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Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

Why are children even allowed on social media? From a society standpoint, social network use is correlated to mental health problems(1). Then factor in sexual harassment and bullying.

(1) https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/youth-mental-h....

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Props for saying it.

The kids would hate it, but then, they hate laws against selling tobacco & alcohol to minors and letting them into X-rated movies too. Too bad. It's for your own good, Junior.

"They'd just find ways around it" ?? Then we'll block those, too. We don't need to be 100% effective.

I found ways around tobacco laws when I was a teenager.

Thank God for those laws, though. If I had easy access to tobacco at 14, I would probably still be a smoker today.

Oddly enough a Daily Mail article on this topic had much more information. [1] What interesting times we live in. Anyhow, one interesting and critical datum they mentioned is that the majority of minors on Instagram already pretend to be adults. I'd assume that's probably to sidestep whatever existing protections currently exist.

[1] - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12977157/Meta-Insta...

If we just keep pushing everything to be unavailable to people until they turn 18, we're just going to have people who don't fully start being an adult until late 20s.

They are allowed have friends and to communicate with them?

There are plenty of other ways to communicate with friends. My generation used text messaging, the generation before used phone calls. Both are perfectly acceptable methods of communicating that don't expose children to the many problems that social media creates.

Shh no one wants to entertain this..

It should be banned for all kids until 16 years of age. Frankly it should be outlawed period. Only books, music, art and board games.

Why are children allowed on the computer at all? Why are they allowed outside the house? Why are they allowed to leave their rooms? Why are they allowed to have friends? Why are they allowed to talk to anyone? Why are they allowed to do literally anything at all? Why are they allowed to exist?

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