California parents whose children become addicted to social media could soon sue | Hacker News Reader

California parents whose children become addicted to social media could soon sue

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As a parent of two young boys, I think this is ridiculous. If the parents were doing their job (ie not allowing devices to babysit their kids, limiting time on devices, interacting with their children, showing their children through example that they should not spend every minute on devices, spending time doing things outside, playing NON-digital games/activities with their kids) their kids would not have such a problem with social media.

It's like blaming fast food restaurants because ... oh wait.

So many people want to push responsibility on to others, but you can hardly blame them if the courts allow this type of baseless suit. Courts and judges should laugh these types of complaints out of court, but sadly they will award these parents and continue to set awful precedents.

I have zero hope for this next generation. I hope I'm wrong.

It's easy to look down on others from your high horse, but you probably have no idea how damaging social media is to children. Rates of self harm and suicidal ideation among adolescents has been at sustained epidemic rates since 2007 when the iphone released.

You can talk a big game about moderation, but the truth is children shouldn't be using social media at all. It takes all their awkwardness and self-consciousness from puberty and amplifies it on a global scale. It creates attack vectors for child predators. It turns bullying from a school time hazard to an ever present threat.

If legislation was introduced to make all social media 18+ only, I would vote for it.

Does Discord count as social media what about the Hacker News comment section?

> If the parents were doing their job (ie not allowing devices to babysit their kids, limiting time on devices, interacting with their children, showing their children through example that they should not spend every minute on devices, spending time doing things outside, playing NON-digital games/activities with their kids) their kids would not have such a problem with social media.

I don't totally disagree, but I'd only point out that you could apply identical reasoning to not criminalize the selling of drugs to children. I mean if the parents were doing their job, the laws wouldn't need to be there right?

Parents need to actually do their jobs and parent, and stop palming responsibility off onto companies.

If little Johnny gets addicted to Tik Tok that's a complete failure of the parents.

I gotta say, the attention economy also harms me, given I specifically have attention deficit disorder and spend a huge percentage of my income on treating it, really adhere to the treatment. In fact I'm trying to find cortisol blood tests, like the glucose tests diabetics use after pricking their finger, prick my finger too, to test for cortisol ie stress. I have no other way of knowing if I'm stressed! And demanding attention creates stress, and stress is physically harmful, and for me there's no benefit.

The attention economy owes me money.

My understanding is that cortisol blood levels are not a good way to test for stress, as they're too variable.

What treatment regiment are you using, out of curiosity?

Personally, I found Dexedrine to be a cheap and effective treatment for me. I think a lot of people, myself included, are turned off by stimulants. But when I finally got around to trying a small dosage, I found it vastly improved my life.

Although you may have already tried those sort of first-line treatments.

Well I can't answer specifically what my treatment regimen is because part of that regimen involves secrecy as to what specific pill I take.

But I've tried most of them, not all of them, under medical supervision. Except for the one that's a methamphetamine, I think I've been prescribed all of them.

I was once prescribed Dexedrine, dextroamphetamine. Very ineffective, might have been a placebo. Didn't lose any sleep over it. And I was super afraid of it too, doctors often said "why not try amphetamines?" And I always said "nah" because of the stigma, then you're an amphetamine user. And with stimulants also, I was super straight-edge, very abstinent with pharmacology and drugs, for a very long time. But then I was prescribed and on the first dose said:

"This will solve all my problems. Then I'll come up with new ones, but for a while I'll have no problems."

And that's what stimulants did! That's exactly what specifically and literally the fuck they did! Solved all my problems, then I came up with new problems.

There was something around in the late 1980s that claimed to judge stress levels from skin contact--a ring or a wristband or something. I didn't pay attention, but imagine that it used skin temperature as a proxy for blood pressure as a proxy for stress.

No, well first off the measurement of temperature is terrible, very inaccurate and low resolution.

In the second event, I have multiple things I want to measure and I can't derive stress from temp, I have adrenaline going on a lot of the time (more and more often than most, because of stress doing nothing), and then, whatever I've got going on...which also affects things. Then indoor heating, what I've eaten, what I'm wearing? No, much better to draw blood and take a litmus test, temperature is plain noise.

This law is a terrible idea, since it's overbroad and will be abused.

However I also think that the addictive design of social media is still something that deserves further scrutiny. I'm really curious how prevalent the phenomenon of people working at tech companies whose kids are raised "tech-free", it's almost a tacit admission that they know they've optimized their products to the point of being harmful (in the narrow sense of eroding executive function).

https://www.businessinsider.in/science/silicon-valley-parent...

Best case scenario, they would voluntarily build in small mechanisms to help people mentally breathe (like stopping an infinite feed after a certain amount of time and little reminders that say "hey, you've been on here for several hours, how about taking a break?") These could even be opt-in settings. But they never will do that, since it's all about juicing numbers at all costs.

Trying to use social media responsibly when you have ADD is a nightmare, since it's designed to exploit it against your best interests. It's silly to expect people to use social media responsibly when everything has thousands of hours of design in it to prevent that, especially for people that have issues with executive function (like kids and people with ADD).

Parents are the most responsible for how their kids use tech, but it's also a privilege to have the time and energy as a parent to counter all of this that's working against you. Parents that have to work long hours and multiple jobs to provide won't be able to do that, and that doesn't necessarily make them bad parents.

All that being said, I'm not sure how you go about improving the situation without resorting to terrible laws like this. There are too many bad laws that are passed under the guise of "for the children", and this smells like one of them. I really hope this doesn't pass and someone finds a better solution.

If social media is like smoking (for the mind), and if there are more phones than humans, then it might mean that the only technologically feasible way to protect minors from the harms of social media would be to implement a drivers-license-like system to gain access to social media.

Will this happen? No.

Will implementing new revenue streams for lawyers happen? Yes.

For more thoughts, 2 months ago with 279 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30707095

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