequences instead.

Not the journalist's fault. Misleading headlines are the curse of our age.

I still would love to read an in-depth exploration of the topic of banning children from social media.

FWIW, there is value to this discussion reaching mainstream as limited as it is.

Fair point

An improved title:

Utah passes laws restricting children's access to social media: The implications and civil liberties concerns

People keep suggesting stuff like that as though it were somehow easy to know who was a child.

It isn't. Not if you want to serve the whole world, or even very much of the world. And not if you don't want to create a panopticon where everything anybody does is associated with everything else that person does, and nothing is ever, ever anonymous.

There are a bunch of sleazy "age verification" companies out there claiming they can do it. They can't, but they've spent years lobbying governments all over the world to get it required.

All "ban children from X" ideas are non-starters because the damage from creating the ability to know who was a child would greatly exceed any possible benefit. Assuming there was any benefit to begin with.

>And not if you don't want to create a panopticon where everything anybody does is associated with everything else that person does, and nothing is ever, ever anonymous.

I have a strong feeling this will be the future of internet.

A company needs to make a reasonable effort. If something is as popular as TikTok, and people know there are lots of children on the app, then the company is liable.

GNU Taler figured out a way to verify age without revealing your identity.

> A company needs to make a reasonable effort.

It's not "reasonable" to demand any effort that won't be effective. Period.

> GNU Taler figured out a way to verify age without revealing your identity.

Well, no. GNU Taler proposed a very complicated system on top of some zero knowledge concepts that have been around since the late 1990s, embedded in the rest of Taler's incredibly complicated overall system. That sort of gross impracticality, generally in the service of authoritarian goals that aren't good ideas to begin with, is how Taler rolls, and why Taler has even less chance of ever getting anywhere than cryptocurrency in general.

But it's true that zero knowledge systems can in theory solve most of the problem: whoever's certifying age doesn't know what the user is doing with the credential, and the relying party doesn't know who the user is.

... and that still has no practical impact at all. You can do all kinds of things in zero knowledge, if you have the infrastructure for it. But to make AV ubiquitous, you first have to make that infrastructure ubiquitous.

In practice, that will probably only happen if every government in the world starts issuing zero-knowledge credentials; only governments have the reach and the generally accepted standing to do that kind of thing. But governments in general have never shown any sign of having any enthusiasm for zero knowledge, in part because they tend to like having somebody's identity attached to everything that happens. At most you might be able to drag governments, kicking and screaming, into adopting systems where only they can invade your privacy. But probably not, because they don't trust one another.

There is, of course, a possibility of a private system developing, or of governments getting off their butts. There's even a possibility of Taler's grandiose dreams of massively complicated interacting systems of public and private institutions coming to pass. However, we don't have any of those now, and even if there were the will to make them work, it'd take decades to make them ubiquitous enough.

So people who want to advocate for age verification need to first go off and do about 50 years of work to build that infrastructure, before they can start talking about requiring AV for anything.

In reality, of course, the intent of all real AV advocates is to totally ignore that possibility and rely on "trust me" assurances from AV vendors.

What is social media? My daughters use messaging more than they use TikTok, IG, or BeReal. They send 100s of messages to each other in a span of 5 mins.

However, even within their close circle of friends, I see the same social issues (peer pressure, need for validation, etc.).

I do wonder sometimes how much of the supposed ills of social media are just social media making things that were already happening much more visible.

I and many others were bullied relentlessly at school through regular non technological means, and I'm sure it had a pretty negative psychological impact. I'm not really convinced it would be any worse if I was more active on Instagram/TikTok/whatever.

The engagement optimizing feeds amplifly some of the ills that are otherwise manageable in "private" groups of friends reading chronological communication. That's what really needs to go.

So, my anecdotal parental evidence suggests otherwise.

My oldest was upset that her friend didn’t acknowledge a message she had sent and apparently changed the topic. Apparently this friend always does that. My daughter was complaining that it is unlikely that this person didn’t see the message that my daughter had sent.

It is a complex world. I just live in it. I will never understand the subtle nuanced rules. I’ve made my peace with it. I just listen.

Well, yeah, that is just part of growing up... that kind of angst has existed since (at least) the invention of language and gossip.

As you ask, how many ills is it actually directly causing versus merely exposing.

As op asks, what even is social media? Does email count? An email based mailing list? A federated group chat protocol like Matrix?

Speaking of federated protocols. Email, Matrix, Activity Pub, many others are federated and self hostable. How is legislation supposed to account for that without causing more problems than it seeks to solve?

On that note, are the downstream negative effects of such legislation even being considered? If one of the outcomes is "provide copy of your passport to register a user account" would that not be a situation rife for abuse, both by governments and corporations alike? Is this a "cure" for which the combined side effects are worse than the original problem?

Did the bullying stop or slow down when you got home? Did you have to check online every 5 minutes to see what pictures of you were posted? Was embarrassing content being spread around to people you had never even interacted with on a regular basis.

Did Photoshopped images of you hanging from a ceiling fan with a Nike Swoosh and a caption saying "Just Do it" get 10,000 likes?

IMO bullying today is orders of magnitude worse than it was ~15 years ago.

> Did the bullying stop or slow down when you got home? Did you have to check online every 5 minutes to see what pictures of you were posted? Was embarrassing content being spread around to people you had never even interacted with on a regular basis.

Yes, it happened over AIM and before that it happened via phone calls between friends. I'm too young to have gone to school before phones.

> Did Photoshopped images of you hanging from a ceiling fan with a Nike Swoosh and a caption saying "Just Do it" get 10,000 likes?

People did horrible pranks like this all the time when I was in school. They didn't get likes, they were just passed out between periods in school or taped up on windows. Photoshop was released in 1990, I can guarantee you that 15 years ago kids were Photoshopping people too.

> Yes, it happened over AIM and before that it happened via phone calls between friends. I'm too young to have gone to school before phones.

You are comparing 2 people recounting to each other what happened to someobody posting a video of what happened so that it is immediately visible to the whole school...

> People did horrible pranks like this all the time when I was in school. They didn't get likes, they were just passed out between periods in school or taped up on windows. Photoshop was released in 1990, I can guarantee you that 15 years ago kids were Photoshopping people too.

GP wasn't saying that 15 years ago kids did not have access to photoshop but that the bullying is worse today than 15 years ago. The fact that photoshop existed 15 years ago in no way address that claim.

Hospital admissions for self harm among girls ages 10-14 have almost tripled since 2010. Suicides among 10-14 year olds have doubled. There really is something different happening to teen mental health, it's not just existing problems becoming more visible [1].

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...

Have you considered it might be their life's outlook? What do most of these girls have to look forward to after school? A well paying job? Most of them will have crap jobs barely scraping by, and most of them know it. A house? Most will pay absurd rates for an apartment and never build equity.

Our school system is pretty trash too, depending on state. I think social media might be a scapegoat, because it's easy to, "just do something," while the real issue goes against the political donor's wishes.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a capitalist, but business have done everything to push down wages and working conditions since Reagan. Would you want to be a kid today with our current outlook?

And then there's the news. Kids don't realize it's mostly fear mongering BS and they believe all the doomsayers' predictions. That's pretty hard for a 14 year old.

Social media probably has something to do with it, but we have to fix all the other stuff too if we want to actually make a difference, rather than just feeling like we made a difference.

Most girls today will make more than any other female generation in history. Your statement would hold true for boys. But the rates of mental illnesses and suicide are growing faster among the former. So it's probably more complicated that economic success.

> Most girls today will make more than any other female generation in history.

Which doesn't matter if actual prices inflated way past that point.

I mentioned more things than just economic success. It's a culmination of multiple things all bearing down on the upcoming generation. To simplify it as "it's social media," is, I believe, dismissive, as if your mind is made up. Trying to remove social media from the equation would probably make it worse by removing supportive groups found there, not to mention when you ban things and people still do it, now they can get a criminal record.

We've been doing this same stuff for decades. Something bad, ban it and throw people in jail for doing it. It doesn't work, it just makes things worse. Why don't we realize this yet? It's been generations.

There could even be a positive correlation there - more career stress, etc.

A new law in the EU will ban showing ads and using personal data for kids. Here in Norway we have had general ban on showing ads to kids for decades, but it was made in the TV age and has not been enforced on social media.

We can't outright ban social media (for a lot of different reasons), but we can regulate away the most harmfull aspects.

One of the fundemental underlying problems is the lack of good privacy laws. As long as companies can gather whatever they want and use it against us to show us personalized ads and posts to hold on to our attention as long as possible, we will not be able to curb the worst aspects of social media.

I don't think that ads are the main problem of social media. It's rather the way they replace personal physical relationships with scrolling.

That is an inherent problem with screens in general, especially mobile ones, as it is such a powerful attention grabing arena.

I'm trying to be pragmatic when I propose to curb the use of algorithm driven feeds and limit businesses to gather massive amounts of highly personal data thats is used to train algorithms to become even more effective attention grabbers.

There has to be limits to what a government can regulate or ban. Being social online should not be banned. Allowing companies to inject themselfs and interfere in our social interactions, gather almost unlimited data and use it to exploit our psychological quirks and weaknesses should be.

EDIT: And I agree that for the user, the ads are not the main problem. However, ads are the main incentive for businesses to do whatever they can to grab your attention, and this is a big problem.

Ads insensitive platforms to design a more and more addictive infinite feed. If they cannot profit from children scrolling endlessly, why would they want to enable children to scroll endlessly? If ads for children on social media are banned (somehow), kids' feeds will probably just become way more boring.

Exactly. If we want to get a grip on the most damaging effects of social media, we have to correctly identify the incentives that has put us in current mess we are in.

Every commercial social media platform that I know of earns money primarily by selling and displaying personalized and targeted ads – so that is where we should start. The 'targeted' part can be addressed by strengthening privacy regulations and enforcing them vigorously, and the 'ads' part can be attenuated by banning ads made for and shown to kids and young people.

I disagree. Just because some group doesn't get fed ads anymore, doesn't magically cause the social media platform to become any less addictive.

Correction: It is illegal to make ads targeted towards children. You can't keep kids from seeing regular "grown up" ads on TV and in public places, but to tailor ads for kids are not OK.

Now I am a bit curious. Does it mean there were no Kindle or Toysrus or similar ads on TV in Norway?

I do not have kids and do not watch much TV, but I have never seen a commercial for Toysrus or any other related type of business. I know that there used to be a loophole where channels from abroad (different jurisdiction) did show commercials for kids, but I'm not sure if this is the case today.

Generally speaking, the law is quite clear: Ads specifically target towards children is illegal. Ads than are meant for grown ups, but is likely to be seen by children also has to adhere to certain limits.

I have to say I'm really happy with these laws. The same goes for the law that prohibits ads for alcohol containing beverages.

A bill just passed in the state of Utah where I live banning children from social media unless they have their parents permission under 18 years of age.

In addition, the parents must be provided with access to all of the children's messages and posts.

This now means that Facebook has to implement some sort of "are you 18" thing. Don't know how they'll implement that, reminds me of a recent law around porn in Alabama. Requiring a driver's license or some such.

It also means Facebook has to implement a back door of sorts for parents to watch their children. As of the parent of a girl who will soon reach social media age, this seems a bit much to me.

But the technical side of my brain screams, how on Earth are they going to implement this and keep spammers from abusing it.

It changes so many things. Child predators pretending to be 14. Indeed, any kind of anonymity has been largely banned because I have to know how old you are to let you on my site.

And it's not just Facebook it's any sort of social media, including our host.

The Utah law is a back-door to Christian/Mormon fundamentalists who want to enforce religious doctrine and parental control over teenagers who are attempting to establish their own identities. This will be disastrous for any teenager in Utah who doesn't meet the local-region-socially-acceptable stereotype of a normal person, such as LGBTQ. All that I can see is even more ex-Mormon teenagers who cut off their parents they day they turn 18 and move to a city somewhere far away from Utah, at the earliest possible financially feasible moment.

Good. You can establish your own “identity” when you’re an adult at 18. I don’t have a religious bone in my body but I wish this law was made effective nationwide.

Thankfully, America is not yet operating in the political reality of The Handmaid's Tale, much as you might wish it to be so.

I feel like that’s a hyperbolic take. Outside forces injecting chaos into the internal workings of a family are about as bad as things can get for a growing child. What’s the problem with deferring sexual issues to adulthood when you’re more mature?

What makes you think that a marriage between two people gives them absolute knowledge how to raise a child in an optimal way?

That’s part of the deal isn’t it. The government can’t decide and mandate what the optimal way to raise a child is outside of certain aspects like schooling, corporal punishment, age of consent etc.

What makes schooling, corporal punishment, age of consent, and - as discussed here - control over online communication acceptable government interventions into an otherwise wise, benevolent and self-sufficient family?

The problem is that those sexual issues arise for the individual almost as soon as they begin to experience puberty. You can’t make teens to ignore their sexuality for 6+ years. It simply will not work, it never has, it never will.

Just go try going back and telling that to yourself as a teenager. Can you imagine?

“Sorry jutrewag I know these are your formative years, but I’m going to need you to put off that formation until an arbitrary date that I and the rest of the adults have decided upon without any input from you or your peers.”

It sounds about as backwards and ridiculous as decreeing puberty blockers until they turn 18 - part of growing up is establishing your own “identity.” The reason that ‘18’ feels like an early candidate for adulthood is because you’ve spent all your time as a teenager up until that point establishing your own “identity” and it’s time for that “identity” to be put to the test in the ‘real world.’

You don’t just become an adult, you arrive there after a long bumpy period of growth, and delaying that growth only serves to delay adulthood. Establishing an identity is essential to that growth. You need to give kids time to figure themselves out. You need to give their bodies and minds time to grow before you call them adults.

In other words you do not ‘choose’ your identity once you become an adult - rather you settle on sexuality after years of experimentation and exploration.

I know you probably aren’t thinking of it that way, but speaking from experience as a former queer teen (lately queer adult) what you are describing is oppression, being denied the opportunity to develop along a ‘normal’ timeline compared to your peers.

I see what you’re saying but there is some merit to kids being influenced to question their identity by outside forces when they probably would never have arrived at that conclusion themselves. You can be peer pressured into trying out a different sexuality- it happens a lot in prison, price of admission for acceptance into a new circle of friends etc.

But questioning your identity is a good thing - of course the broader experiences you’re exposed to the more opportunity you’ll have to question. You might as well keep kids away from the library which - let’s not kid ourselves - is a known conservative position as well. How are you ever going to learn about yourself if you only get to see one thing? The only reason to stop kids from learning about queerness is to constrain them to straightness.

I mean - growing up, when was the first time you had a gay peer? A gay friend? A gay family member? The first time you even saw an out and proud gay person, let alone someone you knew personally? The first time you saw a gay character in media, without it being either queer-coded villainy or a homophobia sob story? Like - obviously, as a kid, I knew that I wanted to have sex with other boys, I’m not an idiot, I can feel my own feelings - I just didn’t see a lot of good examples in my life of how I could do that, and still grow up to live a fully fleshed out adult life. Like I didn’t come out until college, and even then I was real hesitant about it, because I just didn’t know how being gay ‘in the real world’ would work -

And that was bullshit, I should have been out and proud at 11, instead of delaying my sexual and romantic development until my 20s. I had no idea how to date. My peers had had plenty of adolescent fumblings with dating, and I didn’t have a real boyfriend until I was like 27. That’s crazy! Why did I waste all that time?

All that time was wasted because of the double standard: Cishets get to practice cishettery whenever they want - queers are told “no you need to wait until it’s appropriate.” That’s not fair. If we really want to see that change, if we want real equality, we need to push back hard against this kind of oppressive policy, in my experience. You can’t just say “wait til you’re older” and expect things to magically sort themselves out. It’s hurting kids under the guise of helping them. Peer pressure will always exist, prison doesn’t even seem relevant here, but regardless, what will help kids is supporting them, not suppressing them.

I don't necessarily think it's an ethically bad idea, but "banning all children from all social media" is simply impractical for many reasons, including:

- You essentially have to check some sort of ID and ban VPNs, banning online privacy which is BAD

- The smartest kids are way more tech-savvy than the dumbest adults, so you may end up banning adults too, which is BAD

- What will you do to children who get caught? Jail them? Call their parents, teachers, etc. who may not care? Make them take a "social media rehabilitation" classes? Consider that no matter the penalty, many, many kids will try very hard to work around this, and many parents will actively support them.

Something which would actually work is "banning" children like we ban them from seeing Rated R games and movies. Like:

- Banning children from specific social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). This can be done through laws or just activism and lobbying to pressure the sites into banning children themselves

- Encouraging parents to ban children from social media, teaching them how. You cannot call CPS on parents whose children are using social media, unless you think having many, many kids in foster care is a worthy sacrifice

- Creating stronger parental controls (which is also a part of 1 and 2: individual sites can create stronger controls like ID to ban children, and stronger parental controls will help parents)

- Simply discouraging children from using social media, maybe even with incentives

> - Banning children from specific social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). This can be done through laws or just activism and lobbying to pressure the sites into banning children themselves

This is already the case, few will deal with the hurdles of COPPA, so most services require you to be 13 to sign up, and the platform has a general requirement to ban anyone they see that lied about their age.

(I've known two friends that had a Google account at 11/12 and got banned because they said "im 12" in comments; twitter also had a IIRC 2 year period where, if you changed your DOB and it reveals that you signed up when you were <13, your twitter account was suspended, and they only fixed this by requiring you delete tweets made when you were under 13)

This is ignoring the impact of destroying the network effects. Even if 20% of the kids bypass the laws by accessing social media via VPN, that's no problem, because the negative influence comes from the large network and the fact that all their peers were on social media. If 80% of the cool kids aren't on it anymore, there will be no pressure or desire to participate and engage.

GNU Taler figured out a way to verify age without revealing ID.

Few months ago there was some sort of challenge on tiktok, most kids at my local middle school arrived to school with self-inflicted bruises on the face.

With this shit, if you don't do it too you are out of the group and goodbye social life.

Social media are preying on the group-belonging instincts of kids with tremendous damage not only on the kids themselves, but on society as a whole.

However, it's up to parents to deal with it. It's unacceptable that I have to produce my ID on the internet to remedy the damage of other people poor parenting.

I did a stint working on trust & safety tools for a social media startup. What I learned from working with content moderators is that overall, the industry gets by doing the barest of bare minimums, and TikTok is one of the worst offenders

"But the cost!", well, if the business model can't be viable when done safely, then the business model is not viable - we just don't have the externalized costs of harm done visible to help make that call

Be glad no one died, like with the blackout challenge or the cinnamon challenge.

even back in the day there were raw egg or hot chili challenges... being idiots for acceptance is truly embedded in the human mind. But social media and general societal collapse bring it out several orders of magnitude worse.

You would not believe stupid crap and self harm my peers engaged in 25 years ago, before any of us had phones. Self-inflicted bruise or bruises to impress other boys were a thing among some kids.

My concern with child proofing other than I don't think it works is that it starts impacting me directly. No more sign up with email, now I i have to produce credit card or government ID or similar. Which I don't trust sites to protect anyway. Google has been bugging me for two years asking for my birthday on a 20 year old account to comply with laws like this. It can vote, its over 13.

Maybe we could do something radical and empower parents to handle this more effectively by creating more family-friendly policies so parents have the time, energy and mental focus to handle it themselves.

Maybe we could start by finding some effective means for addressing our affordable housing issues.

Last I checked, the US was also the only developed country that lacked a national maternity leave policy. I'm not sure if I really want such, but it suggests there's lots of relatively low-hanging fruit for improving our policies with regards to being family friendly.

As a parent, I say that no amount of parental empowerment can compensate for a culture that seems broadly unaware that there is even a problem.

Sure, better age / times restriction tools (especially ones that unify over all device types) would help. But in the end the kids can just get their own devices and a mobile plan with data and that ends your empowerment unless you want to turn your house into North Korea.

No amount of empowerment will help me as a parent when:

* their friends house has open wifi or even free devices where the parents let them watch/play/consume whatever they want

* when there is free wifi everywhere

* they need WhatsApp or similar to participate in school, clubs and friends groups

* "everyone has it" and not giving them it will make them social pariahs

There used to be strong cultural norms around keeping potentially harmful stuff away from kids going so far that people would not swear around the little ones. Today we have the internet that exposes ALL of that stuff to kids, even including drug analogs like tik tok.

Imagine we are in the 80ies and a coffee shop showed hardcore pornography and gave cocaine to kids on demand. Absurd. They'd been closed down and arrested within the hour.

But today it's supposedly okay but all that has really changed is that they bring their own little screens.

I'm a parent. I don't agree with you.

My sons are now adults but had substantial internet access from a very early age. They got a "safe list" of kid-friendly links plus some local software just for them. They weren't required to stick to those kid-friendly links. It was just to make it easier for them to cope.

One son was so young, he figured out how to roll the ball under the mouse with this thumb because it was too hard to cope with navigation otherwise.

I was fortunate to be able to be a full-time parent. We were a military family, so our social reality was a little different from that of a lot of people.

If your only qualification is you are a parent, I have the same qualification for holding an opinion and we can just agree to disagree here, I guess.

Well, I was also a boy growing up with computers and from that experience I can confidently predict that either you helicoptered him to an unreasonable degree (which is in itself damaging to development) or he saw and probably enjoyed some stuff that you'd find horrifying and that might very well have caused some psychological damage. For my part, I had to deal with porn-induced ED as a young adult which I obviously didn't tell my mum.

You are right, though, that more full-time parenting would lead to better results overall but I don't agree that it's any kind of solution, let alone practical or universal, to the problems posed by technology and social media.

I can confidently predict that either you helicoptered him to an unreasonable degree (which is in itself damaging to development) or he saw and probably enjoyed some stuff that you'd find horrifying and that might very well have caused some psychological damage. For my part, I had to deal with porn-induced ED as a young adult which I obviously didn't tell my mum.

Nope. Neither is true.

Sorry you had a negative experience. You are projecting based on that.

I'm not your mom and I apparently don't handle things the same way most parents handle them.

Well you know regulating kids social media use is not going to make it harder for you.

Controversial but frankly just say no to Drugs campaign of 90s was probably more beneficial until I was old enough to understand the nuance around drug use and could make my own decisions

Or, one could consider the crazy option of letting parents exercise at least some modicum of decision-making on how their children live their lives. I can understand much of the disgust with social media as it is today, but some of these arguments spin off so far into emotional reactionary vitriol that they lose whole forests for meager trees about the larger dangers of laws deciding such minutia for parents.

Try making the decision that your child will not use social media and watch what happens.

Plenty of people do indeed pull it off, and before that heavy handed step, there are others that on a parental level (not by government decree), moderate the effects and use of social media for their children without relying on blanket bans in a society that seems to view even very basic freedoms as ever more maleable things.

The underlying logic of blanket social media bans is awful, and so is the enormous leeway they open for government control of information and expression in so many other ways. This entire proposal is obviously grotesque, that so many people on a site like this don't see that just because they happen to hate Facebook et al in many ways (I myself do too) is absurd.

Am doing it now. Prepare for constant complaints and sob-stories, everyone around you including the school doing their best to undermine you.

Adults aren't included. We prohibit kids from doing many dangerous things, as we should.

We have. So far it has been fine. Mind you it has only been relevant to our introverted sons so far. Might be harder for our daughter in a few years.

It’s essentially manipulation of the dopamine system in the exact same way as casinos except it’s worse because it uses AI to really start personalising what keeps us hooked. Would you let your children become addicted to gambling?

If you don't want your children to become addicted to something, be a good parent and monitor them. It is not the government's or the society's responsibility to babysit your kids.

I don't want my freedoms taken away from me (in this case, freedom to anonymously use social media) just because some people don't have the capability or the motivation to parent their kids properly.

Also, this "what about the children" thing is a very dangerous slippery slope. The same argument is being used by backwards governments around the world to ban anything LGBT related in public.

But society stops minors from doing all sorts of harmful behaviors, like drinking, drugs, gambling, guns etc. I think we should consider limiting the algorithms applied to teenagers at least to being much simpler and maybe not allow personal information to be used. I don't think this is some loss of freedom we need to worry about.

>But society stops minors from doing all sorts of harmful behaviors, like drinking, drugs, gambling, guns etc.

None of which affect my freedoms.

>not allow personal information to be used

I 100% agree with this. If a kid can't consent for anything else, how can they consent for their data being collected and processed?

>I don't think this is some loss of freedom we need to worry about.

You may not worry, but I do. Online anonymity is important for people ruled by shady governments, and there is no guaranteeing your government won't become a shady one in your lifetime. There are multiple examples of this worldwide, both in the past and present.

> It is not the government's or the society's responsibility to babysit your kids

My point is that the government do try to protect children from various harms, why not social media?

The reasoning is simple: If it were the government's responsibility to babysit your kids, it would be acceptable for them to restrict my freedoms in doing so. However, it is neither their, society's nor my responsibility, so my freedoms shouldn't be restricted for that cause. If it doesn't restrict my freedoms, I don't care, government can do whatever parents want, whether it be ban the sale of alcohol to kids, stop them from gambling or whatever.

I understand your reasoning I’d just rather we were more careful about how social media works, especially the use of LLMs integrated into advertising and addiction systems, for example. I think you already seem to think I have a fully formed plan of what the regulations should be, I definitely don’t want infringe free speech but I think teens are especially vulnerable to abuse on these platforms and suicide amongst teenage girls particularly has increased as these systems became more mainstream.

I think there is a balance to be had here but I get that you disagree and are scared of government getting it wrong.

>I understand your reasoning I’d just rather we were more careful about how social media works, especially the use of LLMs integrated into advertising and addiction systems, for example.

I completely agree.

>teens are especially vulnerable to abuse on these platforms

Not only on these platforms, but everywhere else too. What we definitely need is more support programs for these people, and more education for both them, their parents and society in general. Mental health is an issue that still is not being given enough attention to.

> If you don't want your children to become addicted to something, be a good parent and monitor them. It is not the government's or the society's responsibility to babysit your kids.

It's both's responsibility. There's a reason why many countries forbid, for example, television ads that directly target children. As a parent you cannot completely shield what your kids are exposed to, many aspects of life are outside of your control (e.g what types of ads appear on your videos/TV) and that's where it becomes the government's problem.

Again, forbidding TV ads that target children doesn't restrict any of my freedoms, so it is acceptable.

Companies will only get better at creating addictive products for children. This represents an ever-increasing burden for parents.

Also, there are some times when coordination would result in better outcomes than single disorganized actors. I talk to parents who say they WOULD prevent their kids from using social media, but it would have negative social impacts on their kids for them to be the only ones without it.

>Companies will only get better at creating addictive products for children. This represents an ever-increasing burden for parents.

True. Companies who prey upon children and use their lack of experience as a source of income should be punished.

>I talk to parents who say they WOULD prevent their kids from using social media, but it would have negative social impacts on their kids for them to be the only ones without it.

Complete prevention would of course have a negative impact on kids when all their friends are hanging out on social media instead of getting together physically. The "correct parenting" here would be to educate your children about the dangers, always keep communicating with them, limit their endless scrolling, monitor what they share as much as possible, act quick in case of cyber-bullying etc. Social media can be beneficial for children if used correctly, but detrimental to their mental and physical health if left alone to the devices of profit-driven corporations.

The main conflict here is, whether the state should be involved in any of this process. My argument is, as long as it doesn't restrict my personal freedoms, state should do as parents wish because as you said, collective action is more effective than individual action. However, if it would restrict my freedoms in any manner, state must leave it to parents. I shouldn't be punished because some people can't find the time for their kids.

"However, if it would restrict my freedoms in any manner, state must leave it to parents. I shouldn't be punished because some people can't find the time for their kids."

This seems like drawing a very, very firm deontological line in the sand around your freedoms. Are there no conditions in which this would not be the case? You would literally never give up the tiniest amount of freedom to benefit children other than your own, no matter how dramatically?

This is truthfully a very unfamiliar concept to me. Tax-funded programs (fundamentally an elimination of freedom through controlling how one's income is spent) and/or regulations that solve genuine coordination problems - starting with national defense and criminal justice - are fundamental to any civilization run through anything other than pure anarchy.

>This seems like drawing a very, very firm deontological line in the sand around your freedoms. Are there no conditions in which this would not be the case? You would literally never give up the tiniest amount of freedom to benefit children other than your own, no matter how dramatically?

I personally don't want to, because statistically around of the people are below average and I don't want my freedoms restricted because of them.

>Tax-funded programs (fundamentally an elimination of freedom through controlling how one's income is spent)

The taxes I pay benefit me, so it is an acceptable outcome. For example, if I paid for medical care out of my own pocked, I'd have to pay a lot more than any state would, because the state can have a greater control over prices when they are the only paying customer of healthcare.

Back to topic, no way I'm leaving anonymity on the table just because some people can't parent their kids.

> Would you let your children become addicted to gambling?

The problem is worse because it's not up to the parents. Even if the kids opt out, they will now feel excluded because all their peers are on social media, they will still be a victim of the gossip mills and other nastiness present on social media even if they're not directly participating. That's why a blanket-wide ban for under-18s or under-16s is necessary.

I wouldn't go this far but I'd definitely make social media a lot less social/algorithm/attention driven.

If schools are so toxic then maybe we should rethink schools. Either have a true nuke-from-orbit zero tolerance to harrassment or have people who care do homeschooling.

I'd rather not have to provide my ID and verify my identity like on certain crypto exchanges to watch a youtube video or like a friends post on instagram.

I can't see any other implementation of this working, instead we'd have 2 popups now every time we visit a new site. One for cookies, the other to say "yes I'm over 18".

No, instead we could firewall the internet off behind a single-digit number of gatekeepers. Think Google and Facebook, with the engineers to build, execute, and secure a system like this. Think Apple and Amazon, who have credit card data to match a name to a digital identity.

This doesn't mean two popups, this means we forfeit the open and distributed nature of the internet in a final "Think of the children" moment.

The only way to apply this "Think of the children"ism is with internet IDs and regulation only the biggest players could afford to run with. No, thanks. I'd much rather parents be parents and (re)grow the spine to say 'No' to the children they're raising.

If you want to ban your kids from using social media, you don't need to wait for the government to do it for you.

Far more dangerous than social media is this increasingly pervasive attitude that the government is responsible for parenting your kids.

I don't think the government should ban social media, but doing it on an individual level won't work. You either turn your kid into a social pariah for being the only one not on social media, or they will just figure out a way to get into it anyway.

Ok, I'll amend my statement to mention an even more dangerous and increasingly pervasive attitude: the government should parent your kids, so I can parent my kids!

Like I said, the government shouldn't ban social media. I don't want the government parenting my kids or anyone else's. I want parents parenting their own kid.

But the government can certainly make it better by banning things that are universally bad.

I'm quite glad they kids can't legally get cigarettes. Makes my job as a parent a lot easier. Same with alcohol. I wish they wouldn't let them get coffee either.

Yes, you want the government parenting your (and others) kids.

And yet another step when it comes to infantilizing American teenagers. It's bizarre how a country that superficially cares so much about freedom treats people who are almost adults like toddlers, increasingly even when they've turned 18.

>How you feel about all this will likely come down to whether you believe that social-media platforms are addictive products—like cigarettes—

No, the anti-smoking and anti-drinking hysteria is just as bad. I remember Christopher Hitchens like 20 years ago causing a stir in the US when he openly defended teenage drinking, pointing out that these kinds of experiences are perfectly normal and part of social life. If you look at today's teenagers in the US, anti-social, delaying almost any experience teens should make, he was completely right.

Anti-smoking hysteria is bad? Let's be real here. I can agree on drinking, but not smoking.

It seems pretty hysterical that the minimum smoking age is 21 and not 18. Should we just raise the age of adulthood from 18 to 21? We are clearly signaling they are not responsible enough to make some of their own decisions.

This isn't about making choices. Smoking is bad, there is no good outcome from smoking whether you are 8 years old or 80 years old. Age limits, increased taxation are just some ways that our society's way to reduce smoking in general population.

For those discussing what it looks like for a polity to have a widespread ban on types of certain types of advertising, look no further than the great state of Vermont!

We have not had billboards for as long as I've been alive, and it is great, especially when you head over to NY or Massachusetts and see how tawdry all the billboards look.

Read more about the campaign to ban billboards and Ted Riehle here: https://vtdigger.org/2021/07/11/then-again-vermonts-billboar...

Why go with the nuclear option when the crux of the issue lies not in social media itself, but the type of experience it provides?

Just make the experience better for children - chiefly by removing the dark patterns that cause the problem in the first place.

Sure, companies will complain, but they're not entitled to ruining teenage mental health like that.

I think the problem lies in social media itself.

Unless you mean, social media for kids should be sms.

Then how do you explain the fact that the mental health effect appeared years after the introduction of social media?

We had a whole platform(MySpace) come and go without such issues.

Myspace didn't overlap much with smartphones

What follows is that smartphones were the key component necessary for the observed effect. Why not regulate that instead?

We are all children at heart. Ban the rest of us, too.

This whole "social media bad" thing might be a "think of the children," argument the powers that be have been pushing for several years now to further invade our privacy.

We still have the Patriot Act 22 years later. Be very careful what rights you give up.

I am coming to the conclusion that my opinion on this subject is unpopular.

I don't think it's a desirable thing for the government to regulate what type of software or speech happens on the internet, or runs on private silicon. Additionally, I don't like when the government takes on traditionally parental roles. Why are we all cheering on Washington to regulate the internet?

Because we don't want to be responsible for raising our own children. We only want to be responsible for blaming others for ruining our children.

I think it's inherently an undesirable thing to reduce the amount of liberty. I don't think it has anything to do with how anyone raises their children.

There's stunningly little data in the article about why social media is bad for kids. Most of the citations are about why other people _think_ it's bad for kids.

Cf. the recent article posted here[0] regarding the trend of stripping away child autonomy.

[0] Giving kids no autonomy at all has become a parenting norm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35417250

Social Media us not just harmful to kids, but also to adults. Not only is it just as addictive to us, many adults are sucked into all sorts of extremist ideas and conspiracy thinking, which is having a very real effect on our world.

It saddens me that there is no easy alternative to this idea. Social media is how I grew up and how I became a better person. Without social media I wouldn't have been allowed to meet some of the most important people in my life. Without social media I wouldn't have been able to explore or even discover my DID or ADHD. Or even my own identity, which I had to form essentially from scratch due to dissociation.

Most notably, I wouldn't have been able to develop any of the coping mechanisms that kept me from committing suicide during periods of depression. That is, the feeling that people out there care about me and would miss me if I died. The ability to talk to those people every day and feel love for them.

I'm autistic and the internet is the only place I was ever truly able to connect with. Only now that I've started ADHD medication—something I never would have done without the help of social media, since someone had to tell me personally that I might have ADHD—I am finally able to start trying to appreciate the real world.

But... I grew up years ago, and the world is different now. The social media back then is not the social media today. It does not have the same effect on children that it had on me, not even to mention that I'm highly neurodivergent.

Maybe that is what truly saddens me. Can not reproduce.

The only technical way you could accomplish such a ban is to introduce mandatory ID on every website. I'm sure some groups are salivating at the mouth for such legislation.

Although the HN crowd hates it, requiring a World ID would be a technical means to limit minors without sacrificing anyone's privacy, since they won't scan anyone under 18.

https://docs.worldcoin.org/id

Credit card payment is a proxy for adulthood.

If not this, at least find ways to make it easier for parents to moderate their children's usage without peer pressure working against them so aggressively. This was a suggestion in the comments about Utah taking action on this front - lots of parents saying as difficult/unworkable as the general plan might be, it would greatly assist them. "Kid, I know you really want Instagram, but state law says you can't. My hands are tied, sorry!"

We not only need to ban kids from social media because it is effectively creating very short dopamine reward loops that are likely going to make it difficult for them to enact successful long term reward strategies, but we desperately need to figure out a way to make it less tempting to put toddlers in front of a tablet instead of normal human interactions.

I live in a developing nation, and education especially on child rearing is lacking in the extreme. Easily 75 percent of middle class babies, ages 2 and up, are glued to a screen basically at all times in public. Cellphone holders in strollers.

The kid just sits there watching random TikTok videos usually. In these cases, the “attentive” mothers make sure it’s in YouTube kids. But these kids are getting 8 hours a day plus of screen time under age 4.

I’ve seen the first wave of results and it is truly buzzard, 5 year olds that do not act like 5 year old children. They do not interact with other people in any normal manner, jump around with a degree of randomness and apparent purposelessness that is completely uncharacteristic of non neurodivergent children.

This is most definitely creating divergent developmental trajectories. It looks likely to me to create a “lost generation” at a time when humanity can least afford to lose its long term planning capacity. I can only hope the situation is better in other places.

IMHO social media is the new DDT^Pb when it comes to children under 7, and seems to have very bad effects in adolescents as well.

Because the upper class, for the most part have some inkling about developmental psychology and child rearing, and the lowest of the lower class cannot afford phones for babies, I’m concerned that this is going to create a much more deeply stratified society.

Have young kids, they won’t get a phone, tablet or whatever till well into their teens. Tablets are the new pacifier and it’s hard sometimes not to give in for a break.. we allow some limited tv sometimes but only select classic cartoons or documentaries. I cannot see any value at all in social media for kids and I personally cannot believe parents let their kids on TikTok or whatever. It’s wild.

Yes agree 100% on tablets are the new pacifier. Have you noticed how hyper stimulated kids who don’t normally have a lot of screen time get when they do get their “fix” it’s eerie

Social media seems like it's screwing up older people at least as much as children. Banning advertising fixes the problem for all age groups

Firewall!

    Firewall! Firewall all the things
    Make of a DMZ off thy router
    Content inspect every common packet
    Install on ev'ry device that sniffing
    Snicker--alas for lack of space, a new
    Line beneath: pf -f /etc/pf.conf

    Firewall! A backdoor of no trivial make
    Of maister's werk, a tiny hole
    Strapped alongside, whistling rockets,
    Detonating lines, monitored ropes

    Whence thy enterprising sleuth
    Perchance stumble or sneak
    On day zero of the time
    When secrets revealed
    And figured the locks
    And found the world
    Beyond

    Then a new sys admin is made
    With belt of tools; persistence too:
    A shoulder burdened with weight
    Of knowledge, yet
    Too a realization: imprison'd knowledge
    A deliberate moat, a shadowed keep
    To while the youngest times
    In learning's depths

I'm amazed that we're still entertaining banning everything in 2023.

The same song and dance was made of TV 30-50 years ago, keeping kids off the internet 15 years ago, and I'm sure for keeping kids off AI in a few years time.

The cat is out of the bag, and trying to force it back in the bag is going to be no better for kids

Banning things rarely works.

Educating parents on how it can harm and hinder their children is a harder, but more effective approach.

> Educating parents on how it can harm and hinder their children is a harder, but more effective approach.

Is it? There are a number of teachers and allied health professionals in my family and they all say that the majority of parents have zero follow-through on simple things that will materially improve their kids lives.

I can’t imagine the case would be any different with social media education for parents.

> Banning things rarely works.

This depends on your definition of the term "works". Prohibition of many things has had a profound effect on the shape of human society. Prohibitions on religion for example, such as the repression of the Huguenots in France and of Christianity in Japan prevented the development of Protestantism and Catholicism in those countries respectively.

Prohibition and censorship of revolutionary materials and correspondence societies in 19th century Europe absolutely slowed down the process of democratization and popular reform there.

Even just in personal experience, it's much easier to get weed since it is no longer prohibited. You used to need "a source" which you had to work out in each new town or city you moved to. Then there were limits on what those people could get you.

You mentioned prohibition, but for some reason left out capital-P Prohibition, which brought us mobsters, speakeasys, and the US government blinding people: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-us-government-enforced... and was eventually repealed.

Drugs won the "war on drugs". We don't need more authoritarianism. Provide education, and let people choose. Anything else, they'll fight you on it.

I didn't say it was good policy. Nor did I say it didn't have unintended consequences. Nor did I say I favored it.

But it is a myth that "it doesn't work". Prohibition works in that it reduces consumption of or participation in the prohibited thing.

It's a popular historical myth that prohibition of alcohol didn't work in the U.S. It did. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w3675/w3675...

The War On Drugs is a terrible example because it went way beyond prohibition. The War On Drugs was politically entangled in immigration, US interests in foreign regimes, human trafficking, and on. You don't have to quasi-invade other countries to prohibit drugs at home. That's a policy choice influenced by many other prejudices and distortions.

Prohibition works. It's another question entirely whether it is just, whether it can be conducted while respecting human rights and whether it is worth the unintended consequences.

A ban is supposed to do more than "reduce" it's supposed to eliminate. So no, it doesn't work.

That's why I started this entire exchange with

> This depends on your definition of the term "works".

I think for a lot of governments and policy makers the goal is to significantly reduce.

By your definition, literally every human intervention in history, prohibitory or otherwise has not "worked".

>By your definition, literally every human intervention in history, prohibitory or otherwise has not "worked".

Correct.

Even in scenarios where the specifically stated goal of a policy is a specific decline in some measure?

This is the kind of thing that frustrates me. Begging large power institutions (especially economic ones) to raise your kids.

Economic power institutions are not able to stop your kids from going online, and they don't care to. They have no ethics and will slip into whatever position they need to in order to maintain face. So they'll pretend to care when they need to, but they're suck your kids into wasting entire days online in order to compile data that can be used to manipulate them politically or economically or socially when they can make money off of that.

There effectively aren't any social power institutions left (except social media itself), so the only real solution is to have a strong enough family that you can keep your kids away from this soul-rotting garbage.

>Most people seem to agree that something should be done to protect kids from what sure looks like an addictive product. But almost no one knows what that something is.

Speak for yourself. I block social media sites on my home network and will be doing the same through a VPN when they get smartphones.

I'm not against idea, but how would that even work?

Porn for example is already banned from children, and they easily get hands on it. Or "violent" videogames.

I don't think there is any viable way or then it just becomes whack-a-mole thing. Ban those platforms that fail or the user accounts there...

That's very different though: porn and downloads you can get from any site. But for social media to work, by definition your peers need to be on the sites as well. If you apply that to porn, you end up with a handful of sites that have a very large userbase, and you can easily regulate those, because they're also very valuable.

Now, if such a step would lead to large-scale adoption of decentralized social media, that might be another issue, but as adults wouldn't be affected, I doubt they'd invest too much time into it (+ many of the people who are capable of building it don't believe that social media is a good idea).

I agree, but how? As a parent I'm going to implement stuff at home to keep my kids off of it, but the reality is they'll still get access somehow. I don't see a good tech solution for keeping them completely off it.

It'll be fascinating to see the effect on the prestige of working for Meta if this does end up happening. It'll solidify the idea the social media = smoking. Will Facebook be forced to create resources on quitting social media? Will FB become a mostly right-leaning company that opposes government oversight for the sake of their userbase? Will Metamates have a stigma when they seek jobs elsewhere?

Maybe Meta will even rebrand itself like Altria after some turnaround, as a new, "understanding" social media company, that promotes "user's choice to use..." social media.

Why not ban social media from children. It was, at a point in the not so distant past, illegal to advertise to them.

Simply return to this standard, and make the penalty for non-compliance that your company is seized and auctioned.

Maybe we just ban kids from smart phones.

Or ban social media apps on phones operated by minors.

Educate the kids?

I think rather than banning it which won't work if you made the SM companies financially responsible for any damages they cause the children.

The government would make it easier to seek damages from SM companies that cause harm to children. For example if you required the SM companies to provide proof they actively tried to help or stop in cases of bullying and if they don't the pay a large fine.

That would make it more costly to ignore and I'm pretty sure you'd fine a report button on that post to allow you to report bullying pretty quick.

But is SM really responsible for bullying?

Bullying happens irl as well.

The playground builders are usually not considered responsible when bullying happens at a playground.

> But is SM really responsible for bullying?

Yes they are. They are not 100% responsible no but it's the main party as it provides the platform and encourages the behaviour. If their platform has become unsafe and causes harm that's the bit that they are responsible for. It's the same thing as suing a car manufacturer if the car was designed / built with a safety flaw.

> The playground builders are usually not considered responsible when bullying happens at a playground.

That's a great point thanks for making it. By "playground builder" I assume you are meaning the company/org that built the playground and actually they are responsible for the safety of the equipment and if a child gets hurt because of their negligence they will be sued. In my estate we have to pay for insurance for this express purpose.

In terms of bullying though you don't use playground equipment to bully someone. Bullying on the school grounds is the schools responsibility and they have a duty of care to the child to help. So just because the builders built the school doesn't mean they are responsible for all actions that occur only on defects on their work that cause harm.

While I appreciate your thorough response (I'm not exactly sure about what to make of this topic myself) I'm still a bit skeptical of assigning the responsibility for bullying to SM companies.

Physical safety in a car (or on a playground) is about the equipment itself.

Bullying can also happen in a car (or a school bus!) but we wouldn't typically consider the car company responsible.

Regarding SM I think it's a case of we-can-so-we-should. We've moved our social interactions to a technical platform, so now social problems are more amenable (superficially in my opinion) to technical solutions.

But bullying is not a problem that has a technical origin nor a technical solution, and I think trying to approach it that way might do more harm than good.

> I'm still a bit skeptical of assigning the responsibility for bullying to SM companies.

Actually I never said this either. They should pay for the damage caused by the design of their system. The problem with these companies is they are legally shielded from any of the damage they cause. This is specific to Social Media companies. Car manufacturers are not afforded the same legal shield, neither are airlines or doctors ...etc.

Let's take a controversial subject guns. The gun manufacturers can't be held responsible on who they are sold to that would be the merchants and vendors but they should be responsible if they release a gun that explodes and kills you every 1000th bullet. They have a duty of care to design it to be safe for the user of the gun. So if you buy a gun and shoot up a school the gun manufacturer isn't responsible. It's either then vendor who sold you it (gun regs opinion) or the school (NRA opinion).

For example: Right now if you have intimate material posted about you without your permission it very difficult to get it taken down and people will just re-upload it. This has already cause many deaths. Social Media crave engagement as they use that to sell ads. That's fine but if that engagement causes damage they should pay for it. At the moment you can't really sue them for example in the USA as there is a law covering them Section 230.

> But bullying is not a problem that has a technical origin nor a technical solution, and I think trying to approach it that way might do more harm than good.

Who said this ? It wasn't me what technical solution did I propose?

I would disagree though with you statement that bullying doesn't have a "technical origin". Cyberbullying 100% has a technical origin. If you think teens are bullied in the playground first and then online that's false. Mostly now-a-days teens are bullied online first often about something on SM about them (for example an explicit picture).

While I'm sympathetic, this smells a whole lot like banning kids from malls, which already is happening which along with the deepening suburbanization of America just leads kids to feeling isolated. On some level, you need to let young people socialize and have a space where parents can't micromanage them. I'm not sure parents of yesteryear (boomers) or today (gen X, older millennials) are really okay with that. Given the moves throughout society of bannning kids from most public places, requiring shaperones for under 18s, even teenagers, makes me feel like we're further entrenching the mistakes made boomers made with their children and leading young people to be even more isolated and idealistic only to have them shell shocked once they experience the real world.

I want a town built from scratch where me and other millenial parents who want our kids to be able to run around and ride bikes and go to corner shops can actually do so.

You could try most of the world.

I am! Shame we had to emigrate.

Really, there should be some public meeting spaces other than malls. The same applies on the internet. At least on the internet there is a wide range of places.

This is going to be an uphill battle.

Not only is enforcement on a judiciary level extremely difficult (the kids as well as the companies have ways and reason to skirt jurisdiction on the borderless Internet) but you have the problem that addictive products will remain addictive even if there are better options out there.

Personal opinion but I think the best way to counter the social media plague for young people will be something akin to making them "uncool in the schoolyards"

It should be super uphill battle. I really hope so. Parents should determine what’s appropriate and the use cases. People trying to create laws left and right for every damn thing is just nuts. We have ended up with “I accept cookies” on every website now. Isn’t that enough for these “bring in government into every aspect of our life” nuts?

My wish would be no laws could be passed unless we have 3/4th of votes and every 10 year old law gets expired unless passed again.

You could have said the same thing about teenage smoking. It's addictive, hard to regulate away, but teen smoking regulations had demonstrable and massive health impacts. Cultural change is best, but governments have an obligation to improve public health. Particularly for minors, the vast majority of whom can't make informed decisions about addictive technology.

I think youth smoking is a good example.

- It wasn't enough to stop sale to minors (they still got them).

- It wasn't enough to run information campaigns in schools and legislate packaging warnings (stuff like this gets blatantly ignored)

What really worked in the US (but even that with a lag of 5-7 Years) was:

1. blanket banning smoking on the media in the 90s

2. progressively blanket banning smoking in the public since the 90s

Edit: formating

Tangent, but I’m at an age where many of my friends are having kids and are sharing a huge amount of their children’s lives on social media.

Not my business, but I can’t help but wonder what these kids will think once they become of age and realize their entire childhood has been plastered online on Instagram.

My wife and I have decided if we ever have kid, we’re never going to post a single publically viewable photo or video of him/her anywhere.

..their friends will take photos.

At that point, it’s a different game. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

But I was referring to the baby, toddler, and early elementary school age where the kid has no clue what’s going on.

I have an idea: parenting. I never had issues with social media, nor did any of my friends, because we had parents who talked to us, limited our online time and showed alternatives.

Why should we ban something because parents are too lazy to do their job?

Having said that; we should immediately ban all ads without opt-in, and the same for cookies and the like.

Doing things without consent is not okay.

The argument for banning children from social media could equally easily apply to adults. I think everything that's available on the internet, short of pornography and beheading videos, should be equally available to all children, and companies should stop using COPPA as an excuse to ban children from their platforms.

Sadly parents have become so inept, lazy or uninterested that they need the state to step up and raise their children into good and healthy habits. Pretty sad and it's not even parenting that they will receive from the state but a mediocre nanny whose only interest is that they don't get into too much trouble.

As a parent, there is no way I'm aware of keeping an eye (remotely) on their Watch history with Youtube kids. https://dabase.com/blog/2023/youtube-kids/#watch-history

The controls are broken.

I see a lot, and I mean A LOT of people, including several of my friends, using mobile phones or tablets to show their 1-5 years old children animation videos to make them busy and stop whining while adults are doing or minding their own adult business. No wonder that those children became addicted to small screens.

No need to ban anything. Just disable auto-populate on scrolling and rate limit all social media pages to one page per minute where the definition of "page" is what fits on a 6" display. In this day and age of anemic attention span, kids will throw their hands in the air and walk away in 5 mins.

If one brings this up 5 years ago, they are gonna be branded as authoritarian. How times are changed.

Question is, what constitutes social media?

I got my first PC at 11, running Windows 98. Since then I've been participating in online forums and sites like facebook and myspace.

If I ever have a kid I want them to be able to experience the same stuff I did.

The experience for kids today is nothing like what you experienced.

The early internet was pretty magical. I’m not sure we will ever get that back.

Hacker News is social media no?

Is the problem really "social media" or algorithm-driven content feeds?

I think juicing kid’s reward systems of dopamine and lighting up the reward pathways with social media must be detrimental to young minds in the long run, is any of this being studied?

We should really ban adults from social media as well.

Seems like the thing to do is just ban phones in schools. The authority is already there and you can see what affect it has.

Banned in my kids' school. Not for their benefit, but for the teachers.

For all those saying parents, take the phones away. Any idea how hard that is? That could in itself push them over the edge.

They literally can't keep phones out of maximum security prisons. I don't think many parents are up for the challenge.

That would probably be difficult to enforce. Just ban smartphones if you're so inclined.

The case for banning children from social media is stable diffusion and the prospect of perverts taking otherwise normal photos and videos that your children post of themselves (or that you post of them) and making pornography out of it. No parent in 2023 should allow their minor child to use any of these platforms.

Can't we just ban social media? It's literally ruined society.

I suspect we can't even define social media, let alone ban it.

A fine line between puritanism, sobriety and cultural deprivation.

There should be a tax on infinite scrolling. It could be a better way of regulating this. Enforcement could be very difficult though, and of course it should only come into affect at a certain number of users so we don’t stifle innovation

I'll go further - you cannot even put a photo of someone else without their permission, unless it constitutes 'public good' and to be a journalist you have to 'register' - it'd be free and open to do that, but the point being, you're 'on the record' as doing that in some capacity which might come with a few ethical rules.

Sorry for the AI people but we probably want to have rules about data set collection as well.

Absolutely the right to privacy, the right to 'delete' and auto-deletion periods aka 'nothing is kept forever without special consent'.

Absolutely nothing about someone's social media presence can be made public or used for employment searches before age 18 aka that 'bad joke' someone told at age 16 should not ruin their life - I absolutely do not care what they said.

Content that passes a threshold of 'views' must be considered a kind of 'meta public domain' and must come with warnings/notes by the 'conduit entity' (aka FB or Twitter or Spotify) if it has medical or direct political information, aka Joe Rogan (whom I respect at least a bit except when he's yapping about vaccines) has to say 'I am not a doctor, this is not medical information' whenever he opens his fat mouth about vaccines, but he can say whatever he wants about Aliens and MMA etc..

Pricing/sign-ups/trials have to be ultra clear, and current billing has to be clear. Frankly, they should make the intermediary responsible for that as well aka if you have a recurring bill on VISA, then VISA has to list that, and, give you a means to cancel.

Total transparency on tracking, illegal to buy or sell most user data whatsoever. FYI the primary source for this is actually VISA, AMEX and MC.

And work with industry to create 'funnel optimizations' that just don't need tracking.

No advertising directly to kids unless maybe a certain kind of format (I think maybe some youtube ads are ok).

First thing I read all day that makes any sense.

Forget about the children. Can someone ban me from social media?

Better yet, can we just ban the thing altogether?

In general, it should be illegal for strangers to contact or solicit minors anonymously.

1. Make it more expensive to run a website.

2. Lament how the open web has fewer options with the better used networks owned by billion dollar tech companies.

3. Blame Capitalism/Communism/Whatever the latest boogeyman is that takes the pressure off of Karens and politicians who push the latest please think of the children bullshit.

4. Goto 1.

This is the start of a good article on the subject, but doesn't mention the surveillance capitalism aspect.

> everything from gender identity...

Odd—they always lead with this even though it might affect less than a few percent of the population. There might be other ways to help these folks.

> might have to verify their age using official government identification

Now we're getting somewhere, that's a big problem for everyone.

Maybe if they made such sites charge money, which realistically means credit cards, it could largely solve this. Would probably reduce some of the dark patterns and mostly prevent kids from accessing them. That's how it worked with porn, didn't it?

I'd ban children from the Internet and from the phone network.

Computers are fine, as long as they're offline.

Countless generations of kids have grown up fine in these conditions. We already know being online is bad for them.

What are we waiting for?

Well social media as it exists today didn't exist when I was first starting out online, but I doubt I'd be in the position I am today without having free reign (my parents weren't super tech savvy) on the internet as a 9-10 year old and later.

That's around when I started programming, where I got all the materials I could, made some warcraft 3 mods, that catapulted me pretty far..

I did most of that w/o being online, with an Amiga 500.

Only got a PC and later Internet at home once I was 16.

There's literally no reason for a minor to "need" access to Internet.

First used it at age 24 at work, learned socket programming two years later.

How do you possibly enforce something like that for only kids without invading everyone's privacy? What makes you think kids won't find a hundred ways around it?

I am glad you agree with the premise that we should do it, and it's now a matter of how.

We can figure out the how. Say:

- No sale of phones nor phone lines nor ISP's services to children.

- No public access to internet for children in schools, libraries or coffee stores.

- Information campaign for parents.

- ToS of any internet-based service to forbid use by children.

It doesn't need to go much further than this. Similar to how we don't feed caffeine to kids. Or allow them anywhere near pornography.

No draconian measures are necessary, and we can introduce the measures progressively e.g. starting with under 12, then 15, then finally at 18.

If I was the government I would set up a social media use authorization portal and demand social media companies with over 1k monthly active users require their users to take a randomly generated challenge code, take it to the government portal and have it signed and submit the signed challenge in order to register (this would be a smooth UX with popup taking you to the gov portal and back), the gov portal would not ask for authentication, just a clear picture of your id. It will not allow vpns and such and if you presented fake id the that would be a crime.

Now where my policy differs is that I would not prevent kids from using social media, they can still show a school id and their school or parent would need to approve and taken on that legal obligation of presenting valid id. But the critical part is that kids 14-17 and 10-13 each would have their own social media. They can join facebook for example but facebook has to prevent them from coming to contsct with adults and their content or things like adult news feeds and advertisments. Similarly advertisers would become legally liable if they advertise content that steers children to a harmful end. Social media companies must also prove that their algorithms are explicitly tuned to prevent addiction if minors to the platform and even enforce maximum legal usage hours (2h for 10-13 and 6h for 14-17).

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