Social media and modern micro targeting advertising, which plays strongly into your individual hopes and fears (to maximize the likelihood of getting a response from you—which is abusive), creates a validation feedback loop commonly seen in Cluster B Personality Disorders.
Young people (as in developing minds that have not mentally reached adulthood—occurs around age 25) have been primed and trained to make fake, empty, and unthoughtful posts needlessly (i.e. daily or several times per day) just to gain “likes” (also known as approval) from their peers. They also post to social media so that the algorithm treats them nicer, even if they are unaware of this on an explicit level.
Psychologists have been warning about this: how an entire generation of currently developing minds is going to be a lot more narcissistic and a lot less empathetic than previous generations due to this invasive and traumatic long-term exposure.
I am luckier than most: as an adult (with a print-related disability) I almost never have to go on websites that serve ads, as I have access to special libraries and news repositories (with breaking news sources) that legitimately keep me endlessly entertained (see this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26829865). I also use the paid audio apps Blinkist, Audm, and Curio to augment those databases. I probably have not used YouTube in 6 months, due to the above and I am no Luddite! The only social media account that I have is HN.
You can't take away phones from them else they feel peer pressure.
People over here are blaming facebook but video apps like tiktok should carry a heavier burden for a lot of the personality disorders in kids
I don't think that this is sufficient justification for abdicating parental responsibility to moderate and limit phone usage.
People can always choose not to buy your unethical or unsafe product. That doesn't make it suddenly ethical and safe, nor does it exempt you from criticism.
As a parent, it’s your responsibility to choose what risks your children are exposed to. The basis of the comparison is that use of either product entails a certain level of risk, just as every single thing you can possibly do entails a certain level of risk. However the risks associated with each of those products are not comparable at all, and neither is the reward side of the equation.
No one is creating messaging that bicycles are bad for kids. There are safety guidelines for using bicycles.
There is no need for safety guidelines for cigarettes or Instagram for children, because there’s no benefit for children to use those things.
It’s really just a parenting issue.
> There is no need for safety guidelines for cigarettes or Instagram for children, because there’s no benefit for children to use those things.
It’s a social tool, there’s plenty of risk for harm with any form of socialization, especially with children. There’s also plenty of benefit for children to have with socialization, so your comments here just seem very obviously wrong to me.
If you’re a parent you may find those risks to be unacceptable. Especially if you’re a parent who relies on other parties to do most of your parenting for you. But all the arguments put forward here just make the claim that there’s a risk for harm, and as such instagram must be comparably harmful to cigarettes. This is simply an anti-rational argument. It’s a risk decision, just like all the other risk decisions parents make for their children.
Instagram is not a social tool. Instagram is a commercial marketing tool where the users are the product being sold, at the whims of the latest behavioral psychology tactics. It is thinly veiled as a social tool.
This is not comparable to typical socialization in children.
Disagree 110%.
I don’t care for social media but I certainly can’t get behind all this unnecessary cancel culture.
Anyways, can’t your logic be extended to everything? Agree or disagree it’s pretty easy to see why some parents would disagree with the decision