The kids with phones are alright
heatherburns.tech
heatherburns.tech
What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids. Its not good for their attention spans or mental health to a much greater degree than other forms of media.
Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones, but they should be able to use them without being engulfed in social media content that has been shown to have a negative impact on them. Whether its algorithmic feeds targeting particular age groups or short form video content that is reducing attention spans and the ability to concentrate.
I have no idea how an adult filming young girls on a train has anything to do with social media bans. The Senior Legal Officer is absolutely entitled to having a phone, but absolutely not to use it however he means. The teenagers are entitled to having a phone, but potentially may have limits to how they can use those devices.
Just because there are adults with full agency that do the wrong thing, doesn't mean we should remove protections on young people. Just because adults with full agency drive recklessly, doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds the ability to drive.
You can't lace beer with crack and sell it. Not to a 12yo, not to a 50yo. Regulate the proverbial crack, then we see if further regulations are required.
Earlier this year (0):
> “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,”
From 9 years ago (1):
> Facebook showed advertisers how it has the capacity to identify when teenagers feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”
0 - https://www.biometricupdate.com/202602/meta-plans-launch-of-...
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/01/facebook-...
I actually love your example of selling an otherwise good product with a poisonous ingredient and I think the most middle-of-the-road weapon against the negatives of social media is to remove those ingredients. For example, no infinite scroll, no algorithmic ordering, forced slow loading if you've been on it for more than a certain number of minutes, etc. (I'm just spitballing). In other words, undo/ban all technological features (or "ingredients") of the things that the social media companies have done that are deliberately meant to pull on weaknesses in human psychology. They know they're doing it. They hire experts to do it.
You've already got the receipt for this. That memo isn't a company that stumbled into harm and feels bad about it. It's one picking a launch window based on when the people who'd object are busy.
Social media needs to be heavily regulated to the point where it's safe for everyone, or banned entirely. I don't understand why there's this belief it should have a right to exist when basically everyone agrees it's a net negative to society.
That said, with bans upcoming or in force in a lot places, what measures should we monitor to see improvements in wellbeing etc. (screen time isn't one there, I'd say)? What do we do if those do not go up noticably?
Social Media allowed ordinary people to challenge on a global scale the oficially-sanctioned narrative. A generation has already grown with full distrust on what they learn from traditional media.
With that picture, addressing the (undeniable) negative effects of Social Media is only the sales pitch for introducing new legislation. The true goal of the legislation however is not to "save the children", but rather to ensure that the next generations will be obedient and meek.
so Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit are all social-media, because all are ad-supported, and all are focused on user-generated content. HN is focused on user-generated content, but not ad-supported (okay, technically HN is 'advertising for YC', but in practice, the site isn't optimized to get you doom-scrolling so you click on more ads), and a website with a comment section, if it's like a blog or something where the majority of the content is generated by the website owner, isn't focused on user-generated content.
The combination of user-generated content + advertising, however, seems to create websites that will try to get their users addicted to the site, which can harm the lives of their users.
- ASKfm
- Flickr
- GitHub
- Google+
- JustPaste.it
- Tumblr
- Vine
- VKontakte (VK)
- YouTube
This is obviously outdated but it can give an idea.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-anxious-generation-how-the-...
In any case, this is whataboutery. There are lots of harmful things that adults are allowed, but lots that are banned for everyone. There are lots of things that cannot be sold without meeting safety standards (cars, electricals), or that are only sold subject strict controls (prescription drugs, guns). We do not allow adults to have whatever they want.
We therefore then tack other restrictions to those age brackets.
This is sort of true, but there is definitely a scale of development that means the most harm will be done the earlier you start. Same with access to pornography. People's brains don't suddenly become immune to it at 18, it's just that that's the age of legal responsibility that ties in with other things.
Men who turn 18 don't suddenly become disposable meat-based gun-holders in times of war, and yet we still treat them that way.
“ No evidence established direct connections between Georgescu's campaign and Russian state actors. There were only assertions that there must have been due to his rapid rise on social media”
And:
the "National Liberal Party paid for a campaign on TikTok that ended up favoring ... Georgescu" and not Russia as previously presented to the Constitutional Court.
Also:
On 28 April 2025, right-wing conservative Hungarian think-tank Mathias Corvinus Collegium filed a complaint with the European Ombudsman because the European Commission denied access to the documents containing information on the EU's DSA proceedings in the case.
That’s not something you would expect from a proper investigation. The whole thing is a mess and what we heard on the news at the time is essentially a made up story.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusations_of_Russian_interfe...
In events like these it can be useful to operate on the systems thinking maxim and strictly look at who benefited, as this is interesting in itself without entertaining the suggestion that they engaged in anything illegal.
When it comes to social media in politics, I believe the burden of proof is on those who claim a net benfit. Centralization of traditional media is generally regarded as bad for open democracies, and the ultimate owners of almost all social media globally can be counted on one hand with fingers to spare.
What you'll get is restrictions on speech. UK arrests thousands every year for what essentially amounts to mean tweets. There have been people that comment publicly on horrendous crimes that get harsher sentences than those that commit the crimes.
At any point in time politicians could have enforced existing terms of service violations like kids must be 13 or older. But they choose to look the other way and target only things that's a threat to their political future.
Social media helps organization and political action. Maybe you don't like the outcome at this point in time but it's a powerful weapon against those in power. It's no wonder politicians will try to neuter it. But it will not help anyone but themselves.
But it's true there is a lot of coordinated censorship even without state interference. But this tends to resolve itself as there is a market opportunity to create a better product. This coordination and censorship campaign has led to the acquisition of Twitter, which lifted its restrictions and other companies more or less followed suit because an open platform is obviously better for most people. And you had offshoots like Bluesky that had the old centralized censorious pre twitter acquisition policies, and things work out in the long run
I posted "So you're blaming jews then?" to a clearly anti-semitic comment and poof. Gone
Are you confusing subreddit chosen restrictions (like minimum karma) and banning?
Somebody is peddling lies in your direction. These claims don’t hold up to any sort of cursory examination.
There are 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages. It's not heavily reported for some reason but it's very real.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
I said "regulate the proverbial crack" and gave two concrete examples of things going wrong. At no point did I hint at "stop people from conversing freely".
But we gave legal immunity to the corporate executives that forged fire testing certificates and caused the actual fire that killed over 100 people
And when I say we have Russia-style corruption no one believes me
40 years are not kids bro. and wasn't jailed
>The 49-year-old was given a 10-week suspended jail sentence.
Millions of employed might disagree.
Define social media, specifically name the sites you're talking about. And explicitly state the ill health that follows when you consume social media
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48897104
On an unrelated note: yes, I also don't understand how this incident has to do much with social media bans…
> Just because there are adults with full agency that do the wrong thing, doesn't mean we should remove protections on young people. Just because adults with full agency drive recklessly, doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds the ability to drive.
also agree wholeheartedly.
Will we ban posters along highways that advertise car wreck lawyers? Where do you draw that line?
A targeted example for this case would be to switch the digital billboard to tampons because they read your number plates, visually identified the driver is a woman, and your recent texts with a friend mentioned needing some.
Quite a few places around the world have already done so, on the basis that they are an eyesore. Where there's a will there's a way.
There's a reason you get kids toys during the after-school section, and wills and funeral planning during the day
In answer to your first question, what do we do. We regulate the platforms, not the users.
There are loads of things that can be done to reduce online harm, that don't just say "OK, you're over this age, you can experience online harm now".
Platforms can become legally responsible for content, they can be compelled to be transparent about their feed algorithms, enable monitoring via public APIs. We can ban infinite scroll. There are so many policy levers that can be pulled, without getting the ban-hammer out for people of an arbitrary age, and without forcing the rest of us to hand over our IDs to platforms.
I'm not asking "what do we do" but that plenty of people write articles poking holes in current policy or suggested future policy, but lack providing a potential solution.
I pulled a few alternatives out there. What's your take?
From my perspective I think we do need to ask social media companies to reduce algorithmic feeds that create echo chambers or as you say provide transparent metrics on this. Social media companies should potentially ban infinite scroll/short form video content, however this is going to be difficult to do if its based on age as it will fall back to the ID/age verification issues.
Feeds should also not show content considered R18+ unless manually hidden, this shouldn't be able to be removed. There is some horrifying content that can pop up on these platforms that young people shouldn't see unsolicited.
Shoving a pillow over the dial-up modem because I didn't know you could turn off the dial sound....
This is the low-hanging-fruit, for those of us who KNOW it's an addiction and are actively trying to quit, but struggling to limit our usage. I use leechblock NG which is amazing for browser-based sites, but wouldn't really help a kid who's having the isuse on apps.
There are many further steps to take, but I think we should all align on the most obvious ones first and build up from there.
Do we know this? As far as I can tell, the studies are ambivalent at best. Some kids are damaged, others benefit.
After all, novels were once considered harmful [0] but we now consider not being able to read a novel to be harmful.
[0] https://archive.nytimes.com/op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0...
1. Novels and phones are not the same tech. This is not 'generational quibble'; I am simply stating a fact. Just from pure historical perspective, written words were, correctly mind you, called out in that they will likely result in people not being able to commit as much to memory[1]. Move from written to printed produced even more of a change[2]. I am not saying those changes are ( were ) automatically bad, but it is important to recognize where they do fail. Surely, you would not argue that phones did not change the way people ingest information -- and if you wouldn't, the only question becomes whether you are honest enough to say what their particular failure modes are.
2. The nature of the tech in question is different. Written word is static and literally placed upon a page with the intent of the words staying there. Revisions result in a new physical book. The book does not suddenly become unreadable, because someone sent its publisher an order. The physical book does not track your progress to determine what passage made you most entertained to make sure next book is even more entertaining.
I will stop here, but surely you can see where I am going with this...
<< After all, novels were once considered harmful [0] but we now consider not being able to read a novel to be harmful.
Novels by themselves are not harmful the same way using a phone by itself is not harmful. Apart from everything else, as noted in previous paragraph, you can use the phone for more than reading. The comparison is simply not complete or close to exhaustive to allow for a proper comparison.
[1]https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html [2]https://www.amazon.com/Gutenberg-Galaxy-Making-Typographic-M...
These are capital crimes against humanity. The notion that we just have to accept it is absurdity.
Call it something like the matrix.
Isolating specialized customized algorithms tube to be addicted to specifically you and tuned to keep you away from other humans forever.
Instead of identity barriers like in the UK they should simply ban "accounts".
Regulators should say: ok you can serve kids and women and whoever else but you have to creat 20 channels and you can't differentiate and everyone just picks a username that isn't protected and they shout into the group chat and nobody knows who anyone is except the provider and everyone sees the same thing.
Ok this is an exaggeration to make the point.
We can't even see what other people are being shown.
You can't even opt out of being secretly show things.
It's evil.
I want a feed that is 100% public. Every single thing they show me is shown to everyone. Like radio or something.
A flip phone for kids who are out of the house regularly with some contacts is fine.
No need to be a Luddite, but what do kids possibly get out of a phone? If I didn't have work and to chauffeur people around, id toss mine too.
This aspect needs talking about way more especially when the parents don't admit to it and to being the instigator
The question isn't just "what do the kids get out of it", it's also what do the parents: they get surveillance and some kind of reassurance. But at what cost?
In far more cases than is ideal, the phone gives them an element of freedom/safety from their living situation.
Imagine a kid whose own parents are abusing them, or an LGBT kid growing up in a deeply conservative family, and one day the government suddenly decides you don't deserve being able to connect with support resources...
> online content
There is nothing that they get from online content on a phone that they would not get better on an actual computer. My children already have computers (raspberry pis) at home and don't need a phone to access content. Plus, unlike a phone, they are able to use a computer to create content which is a much better perspective with technology than the mindless consumption that is now commonplace.
IMHO it's not healthy for anyone. From kids, to retired pensioners not knowing what to do with their time, to profesionalls doing linkedin "hacking" and "networking" on twitter, etc.
Regulate social media if that is the case.
Bans are ineffective anyway - if you doubt that, compare and contrast the outcomes of Prohibition and the War on Drugs, versus regulating Tobacco companies...
So, legal limits - if your behaviour constitutes harassment especially if you're targeting certain individuals, then it's likely to be illegal. Or if your behaviour constitutes 'disturbing the peace' in some vague way the police might put a stop to it.
But beyond that you're talking about the law but not everything is about the limits of the law, and the law is only a loose guide on morality. You can behave in a legal manner and still be doing something most people would consider wrong.
If you take your camera and try to record someone's kids up close in the park, you should absolutely expect to be told to GTFO, possibly by a whole gang of people. "Oh but it's in public I'm not breaking any laws, you have no expectation of privacy here" doesn't mean squat. Nor is it OK to film a bunch of girls like a drunken old pervert and try to say "It's not illegal".
Which is why others on the train were not happy with it.
The article is, I think, making several points at once:
- some of the people involved in creating this new legislation are already responsible for the harms the legislation alleges to mitigate. We've already heard (here on HN at least) that Meta lobbies FOR age restrictions; now with this incident we have a civic leader abusing their position of power and targeting exactly the people this raft of legislation allegedly protect (although it might be stretch to assume this person is involved in bringing in said legislation; they might be quietly avoiding talking about it because they know they're part of the problem). We should be questioning who's responsible for the legislation and inspecting their motivations publicly. We should be questioning their motivations, and challenging the efficacy of the proposed solutions given the background of motivations of those proposing them. We should be challenging the decision-making: where's the evidence the mitigations will work? (and this is all in addition to the perceived harms to all adults from the increased breadth and accuracy of the dragnet surveillance the solutions create).
- we don't need this kind of legislation to help raise reasonably-minded children. We should be targeting the perpetrators of the harm, not targeting near-adults who are (potentially) being harmed. The current legislation is victim-blaming, not prosecuting the perpetrators. The situation described is somewhat allegorical, rather than "here, social media is good"
I think it's also saying this:
- how else are people, adults, near-adults, children, going to learn of, and discuss, situations like the one described, without social media? "The Kids" have been using social media for the last ten years, and many of them are, despite the harms, growing up sane, self-controlled, able to stand up for themselves.
The article is making me reflect on our household's ban on our teen using social media. We don't want them getting wrapped up in constant one-up-ing, gossiping, body-shaming, discrimination, and other social ills that go around, but we are also denying them some ability to discuss these issues, learn about them, find support from peers and experts. (I mean, they can... they can use the wider web and can talk with their parents, friends, and teachers, in person; but those media are slower or more awkward for being "in your face")
For this specific issue, the solution is simple and straightforward: shaming. None confronted the pervert in the train, because no one knows what is acceptable today and what is not.
Huh? That's exactly what they did to the pervert on the train, because they knew that wasn't acceptable today
I am.
I'll say it. Kids shouldn't have phones until the age of 16.
Yes I needed a smartphone to test on
People come up with all sorts of random scenarios, that aren't even related to "prove" something...
A bus-tracking app on my phone completely changed how I interact with public transit, and made it significantly better. I remember waiting for the bus when I was 14, and I would not wish this to anyone.
A maps app is great when you are going to less-familiar places - either into the big city, or into large parks (although not every kid is ready to be hiking in the parks before 16)
I spent all of my childhood with a (large and ugly) digital camera on my belt. Phone is much smaller, and for the kind of pictures I was taking, the lower quality does not matter that much.
Hadn't got the bus straight from school to my grandma's house, needed to go home first (walkable) and pick up something.
Missed the bus then that was due, and waited over an hour for the next one.
So I was now best part of 2 hours late, and I didn't have a phone yet....
F2P games with dopamine drip loot boxes and things of that nature seem super unhealthy for kids, I can’t even imagine what it’s doing to their impulse control. I am unable to tolerate games like that myself, probably because I grew up with regular video games that didn’t use psychological tricks and pay to win ecosystems to induce people to spend money. If I had grown up playing them I probably wouldn’t know any different, like the fish asking “what the hell is water” when asked “how is the water this morning?” By an older fish.
An extreme example, all genocides are done by people who want to set the world right. It just how they see right is warped.
heh. no.
Because of chungus memes? I think you might be over reacting there bro
Like all risks it doesn’t affect all kids equally either.
Some are less vulnerable for various cognitive reasons just like some are less prone to chemical addiction.
Kids with wealthier and/or more engaged parents or parents with more free time are also less vulnerable. Wealthier kids have more activities available and can often afford to have one parent stay home.
Lastly kids in healthier communities or suburbs or safe urban settings where they can roam free are less vulnerable.
They children of the poor, those with ADD or ASD conditions, and those with less third spaces or other activities are most vulnerable to becoming addicted to endless stupefying doom scrolling and addictive games that pre-train them for future gambling addiction.
It’s not just kids either. The elderly and the isolated become addicted to this stuff.
Addiction engineering is the problem, whether it’s via a phone, a web site, or a chemical.
IMO if you intentionally and knowingly engineer something for addiction you are committing a form of assault.
Make it illegal to advertise to anyone under the age of 18. Make it illegal to trade data about anyone under the age of 18.
What incentive would then remain? I don't think they will do it for the long term gains of training behaviour for when they are old enough to exploit. Companies that engage in behaviour like this are notoriously immune to long term ideas.
It’d be almost impossible to pick and choose so just tax all of it. I think the knock on effects would be positive. It’s an almost unmitigated vice at this point and is the main engine behind this stuff.
They would definitely do that. It is a pretty basic idea to advertise to kids so there will be a customer base in later years. There was related emails leaked too
Whilst I agree that addictive things can be bad how far does this ago? Food manufacturers purposely make foods that are addictive. Video game companies use ways to make games more addictive.
Companies make things that we want and sometimes we get addicted to wanting it too much.
We don't need to get bogged down in this question before doing the first obvious thing and banning the most addictive things known to exist.
The problem is bullets, which guns just happen to make go very fast.
A bit of a weird tangent from what apparently is harassment in a train or something like that? I admit it's hard to follow what is going on.
It seems like, in this situation, we watch primarily non-phone-enabled virtues save the day: a clear sense of right and wrong, assertiveness, courage, steadiness in a tense situation, an attentive social environment with bystanders who both noticed and backed each other up…
Even having practiced some of those skills in moving through the world, I worry that, if I were a phone-carrying person, I’d be tempted to “just record it and let the internet sort it out.” Which is orthogonal to fixing the wrong in the moment.
In some places, payment requires a phone. Tracking unreliable public transit requires a phone. Getting rideshare requires a phone.
The issue probably isn't the phone but letting them outside in the first place.
We can’t just pretend that it’s possible to live an adult life without one in 2026. In 2008, certainly, but that’s not the world these kids grew up in.
But we’re talking about kids, which is a whole different matter.
Desperate reaching. People who carry phones are bad people, I mean FFS, get real
However, if a school district wants to restrict the use of smartphones during the school day for all students, I would be OK with that.
Both of my kids went to public school. My sisters kids both went to a private school. The policy was the same at both places. Kids come in the classroom, turn off their phones, put in a pouch at the front of the class. At the end of the class, kids get their phones back.
Apparently since there is little or no time between classes, I guess with the lack of time to be on their phones, in person conversations have increased and more face-to-face interactions are the norm. Its faster and easier to meet someone down the hall then it is to go through the process of texting someone, which is the entire point.
The goal was to create enough friction (psychological or real) so kids simply revert back to just meeting up at a regular spot to catch up, as opposed to constantly being on their phones. The school admins I talked to said its really pushed kids back into communicating like humans. Many have forgone their phones in between classes, except a quick check for emergency purposes, that sort of thing.
Kind of fascinating to hear to be honest.
echo "0.0.0.0 youtube.com www.youtube.com m.youtube.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
Do teens need phones? Sure, they need a phone. Arguably any child old enough to know how to make a phone call needs one. But do they need a miniature computer to scroll through AI slop 10+ hours a day?
These aren't the same question. Confusing these two is dangerous.
Kids don't want to call, and parents don't want to receive calls except for critical situations. Only elders and scammers are actually phoning.
> AI slop
Same deal as what the GP is pointing at: you need to train kids to deal with slop, and not have them face it on their own at once at some arbitrary adult age.
Sure. That's why I have mine mainlining China White. How will they learn to deal with addictive substances unless they're waist-deep in it?
Letting choose a different path than you is IMHO the minimum you should be doing.
we warn kids about the impacts of heroin, we don’t shoot them up with it.
On paper yes, biologically not really
It meant when I got to university I knew how much I could drink (although as a student I was too poor to drink much anyway haha) whereas there were people drinking like half a bottle of vodka.
I don't drink any alcohol nowadays so it's not like it turned me into an alcoholic either.
16 year olds can currently have them with a meal in a restaurant or pub. Until a few years ago it was 14.
> It meant when I got to university I knew how much I could drink (although as a student I was too poor to drink much anyway haha) whereas there were people drinking like half a bottle of vodka.
I gave my kids some alcoholic drinks for just that reason.
In many countries cultures, strict parents/laws are seen as loving and protecting. Being told "don't drink untl you're at least 20" isn't seen as "forbidden fruit" you're being denied.
But it's not really a fair comparison, because alcohol has a very direct detrimental effect on brain development. Many things can have a detrimental effect, but alcohol always does. Which is probably why they raised the age to 18.
no. it isn’t.
my apologies for sounding more blunt than im meaning to, but, im not at all sure where i would fall on the idea of banning kids from having social media powered phones, but i know they’re not a “necessity”.
People who are not yet ready to have full agency of their own lives is more or less the definition of children.
Does she also expect children to have full time jobs, pay taxes, pay all their own bills and rent, etc etc?
I know a few upper-crust families, including a hereditary title. They all care about their children, like the majority of human beings. But this blogger doesn't think we hate posh people enough, so necessarily they abuse their young.
It snacks of "jews will eat your baby". It's not the vitriol that offends me, it's the stupidity.
I grew up in a listed house with twelve fireplaces and a stable block with coach houses (plural). There were three crown princes in my boarding house at school. My godfather's house is a tourist attraction and my godmother was on the board of ICI. My mother's garden is on the horticultural circuit. My sister got married in Westminster Abbey. One brother used to play polo and the other just made equity partner at deloitte. I can probably get twenty OBEs on the phone. One of my friends has a net worth of €500b, and this year i have declined three invitations from him just to avoid the air travel.
When i was young and everything was black-and-white, i hated all rich people. I chiselled my privilege out of my accent and worked manual jobs. Now i hate the system, and i take the people in the system as i find them. My circle includes people from all walks of life, and I get invited to opera and to warehouse parties alike.
Anyways, your quite pedestrian life story changes none of the data, e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduce...
Being aware of said data is not "hatred" or seeing things black and white.
Just because there are adults that abuse their agency of the use of alcohol (alcoholism) doesn't mean we should remove restrictions on young people.
Just because there are adults with full agency who drive recklessly doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds to drive cars.
The old pervert using his camera shouldn't be doing that. His behaviour was not OK.
Nobody is talking about keeping kids off social media because their behaviour is not OK. They're talking about keeping kids off social media because they believe it's harmful to them, and that the companies designing the products know it's harmful and addictive.
We can disagree about whether or not that's true, or what actions might be helpful (or not), but there is no common thread with the example given.
And also the article they link to, went to the effort to black out their faces.
Giving addictive and attention stealing tech to children from a young age is like giving drugs to rats, they will continue to hit the feeder bar until they effectively kill themselves.
No one's proposing banning teenagers from owning smart phones entirely. I would agree that not allowing 17 year old girls going out to have phones on trains would be bad policy, if that was actually a thing anyone was suggesting. It's unclear how any of the teens in the anecdote at the start of the story would be affected by the proposed legislation at all.
> It’s watching precisely why young adults need phones, the agency to use them, and the life skills to make their ways in the world with their phones in their pockets.
The link between creepy old men being called out and documented on a train and whether or not 14 year olds should be spending 8+ hours a day scrolling tiktok is unclear to the point of feeling like I'm missing something in the article. I guess the idea is that teens are being punished? And we should be holding our leaders accountable instead of restricting the teens? The counter argument to this would be "holding our leaders accountable" looks a lot like "passing regulations to keep children from being harmed by digital nicotine"
> Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday
This is the same reason I think we should give 13 year olds a couple of cigarettes a week, just enough for them to still feel sick from the nicotine and start to figure out how to integrate into adult society.
We've long accepted that certain activities carry enough harm that people under a certain age lack the development for it to be fair to expect them to engage with it in a healthy manner. Does it deny 14 year olds some agency that we don't allow them to ride motorcycles? Yes. Is it sound policy? I think so. We have plenty of evidence for real harms in teenagers with regards to social media, a fact that took me a long time to accept while I worked in the industry, but is plainly obvious in the data and studies done on it over the past decade.
Same for AI.
Smartphones are fomes peccati.
Smartphones aren't, some apps on them are.
(besides being unneeded or a nuisance in some situations)
Once the app store and opened the gate for social media to wonder in, that is when these things got turned into potential addiction machines.
Like SM companies
Edit: now fixed, thanks mods
The former is no issue. I just don't think the author's take is nuanced as they think.
Kids (Age 5-13) safety is of ultimate importance. Devices, independently are also a major issue in schools. Social media use of bullying also is a major issue. To the point they are banned.
The abuse question .. well, "social justice" is a term that starts fights, but there have been a lot of people who've been able to get some sort of justice only because they raised their cause on social media, having been ignored by the authorities. #MeToo is probably the big example, culminating in the Epstein revelations.
You may disagree with the author's conclusions, but that doesn't make the article nonsense.
- I have not heard of a general cell phone ban for children and youth. They may "ban" the use of phones in schools (in reality: phones must remain in a bag or locker) and parents may choose to forbid their children from having phones (which is difficult to enforce after a certain age), but nothing general.
One may argue that children and youth may use phones to document improper or abusive situations in schools, which certainly can happen, but that is not the dominant use of phones by children and youth in schools and there are other avenues to document such circumstances.
- Most of the regulations we are discussing today are related to access to adult content or sites that are run in an exploitive manner (e.g. "the algorithm"). I have heard of no prohibitions of children and youth accessing sites outside of that context, even though there is plenty of room to question where the boundaries should be.
So I will agree that the author is either misrepresenting or conflating the regulations, to the point where the article is nonsense.
This is insane.
So which should we choose as society, removing the 99% harm or keep the 1% usefulness?
Also we should note that the children in this example were 16 and 17 years old, so above the age of many of the suggested restrictions.
I don't disagree that big adtech's reliance on dopamine-driven addictive behavior is real evil, but regulations that at least wall kids off from that makes sense and there's all kinds of research to suggest as much, in contrast to a personal essay about a video online.
> These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults.
Really? I would have said the opposite. Part of the problem is she lumps the affluent and the wealthy together. The affluent professional class go out of their way to encourage independence. They are the people who take gap years to travel, who are pushed to go away to university rather than a local one while living at home (a Scottish "policy wonk" should notice that the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews are full of affluent kids from the South of England).
The story is powerful and i agree with some of the conclusions, but forcing the conclusions to fit narrative that all bad things are the other sides fault is terrible.
(It's remarkable how many of the top-level comments are pointing out this sort of problem with the article content.)
It's complete nonsense. The conversation in the UK right now isn't about whether or not teenagers should be allowed to own cell phones; it's about whether they should be allowed to have access to the myriad of addictive and harmful apps and services available on those devices, often maliciously targeted at them.
The drunk pervert filming them on the train has nothing to do with this argument. He's using his phone like a camera. Teenagers are allowed to have cameras, and assuredly every one of the girls he was filming had a camera of some sort on them of their own. Nobody was on uneven ground in this situation technologically.
If people actually were worried about perverted adults preying on children, they would take a look at the countless examples of perverted adults preying on children via their social media accounts and devices. It's been open season on children online for the past decade.
If people actually cared about accountability, they would stop pushing for age-verification laws, and start penalizing social media companies for their laissez faire attitude towards inappropriate sexual conduct, because currently, sites like Instagram and TikTok cater directly to pedophiles and do absolutely nothing about the predatory behavior coming from their user base towards children that are clearly too young to legally use social media in most parts of the world (<13 in the USA).
We need to reframe this whole conversation. It's not about keeping kids away from social media. It's about keeping trillion-dollar businesses from profiting off of children while actively doing harm to them with addictive algorithms, misinformation, and exposure to malicious actors.
If you read the investigations into CSA, the vast majority is being commuted by white men, white men like the man in this video
>No one is being raped on social media
Who said they were? It's a bit off that you're waving out Sexual Assault in reference to literally everything else.
Do we need to speak to the police about you
What offences would those be? It isn’t an offence to record somebody on a train or else the person who recorded the video of the guy also committed an offence (and neither that person nor the guy did).
Didn’t read past that part. Mindless outrage culture is neither intellectually interesting nor healthy to be around.
But the main point here is that a guy was taking pics of some teens "secretly". Right?
The controversy about teens' rights to use cellphones and how to use them is quite debatable since it implies modern cultural behavior on tech and social media.
Except this is exactly what Heather Burns is doing.
Not this guy, who (I had to check) was apparently following the law(?) and the article even admits this:
> as far as policymakers are concerned, it’s the senior legal officer with the phone who is rightfully entitled to have the phone and use it any way he pleases
(if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article)
It's just a strange argument to say we should loosen the regulations when you have people like Heather exhibiting the problematic behavior that these laws are supposed to protect people from.
But then the rest of the article is a load of nonsense about legislation that doesn't even exist.
i feel like there's a time and a place to split hairs on whether or not legality clears moral wrong doing, and this is certainly not that time nor place. in what universe are these even remotely equivalent without broad abstractions?
* elite boomer filming underage girls for his own gratification
* bystanders filming a perpetrator mid-act
heather touches on those willing to get hung up on this stretch of an inconsistency and even links her other Darnella test post.
> (if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article)
that is literally the article. she's a tech policy writer critiquing the policy framework.
in general the weird undertones of your comment feel like you're asserting heather is like morally compromised or something and that the article is worth dismissing. if there was some discussion about the actual stuff she's talking about in this article i'd be singing a different tune right now, you know about whether or not under 16 bans punish young people for stinky perf perpetrator behavior... but since there isn't it feels even crazier that you're dotting this with your assessment that heather is somehow being the problematic one here. wat
The article mentions 15-16 years of age.
The best practice is to keep kids off smartphones with full internet, full social media, touchscreen and scrolling at least until 13.
It doesn't mean they can't have other kinds of devices.
This is a wide open market category.
Also vast majority of devices run a Linux kernel....
I think smart phones are really cool when they aren't in the attention economy. But high performance but low power draw chips and media accelerators unintentionally allowed for these kind of social media setups to be viable.
We've gone back to heavy CPU burning applications rather than nimble and efficient. Not to mention the amount of background processing for tracking.
Even Microsoft was once sued for how much energy they wasted with nonsense.
Before phones/computers/internet, it was garbage on television channels. Propaganda on 24/7 “news” channels, “reality” tv shows, etc.
I'm not advocating for a return to that, but that was one of the highlights of the era.
Maybe we should've shown a little more spine when they asked us to build a medium for the strong would use to prey on the weak. Maybe we're the problem.
Unfortunately, a lot of people run teenage software on adult hardware and that is a wild combo.
the adults of today, albeit the younger ones, were kids growing up with post-IM world. the ones before that could speak with their friends from their homes instead of only meeting in person (due to telephones). we all are products of the environment we were raised in. but despite those learnings, it seems like we are not self-regulating as a society.
charity begins at home, and before bringing children in a conversation, we should think if we all are alright.
I read the whole article to find these offences.
Found none.
Isn't this what happens in Islamic countries all the time though?
Meanwhile the article you link to, blacks out their faces.
The kids in that sense, are just a convenient vessel for an argument; the same way they function for the author of that article.
> the impetus for the most authoritarian internet regulation in the UK, including the <16s ban, has come from the affluent/wealthy/1% elite on the political right wing
Very strong take with no justification at all. What we observe is that many developped countries with different political orientations are currently taking action against harm caused by social media and more generally by excessive screen time. This is not about political right wing.
>It’s easy to understand why: the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. They never have. And they never did themselves,
Really sounds like a frustrated person that projects his own problems on the rest of the world. And totally not relevant to the debate about the impact of social media on teenagers.
I mean social media is simply misanthropic. If humanity had any balls it'd burn these places down. Calling banishment from social media a punishment is a stretch. The point of these decrees has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with persecuting adults for behaving in ways the state doesn't like. The author's read is just weird