Facebook Should Halt Instagram Kids Plan, Attorneys General Say
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Kids can't talk to anyone who you don't add as a friend, and your child's friends list is managed by you and new friends must be approved by the parents of both kids. You can see at any time who they have been talking to, you can see all the images that have been sent and received, and there's no advertising. It's basically a walled garden just for your kids group of friends who've been approved by parents and nothing more. Kids can't even start a group chat or video chat with friends who aren't all mutual friends, so there's no way for your child to talk to anyone who you haven't approved.
It has stuff that kids like, like little games and filters they can use to play with their friends, which is clearly just to increase engagement (and screen time), but it's actually not nearly as terrible as you'd expect from Facebook (yet).
Messenger for Kids has been a godsend during the quarantine due to the fact that the kids want to do video chat but all have different types of devices, and it's nice because it's locked down to only the people you approve.
Now, is Instagram for Kids a good idea? We shall see, my guess is "probably not" but at least Messenger for Kids isn't exactly the nightmare you'd think it is based on the name.
It can be to their benefit simply because it pushes more Facebook traffic through the ISPs and other major infrastructure. A quick win on the business side, and a whole new venture for further tech development on the product side.
It has been a lifesaver during covid. It is the way kids text/video chat with each other without a cell plan and with only approved contacts. I don't know what my kid would have done without it, it is a 2-3-4 hour virtual playdate when there are no other ways to connect with their friends.
It seems most of the replies that are positive about this service, focus on the way they've helped rear children during Covid.
That breaks my heart, since kids ought to be able to play with their friends in person anyway. Parents have been incredibly docile about lockdowns and have played along since there's been technology afoot to make it all go smoother.
But this only works for a portion of the population that has the money, time, knowledge, and resources to secure such things for their kid. This is a terrible idea in practice in the way it imposes further hierarchy and inequity among kids. In-person, children are on equitable grounds with one another, but this creates a void of separation where rich kids will be able to dominate over the poorer ones.
That is and was debatable during the lockdown. We didn't, and we don't regret our choice. Even if now it is clearer that kids are not as susceptible to Covid, it wasn't clear at the beginning and I don't regret erring on the side of caution.
Not displaying ads to the kids does not mean the data just gets thrown away, after all.
This. It's a gateway drug.
Facebook is inserting its brand into children’s lives early and it’s further cementing their relationship with the parents. This obviously has a monetary value.
Not to mention the data collection.
You can't take away smartphones completely. And once there is the smartphone a communication app is the most useful thing they can get. Better than any game or whatever. But an open messaging app can quickly lead to issues.
Would be good if there were non-profit vendors of similar things, bit they don't exist, yet.
Someone mentioned the other day on HN that Social Media is the modern-day Smoking, and I agree there are a lot of parallels. Surely we can keep our kids out of S.M. without restricting them from using other, less harmful parts of technology.
Here's an alternative: restrict usage to a simple time-boxed window each day, contingent on the completion of what the child needs to have done (chores, homework, etc.). Augment that by limiting what apps the child will have access to, based on what is reasonable at the time. It requires effort, but seems totally reasonable. There doesn't seem to be a strong argument for children having continuous access to devices that have empirically been shown to cause serious mental health issues, not even including the crazy dangers of the internet (stalking, child sexualization, etc).
Alternatively, don't control anything the child does and hope it works out.
Back in my days it was typical for us to run to the phone booth "mom, I'm still out playing, will be late for dinner" Now there aren't phone booths anymore.
The concept of the kids messenger by Facebook sounds right. Quite risk free communication, which allows giving the kid freedom without having to always look over their shoulder what they are doing.
As said: that being not from Facebook would be great!
I'm not a parent, but I imagine controlling your kids electronic device use is a difficult task. The jump to them having a smartphone must be like a dam being blown apart with dynamite.
Facebook is cancer. Letting this play out will only condition kids be more immersed/addicted to social media. How can that be good for them now? How can that be good for them in the future? Facebook has proven that they toy with its users, their psyche, their privacy.
This will definitely come to hurt them in the future. Either by FB selling out every 1_and_0 they got on you, or allowing 'by accident' another scammy CambridgeAnalyticaV2 to siphon all your data, or by getting hacked and disclosing that 2 years late.
Take for example needle exchanges. People who run needle exchanges are not asserting that people being addicted to heroin is a good outcome, only that people being addicted to heroin and also having to share dirty needles is worse.
Likewise, I'm not asserting that little kids using Facebook products is a good outcome, only that it may be less bad than other outcomes.
In terms of verisimilitude, it is 49.9% off base to compare for kids branded apps to tobacco use. In terms of intellectual honesty, it is 99.9% off base to compare for kids branded apps to tobacco use.
If you want guidance on app use for your kids, ask a pediatrician a specific question. You'll get more knowledge than flaming on this place.
It's also why I have the "I will monitor your internet usage at any time that I feel it's necessary" discussion. I don't like invading privacy - I wouldn't want my internet history explored and it's as vanilla as you can imagine but it's also a projection of my inner thoughts.
I knew a young girl who was lured into a sexual encounter with an adult after striking up a friendship on "Words with Friends". I don't trust/allow anything with private communication.
“ A common myth is that child sexual abuse is perpetrated by strangers and pedophiles. But most people who sexually abuse children are our friends, partners, family members, and community members. About 93 percent of children who are victims of sexual abuse know their abuseriii. Less than 10 percent of sexually abused children are abused by a stranger.” https://www.ywca.org/wp-content/uploads/WWV-CSA-Fact-Sheet-F...
So I’d not freak out too much if your kid searches for something really weird, because we all did that as kids.
But also, it’s entirely possible that a family friend would initiate via an app like IG or FB Messenger.
That said, I wish it wasn't Facebook making this tool. I do not trust that company.
I mean, when I was a kid I was all over IRC and Usenet instead of my school's censored e-mail/chat system, just saying ...
I was under the impression that that was US law, so I was initially surprised at the rapid fluorishing of child accounts on nearly every service. But there seems to be a "...without parental consent" rider in our laws about data collection, and that consent is now assumed to be freely given.
Really though, children should not be using these devices to communicate or access web services unsupervised. You are the parent, not the phone.
Banning children from social media has generally been an easy way to avoid the highly stringent regulations concerning data protection in the USA. The FTC doesn’t mess around with COPPA and it’s very easy to find yourself in the hole.
I always wonder how I'll handle these types of situations if and when I myself become a parent. I imagine it's much more difficult in reality than it is in my head.
Aside from that, whether the child is enjoying them or not isn't all that relevant. My kid would enjoy eating ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day but I know what's good for them better than they do.
Answering your questions in that context is sort of ridiculous, but I’ll give it a shot:
1. At that age, my kid would watch whatever was on the screen, basically slack jawed. No bandwidth for anything else, really.
2. See above
3. There was no conversation.
And to answer your comments accusative sibling comment, my kid found it by tapping “next” repeatedly, or whatever was in the sidebar. Fwiw, I know “the phone isn’t the parent,” but the grandparents don’t have the same sensibilities around tech.
Curious what your opinions are on the epidemic of pornography use in young children.
also read somewhere that sexual assault perpetration is occurring at younger ages.
I don’t think I can convey to my kids the wonder of the 80s and 90s, when people were able to get a personal, general purpose computing. It was not just that every month, something new came along. There was a wide diversity of software, even among the same kind of software. People tried to write their own. Although more difficult to use, users also had a lot more power over their computing environment.
The computing landscape we have now:
- we deliberately created computing appliances in which the design of the app are driven by A/B testing, growth hacks, and dark patterns
- being able to talk with your affinity group used to mean not feeling as alone. Now, it means those are the only viewpoints you see, with algorithms feeding your view point back to you. The ancient Greek had a cautionary tale about that, called Narcissus and Echo.
- My wife is a beneficiary of online “mom” groups, and it was through there, we learned about current toys and interactions on developmental psychology. We got a Lovevry subscription, and learned about the “mental leaps”. Yet, those very things show how kids learn through interacting with objects, building neural connections in 3-d, learning through touch, smell, taste, kinesthetic and not just through sight and sound. The Montesorri method of education lets the kids choose what they are interested, but the environment is thoughtfully curated and constructed, and there is direct attention from an adult.
Algorithms are no substitute for parenting.
I first heard that from Neal Stephenson’s _Diamond Age_, but seeing how the tech landscape is now, and having a kid, that is more incisive than it had been when I first read it.
All that mental leap stuff is conjecture. I was unable to find any data to support it, and the person behind it (Frans Plooij) was discredited.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonder_Weeks
I assume any claims about mental development and personalities and whatnot is bullshit. We don’t have the technology to test it, nor even the ability to properly define things in order to test them.
So spying is okay when parents do it? It's interesting how we normalize this all.
I'd imagine most kids use their own creative stuff anyway to get around snoopy parents.
Either they are to young that a smartphone or Facebook would actually benefit them, or they are to old to spy on them.
And let’s say, we think the “constant companion” is the problem, and we restrict the kid’s interaction through an old school, family computer. Is that necessarily any better?
I have already seen first hand how social media interaction at the middle school (when kids are starting to form social identities independent of their parents) gets toxic.
And looking at the social-media-fueled culture wars since 2014, it does not get any better for adults. (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/06/a-quick-battle-field-g...).
The fantasy world is also the one that the likes of Facebook want to lead us to.
Our teenager has a phone we found that is a locked down Android, and has no internet (no wifi or 4g/5g). It is just a phone, with multimedia text, and non-network enabled calendar, clock. There is no app store.
My daughter is autistic. Our problems with the phone has more to do with her feeling like we are cutting her off of connecting with people she clings to, triggering some childhood history. I have no idea what will happen when our neurotypical son becomes a teenager.
There is much more to life than just what are on devices, and I have a general idea on how to approach this. I have been studying, and to some extent, applying regenerative paradigms. A good deal of that will involve the kids into the natural cycle of life. To viscerally experience where their food comes from, and where it goes. How to connect with another living being as a whole being in an ecosystem and community, whether that being is a human, animal, or plant. I am going to teach them the ethical framework, “care for people”, “care for land”, “fair share”.
Technology, then, is thoughtfully applied within that context.
What that means, I am still discovering for myself. But I have already made some progress on that —- what Christopher Alexander really meant by pattern languages and a timeless way of building; what Smalltalk and Hypercard had in common, why we had turned our back to it, and maybe it is time to use it; the philosophy of Free Software and how it is different than open source, and why it matters more than basic rights and liberty; how sandstorm.io enables community-oriented and local platforms.
It has not all gelled together for me yet, but I know something is there.
Maybe OP drinks alcohol but they don’t let their kids drink it.
Maybe they own firearms but they don’t let their kids wield them.
Maybe they watch movies with violence and gore but they don’t want their kids watching them.
etc.
There is a double standard, and there should be, imo.
As a teenager, I would have loathed being restricted from the internet the way the above poster describes restricting their autistic teenager's.
(in fact, on one occasion my mother did restrict my computer access because I wouldn't go to the guitar lessons she paid for me anymore, I did absolutely loathe it, and I still consider that mildly abusive)
I'm not saying it's easy, i've had some epic battles with my kids in how they handle/navigate the complex social structures around technology in the palms of their hands - but i certainly don't think taking that away does anything and may be detrimental.
Society is all of us... There isn't a single one of us that didn't stay up all night reading a book, watching a movie, talking on the phone, writing a letter, sending "beeper" texts out, texting on smart beepers, getting on BBSs, connecting to internet, having phones, then text messages and so on and so forth. It's all connectedness and culture we've always had, but now more readily available.
Help your children navigate it, grow in it and thrive in it. Be there to keep it safe.
Yes, it's important for children to engage with culture, to read, to explore music but this shouldn't be used as an argument to justify everything that can be grouped in under 'connectedness'. It's interesting you put reading there first because that is actually a solitary activity. Today it's arguably much more important to teach kids how to engage with their own minds and how to spend time alone and build out their own personality and views than hooking them into Instagram feeds. Which is not social in any genuine sense of the word.
With that said, everything should be done in moderation. It's a skill important to know whether your socializing, or spending time alone.
The old school online forums were not designed to create such attention. Posts are made asynchronously. Absolute instead of relative timestamps are used.
There are purpose-designed social media software with UX designed to bring people to consensus rather than dissension. They have been used in highly contentious political debates and bring about policy consensus. But you cannot monetize that.
These platforms have very little to teach, so it's not like there is useful tradeoff being made in any case. It's simply an often toxic form of entertainment, worse than television imho.
Do you think being on Facebook, et al is a proper course in these subjects? How did you learn about them in the days before social media? The idea that corporate surveillance and conditioning is somehow required for growing up is silly and dangerous to the kids themselves.
I was on irc throughout my early teens.
I suggest watching the Social Dillema on Netflix for an idea. Here's a decent article I recently read on the subject, though there are probably better ones: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lonely-burden-of-todays-tee...
Perhaps my argument is not clear enough, but it feels like we are not arguing the same point. I have no problem with technology, simply that kids should not be the product. There are plenty of higher-quality alternatives, just like there are alternatives to broadcast television and McDonalds.
Everyone uses the internet.
I now wonder what society will look like in 20-30 years.
By life skills I mean things like creativity, being able to work out things on their own, in person interpersonal skills, grit, etc.
I too share some concerns as a parent of 1 and expecting 2nd soon, but I don't mind accepting that I have no clue what kind of world our kids will live in. I might be out of touch with it in similar way current old generations are from phones and internet. It could also be that shielding kids from it at all costs because we think we know what's best for them might be a significant harm for them later in life.
Some things will disappear, some will get different and/or better, and new ones will come. Fine by me. I just wish it wasn't Facebook, a company with crystal clear amoral values through and through. Anytime Facebook wins, mankind loses in long term. But that might be just me getting already out of touch with current reality out there.
We'll see how this plays out, though. I think some aspects are constructive. The growing content creation community seems to be a Good Thing. The even faster growing content creation consumption community, doesn't seem to be. Personally speaking, I've found myself at an expert at a ton of things, but haven't actually done any of those things.
Additionally - I don't know if it really is an irrelevant factor for the future. This is a flu variant that could continue to mutate and cause havoc if governments act irresponsibly or if a particularly large segment of the population continues to resist vaccination and mask wearing while being egged on by idiots on TV. Lastly, global habitat destruction increases the chances we discover fun new world ending diseases, hopefully we won't see another one for decades, but it's unlikely that we'll be spared another global pandemic for the next 100 years.
But here is something else I also know: the modern way in which kids develop through the teenage years is already screwed up, even without the internet, smart phones, and social media. It seems normal now because it is normative.
Exactly. So let's not make it worse by making children communicate through devices without even a flimsy justification.
I was 10 back then. Both my parents were in academia and wouldn't just let me play all the time, but at some point they gave up.
Later, I played Civilization for so many hours and through the night that once I fell asleep my dreams were filled with hexagons.
Then there was Tetris. Oh, and, Wolfenstein, and the all legendary Age of Empires!
And, here I am, 25 years later, and I am doing just fine. I am healthy, mentally stable and don't care about any computer game no more (ok, I am addicted to HN but that's a different story...).
At first, they fought me... and it was a dumb battle for battles sake. My parents never bothered to understand anything I did and generally just gave up and let me do whatever...
Turns out, they were in the midsts of a relationship failure and there was no time for the kids, so they let me have at the computer...
BUT... It worked :) I taught myself programming, operating systems, I ran a BBS that was the first BBS in texas to offer Linux downloads, I got published in books/magazines/journals talking/writing about OS/2, Linux and DESQview.
In the end, I never went to school, my parents relationship was still crap but I made friends, found my wife and still work online to this day..
My kids are 13 and 17 and its new battles... but i just think back and remember where I started - I try and fill in the gaps of just "Caring" in general and just "wanting a relationship" with my kids in general - and i do that in lieu of trying to prohibit something that is already pervasive in their lives.
Yes, I run firewalls, safety, anti-virus, family-safety, yes there are some things blocked - yes their phones have family safety too but mostly to do what I can to protect them from maliciousness.
The last battle any parent can or should fight is the battles of pop culture, society and social interactions... espeially a year+ into a pandemic.
we had to re-think the whole grounding from devices during pandemic because that was suicide to a teen... and in doing so - it sparked conversations we weren't having and made me realize i was just following in the same ignorant foot steps as my parents.
Kids will get burner devices if they're grounded, they will jailbreak/root phones/devices to bypass controls, they will buy sims at 7/11 to get around time/restrictions - they may find a drawer of old devices and keep one alive for tethering and many other things - lock down their PC? they will install bluestacks and have unlimited android environment...
It's crazy
But damn, if they're doing all that effort and learning/collaborating on all that - they're getting skills that i find many adults still lack
This brought to mind: Years ago when I was a teen, my mom grounded me and took my desktop away for quite a while, which was like a death sentence even back then. Given that it was an oversized cube case and there really wasn't anywhere to lock it away, I would always just grab it after school and keep using it until she got home. Problem is, she put the computer next to the door so I had to resort to locking the second lock to give myself time to put it back when she got home. I didn't think about it at the time but I. was being blatantly obvious and she clued me in years later that she knew what I was doing from the beginning.
Punishments don't have to be all or nothing, they can be like locks: they won't stop the determined, but they will stop the opportunists. The punishment is the inconvenience of the workaround and often has the added benefit that enforcement requires spending more time with them. </parenting "advice" from a coddled nonparent>
Parents who impose "grounding" on children tend to impose sanctions that last far too long. Children have a poorly developed pre-frontal cortex so very short groundings (ten minutes, an hour for most severe things) is more effective that longer groundings.
Messenger kids has been great for my family, especially the times when we've had to self isolate and couldn't meet friends outside.
To know that there are opportunities to socialize and grow my friendships, and those opportunities are being intentionally and needlessly withheld from me as some kind of "character growth" would evoke a kind of primal rage that would have caused me permanent harm as a child.
I'm extremely grateful my parents saw the value of learning how to build and maintain relationships, and I wouldn't dream of taking that away from my children, or any other children I somehow had supervision over.
I'm not sure if this is good or bad for my personal development. Though it did jumpstart my education in computer science and career as a software engineer.
The government on other hand is hell bent on destroying some of the most successful american comapnies at the expense of its citizens.
That opener and the glowing comment that follows are pretty strange. It's essentially, "I hate Facebook too, but in spite of hating it, I give their product to my kids and (effectively) here are all the reasons you should consider giving it to your kids too."
Maybe we dislike Facebook for different reasons, but I believe most (including myself) would point to something along the lines of their horrible business practices and privacy abuses. This is not a per-app thing. It's their approach to everything and, really, the entire point of their ecosystem (of which your kids are now a part).
So, whether or not they can make an app "safe" from outside predators, I have zero interest in feeding my kids to the Facebook machine. I'm not trying to be on the attack here, but it frustrates me as a parent to see another parent promoting this stuff in the name of convenience (or whatever) when they also know it's awful. Ultimately, when enough parents approve and enough kids are using it, then other parents are left to make the awful choice between also feeding their kids to the machine or allowing them to be socially isolated to some extent.
When do we take a stand? Or, at a minimum, maybe don't help Facebook promote it?
And the games on it use the same engagement tricks all of Facebook does, so the kids end up getting sucked into them at a very young age.
You're not conditioning your kids to be soulless zombies to lord Zuckerberg any more than I was conditioned to love AOL. Let your kids socialize in whatever way their friends are, the actual socializing and shared experience is what will matter years down the line.
I believe it should be illegal for a company to intentionally allow children into a system where their psychology is manipulated. Instagram has huge negative psych effects, predominantly on young girls. But the other social dynamics, and the effects of advertising, and the effects of the echo chambers that result from the algorithmic feeds are profound and harmful across all social media platforms.
It isn't socializing when every photo is edited, every post that a kid sees is the most dramatic thing thanks to the algorithm, and moral/political activism is rampant and signal boosted. Kids should learn how to deal with real humans in the real world rather than digital characterizations of humans curated by a machine.
This is not in defense of facebook or IG, they are problematic for kids for sure for many reasons and they should be restricted from data collecting on kids.
BUT... American culture is rooted in pop/controlled/manicured/curated culture... we idolize celebrities, sports teams, beauty... we should fix that too
Growing up, I hung out on chat rooms and online gaming servers. And I probably experienced stuff I wasn't ready for. But it was under a pseudonym and all online.
In social apps today, the bullying the kids do to each other is brutal and cuts much deeper because they know other. And, unlike back in my day, you can't just delete your account and log off. The next day in school, you'll see all of the kids who sharing awful doctored photos of you and telling you that you should kill yourself.
What is fundamentally different now versus then is the the data you are handing over and the manipulation that you are unknowingly experiencing.
Beyond that, in the 80s and 90s we were certainly marketed too... cartoons were invented to sell us toys, get us to buy cards/games and get our friends addicted
Kind of? CCGs are well known for their predatory monetization schemes.
For both factors, addictiveness and harm, there are large piles of scientific studies.
Apart from magnitude of harm, I don't think it's a stretch to think that social media should be grouped together with tobacco as something we want to limit as a society. There might even be an argument on magnitude given that social media causes loneliness and loneliness causes early death https://press.aarp.org/2016-12-07-AARP-Foundation-Draws-Atte.... While I'm not saying that using facebook reduces your lifespan by 15 years, I think there is cause to assume a real physiological impact.
Sure, social media has had its positive impact - every new technology is mixed - but certainly, we need to find common-sense ways to regulate social media to reduce addictiveness and harm.
It's fairly obvious that giving children a safe zone is still better than throwing them in the 18+ internet right?
Are there any arguments as to why a platform for under 13 y/o would be worse than these demographics using the normal platform?
I'd prefer kids didn't use Instagram at all though.
You realize that by sharing those ad topics you are probably sharing too much of your interests. I get baby products.. it depends on what you've searched for lately.
Without knowing anything about Instagram Kids, more parents might let their children use it if it appears safe for children. If it's not actually safe(r?), then that's more exposure.
For example, YouTube Kids is almost the same garbage as YouTube, but the name implies otherwise. Neither flavor should be left unsupervised with children.
Except that everything on there is going to keep kids "engaged." Even the weird toxic clickbait sort of stuff. On regular YouTube, they might at least wander off into something less interesting and put it down, but in the "Kids" sphere, you can safely bet they won't put it down of their own "This has gotten boring..." accord.
I entirely agree that unsupervised YouTube of any form for kids is a terrible idea.
Google's general concept that "algorithms and machine learning" can do anything useful against unlimited attacks from motivated adversaries (some of the bizarre Elsegate videos made quite a bit of money) hasn't worked out very well in practice, and that's before you get the 4chan trolling style attacks. And YouTube's volume is far, far too great for humans to actually watch everything coming in. I can't solve that problem, but I sure can solve the problem of not giving my kids an unsupervised pipeline into that world.
There are ads, of course, but tolerable ones. Certainly not any worse than what I watched on commercial television back in the day.
Videos from channels like Cody's Lab, King of Random, Smarter Everyday and similar are not available on Youtube Kids. This wouldn't really be a problem if Youtube allowed parents to mark a channel or videos as OK for their children. But, it is an outright block for children under 13 with no capacity for discretion.
I tried to create a youtube account with whatever checkbox they have that is "please only show safe content". I subscribed to kid's science channels. The garbage that came though was astonishing.
In the normal platform at least they can be disguised as average users that seldom post anything, and there is less pressure to post anything since it's a hostile place to children in the first place.
>It's fairly obvious that giving children a safe zone is still better than throwing them in the 18+ internet right?
Yes, but this shouldn't be done by a company that's only looking for profit. There's only so much that can be done legally to keep them away from these sorts of things and the rest of it HAS to be done by the parents. Children shouldn't have free reign of the internet and need guidance on what's appropriate and discussion on what they're seeing. I'm probably in the minority but I don't agree with just giving them smart phones/devices that just allow them to be connected to whatever they want 24/7 either.
To my knowledge there is no "gambling" aspect of the game. Did you just randomly pick fortnite because other games have loot box mechanics and you assumed fortnite did too?
Additionally, the actual game-play is made to be addictive and young children don't have the ability to keep this in check.
This is preferable to sheltering them until they go to college where it is all on display for obvious reasons.
One of my fondest childhood memories was figuring out how to get past the high school’s filtering software so we could get hotornot/MySpace/deviant art available.
Just remembered hotornot, kinda crowd sourced child/teen body-image shaming but it did help everyone develop a thick skin unlike today when parents try and micromanage their kids lives.
Certainly not reddit which one of the worse places on the internet for developing minds. It doesn't get mentioned much in discussions of "damaging social media" because it's anonymous and can't target people personally, but I'd wager that a lot more people have absorbed a lot more damaging content than just about any site I can think of.
I am sure there are hundreds of (likely paid) walled gardens for kids out there where a bunch of them even comes with proper moderation.
Also the option of potentially putting up content that mocks other kids. It's somewhat possible with messenger kids but the only information shared is between the few kids on a chat. If 3 kids chatting together make fun of a 4th, that sucks but that 4th kid is never going to see it. If kids Instagram mean everyone in a contact list is going to see the same content, that could be really damaging.
I don't know how many people watched "American Vandal", season 2. I don't necessarily recommend it in a vacuum, but it does an amazing job showing how much kids can be devastated by social media. When I was a kid, the popular kids could make fun of me ( and probably did ) but at least it wasn't in my face - or the face of the rest of the school so they could easily join it.
Kids reading stuff or watching videos or playing games, none of that amounts to a constant numerical score of whether or not their peers "like" them.
https://www.mass.gov/doc/naag-letter-to-facebook/download
Signed by attorneys general of Massachusetts, Nebraska, Vermont, Tennessee, Alaska, California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Northern Mariana Islands, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming
(Also, I was curious and had to look up what the plural is and why for a group like this: It’s tricky, because both “attorney” and “general” are nouns, so it seems perfectly legal to just add the “s” to the second word, and that often happens in news reports. “General” here, though, is an adjective, not a noun; you can think of them as “general attorneys.” So the plural goes on the noun, and the proper form is “attorneys general.”)
It is way worse than cigarettes, on so many levels. It is much more profound than one would initially assume. 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.
Facebook can't even effectively police their existing platform, how are they going to keep children safe?
Imagine if governments cracked down on Snapchat and TikTok for not doing enough to keep under-13 users off their apps.
"Instagram and Messenger are setting such great examples for child safety and data protection, while these other apps are endangering our youth and capturing personal data from underage users. Won't somebody think of the children?"
Hopefully you can help them model their world such that they don’t fall victim to the feelings others might feel from looking at posed pictures. If they inherently don’t value vanity, then they will be able to prosper (mentally) even though the world around them might not.