Surgeon General says 13 is ‘too early’ to join social media
cnn.com
cnn.com
It's fun times to be a human.
Just like in previous times when we discovered alcohol, various cultures also found ways over time to deal with the fallout. Some cultures don't do so well with it.
The same happened with various other chemicals like opium, tobacco, and crack, which all have had societal reactions over time. The contraceptive pill is another one, and I'd argue so are processed foods.
With something like recreational drugs, the upsides are just pure hedonism, you do them because they make you feel a certain way and the downsides aren't inextricably connected. Plus the downsides are pretty awful, whereas with internet stuff it's awful but in a way that doesn't require an ambulance. Basically social media addiction is a flu that millions of people catch and mostly live with, whereas drug addiction is a thing fewer people catch but some of them die from it, like Ebola.
God I wish, I’d probably use it more if it had any similar benefits as alcohol.
It shares many attributes/features with other social media. Does it just come down to excellent moderation on the part of u/dang? Is it the lack of instant reply notifications? Is it that thread depth is capped? Only allowing downvotes for power users? Some combination of all those?
In a way, based on the alcohol analogy, HN is kind of like an evening beer with friends at a biergarten, you drink socially, not too much to even get very inebriated, and if you try to, mechanisms exist to stop you, such as the biergarten owners kicking you out. You're not getting (or are supposed to get) drunk at a biergarten, generally speaking.
On the other hand, many other social media are more like clubs. Sure, you can drink less, but the entire environment is designed to get you to drink more. This is analogous to places like Twitter or Instagram which are specifically designed for you to use them as much as possible, like through only allowing short replies (thus stripping nuance and incentivizing short angry replies) or gamifying like counters and incentivizing heavily cherry picked and edited photos.
It doesn’t have any concept (much less a public one) of “following”, it doesn’t have public likes, it doesn’t have a DM facility, it doesn’t have a personalized algorithm, it isn’t ad supported (and thus isn’t incentivized to tweal its algorithms for maximizing engagement and ad delivery), it has negative (but equally not-public) voting and signals (flagging) that don’t require filling out a form and human review, and it has dang.
From small scale (e.g., "How to create a social media site", etc.) to "How to best use Facebook to sell XXX, to influence political campaigns, to overthrow governments, to confuse your competition, etc.".
A good bibliography?
/me checks how much time I spent on hn this week-end and decides it's maaaybe time to "log out"
Everything else you say is spot on, although the “reward” is a very nuanced minimal for me… it’s something I can go do privately by myself for a few minutes without needing to explain that. It’s probably the biggest conscious tie I still have to the habit.
Not smokers took longer to get to know each other and it was harder. But it was nit about cool factor all that much.
Something this analogy through-line makes me notice, is that we have clear cultural images of what a healthy use of alcohol looks like — going out for cocktails with friends; having wine with dinner; etc; vs. what alcohol abuse looks like — day-drinking, drinking alone, drinking until you pass out, etc. But we don't (yet) have similar cultural images for what healthy vs. unhealthy/abusive social-media participation looks like.
Too much and you become anti-social, but that's a separate problem.
I think the analogy is we're still in the equivalent of the early days of the Temperance movement for social media, where it's somewhat dysfunctional (like not drinking alcohol in the early 19th century US) to not have at least some account somewhere.
We may well be speed-running this. I won't be surprised by an attempt to ban "hard liquor" like FB and Twitter, nor if they decide to ban everything including "beer" places like here.
I've always used sugar and high fructose corn syrup as my analogy.
In the early days of the internet we didn't have what we now call social media, but we had things like blogs and message boards that allowed for some connection with other people. Those things had some of the elements that make modern social media toxic, but they were mixed in with other good things and we consumed them much slower.
Over the past few decades, we've slowly refined social media to what it is today. In an attempt to retain customers we've boiled it down to its most addictive and unhealthy parts and pushed customers to consume more of that quicker than ever before.
The distillation of social media is still ongoing. It won’t be long before TikTok looks as quaint as MySpace does today.
Those who vape would also smoke, vaping is far healthier to do, it's cheaper, and it tastes better. You also can't government regulate liquid like you can cigarettes.
You certainly can, my city just passed a ban of all flavored tobacco products which will include vaping.
I disagree with the ban, but that's beside the point here.
I'm actually curious to see how things play out. The first thing that occurred to me was that vape shops might start selling unflavored liquid and also sell flavoring which you would have to mix in yourself. Not sure that would be passable under the legal regime or not.
Interestingly, statehouse Republicans attempted to pass a law which would have negated my city's ban. This was vetoed by the state governor though.
It's quite frustrating that as we slowly step towards an end to the senseless and wildly net negative prohibition of marijuana, we are determined to repeat the mistake with nicotine.
Lots of the motivation behind this seems to be the popularity of vaping among teens. "Think of the children" and all that goes along with it.
Alcohol
Seems really sad that we're forced to choose between our own wellbeing and participating in broader culture.
Have to point out, though, it seems the one place where everything isn't toxic seems to be (certain forms of) orgnanised religion.
Maybe the lesson there is that organization is the evil, given that it seems to pop up in so many contexts (megacorps < small businesses, megachurches < community organizations, public schooling < small private/parochial/charter schools, big government < grassroots organizations). Would make sense, since an organization, by definition, is about subsuming what individually makes you happy so you can be a part of something bigger. The bigger the organization grows, the less it can fit the authentic selves of the people who support it.
* As a group grows it gets worse at serving each individual's needs.
* Large groups outcompete and disrupt small ones.
I think the trick is for small groups to be illegible to the outside world.
Fish school, birds flock and animals herd partly to avoid predators. I wonder if multiple schools/flocks/herds are always superior to a single one, as long as each of them is above some critical threshold.
That doesn't happen.
Perhaps what we are seeing is a generalization of religion in which certain aspects of social concern have effectively become religious exercise. This might be a challenging thesis to sustain, but where parallels can be found it might give some broader insight into the present moment.
"One wants to do everything and one can do nothing, one is always thinking that from to-morrow one will begin a new life, that from to-morrow one will set to work as one ought, that from to-morrow one will put oneself on a diet; but not a bit of it, on the evening of that very day one will over-eat oneself, so that one can only blink one’s eyes and can’t say a word—yes really; and it’s always like that.” -- "Hlobuev", Gogol, N. Dead Souls (1854)
Obesity uncommon back then, on average people where younger, and there where only ~1.2 billion people alive in 1854 vs 8 billion today. I would be surprised if obesity related deaths topped 100,000 / year back then.
Your comment better illustrates my thought than me. The thought being, while human nature may not change much across centuries, some vices like food and tech are now more refined in their distribution and effects than ever before.
The idea that things are similar but not the same.
:(
If you show anorectic models, they will inspire to anorexia. We all recognize that would be immoral. Now the inspire obesity, but because the pendulum is still swinging away from underweight, we don't recognize it for how sick it is.
Have a friend, non-obese and diabetic, who has learned precisely how much insulin to shoot up after various and sundry of his candy bars and caffeinated-sweet drinks. Impressive in a way.
And the important bit seems to be
>nicotine concentration between 0.001 mM and 4.0mM.
And they found an effect starting at 1.0mW. But, this is what I hate about pretty much all scientific papers that clearly set out with a purpose in mind (good or bad) is the abstract doesn't mention what the hell 1.0mW. Is that even a feasible amount? Is that one puff? Is that 100% nicotine being directly vaped? What on earth is it? None of this is mentioned, for free anyways.
The full study can be found as the first article in this pdf: http://tobacco.cleartheair.org.hk/wp-content/uploads/2018/01...
This says nothing about rates of other non-site specific cancers of course (pancreatic being a big one), or the other health risks that are still associated with smokeless tobacco (stroke, cardiovascular disease, impotency), but it's somewhat telling that even anti-nicotine advocacy groups rarely mention the risk of cancer for smokeless tobacco products in their publications.
My remark was about young people doing something that is idiotic (vaping to the degree they do it) who would not take a puff on a cigarette. Arguments that vaping is "less dangerous than smoking" are precisely "At least I'm not shooting heroin in my eyeballs", because at no point did I assert that they were equivalent.
Becoming the hypocrite is never fun, but at least I understand my parents now.
> But of course they continued using the stuff
Sorry to be blunt, but why don't you do your duty as a parent and continue the prohibition of those devices except for necessary things?
Perhaps one useful and applicable distinction that can be made, is between 'interpersonal communication' (in apps like messengers, directly talking to people you know) and 'posting something on a platform' (in apps that are more like "social media", where posts are available to a broader public). Another distinction could be made for 'private platforms/spaces' (like discord) or 'limited/like-minded/focused spaces' (that aren't just the most general platforms, but something bit more specialized for some kind of content or audience), and the bigger platforms/spaces (that are basically just 'you're out there with everyone'. it also could be pointed out that 'having a semi-private group on a big platform might not be too bad - but that it might be still out there and accessible, so there's things to mind'. or, hell, explain what comes with posting on a big platform and what precautions should one take). Explaining the differences and outlining where and what someone would be doing, could help, in a practical way that won't be just 'you can't do anything now'.
Cutting off messaging isn't something that should be done, in my opinion - it's too drastic. it's basically saying, 'don't talk to people/you don't get to talk to people', and those people are probably gonna be the most familiar/important people to them. Cutting off social media, could be done, but it's really worth talking through and explaining the difference between 'publishing something for the whole internet and hanging out in that broad of a space' or 'posting something for your friends group to see, and hanging in a private, familiar space' (and perhaps, enticing them to grow and enrich their own social circle and seek something there, not just from random people on big platforms). At the end of the day though, cutting off and prohibiting something can be just circumvented, as people might just do something anyway, and if they don't have the 'why' explained to them, it might be even easier to ignore the limits without much concern. With guidance, that stands on its own, maybe it could be less so.
There is something fundamentally different about making things “social” than just doing something harmless offline, like playing a game with the family, writing a story, using MS paint, math blaster.
When things became social, it’s like we were all given sledgehammers and told to go smash the candy store and raid it for whatever we wanted.
Maybe I’m being nostalgic for the early / mid 90s when we didn’t have these devices glued to us and little red notification icons hijacking our dopaminergic circuitry.
The teachers didn't know how to use the computers, and the parents mostly felt that it was a waste of time which would rot our child brains. Still, the school had paid a bunch of money for it as part of an initiative to get rid of the library's card catalog system, so it had to be used.
The teachers tried to convince everyone to play math and typing games, but most kids played with a sort of photoshop-lite program, stuck magnets onto the CRT screens, or played Oregon Trail.
It wasn't an efficient process, but just about everybody in our district was a proficient typist by middle school. When I got to college, I was surprised by how many people typed on their laptops like they type on their phones, with rapid index finger pecks.
It still blows my mind that kids are using Chromebooks and Ipads daily on an elementary level.
I saw this recently on an equipment list for first graders. “One iPad and Macbook with specifications in line required by the school”.
Wtf is my first grader going to do with an iPad other than watch Youtube?
What kind of people do you hang around. I don’t know anyone who commonly uses their index fingers to type on their phone. It’s mostly thumbs.
Thinking back, it was during a time when most phones were small enough to fit comfortably in one small hand. People would hold it with one hand, and use the other to tap.
Modern phones are too heavy and bulky for that, so I think we use both hands to hold and use them. Or maybe the finger-pecking was unrelated to phone use, who knows.
Public view counts on individual pages were extremely common on the “old internet”, if by that you mean the WWW pre the rise of the terms “social media” and “social network”.
Media comes from the root of mediate. Social media is a huge system sitting between people and mediating their communication. The main goal function for most of it is to maximize engagement, which means amplifying and prioritizing the most toxic interactions.
It’s like having someone sitting between you and your friends steering the conversation toward whatever is the most negative, hateful, or ridiculous.
https://www-old--games-ru.translate.goog/game/11519.html?_x_...
This is the game that taught me maths when I was 4-5 years old, and part of why I was excellent at maths for the rest of my schooling. Gosh it was fun!
That plus exploring Encarta 95 for hours on end.
But I also sunk a lot of time into SimCity 2000 and MechWarrior 2, to be fair.
My first real exposure to the internet was through my year 7 English class. My English teacher was I guess you'd call an early adopter he was one of those people convinced technology was going to be revolutionary he somehow signed our class up to be a part of an email pen pal program with a school in Japan. One lesson a week we would go to the school library (where there was a computer with dial up internet) we would tell the teacher what we wanted to say and he would type 2 or 3 sentences from each student in our class and then send it using a program called "Eudora" (pretty sure we were using the teacher's personal address) and maybe a week later the teacher would show up to class with a stack of printouts. He would hand each of us the printout from our respective pen pal full of broken English. We did this for maybe a semester.
That was my first exposure to online "social" use of computers. A few years Later people started to get internet at home ICQ (a chat program became pretty popular) this was around the time of Napster so there was a lot of downloading songs sharing them with people on ICQ etc. A little after that Online gaming was starting to be possible, I remember playing Quake, Starcraft and Diablo 2 with my friends online. I think around year 11/12 Counterstrike came out, it was a mod for the game Half Life and was very popular. The latency was normally pretty bad but it slowly got better.
In the early days bandwidth was so limited it really restricted what kinds of social activities you could do on line.
I'm surprised by this statement considering he's a parent.
You can't really prevent a teenager from doing something if they set their mind on it. All we can really do is educate.
My take is that every social media outlet starts a death spiral once its first generation of users starts being parents of teenagers.
So also give them access to tobacco and booze?
Depends where you live, but in some EU countries, teens start drinking and smoking and already give up on cigs and beer before American teens even start.
It's pretty common to see 14 year olds smoking and drinking beer outside in public despite these being officially allowed when you're 18.
Teens will always try to do what adults tell them is forbidden and bad for them, because doing forbidden things is enticing and makes you look cool and rebellious.
I think every year that a teenager doesn't start drinking alcohol is a net benefit. They black out at college parties at 20 so what? By that time their brain is more developed. I think Europeans have a very unhealthy attitude towards alcohol and their kids pay the price of it. And they do not give up alcohol at all. On the contrary, they don't know how to party without alcohol for the rest of their life.
There is a pub culture here, for example my university had pubs and bars on campus there was a lot of activities like Trivia nights etc. with heavy drinking involved. Pool tables at pubs were pretty common. During Uni I'd often hang out with my friends for a few hours drink beer shoot pool, grab a kebab on the way home, that was a pretty typical night out. Sports involved a lot of drinking as well, I played cricket while I was in university. I'd go to the pub with my cricket team after every game.
I think the American experience, especially around University is more focused around house parties and drinking games (unless the keg party, ping pong ball, cup flipping you see on TV shows is just a Stereotype).
The don't give it up, but they use it in moderation. The prevalence of alcoholism is generally higher in the US than in Europe:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcoholis...
The US especially leads in alcoholism among women.
Furthermore, you won't have parents afraid of banning social media or phones for kids because it's a practical requirement for a social life in current age or something like that
Tobacco is a step further in terms of addictive potential, but I think the US could generally learn from Europe's approach to adolescent drinking.
These surveys are also done on American adolescents, who are more likely to obtain and consume alcohol illicitly than their European counterparts. It would be interesting to see comparative statistics on the two.
Finally: this bulletin mixes up different demographics: you have (1) COAs who are more likely to become alcoholics themselves, (2) adolescents who engage in binge drinking, which is generally correlated with alcoholism in adulthood, and (3) an unmeasured population of drinking-but-not-binging adolescents.
What I do vividly remember is having US exchange students in uni age 21+ who binge drank themselves into oblivion everywhere, catching up on everything at once without anyone around.
No argument that education is important, and that some would seek and find a way around the restriction, like they do with alcohol. But I’m sure that restricting access to social media under a certain age like it is the case for alcohol would significantly reduce the use of social media in the affected age group.
kids need to take to learn control of things that are harmful and how to engage them rather than be kept away from them. This avoidance behavior to me seems to be a consequence of now endemic helicopter parenting. If you hide things from kids, they don't gain the confidence of dealing with them or coming to you on their own terms.
The goal shouldn't be to reduce social media usage, it should be to equip teenagers with tools to be resilient and take control of the way they use social media. It's in a sense like bullying. Yes, you can shield your kids from exposure to it, or you can teach them to confront it. What's better long term?
And that's the thing: as a teenager if you don't have access to <disallowed thing>, there's surely at least one kid in your class, whose parents are either largely absent or particularly lenient, and who will provide you with whatever you need.
In the case of social media I'd imagine a secret separate phone without parental restrictions and SIM card swapped out for the time being. Maybe even a separate SIM card, should the first one be restricted on the provider level. Or just rooting the device and rendering any control moot. There's always this one guy who'll help you out if your parents are too strict in your view.
Of course there's going to be some reduction, but you have to ask yourself: what's the plan when the kid turns eighteen and you can't legally control their internet usage - not when they have a SIM card on their name? You just let go of any restrictions on that day?
I also think focusing all our attention to the broadest instance ("social media" as a whole) is just as lazy as focusing on the broadest audience ("teenagers" as a whole).
One of the most frustrating social behaviors teenagers experience from adults is "infantilization": when an adult refuses to accommodate or even recognize a teenager's own autonomy, discipline, and maturation; instead placing them at the same social level as an infant. Teenagers are not babies, and they know it. They are not likely be fully mature, and they are definitely not fully immature.
To broadly declare that teenagers are endangered by social media is no more helpful than broadly declaring children are endangered by water. In either context, simple avoidance is not a practical solution, nor is it intrinsically desirable.
While true about any human, this mindset is wrong when the conclusion is “I won’t even try to change the problem.”
Education is the wrong answer because education only delivers information. What we need is leadership and wisdom in application.
Properly-applied leadership CAN prevent teenagers from engaging in self-destructive behaviors. Education is not the answer, it is half of the strategy, but perfect education by itself will not solve this issue or any other public health crisis facing our youth.
By the time they hit their teenage years, it's basically too late. You have to start earlier instilling authority and respect and trust in their parents. Not a popular opinion here, but religion plays a role in guidance as well.
I don't think parents will ever do it, not in such quantity that it would matter. Also, if it's primarily the parents' responsibility to do this, it will be the more well-off, more educated and more intelligent parents who will have the resources to do this. The children who need the most help with this problem will again be left to deal with it themselves.
Despite saying lawmakers are "paying attention", there's no talk of regulation in this article, so presumably a voluntary effort on the part of parents is the only actionable plan they are ready to discuss. As the article notes, social products are not de facto designed to keep kids out, and have not done a good job of it so far, so I am also skeptical they will improve in the future without any legal pressure.
Now in 12th, he does use Discord to communicate with a limited set of friends. But that’s it.
I’ve said it before, the difference is that we don’t use any of the social media ourselves, so kids are OK. If parents use them but ask kids to refrain, obviously it’s not going to work.
Can’t they get around this by turning off Wi-Fi?
Also, any excessive data usage would show up in the family plan, which gives me confidence.
I have always vocally expressed my hate for FB so maybe that helped.
But all kids are different, and maybe what worked here won’t work for everyone.
HN has elements of all 3, but to a lesser degree than Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit.
Discord has the potential to have some of those to an extent, but especially if the user is simply using a server for them and their friends, practically none of those apply. It’s much closer to a simple group chat.
I’m sure there’d be push back in middle school but we’ll be able to refer to the older kid. Fingers crossed..
Also, I had used the family thing with the older kid, so app installations required patent approval. So that at least forces usage of web apps if the kid is trying to bypass some restrictions, which in itself reduces the damage caused by these social networks.
But the kid is now in senior year of high school so in worst case I did protect them for as long as I could. I won’t have much control from next year anyway..
Just wanted to post this in case someone else has no idea and they let their kids on that platform. Chances are high most people on Discord are fine, but bad can be found anywhere online.
You wouldn't classify HN as social media?
But, I'm pretty sure the Surgeon General did not have HN in mind while making that comment. :)
HN is a social media, but it lacks certain capabilities that make it OK. First and foremost, there is no DM, then it's heavily moderated both by users as well as by DanG, and then it is text based. Also, based on my observation, the karma/like acquisition is not what drives people's comments here.
So, while you're correct that it's a social media, it's not the cesspool of poison that the usual ones, that come to mind when we use the term social media, are.
Just because you don’t know the real world identity of the other nodes doesn’t mean that a network doesn’t exist.
I have no social media presence and it has never affected me in the slightest.
I've known people who say this. Trust me: They're not worth associating with. Most/all have unhealthy social problems. And none have worthwhile positives that you'd miss out on by not being part of their circle.
Are you worried about the social lives they might be missing out on? About the friendships they might have had if they had a phone with Snapchat on it? A lot of social life for kids happens online.
Also there is the practicality point. In the old days, kids could reach each other from their own volition, back when kids walking on the sidewalk alone wasn't a reason to call CPS. Back when said side walks existed in the first place.
Our eldest travels into the nearest town by train, on his own, to get to his school. He's done this since he was 11.
Our youngest walks to her primary school, on her own, since the first week she started at primary school.
> [..] back when kids walking on the sidewalk alone wasn't a reason to call CPS.
Why any parent wouldn't trust their child to go for a walk unsupervised but would trust them to be on Snapchat unsupervised is completely beyond me.
Yes, it happens, but its exceedingly rare.
A lot of things are said (and done) - often in haste - online, which one would simply never experience in a face-to-face interaction.
We support our kids participating in lots of team sports, not because they're amazingly talented (although they're all better than I was when I was that age!), but because we believe it's good for them, physically and socially.
This is the way to do it. People forget that while some teenage social life occurs online, not all of it does, and the part that can be done in-person is a lot healthier than what's online. In real life, are people going to be comparing themselves to Instagram posts? Unlikely, but even then, there will be a lot more nuance of something like, say, going on an international trip, where a friend can tell you the good and bad rather than showing only the good on an IG photo and making the viewer feel bad because they didn't go on such a trip.
Real life interaction simply has less ability to lack nuance, which I think is a good thing.
This is hard to believe to the point of me thinking your kids were in a plato's cave. It was not possible to have a normal social life without social media as a teenager over the last 10 years. Full stop. You will miss out on events because you can not be invited the normal way. Whether that's a big deal or not is certainly debatable, but claiming that it doesn't exist is ostrich behavior.
I think that's a big part of the problem. I want to encourage more of that social life to happen in person. I would feel bad if I was causing them to miss out on IRL events.
If a student did not have access to those services I would not want to work with them on say a group assignment because it would be very difficult to keep things organized. I would not want to go out of my way to go to their house/make phone calls to keep them in the loop.
It's true, we were sometimes out-of-the-loop with regards to pop culture, which is a somewhat isolating factor. I imagine it could be even more so with social media, since it's not just common discussion material but the actual means of communication.
From time to time, I'll look at TV these days (in a hotel, or so), and it's ... so off-putting. All the ads screaming at you, the pacing of things. I'm sure plenty of people don't even know another reality, but I'm so glad that I do.
I don't see it changing without a grassroots upwelling on a cultural level, where people want it to change. Maybe as quality of those experiences continues to degrade there will be an increased desire for it. A person can hope. Things generally need to get worse before they get better, it seems.
I find the impulse to deny it all fascinating in combination with outrages over pre-teens and tees walking themselves or using public transport, expectation of without constant supervision till age of 18 and so on. There is knee jerk streak of "control everything as tightly as possible". Except that, they should be growing independent. And also fascinating contrast against how toxic online communities gets treated - I have yet to see the call to prevent boys from playing online games as strategy despite some of those peer groups being fairly toxic both in ideology and behavior.
Perhaps we should look at online media as games, with different rules and incentives, and find out which rules are good for us and which ones aren’t.
Public people oriented social media (instagram & Twitter being canonical examples) clearly stand out to me as the most problematic. Worse, the content promotion algorithms are opaque and not customizable, which makes it very difficult to research their influence. Upstream, >99% of these companies’ revenue come from advertisers, it’s likely that they constitute the largest stakeholder in our children’s online experiences (and our own, of course).
Talking about "social media" as if it is one cohesive thing is lazy and unhelpful. The same goes for "teenagers".
"teenagers aged 13 to 16-18" is way too broad a category. What developmental characteristics are shared among that entire group? Which of those characteristics make an individual "too vulnerable" to benefit "safely" from "social media"? Are those traits really unique to children, and not adults? Is the use of "social media" itself entirely separate from learning how to "safely" interact with "social media" later?
The same goes for "social media" itself. Are we talking about public forums, direct messaging, group chats, content creation, media consumption, or something else? What moderation techniques and goals are involved? What subjects do the spaces in question focus on? If we can't get specific here, our only choice is to ban everything from 4chan, to Tinder, to Snapchat, to SMS, to IRC, to landlines, to physical letters, all the way down to chatting unsupervised in a public park!
And what is the "risk" posed? That a child will feel disproportionately leveraged judgement from their peers, and fall into depression? That a child will view traumatic content and get PTSD? That a child will start an unhealthy or dangerous relationship with an adult? That a child will build political or religious beliefs that contradict their parents' ideology? That a child will build an addictive relationship to the media itself, and avoid healthier activity? That a child will learn how to use technical computing skills to circumvent parental, school, or government censorship? Every one of these concerns is considered valid by a significant group of adults, and considered invalid by another.
We all know that leaving people alone to leverage something as powerful as computer networks is dangerous. That leverage goes both ways, and the metaphorical fulcrum is most often positioned nearest to the individual user, and farthest from the network itself. Even though this subject is vitality important, we must recognize that the only way to interact with it at all is through context.
The more context we have, the more control we have over the leverage that these tools provide, and the better equipped we become to maximize safety and utility.
The problem with most of the social media platforms is their hostility to anonymity. A teen with a Twitter account or a Reddit account should absolutely be an anon so that their posts while they're still figuring life out aren't tied to their real name and it would be good if social media companies and search engines would help people destroy the evidence of any embarrassing stuff they posted under their real identity as a teen for the same reason that we as a society typically expunge the criminal records of teenagers who commit crimes.
But social media companies have been making it harder and harder to be anonymous. For example, Twitter started locking new accounts and forcing them to provide a phone number a few years ago ostensibly as an "anti-bot" measure. This is actively harmful and should be discontinued. Likewise, Google needs to allow users who wish to remain anonymous to turn off all of their account security measures other than a password. Security measures such as tying accounts to phones are helpful for adults who have their identity and their finances tied to these accounts but it makes these services unsafe for minors as it allows the platform to know the identities of their underage users which is a possible security risk.
Minors should also be educated in terms of basic measures to protect their anonymous accounts from deanonymization attacks and on the dangers of meeting their "internet friends" in real life. All of this used to be standard advice for "heavily online" youth in the 90s and 00s. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be in the 20s other than the preference of some social media outlets that users use their real identity for ad targeting purposes and the insistence of certain powerful people who can't handle criticism that anonymity is bad because they get criticized by anons who otherwise wouldn't feel safe challenging them (i.e. online anonymity is also good because it allows adults who'd otherwise feel unsafe speaking truth to power to feel safe enough to do so).
Thankfully, there's still 4chan ! (/s ... or is it ?)
Adults dont use social media to keep communication with friends - they dont have friends. Adults use social medias as newspaper.
Was this a few years ago before Screen Time on iOS? Or was Android? We have a very locked down ipod touch and it works well most of the time.
1: I don't consider HN social media for the purpose of this discussion. I do use Facebook very occasionally for marketplace and groups that only exist in FB (utility only).
Where is the unskewed and undistorted social environment that is implicit here?
More generally, taking your "no true scotsman" approach to kids safety would suggest that it's fine to let kids play in a lead-dust sandpit because you can't eliminate 100% of environmental lead.
My kids nag me constantly for Facebook/WhatsApp/TikTok etc. Main argument is that peers are using those media and they feel excluded.
The thing is that all parties involved is way below required 13yo. I do have arguments which are heard but it is not like reality stops being it especially when there is no alternative outside of school-owned Teams account that has most social activities disabled.
It feels like there’s no win in this fight, except for maybe suing FB for not checking carefully enough and allowing young minors to use their platform.
Significant number of pre-teens? Unlikely. Also ICQ didn't use dark addictive patterns to my memory, it was just fun.
Perhaps that type of voice could help create the next D.A.R.E. program, but for this issue given the efficacy of prevention programs.
https://cdc.thehcn.net/promisepractice/index/view?pid=4186 https://real-prevention.com/keepin-it-real/
I mostly found this guidance in here:
https://addiction.surgeongeneral.gov/sites/default/files/sur...
> Well-supported scientific evidence demonstrates that a variety of prevention programs and alcohol policies that address these predictors prevent substance initiation, harmful use, and substance use related problems, and many have been found to be cost-effective. These programs and policies are effective at different stages of the lifespan, from infancy to adulthood, suggesting that it is never too early and never too late to prevent substance misuse and related problems
But should the surgeon general also make comments about how code reviews need to be empathetic? I mean. If the surgeon general is gonna make statements about what is "healthy" for other social issues, where does he stop?
But still. Maybe we should wait until more research is out.
All you parents posting here how your kids are regulated, ha no there is always a friend with a workaround, you have no idea what they are doing elsewhere.
I remember when small cellphone came out (not smartphones, original cellphones) and wealthier parents started giving them to kids, people were freaking out how inappropriate. Then smartphones for kids.
I cannot even fathom what kids are exposed to these days before they are even in high school.
If connecting with people via the internet is not allowed neither should connecting with people via any other medium.
Edit: Was that the joke?