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Comment by slowmovintarget | Hacker News Reader

The real takeaway: Parents protect your children from social media. Talk to them. Give them rules to keep them safe. Say "No." Don't wait for Zuckerberg to do it. Don't wait for Congress to do it. Get yourself away from it, and get your children off it. Find some other way to share pictures with grandma and grandpa.

We need regulation, yes, but this is the same as people smoking themselves into an early grave, but on a societal level.

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> Parents protect your children from social media. Talk to them. Give them rules to keep them safe.

The current generation of parents itself is addicted and influenced by social media (not just facebook) and struggles keeping own online privacy and safety. So they need to do it for themselves first and then for their kids.

Perhaps educational system should care about this as well; computer classes shouldn't be limited to basic machine handling skills and software along with coding (at least that what I ad during my school years) but also cover the Internet and social media along with its pros and cons. It's not enough to do some random lesson with "there's porn and pedos on the Internet, be careful" topic and call job done relying on self-taught experiences at home during free time.

>The real takeaway: Parents protect your children from social media.

This also flows the other direction too. Talk to your parents about how the algorithms on these sites are designed to manipulate and how that shapes everything you see on the platform.

My bet would be that Zuckerberg would be more than happy to endorse your "real takeaway", because unlike some of his detractors he can actually see beyond the end of his nose.

Yes, in the short term you can and should take steps to curtail (possibly to zero) your children's use of social media.

As a longer term strategy this is bound to fail, for exactly the same reason that "if you don't like being surveilled around the clock, just don't buy a smartphone" is by now completely impractical advice.

Optional technologies become creepingly obligatory.

With Facebook the cost of opting out for most Western adults is likely already much greater than what non-smokers ever faced (being seen as less cool?). Chances are already pretty good something that's actually important in your live (like your work) will require use of WhatsApp, for example.

My parents telling me as a kid not to start smoking definitely didn't prevent me from doing it later in life.

100% this. From what I heard Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, completely disallowed their kids to use of smartphones until they were much older and independent.

When there is no skin-in-the-game, one must ask why, do they do this?

The ages of their children doesn't match up to this. But it is probably good advise.

Good point

> Parents protect your children from social media

Now that you say it, it seems obvious. Just compare to anything else with kids: 'all good, you have nothing to worry'? Well, nothing. There is no free lunch.

kids these days don't really bother in Facebook anyways

Teenagers are not interested in facebook at all.

So because the name of the social app is different today the OP's point makes no sense?

No, the way social apps engage today is different to how facebook does. Not sure if I understand what you mean?

Protect your children from social media, no matter which company.

One can only teach values not protect children from social media. I have children.

This is the way to do it. When they're very young, it's by saying "No." When they're a little older, it's by explaining why. By the time they're a teenager, you have to trust them and make sure they know you're there for them.

You also have to model the behavior for them in the first place.

I'm also a parent. You begin as a shield and end as a foundation in your child's life. It is a process.

There are a lot of contradictory ideas out there, sometimes it is important to let children make mistakes, it is not easy as a parent to sometimes do nothing.

I think the point is that even if it isn't facebook, talk to your kids. Just like you'd talk to them about other kids at school and the interactions between them: Social media is a part of their social world, so talk to them no matter if it is facebook or not. Every one of them has the potential to do something akin to what facebook has done, albeit with their own unique method of delivery.

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