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Comment by recursivedoubts | Hacker News Reader

I'll say it again, and I'll take the downvotes: in the future we will look back on allowing children access to social media and smart phones the way that today we look back at smoking ads targeted at children.

Maybe even more incredulously.

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We might even look at all social media by all participants the same way we now look at smoking. It is isn't healthy for the adults either.

The problem is that smoking is pretty much 100% bad (excluding a brief period of being more alert) - social media has some good sides in that it allows you to keep in touch with family and friends who may be far away. It was fun and exciting to catch up with people I'd moved away from. And then it became a vile sludge of toxic positivity mixed with outrage.

Smoking reduces your chances of getting Parkinson’s disease so it is probably less than 100% bad.

Yeah the problem with smoking is mostly self control. It's clearly not a good habit but you can probably smoke a cigar a month for social or even personal enjoyment reasons and get more good than bad out of it.

Oof, that is not true and frankly terrible advice. Most people who quit smoking try the 'just sometimes' approach and it leads back to the original smoking habit.

Framing it as self control problems is also a non starter. That shit is skillfully made addictive - if your outcomes are a high chance of chronic use and related illness or a low chance of occasional use and questionable benefits then the overall expected value is still deeply negative.

>The problem is that smoking is pretty much 100% bad

Bad FOR you, yes; bad as an experience, no. It tastes good and facilitates socialization.

>social media has some good sides in that it allows you to keep in touch with family and friends who may be far away. It was fun

Again, this speaks more to the experience than the health effects. Note that you said ‘it was fun’ in the same way that I can say the cigs I’ve smoked were fun.

I don’t think the comparisons are too wrong to be honest. They are both activities that can facilitate ‘fun’ social interactions but with a deleterious effect on one’s health (cardiovascular and mental)

> It tastes good and facilitates socialization.

Or it tastes like shit and facilitates people running away from the stink of your poison. Maybe they'll socialize over it.

I think it depends on the people and on the cigarettes. I actually like the taste of one specific cigarette brand. I very rarely smoke, less than a packet a year, if that (0 during 2020 - 2022). I do hate the smell, though.

That's subjective. I quit smoking 30 years ago and, unless someone smokes directly into my face, I still like the smell of tobacco.

I think the issue with the comparison is that cigarettes are much worse.

Like the original comment, I won’t be surprised if social media becomes stigmatized as people continue to realize more negative effects, but I doubt any of the effects are going to be as serious as cigarettes.

It’s hard to compare the data, but I’m pretty sure smoking is much worse for you. A bad smoking habit is likely to kill you. There’s a point at which you smoke so much that it’s more likely to be the reason you die than anything else. Social media just makes you miserable.

I think it’s too early in social media’s life to distinctly say it’s worse than smoking. Not enough time has passed to allow for a long-term longitudinal study on the long-term effects on social media use.

While tobacco might be a first-order cause of its ills (cancer, etc), the second order effects of social media might have cascading effects that is too early to tell on a long time frame.

I’d be intrigued to read any decade long studies looking at the well-being of users of MySpace and the early adopters of Facebook.

There are analogues to social media use in every generation. They are problems we’re already familiar with, they’ve just been amplified.

I highly doubt we’ll ever see anything even remotely akin to the risks of tobacco. Tobacco is a medical nightmare. The problems that would likely be caused by social media can be treated and reversed. It’s night and day between the two.

As the commenter stated, it’s an unpopular opinion that social media is as bad as cigarettes.

Tldr: -Problem were here before, but not on such a massive scale -No safe place -Parents have way less influence on their children -Younger people are influenced way more by external factors, than more mature people

How can you be so sure, that we will never see anything as bad / risky as tabacco? Sure, we do know a lot about the physical consequences to our body, but there is so much more to it than just that. Getting cancer, any other illness or damage to our body sucks, however these are consequences we do know exist. Do you consider, that you probably will hang out with different kind of people and as a consequent develop differently? Do you consider the addiction, not beeing able to concentrate for a long time without a breake, because you are longing for the next cigarette? Do u consider ...

This list could go on and on and each of these aspects gets worse the younger you are. Of course I can't tell if these example truely have a big negativ effect on you, but I am sure, that these and other factors shape you as a person.

Now we look at social media, which tend to have not that many physical consequences for your body. However there are so many more psychological factors shaping your brain, behavior and habits. Addiction, false role model, always having social pressure just to name a few. You are rigth, these factors did exist before, but in a much smaller scale. Furthermore a parent can only raise and help his children grow and develop as much, as they are spending time together. Nowadays kids spend a lot of time on the internet / social media, which it used to spend with other children playing and while playing with other kids, learning how to behave in a society. Of course we didn't always do as our parent told us, but we never even come close to the f*cked up stuff we see on the internet daily. We never had a million eyes watching every step and be judged by them. Home was a safe place.

I spent quit a lot of time on this comment, way too much to be honest, but what I am trying to say is:

-These 'normal' factors are on a massive scale and the impact they have, direct or indirect, shouldn't be taken lightly -There is no safe place anymore. If you are not on social media, you are 'different' / 'weird' -Parents have way less influence on the development of their children

There’s no likely avenue through which social media leads to death. It’s that simple. Tobacco products kill a lot of people.

The problems you list are significant and bad, but many of them will improve as society as a whole learns to parent in an age of social media. Not just this, but as people grow to see how negatively social media affects you, the public attitudes toward it will change and adapt. At no point in this process is social media going to be killing people.

I’m not saying that social media doesn’t cause the very negative things you outline. I’m just pointing out that it’s not as bad as smoking.

That being said, I’m all for legislation that stops young people from using social media. I think it would be totally reasonable to make it illegal under a certain age.

Social media and cyberbullying leads to suicide and has and does kill people. This is particularly bad when those alt-f4’ing their life are adolescents and not post-midlife when smoking will kill.

It seems like it’s too early to tell how severe the second and third order effects of social media are on one’s own well-being and the well-being of society.

My language allowed for the acknowledgement of few and far between cases of suicide. It’s not a fair comparison to smoking deaths. Social media suicides get a lot of attention because, like you said, adolescent suicide is particularly sad. The numbers, however, are completely different orders of magnitudes; deaths by social media are insignificant when compared to smoking.

Smoking also has a strong social component. Smokers socialize around the ashcan. It's fun and exciting to catch up with the other smokers in your building or at your work.

It does become a vile sludge, you're not wrong about that.

That aspect at least is easy to solve by drawing a stronger line between public content and stuff seen by people you actually know. This would be more of a social change than technical of course.

The harder part is figuring out how to handle public content, because there are still innocuous or positive uses for it as well.

I wonder if there's a way to model this as a simple Lottery trade off. Imagine a lot of game that has 100 times better odds of winning a Powerball sized multi-million jackpot, but every hundredth winner of this jackpot, (distributed randomly with a probability of 1/100) is arrested and publicly fed to lions. Would ticket sales increase or decrease versus the current scenario?

> social media has some good sides in that it allows you to keep in touch with family and friends who may be far away.

Sure, but there are numerous other ways of doing that without bringing in the problems of social media.

>The problem is that smoking is pretty much 100% bad

Smoking has far more benefits than social media, especially social benefits.

If you have a pack of 20 cigarettes at a bar, you have 20 new friends you haven't even met yet. Smokers stick together. Sharing a cigarette is a bonding moment for a lot of people.

I could go on. Fuck social media. I don't want to see underage girls whoring themselves out. I don't want to see man children acting cringe for likes. If I WANT to keep up with my family, I'll call them on the phone.

Social media is one part.

Manufacturing behaviour through creating habit loops from notifications and scrolling for dopamine hits is an issue beyond social media.

People are working for companies for free to be their valued and attentive audience to resell to the highest bidder.

With small kids of my own I am finding it important to talk to them about things they don't understand, such as being careful of screens and smartphones. They have their own fear of google home as boogie man, which was unintended since we tried it out as a simple way to play whitenoise.

As much as I will worry and take the precautions I can, I also see how kids being born today are so much smarter. Just ahve to make sure to unlock their enjoyment of the real world first, whether its sensory play, the outdoors, etc.

So far, the smile from a screened expreience doesn't compare to being outside.

> Manufacturing behaviour through creating habit loops from notifications and scrolling for dopamine hits is an issue beyond social media.

I agree, but they are mostly intrinsically linked.

> So far, the smile from a screened expreience doesn't compare to being outside.

Yes, this is wisdom. It also reflects that beyond the manipulative algorithms, there still remains unfavorable outcomes of living life online.

The kids beig born today arent any smarter IMO, just more tuned to operate the technology by virtue of being native, just because someone can speak english, french, chinese, german, etc... does not grant the ability to utilize those skills to say something meaningful or having literacy in media using that language.

Agreed 100%. I've said this for a while as well. I can see lawsuits too because Social media companies are doing the same as tobacco, making changes to make the product more addictive and they also have the information to show that it is bad for health. I don't know to what level they are suppressing that information, but it seems likely.

We got a glimpse of that in the documentary Social Dilemma.

I expect it is going to get substantially worse. With the power of AI, data mining behavior for attention is going to surpass anything we have likely seen before.

I don't know... Are we looking back on allowing children access to TV or video games the way we look back at smoking ads targeted at children yet?

We do not vilify smoking because we realized it kills but because smoking has been regulated out of society (because of its cost) and part of this regulation was to change the public perception of it. I don't see in the west a similar regulation targeting social media any more than I've seen one targeting stupid TV programs that were probably also damaging children mental health. Unfortunately.

In some spaces - yes. We are looking back in a similar manner.

Limited TV screen time is strongly encouraged in basically all the literature for new parents (under 2 hours).

Gaming is seeing a strong push against some of the most egregious abuses targeted at children (micro-transactions and loot box gambling).

>Are we looking back on allowing children access to TV or video games the way we look back at smoking ads targeted at children yet?

TV and games "back in my days" had no personalized tracking and targeting. They could only try to target the wider audience, not you specifically by mining all your private info and use dark patterns to manipulate you. Modern social media apps know everything about you and will not hesitate to weaponize it against you for ads if it makes them money.

Also, "back then", parents could look at the TV shows or your video games and see the kind of stuff you were exposed to and limit it or complain to the authorities to ban it. Now, you have no idea what ads or manipulative dark patterns your kids/teens are getting on their phone.

Big, big, difference between then and now.

> Now, you have no idea what ads or manipulative dark patterns your kids/teens are getting on their phone.

I’m not sure about teens. But I’m present when my kid plays games and he despises ads and micro transactions as much as I do. He’s also not allowed to buy anything so he’s more selective about what games to play (a few ones that we have subscriptions for)

Sure but for everyone like you there's 100 parents who leave their kids unsupervised with tablets and phones.

> Are we looking back on allowing children access to TV or video games the way we look back at smoking ads targeted at children yet?

I know a lot of people who do.

It's funny the lengths I've seen people go to on HN to make everyone and their kid suddenly given a smartphone not a big deal at all, which couldn't possibility have any ramifications for mental health or development.

How about the upside of, you know, accessing the riches of human knowledge, entertainment and communication?

We decided it’s better to present this in a curated program called education.

What if everybody else in the same edication programme has a smartphone?

What of people have, like, free time?

For me, education was the worst part of my life and the Internet perhaps one of greatest.

Internet of today has nothing to do with 1990/2000 internet in term of content and especially in term of things competing for your attention, and spread of misinformation

The problem isn't necessarily the device, but the content

Kids spend up to 10 hours per day on screen, most of it on smartphones [0], and they're not reading encyclopedias

Average tiktok user screen time is over 25 hours per months: https://wallaroomedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/tiktok-...

[0] https://i2.wp.com/www.surexpositionecrans.org/wp-content/upl...

I understand all that but you really want to keep that baby while throwing the water off.

For starters, the 1.5 hours ot TV may go.

I'd much rather put my 8 years old in front of some cartoon than god knows where on the internet. Content wise it's much less risky

smartphone != internet

Let's be serious. Between 3 to 7 years: smartphone == youtube.

... and not the good parts of it.

My kingdom for the ability to allow-list what my kids can watch on YouTube. I'd pay double what they charge for YouTube Premium just for that. Youtube-dl'ing the videos and putting them somewhere easily accessible is a giant pain. There's great stuff on there but YouTube makes it so damn hard to curate it.

Basically that. Quite difficult to leave them alone or they'll just watch bad stuff eventually because of the fantastic algorithms.

> My kingdom for the ability

Then, for your kingdom, you will be able to afford building an app that plays YT videos only if matching some regular expression based on your whitelist. You can apparently stream YT videos through the ExoPlayer library or other tricks, see e.g.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29607104/how-to-play-you...

Fuck Youtube. I fucking hate it.

My son can be interested in an animal, so he'll find some youtube videos of the animal to watch. This is ok because the videos he searches and clicks on are fine, usually some sort of documentary. But then the algo. within like 3 videos he's watching badly autogenerated X vs Y monsters fight bullshit videos and it just gets worse and worse.

I'm seriously tempted to set up some sort of network MITM proxy that blocks any YT URL where the HTTP Referrer is a previous YT Video, so that algorithmic suggestions can just fuck off. Searching for and watching a video would be fine.

Yep, noticed the same pattern. Starts with some really interesting and educational videos and then eventually degenerates to gunfights, loud yelling and needless violence videos for kids.

To clarify: If all smartphones were basically just an encyclopedia, instant messenging and music device I think they would be much better for people. Currently, most time on a smartphone is spent engaging with the attention economy, which I think is where most of the real poison lies.

I think even if you got rid of the attention economy though, smartphones would still have negative consequences. A smartphone will help you kill some time, even if you're just browsing wikipedia. I think sometimes it's good to be bored, it can spur you into doing something new. Now we don't get bored, we get placated.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

I'm pretty down on social media. But, you can easily argue that "my child should never smoke". You cannot easily argue that "my child should never use social media".

Part of raising a child in the modern era needs to be teaching how to manage and handle the use of these things. Hell, online games are a great example of a social platform where kids are often in the majority.

> But, you can easily argue that "my child should never smoke". You cannot easily argue that "my child should never use social media".

That might be true now, but it could always change. Don't forget that we all used to think smoking was perfectly healthy.

I'm hoping that movies/shows in the future show how we currently use social media and it shocks people the same way media made now does with cigarettes because we realized how unhealthy it is.

I would argue the effect of smoking was also a lot longer to see the effect. I've been to countries where kids smoke (middle east) and there's no apparent effect on the smoking kids. You'd probably have to wait until their 30s to really see the damage.

Watching a kid watch TV there is almost an immediate feeling of unhealthiness that isn't as apparent from watching a kid smoke. The smoking kid will keep on playing soccer, the kid on the TV is sucked into the sedentary low-thought activity like they're in a trance.

No, it will not change.

Humans are social animals. We depend heavily on each other. Perhaps, we will rebrand social media... but the underlying fundamental issues will persist. Even if the next wave of tech is called Group Links, people will still need to learn how to navigate the noise.

I suppose I could be wrong. If we abandon the internet, disband the newspapers and the post, and generally give up on democracy entirely. But I don't like the sounds of that either.

Smoking is simply a bad comparison, though it's true, both are currently harmful. One however needs to be addressed in a way that promotes healthy use, the other pretty much falls under the umbrella of adults can choose to make their own choices.

Now before I go off down the "but think of the children" path too much further... I'll reiterate; this all falls primarily on better education, not stricter laws and enforcement. Censorship is a double edge sword and implementing it above the scale of the household is very dubious. There's a reason minors are admitted to rated R movies with their parents, for example. Even drinking ages are sometimes flexible.

Anyways, I feel like I could rant about this topic forever right now, but I'm just stop here.

I'm not sure that a majority of adults are actually capable of using social media responsibly. How do we teach kids to use social media when it seems like our entire society is incapable of handling it?

Its not that society is incapable. Its more that Social Media went viral before we even had a chance to digest "this is social media", this is how you operate it.

The lava from the explosion is now cooling, the dust is settling; and we are now starting to see is the newly formed dystopian world that has been created from.

As unlike cigs, that have been around longer than the internet. We've known for a long time they're bad.

We can learn from history. The invention of the printing press comes to mind.

But yea, it's hard to pass good practice on to future generations when the current ones don't have a clue what they are doing.

If you put me in front of someone on an operating table and ask me to operate on them I would be incapable of doing it.

That's not to say I don't have the capacity for it. I just got put in front of a patient before I had the chance to digest any medical studies.

at what age do you think most children would be capable of being taught how to manage/handle these things?

> But, you can easily argue that "my child should never smoke". You cannot easily argue that "my child should never use social media".

Oh, I think one can so argue. Social media as in "public or broadcast-to-all-'friends' style posting, that pushes content at you in a way designed to maximize engagement above all other concerns", yeah, that stuff's digital asbestos. I'm not gonna take my kids gambling, either, and certainly not going to let them do it on a regular basis. Social media's just as low-value and dangerous.

Texting and equivalents, sure, not so much.

"Smoking kills" is a proven scientific fact, known for a very long time (since the 1940s https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/sgr/2000/highlights/historical/i....)

Smartphone doesn't kill (and no one is arguing about this) and actually it's arguable whether it has really more cons than pros...

I can well understand that smartphones may cause some issues to children (and others), but that's never going to be seen as dangerous as smoking is

The parents of children who have died of suicide due to cyber bullying would disagree. As would the parents of children suffering from eating disorders, self-harm, and numerous other mental conditions induced, at least in part, by social media.

The link between physical health and phone use is less direct than to cigarette smoking, but is still present.

I'm one of these (step) parents. I've long held that social media is a cancer and tried to model and promote responsible usage.

I've failed totally, and two of my children have had horrible mental health,with suicide attempts and ongoing issues to this day. Another had long struggles with drugs and has a pretty fragile mental situation even though he is mostly out the other side of that now, and on a better path.

I'm sure the anecdotal defense will be used, but I'm convinced that being exposed to all of the ills of the world via social media has been in part to blame for this, and this despite what I hoped were worthwhile attempts to demonstrate restraint in use of phones and social media, and educate my kids.

Them smoking (without social media existing) would have been better, imo.

What about all the kids that get shot trying to steal food from a drive thru because it's a TikTok Prank?

Smartphone usage increases facebook usage. There is a causal relationship between social media usage[0] and loneliness and depression, which kills.

In other words, social media kills in the same way cigarettes kills.

Smartphones without social media do not kill.

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328838624_No_More_F...

Especially teens. The most vulnerable target age group for anything that gets projected to them as being "cool". Unfortunately the responsibility to steer them in the right direction only lies in the hands of their parents.

Apps like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok do an incredible job of wooing kids into a void of delusion that would slowly deflect them away from things that matter (education, relationships, socializing etc.) to things that push them into continuous, useless loop of validation and security (think about all the underage suggestive content on those platforms, simply disgusting)

It's not even only children, it's literally everyone. Who thought it would be a good idea to put a screen in everyone's hand with infinite content that's engineered to be highly addictive. It's a fucking no-brainer.

Cigarettes are so very bad for you that I don’t think this will ever be the case. I remember working on the administration side of cancer treatments, and half of all of the insurance codes were variants of lung cancer from smoking. There’s a point at which you smoke so much that it’s more likely than anything else to kill you.

Your point is valid that today’s smart-phone-social-media is as young as cigarettes were in the 1920’s, but the general problems have been around forever. Young folks comparing themselves to Instagram models is very analogous to air-brushed magazine models in the early 2000’s to cite a recent example. They’ve just been magnified. Smoking introduced a new problem.

It's pretty bad to compare social media to smoking, or call it "the new smoking" because... teen tobacco usage is far from a solved problem. Teens today vape and it will have long term consequences both for them and society at large.

Honestly the panic around "screens" remind me of the moral panics around Dungeons and Dragon back in the 80s [0] and video games in the 90s and 00s. The media hysteria did try to blame many acts of violence on DOOM.

Some researchers have now spent 30 years trying to prove a link between violence and video games, without any success. To put things in perspective, during the same time period neural networks were completely abandoned by AI researchers, before coming back and giving us the deep learning revolution and the leaps in self-driving and language models.

> Young folks comparing themselves to Instagram models is very analogous to air-brushed magazine models in the early 2000’s to cite a recent example.

In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [1] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [2]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror. The solution? Ban mirrors.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...

Teen nicotine use is still common, but tobacco is on its way out thankfully. While vape has its own problems, and may have others that emerge over time, they’re nothing compared to tobacco. And this is the point I was trying to make. Tobacco is a lot worse than social media.

Unencumbered consuming is a big problem.

Children seem to do better when creating instead of consuming on screens. Except they almost always like creating more in real life (painting, piano) vs the app.

My take is that playing minecraft or such is fine. Instagram is not. Playing with blocks in real life is probably better (but I appreciate you can't build moats in real life so easily).

Creating = building with blocks, interacting, using imagination, creating.

Consuming = passive watching and input only. Watching someone play video games is consuming.

And the adults' access to the phone. It's made it incredibly easy and low-effort to snitch out any kids actually independently outside no matter where they are. People would shit bricks to see the freedom I had as a kid, to roam the countryside alone with a rifle shooting rabbits. Or going miles out from age 7 up snake infested creeks. The average fat American is way too lazy to walk all the way home to snitch a kid out, but with a cell phone they can call the cops immediately.

Or we might look back fondly at a time where we only had to deal with addictive social media sites and your kids' friend groups weren't 50% AI bots yet.

Your basic Jurassic Park story where corporate robots will keep acting like they are in control of what they have built, till the very end.

It is worth pointing out that pre-2010, the internet and social media was a nice place to be. Even if myspace was kind of ugly, social media did not drive negative mental health outcomes until upvotes/downvotes and dark pattern engagements were applied to everyone.

I think we had different places. I remember the first teenager who was driven to suicide from social media way before 2010. Just googling showed me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Megan_Meier who died in 2006 from cyberbullying.

That's also around the time when smartphones started to see huge adoption. It became something you'd never be able to get away from.

Disagree with this. Even myspace sowed a bit of discontent with it's "top friends" feature, with some people getting into arguments about being left out of the "top 8" or where they had been placed in the ordering.

When Facebook came around people had already cottoned on to trying to shape their presence a bit better but then shit really hit the fan when Instagram came around and everyone started curating a completely fake presentation of what their life was like.

Before Instagram there were no influencers. There were influential bloggers like Tim Ferris but 'influencer' and 'content creators' weren't job titles. To this day, I'm wary of anyone who isn't a photographer that says that Instagram is/was their favourite social media platform.

Whoa! I've been saying the same thing for the past couple years. Glad I'm not alone.

We won't, because we will be the children who grew up on social media, and our thoughts will be controlled by the people in charge of the straw from which we sucked. "Meta? How could Meta be bad? Meta is our friend!"

More like alcohol, it's not for children and for adults it's nice if consumed sporadically and in small quantities.

Possibly, but I do not believe that it only impact children. Is there a benefit aspect of smoking ads targeted at adults?

100% agree. Have an upvote.

they say on social media, lol. also, adults are not somehow immune to the ills that children are susceptible to.

> they say on social media, lol

hn hasn't much in common with tiktok &co

> adults are not somehow immune to the ills that children are susceptible to.

Children are more malleable in every aspect, there is a reason why we call the "formative years" formative

Have you never seen an adult addict? Because social media is addiction, nothing else.

Well yes, I tried weed in my 20s and I'm glad I didn't do that at 13

You're making my point

Not really. Weed isn't very addictive, and for every 20 year old that tries and quits weed, there are dozens that try alcohol, smoking, or coke and have a hard time quitting. Now, those can be expensive addictions, whereas a social media addiction is free, so it won't force you to rehab.

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