"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims." -- I am sorry, but how is this not true, when companies like Meta are in full control of their algorithms, tuning them to maximum addiction.
One can indeed argue what is the best way to deal with the problem of kids and social media, but I think the article is misrepresenting the situation.
If you read the rest of the piece they do argue for more regulation. They aren’t making a personal responsibility argument like other commenters are saying.
The problem with bans is they claim the technology itself is purely bad and the only solution is to keep it from children. Which on its face is nonsensical. It’s ok for a 17 year old but not a 16 year old?
We need genuine regulation tackling the actual problems with this technology. Blanket bans do nothing but make adults feel good about “protecting the children”.
Age restrictions don't say it's 'okay' for somebody above a certain age to use something. Cigarettes will screw up your body at 18 just as much as they will at 17. But at 18 you're, legally at least, an adult, the point at which our unstated social contract starts to prioritize liberty over safety. And setting it at such an age also helps significantly reduce the peer pressure to smoke.
Blanket bans are better the no bans at all. I would agree we need genuine and granular regulation, though I don’t think it’s wise to ask kids what they think is best for them. Not a parent but a parent might have some concern for letting kids rule themselves.
Is driving a car on your own ok at age 15? why 16 and not 15? Why not 14? It's ok to drink in Australia at 18 age, why not 17, or 16? Legal drinking age in the US is 21, why not 18 like it is in Australia? Why not allow 20 year olds to smoke, not just 21 year olds.
Its because it is the legal age in which we have established people as adults where they're given more liberty as opposed to safety.
The US is weird in that we can't really decide if you are an adult at 16 (can work a standard job, can drive), 18 (can vote, can serve in the military) or 21 (can drink). In fact for a while between the Vietnam War and the late 1980s, the drinking/smoking age was 18 in many states (or odd compromises where you could drink beer at 18 but liquor at 21). It was largely pressure from groups like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) that increased the drinking age.
Considering brain development and differing effects of various substances/activities, I don't see any contradiction with having different age thresholds.
Well being able to serve in the military at 18 around weapons that potentially kill but you can't have a bear for another 3 years does sound a bit contradictory.
yeah I don't like this "definition", I fully agree that the technology is the issue, but the "badness" of it is irrelevant. In my opinion giving kids unfettered access is the problem. Lockdown tcp/ip and have whitelisted apps and sites for kids at the very most, but I just don't understand the drive to have kids on the internet in general, it seems like a recipe for disaster for the kid and seems abusive, like giving them alcohol or something.
I remember the ol "family computer", the kid isn't going to go hunt porn with their parents sitting in the same room, and giving kids these 24x7 smartphones, especially unsupervised, yeah I don't get it. Yes, obviously if a parent trusts their kid but it seems like the entire tech world is being coerced into unpaid babysitting commitments lol
Maybe. But how do we tell the effects of social media and smart phones apart from the multiple financial crises? The endless, incredibly costly Middle East forever wars? The huge rise in costs of houses, education and healthcare? The blatantly corrupt politics? Globalisation and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs? The inaction on school shootings? The climate situation?
I'd take this one step further and say this would be a major issue even without 'the algorithm' and other such 'engagement' maximization efforts. Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive. The only thing that changed with social media is that it all barriers to entry came crashing down and these sort of services became socially normalized, instead of being just made up of fringe tech enthusiasts.
And it's obviously a big problem for adults as well as kids, but I think there are many nuances there. One would be that we generally accept adults engaging in self destructive behaviors as part of the liberty of being an adult. You're free to go gamble away your life savings as an adult - but you won't even get in the door as a kid.
Another is that lot of the undesirable things that happen in schools (gossiping, conspiracies like false reporting, bullying, in-out crowds, image crafting, etc) get greatly magnified when you introduce social media. And that would happen even if the most benign/benevolent social media, absent any 'algorithm', engagement maximizing, and so on.
> Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive.
Social media today is almost nothing like BBS and Newsgroups. Social media is supercharged to be a dopamine slot machine that sells attention to the highest bidder with the explicit aim of changing their behavior. None of that existed on BBS or Newsgroups.
> Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive.
I'm not so sure about this (having lived both). The "algorithm" has a massive addictive effect that simply was not present in the BBS days, it is nearly universally agreed. Certainly it's believed enough for Meta to spend billions on it.
This is one of those topics that LLMs are quite good at for digging up information and consensus on, because they've been trained on stuff that you may have either forgotten or not been a part of the culture of. BBS were universally deemed extremely addictive. Early telnet BBSs then brought this up to an even more ridiculous extreme. Their usage even cropped up on early studies of internet addiction like this. [1] And similarly for usenet/newsgroups.
I think the algorithm's primary purpose is to be able to more seamlessly push ads. I also think that at some point there was a sort of dystopic interest in seeing if people could be controlled by content. Facebooks emotional control experiments are public validation of that. But these are again tangential red herrings once we establish clearly that addiction happens even without such, and it certainly did and does.
I don't doubt that BBSes were deemed addictive, but your argument is implying that "the algorithm" provides no additional addictive value. And I think the amount of money that goes into it strongly suggests it has a massive amount of addictive value.
It doesn't imply literally none. I'm sure flavored vapes helps improve their addictiveness for their target demographics - children, but they'd also be extremely addictive even without the flavorings. The reason I brought up advertising is because Facebook, Meta, whatever they want to call themselves, is an ad company. And the algorithm is a critical part in delivering both traditional ads as well as native advertising. It likely also helps create more complete profiles on individuals which can then again be monetized with advertising.
This is like saying short form content scrolling apps are adictive but it's just the same as TV back in the day.
Yeah there were studies on TV addiction. Yeah it was a discussed topic. No they're not equally addictive. It's not even close.
Having lived through it, participated in it, and being able to personally contrast people then and now. It's not particularly different, outside of the fact that in the past you had 0.1% of people (if that) using these services, whereas now you have the majority of humanity doing so, so all that's really changed is scale.
Beyond that I think there's also a first principles approach one can take. Not only were these services addictive, but so was Facebook (and other similar services) long before 'the algorithm' was a thing. The core interaction is interpersonal, and people simply want to see what other people are saying. We could define that as FOMO, entertainment, or whatever else - but I think this is the shared common core.
Even on this site, there are many people who are clearly addicted - myself probably amongst them. Yet there's not even a notification of when something you've written has been responded to, let alone some guiding algorithm. Even having to jump through hurdles to achieve interpersonal dialogue, it is still quite addictive.
>Having lived through it, participated in it, and being able to personally contrast people then and now. It's not particularly different, outside of the fact that in the past you had 0.1% of people (if that) using these services, whereas now you have the majority of humanity doing so, so all that's really changed is scale.
Having lived trough all the same i'd say the exact opposite and i'd even add that phones add a constant presence element that is a differernt factor but still i'd say theres a very noticable difference.
And if we look past our own experiences the reason why is fairly straightforward.
The whole point of the algorithm is to make it more addictive.
All those companies would not spend their time and effort on it otherwise if it did not help on this front.
And the fact that they spent quite a lot of research on it and make it quite intricate with lots of computation involved and the fact that it is quoted plenty as the reason for new players such as tiktok coming to prominence should tell you it's a quite impactfull one.
Again as mentioned above I'd strongly recommend using an LLM to search for some info from this era. These systems were all considered extremely addictive.
As for the algorithm - in modern times all these companies driven by advertising. The algorithm works as a means to enable more effective advertising, and especially native advertising. It also likely helps build more effective profiles on people which can then be further monetized with advertising. I'm certain it increases addiction, but that's like saying that the special jingles and bells and whistles on a slot machine increase addiction. You're just adding to an already highly addictive baseline.
I also don't think TikTok really 'won' because of their algorithm. Facebook is now for parents and grandparents, while younger people moved onto other services to find their own place. I think the same sort of view of a service being dated became true of YouTube, even moreso as it moved more from YouTube to CorpoTube. Most, if not all, alternatives tried to be YouTube but with less content and worse CDNs. TikTok actually tried to put the 'You' back in 'YouTube' and caught on exactly like YouTube did back in the day. Go figure.
>Again as mentioned above I'd strongly recommend using an LLM to search for some info from this era. These systems were all considered extremely addictive.
Which is so relative it's meaningless. Cigarettes are also extremely addictive but i'm not about to compare it to TV
>I'm certain it increases addiction
Then what's the discussion about? Companies incentivised and given the technological means to create a more addictive product create a more addictive product. Don't tell me it's by hapenstance or that it's just an insconsequential increase on an addictive baseline when the difference is so easily noticed and the things only wielding the addictive baseline are comparatively abandoned if not for societal innertia.
>I also don't think TikTok really 'won' because of their algorithm. Facebook is now for parents and grandparents,
There I think it's actually both. It's both the new things away from the old and the algorithm was actually good whilst youtube's was garbage in comparison. There were other contenders and ones that died (vine) so i think their execution was also part of it.
For all the outrage about slop, dances and dangerous and short form addictive content if the tiktok algorithm detected you liked ....let's say science and gardening videos in medium to long form it would give you exactly that and would only deviate enough (unless you searched on went on your own tangent) to see if your prefrences deviated but in a way that wouldnt be bothersome. In the meantime youtube was putting the same recommended unappealing vids among others in the sidebar for more than a year straight. It had all the annoying incentives that led to clickbait titles, thumbnails, intros, fillers.
I deleted tiktok because i have an addictive personality and it was too good at giving me both that dopamine fix and what i actually wanted in the moment.
Oh and as a 3rd factor it had less and less intrusive ads.
> this would be a major issue even without 'the algorithm' and other such 'engagement' maximization efforts
Thank you, I don't know why nobody else brings this up. The engagement algorithms certainly aren't good, we should regulate them, but it seems like a stretch to think they're the root of the problem.
Heck, you don't even have to go back to BBS and newsgroups. People can get addicted to group chats, to games, to browsing HN. Kids can get bullied on all these places. No engagement algorithm needed.
I think there's a fallacy of sorts where when something becomes harmful we assume it's evil. Computers make it really easy to shovel entertainment at our eyeballs, it's easy to get addicted to that and for it to cause social problems.
Because there is a huge difference between 0.1% of the population being addicted and 20%. It’s possible to get dropdown drunk drinking Miller Lite. That doesn’t imply that handing out bottles of everclear is safe social policy.
I actually thinks it’s far more applicable in the crack scenario than the social media scenario. There are lots of people who don’t use crack. The vast majority of humanity.
What percentage of teens don’t use social media? I don’t know the answer, and would adjust my thinking if incorrect, but my assumption is “a small minority”
Personal responsibility IS a factor that can’t be ignored when it comes to addiction. I say this as a multi substance addict who’s been clean for over a decade. Tech is a whole new beast though, because we are often forced to use it. It’s closer to food addiction than crack addiction, which, IMO, is the most brutal addiction of all (food). No one neeeds crack to survive, so stopping it is one thing. Stopping (junk) food addiction, or severe over eating, or whatever you want to call it… man, that must be brutal.
I don’t use social media, but I’m an old fogie. I’d imagine you kids can not very easily “just not use it” if they want to have any semblance of social life and to find a high paying job after college
I think personal responsibility does play into these situations to some extent, but even so, that doesn't imply there should be zero regulation.
Both for crack addicts and teens using social media, they not only hurt themselves, but also hurt those around them.
The studies on teen mental health largely suggest that mostly it's not about using a lot of social media yourself, but living in an area where social media is the coin of the realm. It's the toxic culture SM generates rather than direct use that's hurting teen mental health.
Are people seriously routinely experiencing serious harm from social media use, comparable with alcohol or gambling addiction? The discussion may have suffered from much unnecessarily hyperbole in comparing YouTube to heroin, in how a single use guarantees unavoidable long term consequences with little redeeming qualities.
I'm a college age gen Z, and don't really think you can fix much with a social media ban alone, even ignoring all the implications if it's enforcement.
People don't get dysmorphia because some computer program told them so. The "influencers" are just other victims of a fundamentally toxic culture, or leaches on that insecurity.
You could say it used to be better before the internet, and maybe you'd be right. But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. As long as there are humans communicating through any medium, there will be a culture that can harbor these destructive tendencies, and the bigger more sparse that culture is, the more extreme its ideas can get.
Chronological feeds or more civic accountability for any algorithmic feeds (like forcing companies to share data with researchers to study their effects) could be a generally great initiative, but simply banning social media for anyone won't do as much as you'd hope.
Looksmaxing, the latest of these strange internet-induced mental illnesses, literally began on a phpBB forum.
It seems fair to me. Consider the influence it has on an individual’s fundamental moral predicates. It shapes them by exposing them to emotion-laden content and burrows us into individual niches of hyper-optimized recommendation algorithms.
The fundamental is there, the warping is there. What do you suppose is overwrought about the language?
Meh, I don't see it warping people anymore than watching major news networks did and does. The only difference is instead of being force fed a certain perspective of bullshit, social media lets you fish around for your own brand of bullshit.
> heroin, in how a single use guarantees unavoidable long term consequences with little redeeming qualities
This is a pretty inaccurate representation of heroin. This exact question has been studied, and the rate is about 1/4 for dependency after a single dose. Still super scary and it's not something I'll ever try, but it's a far shot from "guarantees unavoidable long term consequences"
Admittedly it's harder to take the rest of your comment about addiction seriously when it begins on such shaky foundations, sorry.
Personal anecdote, and not about social media per se but the infinite-wall aspect of today's web, made my brain behave in very scary ways. I had a few times where I didn't order my hand to swipe (because I was expected to do something else right away) but my hand swiped. It was sufficiently against a part of my mind that it felt 'not me' and it happened a few times, sometimes even more complex movements.
To me it's an evidence that the brain is that sensitive to neurological reward to the point of being bent into automatic aimless actions just for the sake of keeping the cycle going.
It's not as deep and harmful as alcoholism but still too large not to ignore.
“ But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. ”
Isn’t one of the big complaints about social media that only like 1% or .1% of users get promoted?
I think the problem is your last paragraph buries the lede. - the social media companies want to make this about content, because algorithmic feeds are what make meta a trillion dollar company instead of a 50 billion dollar company.
I do think there would be a fair bit of agreement with your thesis if your minor caveat at the end wasn’t the big huge problem.
I think most of these bans are because no one has figured out how to ban the algorithmic feed and SV isn’t self-regulating.
There would still be plenty of moral panics about the content, but I think the bans are picking up speed because of the form.
I don’t care that my kid wants to join a satanic death cult I care that Meta has figured out how to monetize satanic death cult membership in the algorithm.
Maybe it’s because tech people are prone to binary thinking, but there seems to be the idea that if you can’t prevent a bad thing entirely, then you shouldn’t try to prevent it at all. Or maybe the other way around: if you can’t achieve a good thing completely, then why even bother trying?
While I think you're right that this is a real problem, there's also real costs to a partial solution. It encourages people to see it as a solved problem, disincentivising further reform and giving the impression you don't need to keep an eye on your kid's internet use because the state is handling it for you
There is nothing wrong with social media; if anything, we need more social media.
What we need less of are the attention-maximizing, eldritch-horror things that have stolen social media and now walk around wearing the skins of the entity that summoned it.
Facebook is not social media — if you don't believe me, go on Facebook and count how many posts are from people you had mutual interactions with and actively choosen to follow and how many are everything else (not including native ads, I understand the platforms have to make moeny).
It's the same issue, if not worse, on X/Twitter.
I wouldn't know the status of TikTok for the same reason I don't know what the current status of street drugs, but as I understand it you can't even meaningfully follow people on TikTok — it's just mindless consumption from people you don't know.
How can it be social media if there's no social component?
Email is social media; chatting with your guild members in World of Warcraft is social media. Until at least a few months ago, commenting on a pull request on GitHub was more social media than Twitter was.
The first step in dealing with the world is to look at things as they actually are, not as they were twenty years ago.
The profit motive turns social media into an opium machine gun, the maintenance of a global scale consumer social media without a profit motive impossible, and the existence of a consumer global scale social media makes both smaller scale and protocol-based forms obsolete
Well we live in a global informational network. Instagram actually did try to not fully attentionmaxx their reels algos back in 2014 when TikTok came up, and this led to them losing 60% of the market to this.
You can't regulate the whole world, if you won't make something addictive, someone in China will and you will lose the market to them.
Next best thing is ban because regulations in software are stale the day they get released due to legal processes being slower than technological ones.
I can agree with this. And I’m not sure how these bans are scoped but maybe they should be scoped specifically around algorithmic feeds.
The biggest problem to me isn’t the content or posting on a friends timeline. It’s that choices are pushed to the user rather than pulled. Change that one dynamic and I may not care as much that YouTube has content I consider toxic. Add a little friction my teen has to go actively discover content he’s curious about, not pushed an algorithmic feed.
I think the problem is though - the tech companies are incentivized to make this about _content_ “ I can’t ban Andrew Tate because it’s not my job to tell people what they can and can’t watch, first amendment, blah blah blah.
And Zuckerberg isn’t wrong here exactly, but per above the real argument I think is less about content and more about form.
But the reality is these companies don’t actually make their money from the content they make it from the form.
So Zuckerberg can’t concede “oh you’re right, making the newsfeed less adddictive doesn’t violate first amendment rights, at least we’re not banning Trump, because he doesn’t care about banning Trump except for the heat he gets from republicans, he cares about you messing with the money printer.
The thing we may all be able to agree they should do is the thing they’ll push back much harder against doing.
Im barely in the back half of Gen X. My oldest kids are grown now, but grew up with iPhones in their hands.
I am reminded of all the ridiculousness of the 1980s/1990s - "Its 10pm do you know where your kids are?" "I learned it by watching you dad!" Lawsuits around backwards message in music (Later PMRC), that Bevis and Butthead caused the child to burn down the trailer (fire! fire!)...
My kids hate social media for the most part - and are much more free range than their peers. Why? Because we did the hard work of parenting them! We were involved in their lives, from their grades to their social lives, to talking about the tech in their hand and the problems it can create.
We need to have a conversation about kids - about them being able to be outside, roaming, unattended without parents being arrested. About them having third spaces, about severe restrictions on their "freedom" in the world if we want to get to the heart of the issue. They are breaking this law because social media has become their "third space" that is parent free where they can explore and figure out the world.
The big problem with these "social media child bans", is that the capitalistic extreme-addictive experience IS harming everyone. Not just children.
What should have been was what Cory Doctorow has pushed - forced open API integration. From there you can make your own clients, only see friends, de-gamify, chronological algorithm, etc.
But banning children? That's a fools game. But easy for the votes, cause politicians are attacking a population who can't vote, and are disenfranchised by default.
What is everyone so worked up about? All parents have to do to stop the harm Meta is inflicting on children is to have their “high school students get together to hash out a national AI policy for schools.”
TFA: "Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces."
The Study TFA references: "The most common reason children still had their social media accounts was that they had not yet been asked by the platform to verify their age."
So, basically the first quote is an attempt to manipulate people by appealing to a cliche. Who would have thought?
For the record, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has fostered world-class research and development in fields such as A.I., X Windows (Athena Widgets, Kerberos security (adopted by Microsoft in SMB and Windows Server, etc. GNU (Richard M. Stallman))) Emacs and elisp, as well as glibc and gcc compiler tool suite.
Teen welfare is just the excuse. The teens are collateral damage along the path to mandating identification and de-anonymizing the Internet. The teens aren't enfranchised, so they can't meaningfully complain, and once they can vote, their problem is over, so why would they fight?
On the contrary, I think social media bans are poised to accomplish exactly what they're intended to: provide a convenient justification for forced identity verification across all websites.
Promoting it on billionaire owned platforms was always a losing battle - it makes you controlled opposition. When those platforms fall, we can have true ideological competition.
How so? Do you believe the average person will think twice when TikTok asks them to submit a picture of their ID? No, they'll do it without a second thought so they can go back to mindlessly scrolling through the slop.
The ones who will think twice are exactly the sort of people these laws are intended to punish: the dissenters, the wrong-thinkers, those who must be silenced. Either they choose not to verify and cease to use social media (successfully silenced), or they allow their wrong thoughts to be tied to their identity, such that they can be identified and punished accordingly.
True as that may be, I find it unconvincing as it is the same argument that is used against teen bans. Do you believe the average parent will think twice when allowing their children to use social media? No, they'll do it without a second thought so they their children will stop pestering them about it.
The ones who will think twice will have to see their children ostracized because all the cools are on it except themselves.
I lean towards teen bans. We already have the same framework for cigarettes and alcohol. They didn't prevent teenage consumption 100% anyways but they did their job
Then the networks will be full of solely slop, and will have no value. Look at Reddit right now - who still uses it? Only people who mainly hang out in subreddits the slop hasn't caught up with yet.
I wouldn't mind having verified accounts _as an alternative_. Not enforced over existing SM.
I'd like to know that when I'm reading a comment, it's written (or at least endorsed) by a human being. Currently that's.. debatable, and it's only going to be more so. Entities with cash and resources can focus on the topics relevant to them and drown the conversation. I'd like to at least know that the idiotic replies I'm getting are real human idiots, and not astroturfing in one shape or another.
Don’t ban it for kids. Ban the doomscrolling algorithmic feeds for everyone. Make them only show people posts from accounts they opt-in to following, and nothing else.
Or how about you adults all grow up and gain some healthy personal accountability instead of blaming your devices and society for your lack of self control.
For certain technology there should be bans but it is not social media and algorithmic feeds. There may be speedbumps, more user controls and auto classifiying of user type with optional alteration of the feed and type of content, but full bans for things like infinite scroll are disproptional.
Should sexual content be banned on social media? Maybe? Should violent footage be banned? It depends? Should bullying or predatory behavior be banned? I guess so? Or maybe it should it only be discouraged? What kind of social media does there exist? Is it binary or is it a spectrum, and should different rules or guidelines be applied?
Way too many variables. But what is clear is that age (ID) checks for the wide spread internet are completely out of the question. Governments should not have that much control over our social lives.
Face it, technology changes the world. The smartphone with camera did. If you could, would you put that genie back in the bottle? Should all content produced on smartphones be checked and watermarked and pulled through a selection of governments fingerprints to be publishable? Be very careful what you wish for since every new technology comes with hard to imagine second order effects and threats.
Explain to the audience the nature of "personhood" of Meta(Facebook), Alphabet(Google), etm.
Parents aren't hiring thousands of behavioral psychologists to assail the public with weaponized psychology. Parents aren't running mass exploitation via emotional attacks (targeting pregnancy, anorexia, mental illness, depression, etc). Parents never encouraged or helped the genocidalists in the Rohinga genocide.
But.... You blame parents. Standard capitalist response of calling everything a 'personal choice'.
Yep I'm also in favour of legally requiring the default feed on any "social" app to be a chronological feed from people you follow. It's both better for society longer-term and a better experience for the users, just not the shareholders.
The entirety of human knowledge is about defining rules by which we can categorize thing A vs thing B. I think we can determine the difference between Facebook and HN.
Have you tried sending them a fake ID? As I understand, these companies are verifying the format of the ID, not the exact details on it. Including all the subtle format details like the checksum of the OCR section. If it looks good, they add it (and the site you were trying to access, and the timestamp) to their database.
A disingenuous article. The 30% reduction of teen use is touted as a failure. If this was applied to cigarettes and alcohol, the solution would be stronger enforcement, but this is then labelled as doubling down.
It is not. The sources provided shows that the remaining 70% of teenagers that remain on the platforms are due to lack of enforcement from the platforms, not purposeful skirting of restrictions by the teenagers (VPN etc.).
The article further labels the teenage bans as a fight between adults and teenagers, as if the laws will breed resentment from children towards their parents. As far as I'm aware, that's not how teenagers view the issue of tobacco and alcohol bans around the world.
30% reduction is a successful start in the first year. I foresee further reduction in the coming years when less teenagers slip through the lack of enforcement and more of them pass the 16 year old threshold.
"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims."
"In scary headlines like these, the adult man in the white van is the subject, and the child is the passive victim. The child can obviously be trained to identify that adult mans talking to them in white vans may require distance even if not every person doing so is a killer."
“ But less than a year in, it suggests the ban is failing: A state-sponsored survey of parents indicated that seven in 10 teens are still using social media, while academic research has reported even lower rates of compliance.”
Failure? Or 30% improvement.
“While social media can be weaponized for bullying or hate, over half of all teens turn to social media as a source of social and emotional support.”
Teens also turn to drugs as a source of of social and emotional support.
“ Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults.”
Ironically the thesis of this article. In fact I would say by banning teens from social media, we may be implicitly increasing their agency, since they’ll have to figure out how to interface with a set of technolgies that are not optimized for them.
There’s something really dystopian to me about “designing for teens in mind” and I think maybe the unintended consequence of this kind of thinking is just - the continued marketable capture of segments.
What this person is basically advocating for is a new way for tech companies to extract more value from our youth.
The whole point of being a teenager is to generate your own ways to rebel against the fact that the adult world isn’t quite built for you.
This “facebook but for teenagers” is just another opiate for the masses.
> Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces
The article is missing the point entirely. The conversation is not about “regulated spaces”, but removing them from spaces created entirely to drive advertisement, mindless engagement and consumption. If they find other spaces to join without that, perfect - it worked!
What a surprise! Researchers who have a good grift going studying how young people use social media don't want it banned outright. Instead, they want some unspecified conversation in which they have a role deciding how technology can be "better shaped", which coincidentally allows their grift to keep going.
> The companion narrative to technological determinism is something I’d call adult saviorism. Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults. In this narrative, teens lack the media literacy or judgment to save themselves. The conclusion to this line of thinking, when it comes to regulation, is that teens need not be involved, since they themselves are compromised.
This totally devalues the long-accepted wisdom that adults are responsible for raising children and sometimes have to make decisions that children don't like but that are necessary and beneficial for their well-being.
In the author's narrative, teens who have no meaningful context in which to understand how their brains are being manipulated by multi-billion dollar companies for profit are somehow supposed to participate in proposing regulations that protect them from said companies.
> While adult saviorism is, in many ways, well-intentioned, often coming from a place of concern about child safety, it fails to recognize teens’ expertise and creativity in using technology. Most teens are skeptical that their parents and policymakers know better than they do about the good and bad of the online world, and for good reason. Consider the U.S. congressional hearing held in 2021, in which Facebook’s then global head of safety was asked by Senator Richard Blumenthal, “Will you commit to ending Finsta?” Needless to say, such embarrassing lines of questioning — which neither began nor ended with Blumenthal — should inspire very little confidence.
Teens think they know more than their elders?!? What an astonishing revelation!
This is such a straw man argument. Arguing that some geezer in Congress saying "Finsta" is evidence that adults are incapable of making sensible decisions about protections for children is a bad look for anyone associated with an institution of higher learning.
The reason social media bans miss yhe point is because they will be replaced by other addictive/predatory technology, such as gaming. It's wack-a-mole - ban one thing and another pops up. Parental involvement and school education about addiction in all its forms is the best (not perfect) solution. The goal is to allow adolescents to grow into knowledge and responsible adults. Infantilizing them and delaying their exposure to the world only delays that development. And most age verification tech just undermines privacy.
It’s easy to say, but do you want a teenage mind to compete against an army of thousands of marketers and engineers, with billions of dollars on the line, to see who wins that battle? It’s not a level playing field.
This. To be fair, adults should not be subject to this dynamic either. The lawmakers have failed to legislate around social media, and this is a weak fallback option.
I think the difference about the social media moral panic if you want to call it that is it’s about form not content.
I think there are plenty of adults who think maybe there are certain types of social media patterns that should be banned outright.
It’s not whack a mole - I _want_ my kid to engage with a replacement technology like gaming. I’m not worried about my kid playing GTA vi all day. I’m not worried about content. I’m not even really worried about Andrew Tate. I’m worried about the specific way mindless algorithmic applications mimic cigarettes more than “satanic heavy metal rock concerts”
My kid needs more satan in his life! And less growth hacker.
It's not about content. Modern games have similar addictive traits, and they even admit it. Stuff like loot crates, custom skins, pay to unlock stuff early, etc. Even things like "seasons" and rank resets because without them "engagement was dropping".
Not even that. Play Forza Horizon and you'll notice how you get ADHD-inducing pings and pongs all over your screen for literally just doing basic actions in the game.
What education will do is show that to the world. Then we might legislate privacy mechanisms that would make this sort of abuse illegal and less likely to occur for all people.
> The goal is to allow adolescents to grow into knowledge and responsible adults. Infantilizing them and delaying their exposure to the world only delays that development.
Epstein et al. had similar beliefs about banging them
I don't see anything wrong with a social media ban for teens in concept. In execution, it'll be difficult to do effectively though.
What I would like to see is changes to the tax code to disincentivize the social media business model and the advertising industry generally. For example...
1. Tax the crap out of advertising revenue on social media platforms
2. Stratify the ads and ban the existence of paid tiers which include advertising. If you pay for something, you don't see ads, period
3. Ban the use of trackers and fingerprinting on any paid service without explicit opt-in
4. Create a tort for data leaks that travels with any company which handled the data. If anyone in the chain leaks it, you can take an action against all of them, and the penalties are individually assessed
5. Ban the collection and sale of profiling data for anyone under 18
6. Ban the ad-supported tier for anyone under 18
This heavily disincentivizes algorithms generally and makes paid tiers more appealing, which is much easier for parents to control. The problem with social media and teens is that teens can even sign up in the first place. Make them use a credit card, and you suddenly have a much higher barrier to entry. If I tried to subscribe my parents to HBO as a kid, it wouldn't have worked, and this is why. It wasn't because the government banned 14 year olds from seeing HBO.
Just because compliance isn’t 100% doesn’t mean there’s no benefit. Also these things can take time to work, but we do have evidence that bans reduce usage to an extent.
You are conflating cigarette damage with social media damage.
Social media doesn't have to be toxic, just toxic behaviour is rewarded. This is more like "sniper in park causes ban for under 18s". You are keeping the bad things but age gating it. It would be better to remove the sniper in the park.
It is the operating systems vendors who created this scenario by creating single-user walled-garden platforms which abrogate a parents rights and agency over their children’s lives.
I should be able to give my 8 year old a mobile phone for their uses, pair it with my phone, and at any time of day be able to observe their activity on that phone - just as if I were watching what they were up to at the park, or while experimenting with matches in the garden, or riding their bikes on the street for the first time.
But there is a distinct desire by the operating system vendors to serve their true masters - ad agencies - and abrogate responsibilities of the users. “Filesystem, what filesystem?”
The idea of having a parent/child relationship encoded in the functions of the operating system is not in alignment with the idea that the true operators of the platform are faceless corporations, hell bent on harvesting every bit of data from every human being using their platforms.
With one simple trick, operating systems can change this equation entirely: give parents their rights and duties and responsibilities back. Let me see what my 8-year old is doing, in a fair and open and equitable fashion, so that I can - as a parent - fulfill my responsibilities to keep my children safe.
A phone is no less dangerous than a sharp kitchen knife. I’m perfectly fine with my 8 year old learning to use a kitchen knife properly - to gain their own agency over it as a tool - as long as I am able to observe their use of it.
And before anyone tries to make the argument “parents don’t do that, oh my god, you’re violating your child’s right to privacy” - no, that is not what I mean. A child should have privacy and they should learn to have agency over that privacy - but a parent is not absolved of the issue if that child falls of a cliff because of their negligence. Let the OS provide privacy - but let it also provide a means of review by the parents - who are the ones ultimately responsible for the child in the first place.
This needs to be an OS feature. Parents and children should, through the OS, be able to establish a strong, positive relationship with each other over this issue, with agency returned to the family unit.
Otherwise, we are creating totalitarian systems of control and putting them in the hands of people we simply cannot trust. The degradation of agency within the family unit is a function of commercial desire to exploit that lack of agency.
Operating systems, instead of serving ad agency masters, can go a long, long way to provide parents and children the right tools to solve this problem. They do, however, need to stop suckling at the teat of the nameless corporations who see the family unit as a nut that has to be cracked in order to extract the juice.
Android allows parents to monitor and control what apps children use, and for how long, on their devices.
So I block chrome, and require my permission to install any app. They get thirty minutes a day on devices that lack a browser or social media apps. Not even any YouTube.
They can browse the web on PCs that are visible to the whole living room.
That’s all in the right direction. I think there are other things OS vendors can do too - screen sharing and a logged timeline history of events would also be useful for parents.
We have tools to do this already - authentication apps, and so on - but it’s my firm opinion that these need to be built in to the OS. I’m happy to hear Android allows this to an extent already ..
"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims." -- I am sorry, but how is this not true, when companies like Meta are in full control of their algorithms, tuning them to maximum addiction.
One can indeed argue what is the best way to deal with the problem of kids and social media, but I think the article is misrepresenting the situation.
If you read the rest of the piece they do argue for more regulation. They aren’t making a personal responsibility argument like other commenters are saying.
The problem with bans is they claim the technology itself is purely bad and the only solution is to keep it from children. Which on its face is nonsensical. It’s ok for a 17 year old but not a 16 year old?
We need genuine regulation tackling the actual problems with this technology. Blanket bans do nothing but make adults feel good about “protecting the children”.
Age restrictions don't say it's 'okay' for somebody above a certain age to use something. Cigarettes will screw up your body at 18 just as much as they will at 17. But at 18 you're, legally at least, an adult, the point at which our unstated social contract starts to prioritize liberty over safety. And setting it at such an age also helps significantly reduce the peer pressure to smoke.
You’re right, and that’s the reason why some states have gone further banning cigarettes that have flavorings including menthol.
Ironic since menthols are to me associated with an older generation. AFAIK, their original purpose was for smokers with colds / blocked sinuses.
Blanket bans are better the no bans at all. I would agree we need genuine and granular regulation, though I don’t think it’s wise to ask kids what they think is best for them. Not a parent but a parent might have some concern for letting kids rule themselves.
There plenty of stuff that switches arbitrarily between 17 and 18. Tobacco use, sexual consent, army etc.
That's an odd take in my opinion.
Is driving a car on your own ok at age 15? why 16 and not 15? Why not 14? It's ok to drink in Australia at 18 age, why not 17, or 16? Legal drinking age in the US is 21, why not 18 like it is in Australia? Why not allow 20 year olds to smoke, not just 21 year olds.
Its because it is the legal age in which we have established people as adults where they're given more liberty as opposed to safety.
The US is weird in that we can't really decide if you are an adult at 16 (can work a standard job, can drive), 18 (can vote, can serve in the military) or 21 (can drink). In fact for a while between the Vietnam War and the late 1980s, the drinking/smoking age was 18 in many states (or odd compromises where you could drink beer at 18 but liquor at 21). It was largely pressure from groups like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) that increased the drinking age.
Considering brain development and differing effects of various substances/activities, I don't see any contradiction with having different age thresholds.
Well being able to serve in the military at 18 around weapons that potentially kill but you can't have a bear for another 3 years does sound a bit contradictory.
yeah I don't like this "definition", I fully agree that the technology is the issue, but the "badness" of it is irrelevant. In my opinion giving kids unfettered access is the problem. Lockdown tcp/ip and have whitelisted apps and sites for kids at the very most, but I just don't understand the drive to have kids on the internet in general, it seems like a recipe for disaster for the kid and seems abusive, like giving them alcohol or something.
I remember the ol "family computer", the kid isn't going to go hunt porn with their parents sitting in the same room, and giving kids these 24x7 smartphones, especially unsupervised, yeah I don't get it. Yes, obviously if a parent trusts their kid but it seems like the entire tech world is being coerced into unpaid babysitting commitments lol
I grow up with ICQ where you can click a button to talk with a random stranger. Boomers were crying about Internet addiction.
30 years later, I’m fine and the boomers are the ones getting addicted to fake stuff on the internet.
Our generation did not turn out fine. Phones are hugely a net loss for society. I stand by that.
Every living generation has a phone "problem", so that's not unique to one made up cohort.
Maybe. But how do we tell the effects of social media and smart phones apart from the multiple financial crises? The endless, incredibly costly Middle East forever wars? The huge rise in costs of houses, education and healthcare? The blatantly corrupt politics? Globalisation and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs? The inaction on school shootings? The climate situation?
Maybe without perpetual distraction some of those problems wouldn't be as bad.
I know people who got into car accidents and 30 years later they were fine
I'd take this one step further and say this would be a major issue even without 'the algorithm' and other such 'engagement' maximization efforts. Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive. The only thing that changed with social media is that it all barriers to entry came crashing down and these sort of services became socially normalized, instead of being just made up of fringe tech enthusiasts.
And it's obviously a big problem for adults as well as kids, but I think there are many nuances there. One would be that we generally accept adults engaging in self destructive behaviors as part of the liberty of being an adult. You're free to go gamble away your life savings as an adult - but you won't even get in the door as a kid.
Another is that lot of the undesirable things that happen in schools (gossiping, conspiracies like false reporting, bullying, in-out crowds, image crafting, etc) get greatly magnified when you introduce social media. And that would happen even if the most benign/benevolent social media, absent any 'algorithm', engagement maximizing, and so on.
> Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive.
Social media today is almost nothing like BBS and Newsgroups. Social media is supercharged to be a dopamine slot machine that sells attention to the highest bidder with the explicit aim of changing their behavior. None of that existed on BBS or Newsgroups.
> Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive.
I'm not so sure about this (having lived both). The "algorithm" has a massive addictive effect that simply was not present in the BBS days, it is nearly universally agreed. Certainly it's believed enough for Meta to spend billions on it.
This is one of those topics that LLMs are quite good at for digging up information and consensus on, because they've been trained on stuff that you may have either forgotten or not been a part of the culture of. BBS were universally deemed extremely addictive. Early telnet BBSs then brought this up to an even more ridiculous extreme. Their usage even cropped up on early studies of internet addiction like this. [1] And similarly for usenet/newsgroups.
I think the algorithm's primary purpose is to be able to more seamlessly push ads. I also think that at some point there was a sort of dystopic interest in seeing if people could be controlled by content. Facebooks emotional control experiments are public validation of that. But these are again tangential red herrings once we establish clearly that addiction happens even without such, and it certainly did and does.
[1] - https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED416838
I don't doubt that BBSes were deemed addictive, but your argument is implying that "the algorithm" provides no additional addictive value. And I think the amount of money that goes into it strongly suggests it has a massive amount of addictive value.
It doesn't imply literally none. I'm sure flavored vapes helps improve their addictiveness for their target demographics - children, but they'd also be extremely addictive even without the flavorings. The reason I brought up advertising is because Facebook, Meta, whatever they want to call themselves, is an ad company. And the algorithm is a critical part in delivering both traditional ads as well as native advertising. It likely also helps create more complete profiles on individuals which can then again be monetized with advertising.
How are you quantifying it?
This is like saying short form content scrolling apps are adictive but it's just the same as TV back in the day. Yeah there were studies on TV addiction. Yeah it was a discussed topic. No they're not equally addictive. It's not even close.
Having lived through it, participated in it, and being able to personally contrast people then and now. It's not particularly different, outside of the fact that in the past you had 0.1% of people (if that) using these services, whereas now you have the majority of humanity doing so, so all that's really changed is scale.
Beyond that I think there's also a first principles approach one can take. Not only were these services addictive, but so was Facebook (and other similar services) long before 'the algorithm' was a thing. The core interaction is interpersonal, and people simply want to see what other people are saying. We could define that as FOMO, entertainment, or whatever else - but I think this is the shared common core.
Even on this site, there are many people who are clearly addicted - myself probably amongst them. Yet there's not even a notification of when something you've written has been responded to, let alone some guiding algorithm. Even having to jump through hurdles to achieve interpersonal dialogue, it is still quite addictive.
>Having lived through it, participated in it, and being able to personally contrast people then and now. It's not particularly different, outside of the fact that in the past you had 0.1% of people (if that) using these services, whereas now you have the majority of humanity doing so, so all that's really changed is scale.
Having lived trough all the same i'd say the exact opposite and i'd even add that phones add a constant presence element that is a differernt factor but still i'd say theres a very noticable difference.
And if we look past our own experiences the reason why is fairly straightforward. The whole point of the algorithm is to make it more addictive. All those companies would not spend their time and effort on it otherwise if it did not help on this front. And the fact that they spent quite a lot of research on it and make it quite intricate with lots of computation involved and the fact that it is quoted plenty as the reason for new players such as tiktok coming to prominence should tell you it's a quite impactfull one.
Again as mentioned above I'd strongly recommend using an LLM to search for some info from this era. These systems were all considered extremely addictive.
As for the algorithm - in modern times all these companies driven by advertising. The algorithm works as a means to enable more effective advertising, and especially native advertising. It also likely helps build more effective profiles on people which can then be further monetized with advertising. I'm certain it increases addiction, but that's like saying that the special jingles and bells and whistles on a slot machine increase addiction. You're just adding to an already highly addictive baseline.
I also don't think TikTok really 'won' because of their algorithm. Facebook is now for parents and grandparents, while younger people moved onto other services to find their own place. I think the same sort of view of a service being dated became true of YouTube, even moreso as it moved more from YouTube to CorpoTube. Most, if not all, alternatives tried to be YouTube but with less content and worse CDNs. TikTok actually tried to put the 'You' back in 'YouTube' and caught on exactly like YouTube did back in the day. Go figure.
>Again as mentioned above I'd strongly recommend using an LLM to search for some info from this era. These systems were all considered extremely addictive.
Which is so relative it's meaningless. Cigarettes are also extremely addictive but i'm not about to compare it to TV
>I'm certain it increases addiction
Then what's the discussion about? Companies incentivised and given the technological means to create a more addictive product create a more addictive product. Don't tell me it's by hapenstance or that it's just an insconsequential increase on an addictive baseline when the difference is so easily noticed and the things only wielding the addictive baseline are comparatively abandoned if not for societal innertia.
>I also don't think TikTok really 'won' because of their algorithm. Facebook is now for parents and grandparents,
There I think it's actually both. It's both the new things away from the old and the algorithm was actually good whilst youtube's was garbage in comparison. There were other contenders and ones that died (vine) so i think their execution was also part of it. For all the outrage about slop, dances and dangerous and short form addictive content if the tiktok algorithm detected you liked ....let's say science and gardening videos in medium to long form it would give you exactly that and would only deviate enough (unless you searched on went on your own tangent) to see if your prefrences deviated but in a way that wouldnt be bothersome. In the meantime youtube was putting the same recommended unappealing vids among others in the sidebar for more than a year straight. It had all the annoying incentives that led to clickbait titles, thumbnails, intros, fillers. I deleted tiktok because i have an addictive personality and it was too good at giving me both that dopamine fix and what i actually wanted in the moment. Oh and as a 3rd factor it had less and less intrusive ads.
> this would be a major issue even without 'the algorithm' and other such 'engagement' maximization efforts
Thank you, I don't know why nobody else brings this up. The engagement algorithms certainly aren't good, we should regulate them, but it seems like a stretch to think they're the root of the problem.
Heck, you don't even have to go back to BBS and newsgroups. People can get addicted to group chats, to games, to browsing HN. Kids can get bullied on all these places. No engagement algorithm needed.
I think there's a fallacy of sorts where when something becomes harmful we assume it's evil. Computers make it really easy to shovel entertainment at our eyeballs, it's easy to get addicted to that and for it to cause social problems.
Because there is a huge difference between 0.1% of the population being addicted and 20%. It’s possible to get dropdown drunk drinking Miller Lite. That doesn’t imply that handing out bottles of everclear is safe social policy.
Exactly, it's like talking about the symptoms and missing the point of the diagnostic.
Yup. All this talk of personal responsibility in these types of situations is nothing but a perfidious form of victim blaming.
"The crack addict should've known better, it's not the dealer's fault they came back for more!"
I actually thinks it’s far more applicable in the crack scenario than the social media scenario. There are lots of people who don’t use crack. The vast majority of humanity.
What percentage of teens don’t use social media? I don’t know the answer, and would adjust my thinking if incorrect, but my assumption is “a small minority”
Personal responsibility IS a factor that can’t be ignored when it comes to addiction. I say this as a multi substance addict who’s been clean for over a decade. Tech is a whole new beast though, because we are often forced to use it. It’s closer to food addiction than crack addiction, which, IMO, is the most brutal addiction of all (food). No one neeeds crack to survive, so stopping it is one thing. Stopping (junk) food addiction, or severe over eating, or whatever you want to call it… man, that must be brutal.
I don’t use social media, but I’m an old fogie. I’d imagine you kids can not very easily “just not use it” if they want to have any semblance of social life and to find a high paying job after college
I think personal responsibility does play into these situations to some extent, but even so, that doesn't imply there should be zero regulation.
Both for crack addicts and teens using social media, they not only hurt themselves, but also hurt those around them.
The studies on teen mental health largely suggest that mostly it's not about using a lot of social media yourself, but living in an area where social media is the coin of the realm. It's the toxic culture SM generates rather than direct use that's hurting teen mental health.
Totalitarian regimes around the world love the way you think.
Are people seriously routinely experiencing serious harm from social media use, comparable with alcohol or gambling addiction? The discussion may have suffered from much unnecessarily hyperbole in comparing YouTube to heroin, in how a single use guarantees unavoidable long term consequences with little redeeming qualities.
I'm a college age gen Z, and don't really think you can fix much with a social media ban alone, even ignoring all the implications if it's enforcement.
People don't get dysmorphia because some computer program told them so. The "influencers" are just other victims of a fundamentally toxic culture, or leaches on that insecurity.
You could say it used to be better before the internet, and maybe you'd be right. But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. As long as there are humans communicating through any medium, there will be a culture that can harbor these destructive tendencies, and the bigger more sparse that culture is, the more extreme its ideas can get.
Chronological feeds or more civic accountability for any algorithmic feeds (like forcing companies to share data with researchers to study their effects) could be a generally great initiative, but simply banning social media for anyone won't do as much as you'd hope.
Looksmaxing, the latest of these strange internet-induced mental illnesses, literally began on a phpBB forum.
Having lived many years prior to social media, it feels very clear that social media fundamentally warps people in a way they weren’t before.
If you have only lived within it, it makes sense to underestimate the impact.
Having lived many years prior to social media, I'm gonna say that "fundamentally warps people" is pretty damned overwrought language.
It seems fair to me. Consider the influence it has on an individual’s fundamental moral predicates. It shapes them by exposing them to emotion-laden content and burrows us into individual niches of hyper-optimized recommendation algorithms.
The fundamental is there, the warping is there. What do you suppose is overwrought about the language?
Meh, I don't see it warping people anymore than watching major news networks did and does. The only difference is instead of being force fed a certain perspective of bullshit, social media lets you fish around for your own brand of bullshit.
Even the big news networks were "only" warping the minds of about 50 million americans total.
Go ahead and compare that to Facebook's reach.
Fox News never convinced me to watch it because of other people in my family watching it. MSNBC never got popular at school.
No it doesn't. It just detects what you are most receptive to, and force feeds you that.
> heroin, in how a single use guarantees unavoidable long term consequences with little redeeming qualities
This is a pretty inaccurate representation of heroin. This exact question has been studied, and the rate is about 1/4 for dependency after a single dose. Still super scary and it's not something I'll ever try, but it's a far shot from "guarantees unavoidable long term consequences"
Admittedly it's harder to take the rest of your comment about addiction seriously when it begins on such shaky foundations, sorry.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6584277/
Personal anecdote, and not about social media per se but the infinite-wall aspect of today's web, made my brain behave in very scary ways. I had a few times where I didn't order my hand to swipe (because I was expected to do something else right away) but my hand swiped. It was sufficiently against a part of my mind that it felt 'not me' and it happened a few times, sometimes even more complex movements.
To me it's an evidence that the brain is that sensitive to neurological reward to the point of being bent into automatic aimless actions just for the sake of keeping the cycle going.
It's not as deep and harmful as alcoholism but still too large not to ignore.
A single use of heroin does not guarantee unavoidable long term consequences. I've met many occasional drug users who are clearly not addicts.
“ But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. ”
Isn’t one of the big complaints about social media that only like 1% or .1% of users get promoted?
I think the problem is your last paragraph buries the lede. - the social media companies want to make this about content, because algorithmic feeds are what make meta a trillion dollar company instead of a 50 billion dollar company.
I do think there would be a fair bit of agreement with your thesis if your minor caveat at the end wasn’t the big huge problem.
I think most of these bans are because no one has figured out how to ban the algorithmic feed and SV isn’t self-regulating.
There would still be plenty of moral panics about the content, but I think the bans are picking up speed because of the form.
I don’t care that my kid wants to join a satanic death cult I care that Meta has figured out how to monetize satanic death cult membership in the algorithm.
Maybe it’s because tech people are prone to binary thinking, but there seems to be the idea that if you can’t prevent a bad thing entirely, then you shouldn’t try to prevent it at all. Or maybe the other way around: if you can’t achieve a good thing completely, then why even bother trying?
While I think you're right that this is a real problem, there's also real costs to a partial solution. It encourages people to see it as a solved problem, disincentivising further reform and giving the impression you don't need to keep an eye on your kid's internet use because the state is handling it for you
There is nothing wrong with social media; if anything, we need more social media.
What we need less of are the attention-maximizing, eldritch-horror things that have stolen social media and now walk around wearing the skins of the entity that summoned it.
Facebook is not social media — if you don't believe me, go on Facebook and count how many posts are from people you had mutual interactions with and actively choosen to follow and how many are everything else (not including native ads, I understand the platforms have to make moeny).
It's the same issue, if not worse, on X/Twitter.
I wouldn't know the status of TikTok for the same reason I don't know what the current status of street drugs, but as I understand it you can't even meaningfully follow people on TikTok — it's just mindless consumption from people you don't know.
How can it be social media if there's no social component?
Email is social media; chatting with your guild members in World of Warcraft is social media. Until at least a few months ago, commenting on a pull request on GitHub was more social media than Twitter was.
The first step in dealing with the world is to look at things as they actually are, not as they were twenty years ago.
The profit motive turns social media into an opium machine gun, the maintenance of a global scale consumer social media without a profit motive impossible, and the existence of a consumer global scale social media makes both smaller scale and protocol-based forms obsolete
Well we live in a global informational network. Instagram actually did try to not fully attentionmaxx their reels algos back in 2014 when TikTok came up, and this led to them losing 60% of the market to this.
You can't regulate the whole world, if you won't make something addictive, someone in China will and you will lose the market to them.
Next best thing is ban because regulations in software are stale the day they get released due to legal processes being slower than technological ones.
What you're saying is we need less social media, and more social networks.
I can agree with this. And I’m not sure how these bans are scoped but maybe they should be scoped specifically around algorithmic feeds.
The biggest problem to me isn’t the content or posting on a friends timeline. It’s that choices are pushed to the user rather than pulled. Change that one dynamic and I may not care as much that YouTube has content I consider toxic. Add a little friction my teen has to go actively discover content he’s curious about, not pushed an algorithmic feed.
I think the problem is though - the tech companies are incentivized to make this about _content_ “ I can’t ban Andrew Tate because it’s not my job to tell people what they can and can’t watch, first amendment, blah blah blah.
And Zuckerberg isn’t wrong here exactly, but per above the real argument I think is less about content and more about form.
But the reality is these companies don’t actually make their money from the content they make it from the form.
So Zuckerberg can’t concede “oh you’re right, making the newsfeed less adddictive doesn’t violate first amendment rights, at least we’re not banning Trump, because he doesn’t care about banning Trump except for the heat he gets from republicans, he cares about you messing with the money printer.
The thing we may all be able to agree they should do is the thing they’ll push back much harder against doing.
Im barely in the back half of Gen X. My oldest kids are grown now, but grew up with iPhones in their hands.
I am reminded of all the ridiculousness of the 1980s/1990s - "Its 10pm do you know where your kids are?" "I learned it by watching you dad!" Lawsuits around backwards message in music (Later PMRC), that Bevis and Butthead caused the child to burn down the trailer (fire! fire!)...
My kids hate social media for the most part - and are much more free range than their peers. Why? Because we did the hard work of parenting them! We were involved in their lives, from their grades to their social lives, to talking about the tech in their hand and the problems it can create.
We need to have a conversation about kids - about them being able to be outside, roaming, unattended without parents being arrested. About them having third spaces, about severe restrictions on their "freedom" in the world if we want to get to the heart of the issue. They are breaking this law because social media has become their "third space" that is parent free where they can explore and figure out the world.
The big problem with these "social media child bans", is that the capitalistic extreme-addictive experience IS harming everyone. Not just children.
What should have been was what Cory Doctorow has pushed - forced open API integration. From there you can make your own clients, only see friends, de-gamify, chronological algorithm, etc.
But banning children? That's a fools game. But easy for the votes, cause politicians are attacking a population who can't vote, and are disenfranchised by default.
What is everyone so worked up about? All parents have to do to stop the harm Meta is inflicting on children is to have their “high school students get together to hash out a national AI policy for schools.”
TFA: "Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces."
The Study TFA references: "The most common reason children still had their social media accounts was that they had not yet been asked by the platform to verify their age."
So, basically the first quote is an attempt to manipulate people by appealing to a cliche. Who would have thought?
For the record, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has fostered world-class research and development in fields such as A.I., X Windows (Athena Widgets, Kerberos security (adopted by Microsoft in SMB and Windows Server, etc. GNU (Richard M. Stallman))) Emacs and elisp, as well as glibc and gcc compiler tool suite.
> there should be a focus on supporting positive online engagement
I feel like this is the key for fighting all negative behaviors.
Fill the time, burn the energy, with better stuff so that nobody has any left for the bad stuff.
I'm not sure that most people have a concept for what positive online engagement is.
Teen welfare is just the excuse. The teens are collateral damage along the path to mandating identification and de-anonymizing the Internet. The teens aren't enfranchised, so they can't meaningfully complain, and once they can vote, their problem is over, so why would they fight?
Yes, no one is trying to fix the problem here. Otherwise we'd ban algorithmic feeds and let the client decide what they see.
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On the contrary, I think social media bans are poised to accomplish exactly what they're intended to: provide a convenient justification for forced identity verification across all websites.
That's just a means of banning social media for everyone, which is even better than banning it for teens.
No, it's a means of removing anonymity so promoters of ideologically unsound sentiment can be identified.
Promoting it on billionaire owned platforms was always a losing battle - it makes you controlled opposition. When those platforms fall, we can have true ideological competition.
How so? Do you believe the average person will think twice when TikTok asks them to submit a picture of their ID? No, they'll do it without a second thought so they can go back to mindlessly scrolling through the slop.
The ones who will think twice are exactly the sort of people these laws are intended to punish: the dissenters, the wrong-thinkers, those who must be silenced. Either they choose not to verify and cease to use social media (successfully silenced), or they allow their wrong thoughts to be tied to their identity, such that they can be identified and punished accordingly.
True as that may be, I find it unconvincing as it is the same argument that is used against teen bans. Do you believe the average parent will think twice when allowing their children to use social media? No, they'll do it without a second thought so they their children will stop pestering them about it.
The ones who will think twice will have to see their children ostracized because all the cools are on it except themselves.
I lean towards teen bans. We already have the same framework for cigarettes and alcohol. They didn't prevent teenage consumption 100% anyways but they did their job
Then the networks will be full of solely slop, and will have no value. Look at Reddit right now - who still uses it? Only people who mainly hang out in subreddits the slop hasn't caught up with yet.
I wouldn't mind having verified accounts _as an alternative_. Not enforced over existing SM.
I'd like to know that when I'm reading a comment, it's written (or at least endorsed) by a human being. Currently that's.. debatable, and it's only going to be more so. Entities with cash and resources can focus on the topics relevant to them and drown the conversation. I'd like to at least know that the idiotic replies I'm getting are real human idiots, and not astroturfing in one shape or another.
Don’t ban it for kids. Ban the doomscrolling algorithmic feeds for everyone. Make them only show people posts from accounts they opt-in to following, and nothing else.
Or how about you adults all grow up and gain some healthy personal accountability instead of blaming your devices and society for your lack of self control.
For certain technology there should be bans but it is not social media and algorithmic feeds. There may be speedbumps, more user controls and auto classifiying of user type with optional alteration of the feed and type of content, but full bans for things like infinite scroll are disproptional.
Should sexual content be banned on social media? Maybe? Should violent footage be banned? It depends? Should bullying or predatory behavior be banned? I guess so? Or maybe it should it only be discouraged? What kind of social media does there exist? Is it binary or is it a spectrum, and should different rules or guidelines be applied?
Way too many variables. But what is clear is that age (ID) checks for the wide spread internet are completely out of the question. Governments should not have that much control over our social lives.
Face it, technology changes the world. The smartphone with camera did. If you could, would you put that genie back in the bottle? Should all content produced on smartphones be checked and watermarked and pulled through a selection of governments fingerprints to be publishable? Be very careful what you wish for since every new technology comes with hard to imagine second order effects and threats.
Explain to the audience the nature of "personhood" of Meta(Facebook), Alphabet(Google), etm.
Parents aren't hiring thousands of behavioral psychologists to assail the public with weaponized psychology. Parents aren't running mass exploitation via emotional attacks (targeting pregnancy, anorexia, mental illness, depression, etc). Parents never encouraged or helped the genocidalists in the Rohinga genocide.
But.... You blame parents. Standard capitalist response of calling everything a 'personal choice'.
Yep I'm also in favour of legally requiring the default feed on any "social" app to be a chronological feed from people you follow. It's both better for society longer-term and a better experience for the users, just not the shareholders.
> Ban the doomscrolling algorithmic feeds for everyone.
HN itself will get banned under this criteria.
I don't think so. Everyone sees the same feed. It's more like the New York Times homepage than it is Facebook.
The entirety of human knowledge is about defining rules by which we can categorize thing A vs thing B. I think we can determine the difference between Facebook and HN.
I’d celebrate the revival of the ca 2000‘s blogosphere.
So?
It's already banned for everyone who doesn't want to send their ID documents to Persona.
Persona already has the ability to access your ID, or they would otherwise not be able to determine if the ID you sent was genuine.
Have you tried sending them a fake ID? As I understand, these companies are verifying the format of the ID, not the exact details on it. Including all the subtle format details like the checksum of the OCR section. If it looks good, they add it (and the site you were trying to access, and the timestamp) to their database.
A disingenuous article. The 30% reduction of teen use is touted as a failure. If this was applied to cigarettes and alcohol, the solution would be stronger enforcement, but this is then labelled as doubling down.
It is not. The sources provided shows that the remaining 70% of teenagers that remain on the platforms are due to lack of enforcement from the platforms, not purposeful skirting of restrictions by the teenagers (VPN etc.).
The article further labels the teenage bans as a fight between adults and teenagers, as if the laws will breed resentment from children towards their parents. As far as I'm aware, that's not how teenagers view the issue of tobacco and alcohol bans around the world.
30% reduction is a successful start in the first year. I foresee further reduction in the coming years when less teenagers slip through the lack of enforcement and more of them pass the 16 year old threshold.
The that's missing and should have been done in parallel is the platforms require moderation - of posts and ads.
There's no accountability on META for accounts passing as locals, when in reality are just bot or agents spreading misinformation, scams, etc
This doesn't apply just to kids, but for everyone. Yet nothing is done to prevent this.
"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims."
"In scary headlines like these, the adult man in the white van is the subject, and the child is the passive victim. The child can obviously be trained to identify that adult mans talking to them in white vans may require distance even if not every person doing so is a killer."
"The solution imposed is to ban the child from going anywhere where a white van may also exist."
it's not anywhere a white van may exist, it's the inside of the white van
“ But less than a year in, it suggests the ban is failing: A state-sponsored survey of parents indicated that seven in 10 teens are still using social media, while academic research has reported even lower rates of compliance.”
Failure? Or 30% improvement.
“While social media can be weaponized for bullying or hate, over half of all teens turn to social media as a source of social and emotional support.”
Teens also turn to drugs as a source of of social and emotional support.
“ Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults.”
Ironically the thesis of this article. In fact I would say by banning teens from social media, we may be implicitly increasing their agency, since they’ll have to figure out how to interface with a set of technolgies that are not optimized for them.
There’s something really dystopian to me about “designing for teens in mind” and I think maybe the unintended consequence of this kind of thinking is just - the continued marketable capture of segments.
What this person is basically advocating for is a new way for tech companies to extract more value from our youth.
The whole point of being a teenager is to generate your own ways to rebel against the fact that the adult world isn’t quite built for you.
This “facebook but for teenagers” is just another opiate for the masses.
> Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces
The article is missing the point entirely. The conversation is not about “regulated spaces”, but removing them from spaces created entirely to drive advertisement, mindless engagement and consumption. If they find other spaces to join without that, perfect - it worked!
What a surprise! Researchers who have a good grift going studying how young people use social media don't want it banned outright. Instead, they want some unspecified conversation in which they have a role deciding how technology can be "better shaped", which coincidentally allows their grift to keep going.
> The companion narrative to technological determinism is something I’d call adult saviorism. Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults. In this narrative, teens lack the media literacy or judgment to save themselves. The conclusion to this line of thinking, when it comes to regulation, is that teens need not be involved, since they themselves are compromised.
This totally devalues the long-accepted wisdom that adults are responsible for raising children and sometimes have to make decisions that children don't like but that are necessary and beneficial for their well-being.
In the author's narrative, teens who have no meaningful context in which to understand how their brains are being manipulated by multi-billion dollar companies for profit are somehow supposed to participate in proposing regulations that protect them from said companies.
> While adult saviorism is, in many ways, well-intentioned, often coming from a place of concern about child safety, it fails to recognize teens’ expertise and creativity in using technology. Most teens are skeptical that their parents and policymakers know better than they do about the good and bad of the online world, and for good reason. Consider the U.S. congressional hearing held in 2021, in which Facebook’s then global head of safety was asked by Senator Richard Blumenthal, “Will you commit to ending Finsta?” Needless to say, such embarrassing lines of questioning — which neither began nor ended with Blumenthal — should inspire very little confidence.
Teens think they know more than their elders?!? What an astonishing revelation!
This is such a straw man argument. Arguing that some geezer in Congress saying "Finsta" is evidence that adults are incapable of making sensible decisions about protections for children is a bad look for anyone associated with an institution of higher learning.
They don't care about social media bans, they care about linking users to their government ID.
It's baffling to me that anyone has still not realized that.
Who is "they"?
I care about social media bans.
The people introducing those laws and the people financing them. Meta is the biggest lobbyist in the US for this, why do you think that is?
Because it removes their liability for intentionally pushing addiction on teenagers?
The reason social media bans miss yhe point is because they will be replaced by other addictive/predatory technology, such as gaming. It's wack-a-mole - ban one thing and another pops up. Parental involvement and school education about addiction in all its forms is the best (not perfect) solution. The goal is to allow adolescents to grow into knowledge and responsible adults. Infantilizing them and delaying their exposure to the world only delays that development. And most age verification tech just undermines privacy.
It’s easy to say, but do you want a teenage mind to compete against an army of thousands of marketers and engineers, with billions of dollars on the line, to see who wins that battle? It’s not a level playing field.
This. To be fair, adults should not be subject to this dynamic either. The lawmakers have failed to legislate around social media, and this is a weak fallback option.
I think the difference about the social media moral panic if you want to call it that is it’s about form not content.
I think there are plenty of adults who think maybe there are certain types of social media patterns that should be banned outright.
It’s not whack a mole - I _want_ my kid to engage with a replacement technology like gaming. I’m not worried about my kid playing GTA vi all day. I’m not worried about content. I’m not even really worried about Andrew Tate. I’m worried about the specific way mindless algorithmic applications mimic cigarettes more than “satanic heavy metal rock concerts”
My kid needs more satan in his life! And less growth hacker.
It's not about content. Modern games have similar addictive traits, and they even admit it. Stuff like loot crates, custom skins, pay to unlock stuff early, etc. Even things like "seasons" and rank resets because without them "engagement was dropping".
Not even that. Play Forza Horizon and you'll notice how you get ADHD-inducing pings and pongs all over your screen for literally just doing basic actions in the game.
Facebook measured "sentiment" and then shown weight loss influencers bullshit ads to teenagers deemed "more insecure about their looks".
Yes it feeds directly into anorexia. And yes, it had that effect.
Education wont counteract these effects, not when the company can put staggering amount of money into A/B testing for maximal impact.
What education will do is show that to the world. Then we might legislate privacy mechanisms that would make this sort of abuse illegal and less likely to occur for all people.
Gaming is much healthier than social media.
Sure, Jan.
> The goal is to allow adolescents to grow into knowledge and responsible adults. Infantilizing them and delaying their exposure to the world only delays that development.
Epstein et al. had similar beliefs about banging them
I don't see anything wrong with a social media ban for teens in concept. In execution, it'll be difficult to do effectively though.
What I would like to see is changes to the tax code to disincentivize the social media business model and the advertising industry generally. For example...
1. Tax the crap out of advertising revenue on social media platforms
2. Stratify the ads and ban the existence of paid tiers which include advertising. If you pay for something, you don't see ads, period
3. Ban the use of trackers and fingerprinting on any paid service without explicit opt-in
4. Create a tort for data leaks that travels with any company which handled the data. If anyone in the chain leaks it, you can take an action against all of them, and the penalties are individually assessed
5. Ban the collection and sale of profiling data for anyone under 18
6. Ban the ad-supported tier for anyone under 18
This heavily disincentivizes algorithms generally and makes paid tiers more appealing, which is much easier for parents to control. The problem with social media and teens is that teens can even sign up in the first place. Make them use a credit card, and you suddenly have a much higher barrier to entry. If I tried to subscribe my parents to HBO as a kid, it wouldn't have worked, and this is why. It wasn't because the government banned 14 year olds from seeing HBO.
Why not “Teen Cigarette Bans Miss the Point”?
Just because compliance isn’t 100% doesn’t mean there’s no benefit. Also these things can take time to work, but we do have evidence that bans reduce usage to an extent.
You are conflating cigarette damage with social media damage.
Social media doesn't have to be toxic, just toxic behaviour is rewarded. This is more like "sniper in park causes ban for under 18s". You are keeping the bad things but age gating it. It would be better to remove the sniper in the park.
It is the operating systems vendors who created this scenario by creating single-user walled-garden platforms which abrogate a parents rights and agency over their children’s lives.
I should be able to give my 8 year old a mobile phone for their uses, pair it with my phone, and at any time of day be able to observe their activity on that phone - just as if I were watching what they were up to at the park, or while experimenting with matches in the garden, or riding their bikes on the street for the first time.
But there is a distinct desire by the operating system vendors to serve their true masters - ad agencies - and abrogate responsibilities of the users. “Filesystem, what filesystem?”
The idea of having a parent/child relationship encoded in the functions of the operating system is not in alignment with the idea that the true operators of the platform are faceless corporations, hell bent on harvesting every bit of data from every human being using their platforms.
With one simple trick, operating systems can change this equation entirely: give parents their rights and duties and responsibilities back. Let me see what my 8-year old is doing, in a fair and open and equitable fashion, so that I can - as a parent - fulfill my responsibilities to keep my children safe.
A phone is no less dangerous than a sharp kitchen knife. I’m perfectly fine with my 8 year old learning to use a kitchen knife properly - to gain their own agency over it as a tool - as long as I am able to observe their use of it.
And before anyone tries to make the argument “parents don’t do that, oh my god, you’re violating your child’s right to privacy” - no, that is not what I mean. A child should have privacy and they should learn to have agency over that privacy - but a parent is not absolved of the issue if that child falls of a cliff because of their negligence. Let the OS provide privacy - but let it also provide a means of review by the parents - who are the ones ultimately responsible for the child in the first place.
This needs to be an OS feature. Parents and children should, through the OS, be able to establish a strong, positive relationship with each other over this issue, with agency returned to the family unit.
Otherwise, we are creating totalitarian systems of control and putting them in the hands of people we simply cannot trust. The degradation of agency within the family unit is a function of commercial desire to exploit that lack of agency.
Operating systems, instead of serving ad agency masters, can go a long, long way to provide parents and children the right tools to solve this problem. They do, however, need to stop suckling at the teat of the nameless corporations who see the family unit as a nut that has to be cracked in order to extract the juice.
Android allows parents to monitor and control what apps children use, and for how long, on their devices.
So I block chrome, and require my permission to install any app. They get thirty minutes a day on devices that lack a browser or social media apps. Not even any YouTube.
They can browse the web on PCs that are visible to the whole living room.
That’s all in the right direction. I think there are other things OS vendors can do too - screen sharing and a logged timeline history of events would also be useful for parents.
We have tools to do this already - authentication apps, and so on - but it’s my firm opinion that these need to be built in to the OS. I’m happy to hear Android allows this to an extent already ..
Please contact me or share your contact information, I am working on something exactly like this.
Interesting - for which OS?
All of them :)
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“It failed now please don’t try anymore, see it can’t be done, trust the kidz.”
Someone’s nervous.
lol