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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs.

If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately.

Heck, if you proposed a tracking system that kept track of kids' whereabouts, social connections, and required them to post identifying information and photos, as well as gather their interests and political leanings, it'd be illegal.

The fact that we allowed companies to do these two things together while making money off it is absolutely astounding to me.

View on HN

Amusingly, you could analyze anything this way if you ignore the benefits and only look at the costs.

"Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials."

"How are schools allowed! They literally imprison our kids for upwards of 7 hours a day, feed them substandard food, and subject them to Orwellian surveillance, exorbitant record-keeping, cruel social hierarchies, and a stress-inducing grading system akin to a dystopian social credit system."

I'm not saying the downsides aren't in fact downsides. They are. But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too.

Rather than alluding to vague upsides, can you list what upsides you want to assert that social media provides, so that we can do as you say and perform a cost/benefit analysis? As both an early adopter and former user of both Facebook and Twitter, my eventual conclusion was that whatever benefits they offered were vastly outweighed by the mental toll they took on me.

To quote @mumblemumble:

"""

There's another side to this, though. Letting kids roam the internet can give ones who might otherwise be doomed to become misfits an opportunity to find community. Being a queer kid pre-Internet, for example, sucked, and the Web rolling out to households changed a lot of kids' lives. And we have a poor cultural memory of what that experience used to be like, because, before the rise of online communities, a big part of being queer - especially being a queer kid - was being subjected to systematic erasure.

I'm not sure how you balance those two things. My sense, though, is that the balance was better 20, 25 years ago, when the Internet had more small, individualized communities. Most of them have since been squashed by the rise of the social media oligopoly.

"""

I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum.

This is all personal anecdotal, and not intended to be a real argument either way.

I have and have had internet in my house since I was 5-10. And I'd have to say: I'm still a misfit, social pariah, currently with no friends. Ironically the most respect (I mean this in the most basic sense of respect) I get from other humans is on here. But things were better when I was younger and worse now that I am 31. I'm not misremembering having more friends when I had places to go and do things in person, I definitely did. And these days I find it increasingly difficult to talk to people who have ever shrinking attention spans. Why is meme speak becoming pervasive in spoken language? Even when I call my mother she can't put down her Facebook or emails for a few minutes to talk. We used to be close. She says she has no time for anything. She's a book publisher and doesn't have time to read the one or two articles I send her every 6 months or so. Even when they are strictly about her field of work. She reads the first paragraph and says she got the "gist", which means we can't talk about it because she has no idea what the other 20 pages said, nor does she care because... well "haven't you seen the top reddit post today. I can't believe (random person) said (random comment) to (random other person)"

To me so many people have just become very boring. I mean what's worth saying/reading that takes 3-5 seconds, really? It's not that I think the internet or online social communication is all bad, or course it's not, but in my experience the bad does outweigh the good. And with suicide and depression rates rising beyond a standard deviation in gen z girls it's hard to feel as if it were worse from them in the past.

I'd say things are worse. Forums were a more personal experience. Fewer people, shared interests, avatars.

Look at HN - how many commenters do you personally recognize, except for the ones that are popular because they're part of YC (so for things outside of this discussion forum) or because they also submit articles they're written (so again for things outside of this forum)?

I probably recognize maybe 10 people, and with the way this discussion forum is designed, I recognize them despite the software, not because of it.

Yup. I really felt like I "knew" people on forums. I recognized their names. Our inside jokes were ones we had created.

These days I never recognize a single username on any forum (HN and Reddit, mostly), even tiny sub-reddits. The culture there is created by the masses, so there are plenty of in-jokes only because tens of thousands of people repeat them every week.

Twitter is the closest I have to a site where I recognize a stranger's voice and opinions. But that's typically one-sided -- even in small hobbiest groups, it tends to be the well-known producers talking to everyone else.

> Look at HN - how many commenters do you personally recognize

It would be 0 for me.

Twitter is better for me in that way, but because is only short interactions, it's not like I'm close to them.

With forums it was way better, for me at least. It felt like family, and in 1 forum I was, we actually had like a 'newbie adoption' thing. With many people there, we actually ended up being internet friends, while on Twitter we might be more like acquaintances.

"Even when I call my mother she can't put down her Facebook or emails for a few minutes to talk."

Anecdotally, it seems like the older generations are some of the worst offenders when it comes to this stuff. The stereotype is of two millennials sitting at a restaurant and both spending the entire meal staring at their phones. While that does happen, I think it's actually a lot more common now for older people to behave like this, maybe because they've had less time to develop any form of social or psychological resistance.

I think we need an evolution of social etiquette to account for this brave new world of self-absorption and rudeness. Pulling out your phone while in the middle of a conversation is incredibly rude, but people do it constantly, without a second thought, in both personal and professional contexts. It should be acceptable to kindly but firmly shame people for this kind of anti-social behavior, just like we'd shame people (perhaps not so kindly) if they started spitting in everyone's drinks or being blatantly cruel to others. I'm not trying to claim moral superiority, as I'm as guilty as anyone of doing it on occasion, but I'd honestly be happy if the person I'm with would say "put that thing away and pay attention to what I'm saying you dick!".

Older people stare at their phones when they're in restaurants because they are often with their spouse, and they already spend 100% of their time with each other. Their lives are encumbered with child rearing, house maintenance, and other time-consuming adulthood chores. So when you see them at a restaurant, they're both thinking Thank god we can finally sit down and peacefully stare at our phones in peace.

I don't really care if two people would both rather do that (except that it's kind of sad for them). But similar to the GP, I have some older relatives and acquaintances who do this constantly no matter who they're with. They seemingly just don't think there's anything wrong with it.

Social media are not the internet. If Facebook, Instagram and tiktok disappeared tomorrow, the internet would keep existing. In my opinion we would all be better, queer kids included.

I agree - I feel like one really important misconception to set aside is lumping "communication" in with "social media".

From a teenager's perspective, Instagram and TikTok are a lot worse for your mental health than say, Snapchat and iMessage.

In addition, for the queer community example - I'd say the perfect parallel for today would be Discord. Anyone can find a community and make friends on Discord, but it's probably not 5% as damaging to mental health because it's a communication based platform

Yes I think this is an important distinction. In my view the most salient divider between modern social media and other social things that use the internet is the presence of activity feeds. The model of pushing everything you do to everyone you're connected with was a huge shift.

I was on the internet communicating with friends and strangers on forums/message boards, IRC, AIM, and pre-feed Facebook well before the news feed was the default model. The "stalker feed", as it was known in 2006(?) when it was first launched, totally changed things, both in terms of the volume and ease of scrolling through content and the kinds of "news" that would be brought to your attention.

Something that sticks out in my memory of when Facebook's feed launched (I was in college at the time) was the additional pressure surrounding the "relationship status" field. Suddenly it wasn't just people who actively looked up your profile who might notice that you were "In a relationship with X", instead the act of updating it was broadcast to hundreds of people. Low stakes for adults, perhaps, but genuinely stressful for teenagers!

Do you think the online queer community is better or worse after Tumblr's self destruction?

doubt it.

I grew up in a suburb and pretty isolated intellectual vacuum where it was hard to learn anything.

I got internet access I could use regularly when I was around 12.

Things were less developed then ~2002 and I didn't have FB until 2007 so maybe it's not directly comparable to the modern web, but the information access was amazing.

There was so much available to read and learn and most importantly, it helped with unknown unknowns.

When you're isolated like that and you don't live in a community of people that can introduce you to new things it's really hard to find where to even look on the map of interesting ideas. You don't know what exists. I wouldn't have been able to learn about computers, wouldn't have eventually been able to come out to the bay area as early as I did. I think people don't realize how the internet frees people that don't otherwise have a personal connection to someone who knows things.

My case isn't even that exceptional (my dad is an MD and smart, he was just the first in his family to really succeed so didn't know how to navigate a lot of the social class stuff) - someone who truly grew up in poverty would have even less access to things via their personal network.

At least for me, there is way more good with the web than bad.

The web and internet access may drive most of humanity to tribal motivated reasoning and echo chambers, but for others it leads to better critical thinking, learning new ideas and arguments and changing your mind/becoming a better thinker.

The upside potential is still there and huge - it's easier to learn than ever.

It just didn't fix the fact that the average person is not well suited to take advantage of it.

>I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum.

They're clearly worse. Forums don't have algorithms constantly running trying to hijack your brain stem to keep you scrolling and clicking links...

Neither does HN, but I personally find it as addictive as anything else on the Internet.

There are options in your HN profile to help with this.

"Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero."

There are upsides. From providing self estem from a different source from the local.

It has raised awareness like never before.

It has provided an income for some.

It allows new peer groups not available locally

It provides a safer space to interact with strangers.

Where we got it wrong was connecting these profiles to real life names. That has ruined people's lives.

None of the things you list are unique to social media. They all existed before the rise of the socials. Many of them existed before the internet.

This is like saying the written word existed before the printing press. It certainly did, but technology has fundamentally changed its impact.

Yes, but the increased availability of such things around the globe and across social strata is unparalleled.

Availability and immediacy, too. What does it mean when information becomes available to a broad swath of the population immediately after it comes into existence? For instance, we're already witnessing the effects of speedy dissemination of dis- and misinformation.

Nonsense. Social media and the sensational, vain culture it has inculcated it is entirely damaging and without value. It is _only_ revolutionary and disparages any prior merit and censure without reason. It is a denial of service on reason and experience claiming precedence and priority without any historical context.

I think you have the causation exactly backwards - the vain culture is what gave rise to social media. Japanese "social media" including forums and image boards are biased towards being nonentity as possible. Famous cat owners make efforts to be non-entity as possible compared to US ones often involving owner presence even if just dangling a toy and talking to the cat.

Japan sure as hell isn't perfect socially but they demonstrate that the source of social problems may be found in the mirror collectively and not in new technology.

No. Entrepreneurs understood our cultures tendency towards vanity, self reflective and voyeuristic exhibition, and created businesses based on this. Social media was the exploitation and exaggeration of that vanity. What it is now is a huge business and opportunity for marketing and social control.

> From providing self estem from a different source from the local.

The article explicitly covers this and shows a net negative. So saying there are positive effects isn’t very helpful as any gains are more than offset by negatives.

I think your argument is better through quantification. As I don’t think anyone is making the case that social media doesn’t have any benefits at all, the argument is that the negatives outweigh the benefits.

Of course, I think it’s easier to quantify the negatives than positives. How do I quantify the positive effect that offsets the probably correlated increase in preteen girl hospitalizations? [0]

[0] sorry trying to find the easiest citation for the graph in Lukiakoff and Haidt’s book Coddling of America’s Youth [1] https://livingonparr.wixsite.com/livingonparr/single-post/20...

[1] https://www.thecoddling.com/

To put a finer point on one of yours, social media made very obvious the existence of violence against racial and ethnic minorities by law enforcement, among other social ills.

It's hard and slow work to gain populist support for socially progressive policy. We wouldn't be talking about this stuff were it not for the truths presented to us by the people it affects most profoundly.

Connecting those profiles to real life names has the upside of enabling those teenagers to stay in touch with old friends when everyone moves around as adults

(and I wouldn't say the social networks where profiles don't need to be connected to real names are necessarily any better)

I don't see what real life names have to do with keeping in touch. I've kept in touch with people for 15+ years using IRC nicknames. In a few cases I don't know the other person's real name at all.

Sure people can change their nicknames, but people change their real names too. I've gone by three different 'real' names throughout my life. That may not be super common, but people getting married and changing their name at least once is certainly not rare. The way I see it, a 'real' name is only more real than the others insofar as it's the name the government uses for you. But that sort of realness isn't relevant for social purposes. For social purposes, the 'realest' name is the name people call you.

I mean "here's all the people you went to school with" was literally Facebook's raison d'etre. If I was relying on stored phone numbers or email addresses I'd be a lot less likely to be in touch with some of them (including those whose numbers I still have!)

Sure, it's possible to stay in touch with a long list of monikers and sometimes even not much more difficult, but (going back to the OP I responded to) it's possible and often no more difficult to ruin people's lives across pseudonymous services too. Lack of real name is probably more of an impediment to the casually interested old friend than the concerted hate campaign.

It's a valid point and I have found value in looking up past friends on facebook.

I'm not sure a teenager has the same value. Anyone under 18 shouldn't have real identifying names them.

When facebook came out you had people isolated into networks of schools. Those structures provided better protections and freedom. The transition to fully public with forced real names made facebook into something not for kids but great for older folks.

And for many, the ego had increased exponentially with the attention gathered.

I just finished writing a paper on this. Here are some upsides:

Studies have shown that disclosing information about oneself is an intrinsically rewarding experience [0]. Social media offerings provide a platform for sharing information easily with a large audience, which activates reward mechanisms in the brain. People use social media because it makes them feel good, which is probably the reason for their explosive growth over the last decades.

Social media offers a way to stay connected with people, or at least feel connected, without having to put in much effort. When you open the Facebook or Instagram application, it is immediately filled with recent pictures and status updates of friends and relatives. Not only does this provide you with information, it might also motivate you to contact those people again, which will then reinforce the feeling of friendship. It has been shown that having an active social circle is predictive of lower stress, increased happiness, positive attitude, and self-assessed health [1].

Patients suffering from serious mental illnesses can self-organize into peer-to-peer support groups on social media platforms. Reported benefits include greater social connectedness, feelings of belonging, and being able to share personal stories and coping mechanisms. Through this empowerment, patients can challenge the stigma associated with their condition; and potentially even improve their situation by learning from peers, and gaining insight into important health decisions and possible remedies. If peer support proves insufficient, patients can motivate each other to seek professional help. [2]

Social media platforms are one of the most accessible forms of long-distance communication. Among the reasons for this, is that they are free of charge, an account is set up in a matter of minutes, and communication is not limited geographically. Furthermore, social media enables certain groups of disabled people to communicate with individuals they are normally unable to reach. For example, deaf people usually communicate through sign language or written text. Since the number of sign language ``speakers" is low, written text is the most accessible way to communicate with others. For them, social media offers an accessible and efficient way to stay in touch with friends and relatives that are geographically far away. Christine Forsberg showed that social media use among the deaf and hard hearing increased their feeling of empowerment, when empowerment is measured in self-efficacy, self-esteem, and self-determination [3].

Happiness, positive attitude, satisfaction, connectedness, and increased (mental) health can be assumed to provide positive utility, and thus promoting them is ethical from a utilitarian viewpoint. It is worth noting however, that there is a flipside to most of the effects covered above (see section \ref{sec:negative_effects}), and it is unclear whether the cumulative utility of all positive and negative consquences is positive or not.

[0]: Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell. “Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding”. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America109 (May 2012), pp. 8038–43. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1202129109.

[1]: Suwen Lin et al. “Social network structure is predictive of health and wellness”. In: PLOS ONE 14.6 (June 2019), pp. 1–17. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0217264. url: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217264.

[2]: J. A. Naslund et al. “The future of mental health care: peer-to-peer support and social media”. In Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences 25.2 (2016), pp. 113–122. doi: 10.1017/S2045796015001067.

[3]: Christine Forsberg. “The Empowerment of Deaf Cochlear Implant Users Through Social Media in the UK, the Netherlands, and Croatia”. MA thesis. July 2020. url: http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=152367.

Also, social media has been used to organize riots in the Arab spring, Hong Kong, etc.

Very interesting

> or at least feel connected, without having to put in much effort.

I have experienced the other side of this, so to speak, having someone think that they have made a connection with me or contacted me etc. just because they made a post or sent a tweet/text assuming that I'd see it. I don't always see these things or spend my time logged into these sites.

There are some people (including family members) that simply no longer 'talk' to me but think that they are 'always telling me' things. I've been caught out with things like phone number changes, address changes because someone has moved home and think they have 'told me' because they did some random tweet to 'everyone' some time back.

There are two sides to 'staying connected', social media (generally speaking) has made these connections rather one-sided. Staying connected should be more like a gentle came of catch-and-throw but instead it's more akin to beig stood in front of one of those machines that fling balls at you relentlessly regardless if you are ready or not.

I hate it.

> Social media platforms are one of the most accessible forms of long-distance communication

E-mail? Have you heard of it? Signal? Other IM platforms. And you continue on selling social media as means of friendly communication which is not true. There's gazillion alternatives but those were all eaten up by the giants. All those use cases and people that you mentioned used mailing lists before and were doing just fine.

It says “one of” the most accessible, which is undeniable.

> And you continue on selling social media as means of friendly communication which is not true.

No, I do not. The section about negative effects is much longer, and the conclusion drawn at the end also damns social media. In a scientific paper, you have to present both sides.

I just included the positive effects section here, because somebody asked.

One upside for me is that I only like interacting with people about my interests, not about personal stuff. I don’t want to hear or talk about weather/kids/sports. Social media allows me to discuss woodworking with someone in Galway instead of whatever little common ground I can find with my next door neighbor.

This is not about upsides and downsides. The truth is execs in Twitter, Facebook and Youtube had no clue what upsides and downside would be produced by the system they created.

The happily took credit for the upsides and for the longest time, like almost a decade, laughed out of the room anyone talking about the downsides.

Such people are still in charge of these fucking companies.

There's a reason these people will come out and say they don't let their kids use the apps they work on...

That luddite standard of "expected to know all upsides and downsides of something novel" bugs the royal crap out of me. It not only demands omniscience but implicitly assumes perfection of the status quo by not holding it to the same standards. To call forums for speech reckless is a very novel standard that back in the 90s and 00s would get you mocked as sounding like a third world dictator.

> But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too.

apologies but it sounds like PR from the tobacco industry before they got regulated. wonder how we'll look at this in 10-15 years time. the "let's listen to both sides" argument has no place on something this evil and damaging (not just to children) imo.

On the other hand, 'Social media damages teenagers mental health' sounds a lot like puritan arguments against rock music, weed, and video games from decades past. All of those things had legit studies done on them that showed harm, too. Honestly I think the kids are gonna be alright.

Well, sometimes they get things right, like (only stretching slightly) alcohol, which is not great in excess. You have to consider these things individually rather than trying to draw generalizations like "all puritan backlash is wrong."

My argument isn't really "they said these things were bad and they're not," it's more like "these things are actually kinda bad in some circumstances, but mostly we all turned out ok anyway, and things wouldn't really be much different or better if rock music were more heavily regulated when we were kids."

Really? How is rock music bad in some circumstances?

I think I just got hung up on a technicality in your argument.

I mean if you want to factor in the benefits of drugs, be my guest, because spoiler alert: They are fucking awesome.

Or at least they should be if we both detach the stigma and stop lumping in things like Cannabis in with Crack

Absolutely, cannabis is leaps and bounds worse than crack.

Nice troll

I must concur. There is a reason taking drugs has been around for 1000's of years - within reason.

Lots of things have been around for 1000's of years. Rape, murder, clothes, but that doesn't mean they are a good thing.

Being around for thousands of years has zero bearing on whether something is good or bad. It can speak to relative safety. In all the thousands of years, there has yet to be a single death that can be attributed directly to cannabis (and I don't count "marijuana-related visits" to hospitals where regardless of which ailment a person has, if they test positive for cannabis it becomes a "marijuana-related visit", nor do I count deaths where a person just happened to have smoked beforehand).

Good point!

> But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too.

Trust me, with trillion dollar corporations pushing their propaganda nonstop and self-important, self-appointed lords of industry convincing themselves every little tweak to their website is world-changing, the "upsides" need no signal boost from me.

Sorry to be a bit of a downer, but we absolutely should be talking about the downsides instead of listening to over-powerful CEOs tell us how great their crack is.

Also, you forgot that planes emit CO2, which is not just a subjective judgment, but is objectively bad for our planet in large quantities. ;)

Your analysis of schools doesn't seem so far-off for me, and it's not unreasonable to say that not every aspect of social life should be measured by a calculus of upsides to badsides. The utilitarian 'weighing' mode of thinking is not appropriate for every situation, and I think you (inadvertently) made a good case for why, at least with schools. The fact that schools also educate can be worked into an analysis even of the 'bad sides' as not contingent, but a part of the same system that creates the 'bad sides'.

The very fact that we consider weighing the 'upsides' of something is if we give it, or part of it, legitimacy in the first place - legitimacy that may not be deserved. I'm silent on the topic of social media, but we wouldn't even begin to consider the 'upside' of murder or rape or defamation, for instance - and that's not because people in the past have done that analysis for us, it's because collective experience has shown the analysis isn't worth doing - that the utilitarian analysis is the wrong method to apply to the question, just as there are good and bad methods in science or philosophy.

There is a difference.

Planes and schools are by design positive things.

Social media by design is at best neutral.

Social media is designed to benefit its owners and its customers (ad sellers). At best social media is designed to entertain its users, but the big caveat is that it does it through whatever means necessary. And that's a big caveat. Because at the end of the day, it's an online casino. And we regulate casinos to hell and back.

>"Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials."

I feel like you're dead on for air travel. I absolutely hate it, and wish it were drastically reduced.

> Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs.

I don't think you need young in that sentence. I see social media's negative effects on all age groups.

I see it in my own life (I'm 30): somehow, I feel compelled to keep track of politics, and I watch political shows way too much. I don't learn anything from it 98% of the time. After I watch/read about that topic, I can't concentrate on anything for long, I want to know more. The moment I wake up, I reach to the mobile to read the news. Then, I visit some meme sites, then I go to Hacker News. When I don't want to wake up yet, I repeat.

As a defense mechanism, I deactivated Facebook, I only post programming content on Twitter and I aggressively mute anyone who brings political tweets in my feed. I disabled notifications from most apps. I set up content blocker extensions so I don't accidentally wander to sites I don't want to visit. When I visit YouTube, I intentionally focus on the task at hand and try to not let the algorithm distract me (which is hard, because their recommendations almost always resonate with me). It works "okay", but I still didn't break the habit and I need strong self-control.

I see it also with my mother and sister, they are approx 60 and 35. They never get bored of scrolling through their feeds, they can't focus on anything else. They also often feel bad because their lives don't match what they see on the web. They make up a persona online that don't match their reality (which I see).

I'm not advocating for banning these things for adults, but I'd raise this issue to the people who read my comment: most adults behave very similarly to children, so observe your behavior and adapt.

I feel similar, especially durring this covid stuff my internet habits have gotten pretty bad. I turned off my Twitter, Facebook got a bit. Reddit was hard but I think keeping it read only (I gave my gf my account passwords) at least keeps me from interacting.

It's hard, there's no immediate downside to checking your phone or app.

I kind of think stuff like infinite scroll, gamification of social media needs some kind of regulation. I don't think we have the power to fight for our selves against these companies

I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable.

Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me.

These days I expect that most teens experience this at like 12yo on their smartphones. Last week I was linked a reddit video of some guy dying in absolutely gruesome circumstance due to an industrial accident. And then there's the constant influx of disinformation. Did you know that Hydroxychloroquine cures HIV? I saw a Youtube video claiming just that yesterday.

Leaving a kid on the internet is like living them on a shaddy part of town for hours at a time. I'm old enough that I only had internet at home when I turned 18, in hindsight I feel like I dodged a bullet.

Just wondering, how old are you?

I'm 30, so myspace and Facebook showed up only once I was in high school, but everything you describe was still available on the web before social media. Shock sites were huge (goatse, tubgirl, etc), and I remember watching a beheading with a chainsaw by a Mexican cartel. And of course porn was around too.

The difference with social media is the "keeping up with the Joneses" except now it's your entire life, not just your literal neighbor. Way more damaging long term, since you actually know these people and can relate to them. Yeah the beheading was shocking, but I'm not hanging out with cartels regularly. Just a completely different thing.

This. Im 29 and share the same experience.

And we can even go further back; have people checked, old black & white cartoon? Some of them are so blatantly propaganda/politica/visual horrific that they wouldn't even be aired for 15 y.o today. If you take a closer look, even Tom & Jerry is quite violent, and most Japanese animation that air on kids TV-channel back then also, very sexual.

And these things were airing on TV, broadcasting at a specific time and all you had to do as a kid was to push a couple of buttons to access it.

Of course there was always violence and sexual content on TV and elsewhere, but comparing Japanese anime and Tom and Jerry to stuff like https://www.reddit.com/r/DeadorVegetable/ (NSFL) or the hardcore porn you can find basically everywhere online is disingenuous. I don't think I'm very squeamish but there's stuff online that still profoundly disturbs me in my mid thirties. Meanwhile, and at the risk of bragging a little, I can watch any Tom and Jerry easily even late at night and still sleep soundly. Hardcore, I know.

You couldn't see the surveillance footage a guy being dismembered by a lathe or weird Japanese rape porn in 1080p by "pushing a couple of buttons" before the internet. Well, at least not where I grew up...

No one is comparing it, the other poster suggested completely restricting access to the internet because this content exists.

Well, in Spain I could see Bulma's breasts on manga an Shizuka one's as a dark joke in Doraemon. No one gave a shit, we have far worse real life problems in the 90's.

Another big difference is constant availability. A decade ago, the moment you walked away from your computer the shock sites were memories. Twenty years ago, the moment you walked away from your phone most of the social drama were memories. The most that most of us do now is stuff it into our pockets.

Aside from the psychological differences with teens, we also have to consider that they aren't being exposed to this environment "in moderation". They don't really have the opportunity to think about their responses to it.

This is true. We didn't even have wifi in school until my last year there (2007-2008). If you wanted to use a computer you had to go to the library or be in a classroom that had a few in the back.

This, I believe, is the largest difference between today and twenty years ago.

That, and the pervasiveness of social media. Myspace, for example, was huge. But unlike today’s social media, maybe 25% of your AFK circles would hang out there, not 95% like today.

A random thought: What if the filter back then (I’m 34) helped? Most of the people spending significant time online back then were some degree of nerd (I hope that classification doesn’t offend anyone). Nowadays, it’s everyone.

During the early years of the German equivalent of high school, most of my classmates would spend days without being online once.

There's a difference between something being available somewhere on the Internet (when Internet access was 56K from a desktop computer featuring prominently in your family room) and having it shared with you specifically to your smartphone.

I never get anything gore shared to me, but I think it's also because I wouldn't stay friends with anyone who sends me that. I think it's weird that, as a society, we're more OK with violence than sex.

Consider how many people saw the shooting of the Trump supporter storming the capitol or the killing of George Floyd. I can't imagine that level of exposure in 2005 or earlier. And this is just gore; we're not talking about sex (also, we don't have to choose between the two, so I don't understand the dichotomous argument).

You think more people saw the shooting of the Trump supporter or George Floyd than saw images from Desert Storm, 9-11, or school shootings? They are all horrible, but I have seen a lot worse stuff pre-2005 than after.

No, I'm not arguing that more people saw footage of those two incidents versus the universe of gore preceding 2005; rather, I'm arguing that gore is far more prevalent and accessible after 2005 than before. The images that we saw before were generally censored of gore--we saw night-vision imagery of bombs raining down on Baghdad, but we didn't see the actual death. Similarly, we saw the towers fall, but most of the actual death was censored (the worst I can recall were people falling from the towers from such a great distance that they appeared to be specs).

I swear that beheading video is a form of generational anchor in the same way that the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 soundtrack is something a certain group (early millenial/late genx) is.

>Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 soundtrack

Ouch. Right in the nostalgia :)

Yeah its funny I feel like the "meme" internet for teenagers was way worse if shocking content is worse when I was young. There were so many NSFL websites too like stileproject, rotten, ogrish, etc. that everyone knew about and so much weird stuff on the pirating websites and gif sites back then that you don't really see anymore outside of the dark web.

I'm pretty convinced that just a "dumb" web 1.0 site of shocking content is way better for your mental health than a handful of giant corporations honing in on your psyche and exploiting the weaknesses of the human mind.

I have distinct memories of a website Defvac or Defecation Vacation. Morgue photos and other terrible content. This was between 1995 and 1998 I think?

I'm only a couple of years older than you are. Some of my friends had internet at home well before me during high school, but I only got it when I moved after High School (my parents weren't so much anti-tech are completely outside of it).

So while I very well remember goatse, tubgirl and rotten.com, I only discovered those as an adult.

Also note that I wasn't singling out social media here. It's the web as a whole that seems very unsuited for a teenager without supervision, IMO.

It is this weird balance because I owe literally everything I know about programming to unsupervised internet access: asking questions in IRC rooms, finding random programs on random websites, posting on obscure forums, etc.

I was able to find some wonderful communities, like the iPhone jailbreaking community on IRC, which completely changed my life and put me on the path I am on now. I was also on Twitter in the early days, too, which was the primary way that the iOS development community communicated. Facebook allowed me to connect with my high school robotics community, as well.

Communities like this existed before my time with Flash games, Neopets, MySpace, etc. and continue to this day, with the Minecraft modding community, Roblox game building community, etc.

But at the same time I also agree that social media has become incredibly toxic and addictive, and we don’t give anyone any tools to navigate it. I ultimately quit social media entirely, but my younger sister spends 3.5 hours a day on social media. I think this is a relatively new beast, and not inherent to the internet itself.

To strongman the OP, would your parents have stopped you from talking about programming on IRC if they had observed it? Would you stop your kids, if you observed them? Watching your kid's internet use doesn't mean not letting them use the internet, it means applying your developed adult discernment to judge between healthy and unhealthy uses.

I'm not OP, but it's not entirely about the content being viewed. A lot of unsupervised online access takes the form of large swathes of time.

Not every parent would necessarily want their child online for 3 - 5+ hours, especially doing things like participating in communities.

Not OP but I was in a similar situation. They certainly wouldn't have encouraged or would have stopped me from talking to strangers online. I understand why, you have to precautions against things like grooming, but on the internet and especially behind text no one knows if you're a 12 year old or a 22 year old with poor writing skills.

There's another side to this, though. Letting kids roam the internet can give ones who might otherwise be doomed to become misfits an opportunity to find community. Being a queer kid pre-Internet, for example, sucked, and the Web rolling out to households changed a lot of kids' lives. And we have a poor cultural memory of what that experience used to be like, because, before the rise of online communities, a big part of being queer - especially being a queer kid - was being subjected to systematic erasure.

Before the internet we were passing video tapes/films, magazines, and prints around with porn and gore. Pre-teen me saw a lot of the kind of things you mention before the internet was a thing. The students at my school had pseudo-competitions for who could get the best porn/gore, earning kudos for the bloodiest gore or "hottest" porn. Often the lines would blur whens someone found scat or snuff but that's a different matter.

Later on in life, I think everyone knew "a guy" at work that had all kinds of taboo material. The Weird Eddies or Creepy Colins of the world had a black-market snatched from them when the internet got popular.

I’ve been saying that the internet was designed by engineers, for engineers. I don’t mean this literally, but in the sense that methodical, reasonable adults built out these systems without thinking about how the average person, let alone teenager, would be using it.

And at this point even a lot of engineers I know fall into the traps of addiction and echo chambers quite readily. I find of Tristan Harris’s “pointing supercharged AI at our brains” line to be accurate.

There's definitely some bad things I saw too soon on the internet but if I'd not had access at a young age to it and my own computer I absolutely would not be where I am currently. There are many bad influences, but in my case I'd take all of them for the things I learned in my journey. I'd prefer of course to find ways to minimize them but not by way of abstinence

>Leaving a kid on the internet is like living them on a shaddy part of town for hours at a time. I'm old enough that I only had internet at home when I turned 18, in hindsight I feel like I dodged a bullet.

I grew up with uneducated parents who are susceptible to believing bullshit peddled by cult leaders. I lived in their business, without access to other people since we lived in a business area with no other residents.

Access to the internet was the only way I was able to interact with educated adults, and I attribute it to as the main reason for my economic and social success as an adult.

There was also lots of gore/pornography/other explicit stuff, although social media was more limited to instant messengers and photo/video content of yourself was not a thing yet. But the upside was almost limitless with the access to all the information, experts, and ability to interact with someone you can learn something from.

Agreed. It's one thing to say that you don't want to shelter your child; totally reasonable, kids should be exposed to a wide variety of experiences. But by definition kids lack experience, and if you expose them to a distorted image of reality, then unless you make an effort to point out that distortion, then they will rightfully conflate the distorted reality with reality.

To use your example as an analogy, most porn with any production value at all will show a drastically distorted depiction of what sex is actually like. To be raised on a diet of unrealistic porn will not leave you merely ill-prepared for an actual sexual relationship, but will actively disillusion you when reality fails to match your expectations.

If you let your kids use social media, then you need to take steps to emphasize the hyperprocessed fiction that it represents.

On the flipside, there's increasingly more and more amateur porn. On pornhub, there are many couples making videos of themselves and getting millions of views, making a living off of this. What these people make is obviously still probably setting high expectations (good lighting, edited to cut out the awkward parts, etc), but IMO, there is a lot more amateur and realistic content out there, and it's what many people want to see. I think in the 70s, 80s and 90s porn used to be a lot more studio, and now the general trend is for more natural, less processed.

I first got access to porn when I was 12, but I heard the disclaimer, everyone told me it wasn't realistic, and I don't think it skewed my expectations too much. IMO humans learn and adapt. I don't think that porn is a threat, but I do wish there was more sex education, and maybe relationship coaching for teenagers... Teenagers need to be taught early to have realistic relationship expectations in general, how to approach someone respectfully and accept "no" for an answer, consent, etc.

It’s funny I went online in the 80s and had no supervision whatsoever. And it was pretty wild back then. I remember adults chatting with me when I was 10 and printing out and mailing me game manuals. Chat rooms with every kind of pornography and drug and explosive recipes. My parents would have been horrified and stopped it.

I survived, so maybe there are missing stories from people who didn’t. I learned lots of skills used every day for work and never did anything I’m ashamed or or criminal.

But with my own kids, I protect them more than I protected myself. I wonder about the paradox of whether I would have changed anything in my chaotic youth and whether I’m stunting my kids by sheltering them. But there’s YouTube videos of behedding that I don’t want to risk my kids’ mental health.

I feel like the paradise I envisioned after reading Heilein and Dickson and Stephenson is here now and I hate it. Now spend my time in the digital Galt’s Gulch.

I had certainly viewed my first dirty magazine long before the age of 17, as well as seen my share of violent movies and video games. When does this end? When cursing around anyone under the age of 18 becomes illegal?

The issue with the internet as is currently is more about societal pressure. Every device for the last umpteen years has come with parental controls that include filtering out NSFW-esque material. If your position is that platforms such as FB should also include these sorts of parental controls I agree, but if your position is that we should restrict kids access to the internet as a whole because they might see a boob, then I wholeheartedly disagree.

I was 12, I self learned how to google properly, write html, css and photoshop, how to avoid online scams and advertisements, eventually this self learning grew into teaching myself PHP, SQL, how to build computers, setup arch linux into a LAMP server on my own VPS. Unsupervised internet was not all bad. I probably would have avoided internet time if I was being watched by my parents. Lol

Eh. Responsible consumption of media isn't something we're magically endowed with when we turn 18. It's a skill like any other. Obviously there's a point at which children are too underdeveloped to be responsible about media consumption, but teenagers aren't idiots. If a youtube video is feeding them bullshit, they'll usually be able to tell. Not all teenagers are that savvy, mind you, but we've learned in recent years that not all adults are either.

Screens are a legit drug, and unfortunately I'm a user. It's worse for kids growing up into this, at least when I was a child screen time was limited by the kid show time slots, ofc its available 24/7, several firehoses worth at all times. Not a lot of available resources to combat this, except individual efforts Im afraid.

Quick note: It's not the kids that are fooled about Hydroxychloroquine, it's the adults. If you're taking away juniors Internet, you need to take away your parents' connections too...

Any advice on reasonable alternatives these days?

> I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable.

I grew up on the internet. I first connected with I was 11. I was first online by myself soon thereafter. I practiced writing on the internet while hanging out on the internet. I made friends on the internet. I made mistakes on the internet. I lost friends on the internet. I learned about Linux and programming on the internet. I got a job on the internet. All of this happened before I was 16. There is an old joke, one that I took to heart as a child, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog". On the internet, nobody knew (or at least cared) that I wasn't an adult. People accepted my patches, took my advice, flamed my half-baked ideas, and overall treated me as an equal.

As a young adult I started internet companies over the internet with business partners I met on the internet. I met love interests on the internet. I found new music leading to concerts, festivals, and road trips on the internet. I learned about Magic: the Gathering strategy, met a lot of friends, and coordinated cross-continent travel over the internet with people I had only interacted with via IRC.

> Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me.

People are different. Maybe I'm a degenerate. I grew up watching The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead. In middle school, friends would trade porno mags. A friend had the premium cable channels with "Skin-a-max" (Cinemax) playing late nights. When I first got online (at 11 years old), I had two priorities: porn and learning how to hack like I saw in some movies (Wargames, Ferris Bueler's Day Off).

Finding porn was easy since the "filters" were mostly someone who largely didn't care configuring a default search engine or maybe a DNS blacklist. Once I knew "search engine", finding more search engines that weren't filtered was easy. A couple queries about how filtering works and I knew enough to configure a different DNS resolver. It's not like I went looking for Pokemon tips and found hardcore XXX action.

In trying to learn about hacking, I stumbled onto ESR's "Hacker Howto". I took it to heart, printed it out, and pasted sections on my bedroom wall. "The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved. No problem should ever have to be solved twice. Boredom and drudgery are evil. Freedom is good. Attitude is no substitute for competence." I kept this as a mantra. I took the "Basic Hacking Skills" section as a formula. Python, C, Lisp, Perl, Java. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Learn to use a *nix? Done. I never was especially good at red team offensive security, but "how to hack" put into a search bar changed my life for the better.

> These days I expect that most teens experience this at like 12yo on their smartphones. Last week I was linked a reddit video of some guy dying in absolutely gruesome circumstance due to an industrial accident. And then there's the constant influx of disinformation. Did you know that Hydroxychloroquine cures HIV? I saw a Youtube video claiming just that yesterday.

At least in my day, we learned skepticism early on the internet. Everyone can be an asshole and most accounts would troll you. Getting razzed for your naivete in a chat room or message board was a rite of passage. Bullshit comes in a lot of flavors, and some people needed to taste the rainbow and while others were quicker on the pickup.

I could never deny others the chance to gain what I have gained by restricting their ability to access the internet.

As far as I can tell, the group that seems to be the most influenced by the sea of disinformation is the people who grew up when that wasn't how the world worked. I see far more of the middle aged/elderly crowd getting sucked into conspiracy nonsense than younger.

I think among people who grew up with the internet, there's less assumption that things are true just because someone said or wrote them. People can and do lie constantly on the internet and without evidence it's not necessarily worth believing.

That there's some "news" outlet just blatantly lying and making things up, even if it looks to be made "professionally" is not surprising to a younger person.

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For personal anectdata:

I'm late 20s and had virtually unsupervised internet access and my own personal computer from about age 8 or so, as my father brought home old parts from work and let me tinker/assemble something, and they didn't watch me too closely. (early DSL adoption meant I wasn't limited for long by speeds, either).

I pirated and played all the violent games, I downloaded lots of porn, and while I was never into "shock"/watching real death/gore, the nature of the internet was such that you were going to run across plenty of it if you spent enough time browsing, I certainly saw a lot.

I turned out to be a fine, reasonably well-adjusted adult, as did most of the friends I know who grew up similarly.

I don't know all the details of their sex lives, but I'm not aware of any winding up with unrealistic expectations from porn. Always seemed like an action movie. Exciting, but not "real".

Most of the shock stuff felt like it just made me more cautious. "That guy got one whack in the head and he died!" was a better argument against getting in a fight than the threat of parental/school punishment is. Same regarding a lot of other potential teenage risk-taking behavior, like reckless driving or getting exceptionally drunk. Watch enough people die or ruin their lives at something and you're a lot more cautious about it.

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To be clear, I'm not suggesting that it's a net positive for kids to view those things at a young age. I'm just not sure that the harm is as large or uniform as people making moral panic claims often make, either.

Also, something like a third of people lose their virginity before 16 (although it's declining) and the median age is ~17 in the US. A lot of your peers were having real-life sex when you ran across porn for the first time. Worrying about them watching porn when plenty of them are having sex.....I don't know it makes much sense at that point.

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Looking back on that time, I'm primarily concerned with how easily I was talking with random strangers in great depth than the content I was watching. While there are some internet friends from old forums and chatrooms I've kept in touch with for 15-20 years now, that I could get to know random strangers like that as a preteen obviously had potential risks. Worked out well for me and I found great communities and interests, but still.

I agree that kids shouldn’t use the internet unsupervised, but what is the alternative? We were all 15 once. It is 100% impossible to stop kids from using the internet if they want to. So what’s the alternative?

Active and available parenting, ideally starting long before the teen years where they no longer want to take advice from their parents.

Saying that it's 100% impossible to stop kids from using the internet is as true as saying that it's 100% impossible to stop kids from trying alcohol. But there's a difference between a kid getting drunk once at a party and a kid being a habitual, daily alcoholic.

As a parent you want to guide them towards healthy ways to engage with things that could otherwise destroy them in excess. Social media in moderation is fine. Social media in excess isn't, and that's where a lot of parents have left their kids (because even they don't know how to use it in moderation; society hasn't caught up yet).

> Active and available parenting, ideally starting long before the teen years where they no longer want to take advice from their parents.

This, 1000 times this. Also, leaving kids completely without supervision or using screen time/smartphones to babysit them it's easy but it's just like tech-debt and really any other form of debt. You will pay the consequences 10x during their teen years.

I recently saw a tweet that for once seemed insightful: "the internet did to boomers what boomers thought it would do to us", presumably posted by someone under the age of 25.

Young people are vulnerable to social media, and your point still stands, but I am also under the impression that it has impacted previous generations to a far greater extent, breaking their link to reality altogether.

I'm 40, and grew up programming in my early teens, so I've seen the Web's entire arc. This social media stuff was fun for a time but it turned very dark, almost exactly in proportion to the money involved, like everything else on the Web, IMHO.

Also, the gamification of many things. Even HN karma. The thrill of watching the upvotes roll in! (even now...)

Is it the money, or just society in general moving into the space? Darkness is an inherent part of human life, and the internet is now the agora. For a social animal, any aspect of existence will have been gamified from the start...

I have a theory that older generations are much worse at identifying fake information on the internet. I clicked a few bogus banner ads (punch the monkey and win 100$) and got my fair share of malware from limewire, so I learned that you should treat everything on the internet with skepticism. Older people grew up with media that wasn't always accurate, but at least wasn't directly lying or trolling you.

Now the internet has been delivered right into their pockets and they aren't prepared for it. They see a video about ballet boxes being stuffed, and of course they believe it. Their friend Gladys shared it on facebook, of course it's real!

Add to that recent games like FIFA or NBA that have casino-like mechanics with real money.

Watch out, they'll outlaw Robinhood

I think you're a little over confident in your points if you don't mind me saying.

For paragraph 2, Sugar, TV, organised religion, the Boy/Girl Scouts and comic books all satisfy at least some of your criteria. None has been banned yet.

Similarly, many American parents would rush to sign up to a service that let them do those things. Plenty pay for Life360 and similar just for some of those "features". Far from being illegal, many jurisdictions encourage it.

I don't think social media is a force for good. But let's not pretend we really care about the kids or privacy or mental health.

I actually think that many parents (sadly) prefer a kid that sits at home on the computer and is monitorable and docile (a side effect of depression). The alternative is to actually take them places or to let them go unattended, neither of which parents seem happy to swallow.

It's called "parenting" which is not in vogue right now. Currently, people treat children like adults, expecting them to navigate the world as an adult would, and that's dumb.

Reject a failed society. It's okay to be an individual, you don't need to be part of the collective.

I think we have different definitions of treating children like adults. It seems to me like they are barely treated as people.

Yes, parenting is not in vogue, and that's the problem. People do not know how to parent. It almost seems like many people are treating them like pets.

They treat them like adults if the adults are prisoners essentially.

Do they? I keep hearing how college age students are “coddled” and the whole helicopter parenting thing. Your comment is the first time I saw the opposite view expressed in a while.

This is called victim blaming.

Social media provokes behaviours which are unnatural or even impossible in an ordinary "social" setting. On one hand, it is the instant ability to have others react on whatever you may say or post, regardless of the context of what is being expressed. In an ordinary social gathering with people talking, there is a collective subject discourse and you cannot just express your preference for cats in the middle of the conversation. Second, the format is designed to encourage hyper-expression and hyper-reactivity. Personalised likes, notifications, a time-trackable identity linked to your emotional preferences like movies, sports, lifestyle etc.

> Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs.

I hear what you're saying but I'm pretty sure drugs (like meth) are much worse, we just manage to keep kids away from them, whereas Internet is given to them.

Worse than drugs? That is downright hyperbollic and hysterical especially given that many drugs can cause permanent brain damage.

I find it impossible to take the arguments for a ban seriously when they were recycled from D&D, heavy metal, video games, and goth and emo music.

This problem has been said again and again for almost a decade. Are we still "studying" it? I guess it's more obvious than studying criminal thinking. Not more complicated than Mindhunter sort of thing, yet there's no feasible action?

I generally dislike banning things because a few individuals can't handle it. Punishing those people that have self control seems ridiculous and I hate sin taxes for that reason. However, I think putting restrictions on stuff for younger people that don't have fully developed brains seems perfectly reasonable. If you're under 18 (21 in some cases) you cannot drink, smoke etc. Social Media should be treated the same way.

Unfortunately, laws can only do so much with out invading the privacy of citizens so it's really going to take a large campaign similar to anti-smoking ads in the 90s to get the message out about the cons and parents will HAVE to put their foot down. Although, it seems like a certain portion of our society thinks children should be allowed to make decisions themselves nowadays so I expect backlash at the thought of parents actually stopping their kids from harming themselves.

https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/adult-brain

Ok what's your point? Legally the adult age is 18 in most states. If you want to argue changing what legal age is that's fine but it doesn't really have anything to do with the main point of my comment. Additionally, this study specifically shows it harms adolescents.

If you're going to apply laws that strip rights away from people you have to have a cutoff somewhere. Unless you're suggesting a blanket ban on social media for everyone.....

Wisconsin does not have a minimum drinking age.

Ok? so? I don't see what that has to do with the main point of my comment. Also the law is that you have to be accompanied by an adult if you're under 21 in Wisconsin so you're being a bit disingenuous.

I don't think it's reasonable to compare the scales of the impact of social media and drugs, simply because far more people engage in one over the other.

Many of those problems apply to any form of entertainment: movies, games, music, etc. I say we ban all forms of fun.

We become the product. Social media needs us in order to make a buck and they will do everything in their power that we need them. Some of it is to our benefit but many times it's a waste of time and trying to create a need where there was none. TL;DR yes, social media are drug dealers :)

But these companies provide great value to the shareholders! Apparently that's enough to trump any other concern.

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