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Comment by SirensOfTitan | Hacker News Reader

To be perfectly honest, I’m extremely conflicted with this kind of legislation—natural physical social interactions have all but atrophied in huge swaths of American youth, and social media is the way kids ultimately communicate. I don’t think that limiting social media exposure will somehow restore in-person physical interaction, and it could just prove to atomize and isolate kids even more than they ultimately are. It is very typical that the state wields the law like a hammer and doesn’t consider the blowback—they should be thinking about how to restore real in-person intimate relationships amongst children.

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Your comment suggests you didn't look into what this policy actually does.

It doesn't ban kids from connecting with their peers on social media or even from following popular (or esoteric) influencers.

It just prevents providers from algorithmically optimizing kids' feeds for engagement or whatever else, and adds some limits to when notifications are allowed.

Both are actually pretty modest and would seem entirely reasonable in light of what concerns you raised.

It's good we have different states/schools trying different things, all within the realm of sensible ideas. This creates natural experiments which will be studied in detail, and which will guide evidence-based policymaking.

There's enough plausible evidence linking social media to problems in youth that we have to bite the bullet and try something, then reassess afterwards, rather than be caught in analysis paralysis about what may go wrong with attempts to fix the issues.

I was at a pizza place and saw a group of 6 or more teenagers sitting together. They were all on their phones with the personification of ennui upon their faces.

Just an anecdote.

I've seen the same thing with a gaggle of boomers sitting in bar together all not talking and just drinking. No phones.

As someone who was a kid in the pre-iPhone / mobile internet era, I'd say,

>> Life, uh, finds a way

Things worked just fine over multi-tap keypad SMS, and there were even complaints about kids being sucked into their phones then!

Pretty sure if you physically separated every teenager on the planet in a dark basement, they'd have rats carrying braille messages implemented in a week.

“Things worked just fine over multi-tap keypad SMS” - did they though? Imagine all the time you spent as a child in front of advertising generation machines, television probably the most, and what you could have done with that time instead if they weren’t around or at the least not quite compelling.

Just because it wasn’t as bad when you were young doesn’t mean it was fine then or now. Kids need to be able to be kids, not preyed upon as revenue streams.

> Just because it wasn’t as bad when you were young doesn’t mean it was fine then or now.

Not as bad can mean fine depending on your goals.

The difference of TV advertising is that it was only loosely (channel audience) targeted. There was no individually-level tracking and micro-targeting.

So while my cohort was bathed in cathode rays, I don't think it was as influential.

What are you proposing? That childhood now just is an isolated and gloomy affair, and we should just accept it? Price of progress and all?

Social media isn't the problem. Centralized, corporate, censored, ad company social networks are.

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