HOT TAKE: I think the parents are responsible for regulating the social media hours of their kids, not Mark Zuckerberg. Even If facebook changes, kids will find something else to hook onto, leading to more mental health problems.
I say this every time this comment comes up and I always get downvoted but I just don’t care. I love my kids and I fight every day to keep them safe and healthy and I DO NOT NEED to fight a super villain with direct access to my child’s mind.
Social media is evil. It will be banned. Wait and see.
In short: Network effect.
Now it’s a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t”, and just giving your kids the keys is probably the lesser of the two evils.
Which is why we should be making sure that these platforms are healthy for everyone involved, as much as is practical and possible.
If this was business as usual, that wouldn’t have happened.
No, I foresee a future in which social media is mandatory - if not in law, at least in practice. I use none, as I found it turned me into a performer rather than a person, and even now sometimes find myself at an impasse where I am not able to do x, y, z because I do not have a social media presence. For instance, I was refused entry to the US for refusing to divulge my social media handles - because I have none. I was last night refused entrance to a bar because I wouldn’t share my instagram handle - because I have none. I had to go for a physical interview last year for a residency permit where I live, because I would not share my Facebook handle - because I have none. I got residency, but I was presented with additional hurdles for not being a user.
If you want out, the only way is to forgo much of modern life - and this will only become more and more apparent.
I’ve taken to writing physical letters. If I can’t be bothered, what I had to say evidently wasn’t important in the first place.
And even if you ban them from using ALL meta product. They will still be hooked to something else. Forum ( That is a form of Social Media as well ), other media for celebrity news or whatever. Ban Whatsapp? There is iMessages on iOS and used mostly across teen age group in the US, Line in Japan, KakaoTalk in Korea. Did anyone remember SnapChat ?
Even if you DO ban all of them. They will still get spread in school talking about the trendiest topic. They will find a way to join the conversation no matter what so they dont get left out. And I have seen this first hand.
I am not against Facebook providing some sort of filter or mode for Kids or something. But it is ultimately the parents that is responsible. The world has changed. And I have always argued it is not the platform or social media. It is the internet itself, extremely affordable and accessible via Smartphone everywhere. And so far I didn't even mention Youtube.
Parenting in the 21st century is harder than ever.
On the other hand kids these days learn so so much more at their age on topics that you could never imagined over the internet. Things I could only dream of when all I had was books in library written by people not targeting my age. ( Which is actually another issues because those who are curious and willing to learn excel so much further than the bottom half of the class, it seems the information super highway has fastened inequality everywhere. )
I am actually surprised at the Hotcake being the most upvoted comments, for the past 6+ years Facebook has been the most hated company on HN and anything that goes against hating Facebook tends to get downvoted.
I hope I'm not misrepresenting your argument with this analogy, but it seems like you're saying "Don't ban heroin. Kids will still get hooked on weed!"
It's okay to ban the worst offenders and carefully regulate the 'market'.
With a free and open market, billions of dollars of investment, and thousands of smart minds working over at Facebook, it's quite possible that things will get worse if there's no regulation.
Except I can see zero good about heroin, while social Media ( inclusive of instant messengers ) have their own good. So it is not as clear cut.
For example I define Chat as a different category then Social Media.
How do you define Social Media and what is the value (or good) they add that is unique to these platforms?
Hence, legislation shouldn’t target individual companies, but “features” that harm people or lead to bad outcomes for society at large. One such example is Europe’s GDPR, which imposes some fundamental limitations on what companies can and cannot do with their users’ personal data. And as negative consequences of poor social media design becomes more apparent, legislators must expand on that and ban more of the malicious practices that are at fault.
It may take time for the US to deliberately damage national champions like Facebook and Google. Other countries will be less patient to act. I cannot imagine democratically elected governments idly standing by as Facebook drags their people into a dystopian Metaverse where there’s no more escaping the misinformation and manipulation that’s already rampant on current-generation social media platforms.
How, by getting rid of the first amendment? Seems doubtful.
Like it or not YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and the internet in general has taken up the place of parenting and social interaction because parents are worked to death for the 1% and social media is designed the same way as casinos. They're designed to prey upon your instincts and are demonstrated to be quite effective at it. I wouldn't mind if tomorrow Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, etc, all disappeared overnight. Obviously government can't have the power to do that because they'll go after everything but that.
It’s interesting to watch Australia navigate this. Murdoch is rather powerful there and has some leverage.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/rupert-murdoch...
And ppl like mark is obviously responsible because they are using dopamine tricks to make content more addicting. Like whats the point of showing me nonsense news because one of the people I added liked some nonsense? Why to show nonsense ads that says me "She looks beautiful and if you want try this cream"? (mark because he is the own who has ultimate control over facebook and insta)
China tackled this by banning and making sure tiktok etc returns more science content for children instead of dopamine addicting content. (China because I don't know if other country has regulated social media like this)
Welcome to North Korea. I will win.
you have no idea what the impact of allowing access to "social" tech will have on them in the long term
Its all a massive guessing game.
After that day we realized its not easy to control smart children.
Is your example a smart child or a stupid child?
I like to take my son fishing because it teaches him it’s ok to be bored, silence is ok too, also our talks and bonding is deeper in these moments, and it gets us out in nature.
Personal story: to situate, when i was teenager facebook was starting to be a thing and myspace started fading. My parents did something i find to be very sensible: they responsabilised me and introduced me to computers. I had restricted "freetime" computer hours and slightly less restricted "working" computer hours (doing school work etc), which eventually led me to programming since it somehow passed as working (my mom's a programmer so there's that). I wasn't allowed to have a facebook account and it was explained to me why that was so. Reasons where mostly not putting random private stuff online somewhere i wouldn't control it, addiction wasn't too important but i think it was implicitly said that these stuff eat you time and that now your time doing constructive things vanishes. OTOH my computer was clean of any spyware and i was trusted (had admin password and all). I surely was an outsider from this pov, but i quickly managed to own it and be proud of not having that account. For me this is the key: you cannot protect your kid against his will, you must (and surely can, kids are smart) convince them that they have more to loose than to gain. Maybe at that time it was simpler since it was the golden age of xmpp and gtalk was something i had access to (Adium for the win!).
One of the oft-touted figures was that “thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.”
My hot take is: "That's probably about right." Given the sorry state of physical education, fitness, and the fact that 60%+ of adults are obese or overweight, the fact that 1/3 of people on Instagram look at other people and feel their appearance needs improvement is probably about right -- if not a little low. There are probably another 1/3 that _should_ feel bad but don't. (And boys too!)
Parents can regulate the hours, but unless they regulate them down to zero, they cannot affect the adictiveness engineered into the product. Yes, the dose makes the poison, but I guarantee you Facebook has a team of psychologists making sure the dose needed to get kids hooked is as low as possible.
The opioid crisis is also the fault of all those pesky addicts who chose to get themselves addicted and it’s not at all on Purdue.
Right?! /s
We should also prevent the supply of these things and regulate harmful corporate behavior, but that doesn't absolve parents of their responsibility.
1. You have no idea about teenagers.
2. You have no idea about the causes of the opioid crisis.
Also, I did not conflate the two which you appear to think I have done.
That’s exactly the reason people without children have no children: they want to have free time.