California parents could soon sue for social media addiction
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The litigation culture of having individual people sue for damage doesn't go to the root cause and is a bureaucratic and legal nightmare. Delegating something that is effectively an environmental issue to the responsibility of individual parents is like blaming parents for not protecting their kids from drinking lead water.
Technology and social media are ubiquitous, there's only an illusion of choice. It's digital infrastructure and the water we swim in. In fact the covid pandemic has shown that it is not even a choice as it turned into the primary means for kids to have a social life and education.
What's necessary is clear rules that align the behavior of companies with social ends. If they can't square making money with keeping public discourse healthy or not making teens mentally ill they need to be culled, it's that simple. Clear, strong and unambiguous legislation, rather than private legal threats will not harm the kind of entrepreneurs that build tools that are in the interest of the public. It will give them a better shot, just like environmental laws for cars have aided electric car makers. For every billionaire incumbent there are thousands eager to build good products to take a slice of the pie. The anti-regulatory argument has very little merit.
> What's necessary is clear rules that align the behavior of companies with social ends. If they can't square making money with keeping public discourse healthy or not making teens mentally ill they need to be culled, it's that simple.
I don’t think it’s that simple, or simple in the way you may imagine. It’s impossible to come up with rules that even a plurality agree with. Just scroll the comment threads here when social media “censorship” comes up, which may not be directly what you’re talking about but is surely related in part if not in whole to the very real mental health issues you are describing.
The auto regulation and leaded drinking water analogies, however, incidentally hint at what the real answer is. We banned those things. If social media is the lead in our water, we don’t need better filters (or whatever) we need to get rid of it.
An idea I had is to set some kind of guideline like “users should on average spend no more than 1 hour on the platform per day” and then if the average user starts going over that, the company gets penalised until they bring the number lower.
This way you let the companies use whatever measure they find works best to keep addiction under control.
We have nutritional labels on food. We need nutritional labels for websites/apps/services. And then maybe a small popup "You've reached your daily serving of social media use. You may continue, but know that you'll be in unhealthy territory."
And then we treat "social media addiction" as an additional insurance cost factor, just like obesity. More than 2h of facebook per day => let's double your mental health premiums.
That way, we (the society) can accurately measure and allocate the damage and resulting costs caused by social media companies.
I mean some of the controversy here may be of the 'difficult to make someone understand something their income depends on them not understanding' variety.
Doesn’t it? The root issue is an externality: social media companies profit from the user engagement that addiction provides, but do not bear the cost of the addiction. Creating a private right of action (preferably with asymmetric fee award exposure) both enables and incentivizes the charging of those costs to the companies.
Admittedly, this “litigation culture” as you call it is inefficient. But I think it’s generally more effective than the alternative of having top-down regulatory intervention, where you have to contend with issues such as regulatory capture and the general ineptitude of government bureaucracies.
We've seen this happen in other highly regulated areas such as healthcare, telecommunications, etc.
I suspect the way things are trending, in 10 years, very few entrepreneurs would be willing to start a new social media company.
Clearly the regulators see this as a potential downside, which is why the $100 million in gross revenue provision was added.
Not if the existing companies are still allowed to do exactly that, or it's just called regulatory capture and serves the interests of Reddit/Twitter/Facebook/TikTok and co. Either it's illegal for everybody to exploit mental illness for profit or it's legal for everybody.
It can be spun however anyone wants to spin it, but at the end of the day, that's exploiting biology to subvert the will of others. And yes, I know this can describe advertising, as well.
Smart businesses optimize UX for conversion. FREE with no revenue is loss.
What's next? Suing vegas for the lights? You don't want to gamble? Don't go to Vegas.
They already have "How much time have I spent in here?" features.
You may not optimize yield because the children are compulsive addictive and it's the internet's fault.
What's next? Suing the bar for allowing you to spend time there? You'll have to make it more unbearable.
Just do a little more censorship for me too, mmkay?
It's not Art it's Ari: You want to sell an art film? Take it to an art film festival.
How are they supposed to know that you don't want to be in the store anymore?
For context here, there are many existing methods for limiting ones access to certain DNS domains and applications at the client. A reasonable person can:
- Add an /etc/hosts file entry: `etchosts='/etc/hosts' echo '127.0.0.1 domain.com www.domain.com' >> "${etchosts}`
- Install a browser extension for limiting time spent by domain
- Buy a router that can limit access by DNS domain and time of day (with regard for the essential communications of others who could bypass default DNS blocking with a VPN that can be expected to also regularly fail)
- Install an app (with access to the OS process space of other programs in order to restrict them) to limit time spent by application and/or DNS domain
-- Enable "Focus Mode" in Android; with the "Digital Wellbeing" application
-- Enable "Screen Time" in iOS; and also report on and limit usage of apps [and also to limit access to DNS domains, you'd also need required integration with a required browser]
You can install just an IM (Instant Messenging) app, and only then learn strategies for focusing amidst information overload and alert fatigue.
Some users do manage brands and provide customer service and support non-blocked but blocking essential communications, while managing their health at a desk all day. Some places literally require you to check your mobile device at the door. What should the default timer above the fold on just facebook be set to?
Well, actually: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dram_shop
Is the store - who you are not paying - a 1) business of public accomodation; or 2) obligated to provide such detection and ejection services; or 3) required to provide service?
You can't cut them off, they're Donny (who TOS don't apply to). You must cut them off, they can't they're not even. You are responsible for my behavior!
Best of luck suing the game publisher for optimizing the game, the author of a book you got for FREE for your time lost, suing the bar that you chose to frequent; do you think they're required to provide service to you? Did they prevent you from leaving? Did they prevent you from choosing to do something else, like entering a different URL in your address bar at will?
You should instead pay someone to provide the hypothetical service you're demanding fascist control over. CA is not a shareholder; and this new policy will be challenged and the state must apply said policy to all other businesses equally: you may not dog just {business you're trying to illegally dom} with an obligation to put a countdown or countup timer above the fold because they keep taking so much of your time.
EDIT: I just can't f believe they thought that only {Facebook} would have to check real name IDs at the door, run a stopwatch for each user with a clock above the fold, profile your mental health status, allow Donny to keep harassing just whoever, and tell you when it's time to go because you can't help yourself when it's time to leave the store they continued to optimize.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/24/22994234/eu-antitrust-leg...
The reason why it would differentiate on size is precisely the reasoning you presented in your previous post. Because it doesn't want to create moats around big existing players on the market. If you look at the act the GP linked to you'll see that one of its purposes it to tear down a non regulatory moat that those big existing player have.
And because a small company, without a doubt, has less potential for harm on a societal level than a big company.
I suspect that future social media will be even worse that Twitter/TikTok/Reddit and co, just like TikTok is even more unhinged than Facebook or Twitter. Social media is entertainment, entertainment is always pushing the limits of what is morally acceptable to broadcast because it's profitable and brings in more eyeballs. It's exactly the same reason as to why reality TV perverted television even more by turning TV into some voyeuristic dystopia. That's what social media is.
I’m not sure this is a bad thing. Is the world better and happier from social media? Do we want it to keep rising from the ashes and sowing misery, ignorance, and depression? Maybe it is my nostalgia glasses but I feel like everyone I know was happier when the only way to communicate long distance for the average person was a rotary phone that weighed about 20 lbs.
That’s just the natural outcome of blurring chat rooms with social media.
> The proposal would only apply to social media companies that had at least $100 million in gross revenue in the past year
And also:
> Also, companies that conduct regular audits of their practices to identify and remove features that could be addictive to children would be immune from lawsuits.
...if a company is earning $100 million per year from their social media product I think I'm kind of okay with demanding they spend a person-day every couple months verifying that they're not adding features classed as addictive to children.
I'm not really seeing where your outrage is coming from, here.
The real issue with this bill is that "addiction" isn't the same for everyone. The Twitter "trends" paradigm itself could be considered addictive if you really stretched it, maybe a 15 year old looks at it every waking hour of their day and goes through it all looking for tweets to reply to? Since the law doesn't only apply in a class-action sense, any parent could bring this to court with their anecdote and the court's main argument would be on whether that specific feature is 'addictive', not "addictive to all children".
For reference:
> An operator of a social media platform shall be found to have violated their duty if the social media platform is found to have addicted a child user by either of the following means:
> (1) The use or sale of a child user’s personal data.
> (2) The development, design, implementation, or maintenance of a design, feature, or affordance.
Quite literally anything could be grounds for the $25k + 2x attorney's fees in damages.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
Yes, absolutely. I actually lived in the rotary phone era and it was fucking lonely. It's much easier to stay connected with friends now. That's especially true now that I've moved out of the city and started a family.
Or maybe they like the idea of having adult children? I really don't know.
But I know so many people who don't actually like spending time with their children. I get some people actually have to work a lot but it's a shallow analysis to blame it on that (IMHO).
So expectations tend to be super-high. Their children often have to go to Ivy League schools. They themselvves need to save north of $500k+ to pay for that blue blood education. These people will bemaon the high cost of raising children while living in a 7000 sq ft 6 bedroom house with their 2 children, paying $50k/year to send each of those children to private schools and so on.
And while you can argue those things have value (I actually think that's debatable at best), the net effect is that these people actually seem to spend little time with their children. After awhile it occurs to you that's the point.
I feel like an awful lot of people are motivated by living vicariously through their children too. "I'm going to give my child the opportunities I never had". That sort of thing.
As far as social media goes, it's easy to say "don't allow your children on social media" but my guess is it's mostly childless people saying that. Those growing up now are connected socially to their peers through these networks. No social media is a form of forced social exclusion that's pretty all-encompassing. It's a hard problem.
I'd say, if anything, the problem starts way earlier than that. I actually think in an ideal world a child wouldn't even see an electronic screen (TV, phone, tablet, computer) before they're like 8 years old. That's pretty unrealistic though.
One issue with social media is because of US laws most networks are age-restricted. Some to 18 and over. Others to 13 and up. We all know that people lie and use them anyway. Where does responsibility for this lie? With the companies? The parents? I really don't know.
It does seem easy to scapegoat companies for these issues though.
When the addictive factor is deliberately manufactured into a product (AKA engagement), the company absolutely bears some (IMO, a large amount of) responsibility.
If this law isn’t perfect and has some unintended side effects, we can adjust and stay flexible.
So, every product from every company ever. That's the goal of marketing, after all. Why not extend this law for everyone? Why can't I sue Lego because my son keeps insisting I buy them, or why can't I sue Budweiser because I keep finding myself buying their booze?
It's an unfairly targeted law to win easy political points, because everyone hates big social right now, but everyone loves Lego.
And considering the forum, a credible argument for everyone to sacrifice some of their freedom needs to clear a way higher bar.
Having kids is literally hardwired into most people’s brains, even if it’s an illogical choice for them.
Being an engaged parent is great fun, but it's intensive. Trying to be an engaged parent while juggling a heavy workload is especially difficult; people find solace at the office because almost anything is easier. In an era where work follows you everywhere - I work past midnight most nights when the kids are sleeping and for parts of most weekends - the tension is hard to escape.
I don't think most people don't want or resent their kids, just that it's another thing pulling you in more directions.
Do you have kids of your own?
If they start requiring some sort of government issued ID for age verification for the services in question, those services might as well go up in flames. It's easier just to find or create an alternative that isn't affected by the legislation
When we were online we used to talk on zoom/Google Meet whatever. I didn't feel any loss not being with my friends on social media.
We could call it “parenting”.
I live in US, and like China's approach on this specific issue.
1) Disallow smartphone until certain age. Which age?
2) Allow smartphone, but with parental controls. Which ones? Many of them are hackable.
3) Allow smartphone, but with time of day/week restrictions that you enforce by taking away the phone?
2) I have the Google controls. That said, its as you say kids can circumvent controls so the best thing you can do is have this conversation.
We've spoken a buch of times with the kids about how other kids will look at gore/porn out of interest/shock value but they should choose not to as its not healthy etc. And other things like staying private online, predators, come to us if they are getting bullied or do something wrong like share an embarrasing picture and its getting used against them etc.
Ultimately this one its about having a good/trusting parent child relationship I feel than via digital restrictions.
3) From the Google controls we have time restriction, both time of day and total hours.
The other thing I feel is important 1) is making sure you do things with kids. It's easy to get tired as a parent and let them entertain themself but playing board games and sports etc is so important. Making sure you have quality time beyond screens makes it a smaller part of their life. And 2) Encourage the right friendships. Put the effort to organise events with kids/families with good values as the group surrounding them will have a big impact.
None of what you mention is easy, or path of least resistence. Especially waiting for highschool for the phone. We did sixth grade and we regret it now that our middle schooler is mildly addicted. We are spending this summer working on that.
And let's not forget the bullying and peer pressure a child who does not have a cell phone will endure. I saw this happen with a niece I tutor first hand, sadly. Not to mention that a good portion of her assignments come via the web or an app these days - which is super frustrating for me.
are you certain your kids ~~are not sneaking a flashlight under their blankets to read books until dawn~~ do not have a secondary phone to scroll tiktok until dawn, are not learning from friends about vpns, are not browsing porn
when your kids go to school or are away from home can you be certain they are not circumventing all those things you have had the talk about?
Looking at some things at a friend's house is much less impactful than an everyday half-unlimited supply.
> Ultimately this one its about having a good/trusting parent child relationship I feel than via digital restrictions.
Your children still need someone you trust for when they don't want to go to you. Your friend, your sister, someone. Because regardless of how good of a parent you are, there will be times they don't want to go to you.
At some point you have to put some responsibility on the companies who are creating addictive experiences targeted at children.
1/ You do that when you get the idea that they have grown smart enough and sneaking and doing it anyway on their friends' phones. 2/ Apple phones are good and hard to hack (at least by a regular kid). 3/ Yes. Plus a reward/punishment system for additional/curtailed hours on completion of chores.
I personally have a slightly different approach.
1/ I have given them Kindle as replacement devices (they also have jailed phones) and socially engineered them to make them feel superior about that. I've also given them some RPi to play with (to practically apply the things they read and learn from the books on Kindle).
This way, they don't take the phone as a forbidden fruit (since they already have it).
2/ I have created a normal user on Android phones with Microsoft ecosystem (I have a O360 family subscription) so, apart from the regular firewall stuff, it also logs everything my kids do on the phone and reports to me. Occassionally I go through the complete logs in their phones, to see if they tried to bypass their user profiles and do something funny.
However, it's important to make them realise that all this is done for their own good. Plus I make sure not to interfere in everything they do. It's ok to make mistakes as long as I can make sure it's reversible. Otherwise I've seen deep rooted resentment in some other kids. For example, their map locations sync to me in real time. I make sure they understand that this is for their own convenience (kids don't care about safety so no point in highlighting that) like arranging an Uber if they need one or to give them directions. That way, they don't take it as spying on them and are completely comfortable with sharing their live location with me. On the contrary, they take it as their parent (me) taking care of them and are actually pretty proud about it.
3/ I avoid negative feedback loops. I don't say you can use the phone only for 2 hours daily. Rather I say, you can use the phone as long as you want but only after you finish your daily checklist. Chores/Class tasks etc. It's works pretty well.
I love talking with my kids, and I love hanging out with my kids. I don't understand the parents who go out to eat and let there kids bring a device of some sorts.
Especially when the psychology behind it is completely unknown to everyone (sure, everyone has an idea but I think some would be surprised at what they actually do).
I’m with you that it’s still on the parents, but parents taking it to the social media companies in a way is embracing their role as parents to act on their kids behalf.
All that out of the way, sounds a bit zany and I’m not sure how or if this could ever actually work.
We could call it "sueing".
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
- The Catcher in the Rye (1951)Why limit this logic to just social media sites and not other things that kids can be addicted to?
I'd suggest they did harm to their own children when they allowed a smartphone and social media at an early age.
Given that the human brain is still forming into your 20's, the harm can happen at any age. And given how much social media pressures impact teenagers, it doesn't even require that early of an age.
I believe that is what they call whataboutism, unless I misunderstood the point of your comment. When people comment at me I usually assume they're attempting to correct me.
If you don't want to perform a parent's job, DON'T HAVE KIDS.
I detest social-media companies in general, but clogging up our courts with this namby-pamby bullshit is offensive to every citizen.
And ugh, just as people were mocking Reddit's declining culture, a couple of them turn around and down-mod this oh-so-hurtful sentiment.
Pull up your big-boy pants and parent your kids, because taxpayers shouldn't be paying for your nanny. They're already paying for your kids' schooling.
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Many adults can't keep themselves from the addiction. How do we expect parents to keep their kids from it?
Or, to put it another way, I'm sure the median parent would have much less luck keeping their kids away from social media than they do with porn.
There's some behaviors of corporations interacting with children that are correctly regulated in the interest of the broader society we live in. It is completely valid to argue that social media specifically isn't harmful enough to regulate, but your comment amounts to snark that implies nothing should be regulated which is a pretty extreme Anarcho-capitalist position to blanket take.
I remember being given a glass of wine or a beer occasionally growing up. I think this is something that my parents did to discourage underage drinking my making it boring (which worked, at least for me).
That works because the parent is mediating.
Yes. But age limits on them should still exist but be lowered (to say 13). Parents need to teach their kids how to responsibly enjoy vices. In general I think all vice laws should be purged from the books.
> 2. What about advertising specifically targeted at getting kids interested and hooked on cigarettes?
I'm okay with some limits on addictive advertising but I largely think it is parents responsibility to teach their kids how to properly evaluate purchases and understand what addiction is so they can avoid it.
> 3. What about child labor?
Depends on age, but I'm OK with kids working as young as thirteen in many capacities. Even younger kids can work in some more limited jobs.
> 4. Why not let just parents decide what's right for their kids?
Parents should be deciding what is right for their kids... they are _their_ kids. The government is too far abstracted away from families to know what is best for a kid.
A lot of people were so sure and so vocal that violent video games cause violent behavior, a "just so" theory that no one bothered to prove. History loves to rhyme.
It's my job to not shit in the pool. And, it's your job to avoid it if I do shit in the pool.
The idea that people can do whatever they want and the consequences are 100%, completely on the heads of other people to deal with is a hilariously juvenile view of personal responsibility.
I ask because it looks to me like every restaurant, bar, food producer, video game company, social media company, hotel, cinematic universe, book series author, and basically any consumer product or service is optimizing for repeat business.
But one way to tell they're going too far is when they explicitly call out these actions on investor calls, on official blog posts, ex-employees speaking out...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/facebook-documents...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28051930
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-addictive-as-cigarette...
Because they're different ages and with different interests, they often use them in place of TV also when they can't agree on what to watch.
We should consider individuals aren't able to parent their kids effectively.
Would you rather trust two exhausted individuals or a huge army of trained professionals at payroll by government to parent the kids?
There is very less transfer of knowledge and the worldview of individual parents is often limited. If there is an organization parenting thousands of kids, they can run A/B tests, see results of changing incentives, able to better respond from all data gathering and long trail of past experience. A parenting organization at scale also has more power to push through effective policy faster and change legal system to remove harmful corporations (social media in this thread).
Individual parents on other hand are inefficient, start with nothing usually, don't have enough visibility, time or expertise to consider the most optimal choices. They are helpless.
But probably the best way to defeat the existential threat of gray goo.
Certainly it’s the fastest way to curb religious extremism, racism, and other social ills. Sadly it’s also the fastest way to create them.
Specifically, it eliminates extremism by extinguishing religious and cultural groups in their entirety. Under some definitions and the specific intentions/targeted groups, this can even qualify as genocide.
We could make the government portion of raising kids flexible and offer more time to parents with longer hours. Call this “extracurriculars” maybe. Thoughts on my novel idea?
Healthcare is a known thing. We know how to provide good healthcare. This inherently does not require innovation.
The VA is one of the most fundamentally broken and flawed systems known to man. Months and months before you can get basic care. Psychiatric care is so poor that soldiers have stupidly high rates of suicide. Basic things go misdiagnosed. There are reams of paperwork to fill out.
Do you really think we should trust kids to such a system?
Cuz we already do. Right now there are thousands of kids managed by the US government and they barely have blankets or beds. The government can barely feed them, and generally fails at showering them and clothing them.
Read into any case where a bulk group has mass raised children. Not once has it worked out. Not once.
Parental love is an impossible thing to simulate.
Without generational wealth or inheritance, there will be no incentive to own property. All housing will be group housing provided in return for work. All transportation will be provided as a public utility. People will no longer have anything to hide.
Or creepy dudes who offer to buy alcohol for minors to get in their pants?
The world is a big place and it's impossible for parents to be everywhere they need to be for their kids all the time. It's only gotten unfathomably bigger since the advent of the web and the explosion of social media.
I agree that this bill is silly, but "parents are responsible for preventing all harm to children" doesn't seem like a universally applicable argument.
Even a couple of generations ago it was much more of a group effort. Now it is just the parents versus everyone else either not caring or kicking down on them (for example, some comments over here).
Why does there always have to be an option to sue someone?
The core problem is:
1) We've gotten very good at making things hyper-addictive.
2) Market forces reward clicks. Without regulation, things WILL be hyper-addictive.
3) Private right-of-action is a really good way to implement regulatory frameworks; it tends to be far more efficient than DoJ or similar for these sorts of things.
Personally, I'm uninterested into being tricked into getting addicted to something. I would welcome regulation which would change those market dynamics. The older I get, the more I'd like a humane regulatory system.
Where gamification is in 2022, society will collapse if we don't get this under control. We've polarized our whole civic discourse for ad clicks.
A lot of addictive things aren't fun. A gambler might be miserable but CAN'T stop. Likewise, there were a lot of time-wasting games in the 2010s which no one enjoyed playing, but which were very hard to stop.
A popular model was:
- Click on things to gather points / resources / etc. which you can trade in to be able to do more.
- You have a constant feeling of progress. There is often exponential growth of some kind of points / diamonds / etc. as you can trade them in for things which produce more.
- There is real-world time involved. For example, plants might grow in 8 hours, and whither in 24. You need to log in periodically or you lose them. There might be weekly rewards, which are one-shot (if you don't get one some week, you lose it forever).
- There is an element of randomness on rewards (treasure boxes) and determinism on punishments (if you've failed to log in one week, you lose that reward forever).
This was well-studied. Similar techniques are used by shopping vendors to get people to buy, employers to get people to work, etc. We've gotten really good at making things addictive.
Right now, there's a similar thing happening with hate and polarization. People have a need to follow stories which often have no effect on their lives (in some cases, are statistical anomalies), but which serve to scare. We're wired to follow fear. That's a lot more effective than the 2010 model, and makes people hate each other.
A lot of drugs create a dependence too, without being fun.
Imagine majority of parents glued to a smartphone and their kid wants to imitate them. The parent allows it because they are addicted to the device and don't know how to cope / moderate it.
Kids are a reflection of their parents, if we ought to solve a problem, it should also be for internet addiction of the previous generation.
That doesn't sound effective.
That might be the actual purpose of the bill. And I believe it would be a net positive for society.
think of the children.
anyway, i've seen this trend a million times already. two ideologies:
1. people can't protect themselves, can't be trusted to make the right decision etc, so they need to be protected by some law/government/union etc.
2. people can be trusted, they can make the right decisions for themselves, no government involvement is needed.
in today's America point 1 is very trendy.
Doesn’t have to be default, but should be configurable. It’s harder and harder to participate in society without major social media tools so don’t just tell me to stop using these platforms.
I'm not saying let your kid shoot up heroin but I'd much rather deal with social media usage problems in a 14yo than a 17yo
This issue really is more complicated than you make it to be.
This topic seems to be set into areas of black and white, just like every other political position. It seems like so few people appreciate the grey areas anymore.
No one is going to rob their parents, break into a business at night, or suck dick to check their Facebook feed.
You might miss it, but that's not an addiction.
So you have the companies providing the communication mechanisms intentionally manipulating the communication to encourage specific behaviour.
A very simple “you cannot reorder or promote content for people less than X” rule would do a lot to reduce the problem for kids. Once you’re an adult you can be just as free to get addicted to Facebook as you are beer.
Before then Social media companies should be subject to similar rules that we have for alcohol. SM at least have the advantage that they can just completely remove the intentionally addictive reordering algorithms, whereas alcohol companies can’t make a meaningfully similar simulacrum when then extract the alcohol.
Social Media Platform Duty to Children Act
Then maybe some of the really exploitive tactics mobile games use to leech money would have some kind of check on them.
So, really, no.
In principle no matter the appointee judges have to follow the law, but there’s clearly huge amounts of variation and bias in terms of sentencing, penalties, how broadly things are interpreted.
And their preferred alternative is always, "parents should parent"
I believe I am a huge supporter of free speech and the First Amendment (two different things), but I find this quite frustrating and believe their approach is both unrealistic and turns the First Amendment into a "suicide pact" (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suicid...)
If only there were some way for social media companies to not re-order or promote certain content in a way that encourages addiction? Maybe by just leaving content in temporal order, rather than order by popularity or trendiness.
That said businesses removing themselves from children in CA seems similarly effective.
Finally, while I think that while Social media companies are significantly at fault - the development of trending, popular, and other non-temporal ordering of content is explicitly and intentionally designed to be addictive, and in no different from a food company adding addictive chemicals to food. I also think that parents have to have at least tried to parent their children, not simply ignored them until it turned out they had a serious problem.
Their first device is the iPad, starting at about 3-4 y/o and I've seen a case as young as 1 y/o. Before the iPad, the children act natural. They play with physical toys, other children, and are exploratory.
There's a short "mixed" period but the iPad pretty quickly starts to dominate, effectively largely replacing other toys and more physical play. You can quite literally see the children retreat from real life and sink into their iPads.
Parents are quite aware of it, they're not neglectful. They have to fight tooth and nail to get their kids to do anything active. Sure enough you can be strict, but the draw to the device seems extremely powerful. They quite simply seem to prefer it over reality.
The iPad age lasts a long time, as smartphones are not in the picture yet. There's a strong network effect. All other children are doing it too, and when they make way to the playground, there's few or no children there. That makes it a societal addiction, not just an individual one, making it even harder for parents to sanction it.
And still I found some hope. When you really pay close and genuine attention to these children, you'll discover that they really still prefer rich in-person human experiences over their device. They're just getting very little of it, only a handful of fleeting moments a day, on a work day. Rushed interactions.
I found this out by the simple act of showing a real and sustained interest. Just asking a bunch of questions and really listening to answers. They seem almost shocked that anybody would bother with that, and I find that the saddest thing.
Further, imagine these kids sitting in a row with iPads, whilst us adults talk. They seem absent-minded, distracted, but they hear everything we say. They're listening, and they're interested. They're not at all the zombies that some think they are.
The iPad seems a filler for a massive void. They're attention starved. And I lay no blame on parents as they truly do their utmost best. Modern life is just too damn fast to allow for slow, lengthy, genuine humane interactions.
By the age of about 11-12, the smartphone arrives and for boys typically also a console. All toys are cleared out because just the smartphone replaces all of them. It's all downhill from here because now they have access to this stuff no matter where they go.
And, they have a richer vocabulary, a larger group of friends or classmates, will have their first go at even more addictive apps, and...it's just absolutely hopeless at this point. To add insult to injury, society digitizing means that also other aspects move to the device, like learning itself. Which they can't, because 5 million distractions are a tap away or a notification pulls them in.
These children just don't stand a chance. They don't really want it, nor do parents want it. But it happens regardless. It's like fighting gravity.
The issue goes far beyond wasting time. They don't know true boredom or down-time. They miss 99% of real communication (in-person) as it's all digital. They're exposed to the extremes of social networks and take it as if this is how the world really works. They're physically inactive and have a short attention span. They don't collaborate but compete as individuals by means of Tiktok, a status competition.
The only counter parents seem to have is not restrictions, rather replacements. Replace useless device time with non-device activities that are genuinely fun and engaging. Not lame things.
And I didn't even talk about sugar yet. Where for me a sugary snack was an infrequent highlight, these kids are stuffing themselves with it. Out of this small group of kids, 2 flat out refuse to eat anything else. And if they don't get it, they'll eat it at a friend's house or when older buy it themselves from their allowance.
I used to think all of this is bad parenting, but seeing it with my own eyes, I changed my mind. These kids grow up in a world of devices and unlimited sugar, which is not the world I grew up in. It is so omnipresent that parents are fighting a losing battle.
These parents ARE taking personal responsibility, but it just doesn't work when the odds are stacked against you like this.
And anyone here who reduces teenage digital addictions to “bad parenting” can pound sand. Nothing about parenting is simply the result of “the parents” and their methods. Raising a child is an impossibly multi-variate occupation and you only have so many knobs to turn and hours in the day.
If Facebook/Instagram/TikTok or whatever stop operating in California for those under 18, good riddance.
They're weaponizing hundreds of years of human psychology research for profit.
Maybe the parents should try to get more involved with their children instead of just shoving them in front of screens.
I don't know I'm fairly particular to this social network, Hacker News, the social network for essays. The opposite of Twitter.
So in fact I'm rate-limited because my posts are controversial, but I accept this and deliberately did not ask for full free access again. It is a better version of the no-procast (meaning no procrastination, I think it's from 2007 or 2008) feature, which can easily be worked around on short notice without talking to a human. No shame factor. Doesn't work for that reason.
And that's it! No social media addiction! And I have quite the addictive personality, been to rehab after all!
Solve my own problem in a clever way, like a hacker, hack my own Hacker News addiction! Just like it says on the box!
And I volunteer to give testimony in favor of this social network, Hacker News, in court, if it's still like it is now. Which includes suing without trying to actually solve the problem by talking to the mods, or making a post.
Note that on May 12, 2012, at 11 AM, I was declared to be a hero in terms of the Roman Law definition, at the corner of Kearney and Bush, in San Francisco California. This means victims (it can be a single victim too in other cases) call you a hero for saving them from a criminal, in the spur of the moment, right then and there, of their own accord. They had asked me to defend them and I really did defend them, the cops ended up catching the perp at the scene of the crime, it was beautiful. According to me it was beautiful, actually the victims said "That was perfect!"
I might enjoy a little more credibility because of it. That's the point of that Roman law. Apparently that law fell off the books because it flat-out never came up, not because it was a bad law. And any court can make a declaration backing this, any court, that law isn't even necessary.
Including the social addiction media court, I suppose. If you wanted to sue Hacker News you might need more ammo for that judge and jury. More expensive lawyer perhaps. More prestigious expert witnesses.
If on the other hand you want help with addiction, write me, and look at my comments where I talk about it, at https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=daniel-cussen
They do enough bad in the world that they can cry me a river.
What about youtube?
For kids, I think it's irresponsible to get kids even more addicted earlier on in life.
At this point, I don't think it's simple to blame the individual or parent for personal responsibility. The only way to avoid it is to get it out of your home completely. This is similar to televisions in the home in the 60s till today. Should we also be able to sue television and cable companies for tv addiction?