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Comment by unnamed76ri | Hacker News Reader

I’m not a fan of any of the companies listed but I don’t necessarily like blaming them for things parents shouldn’t be giving their kids access to. But maybe these lawsuits will wake some parents up.

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My kids are in middle school.

Almost all of their friends have no restrictions at all on phone use, electronics, video streaming, etc. A few have been on TikTok and Instagram since they were in 5th grade. The amount of pressure I hear to let them have Snapchat is constant.

Regardless, we maintained the restrictions. Apple Family makes it fairly easy to manage. Xbox controls are a little more of a pain but they work too to moderate.

I’ve talked to my kids about the addictive and psychological elements of how certain games work or videos. They listened but didn’t understand.

Last week, they started talking to me about how a lot of their friends have a phone in front of their face all the time and they see what we’ve been trying to warn them about. It was a struggle to get there but seeing that they finally really understood was big.

The flip side though, the reason they understand is because they see people who have fallen victim to it. It’s like understanding why your parents warned you about drugs because you see what happened to your friend who fell into it.

We know the consequences. At this point, parents shouldn’t have to spend so much time worrying about this. It’s not easy but it should be.

I am with you. I will die on this hill.

Social media is toxic: it’s not real, it’s a waste of life when there’s tons of other awesome things you can do. And the legitimization of chasing Internet Points is truly sad.

I'm an illustrator/painter and instagram has been a MASSIVE net positive on my life. I have come across extremely useful products (allaprima pochade) and artists who provide unparalleled education. I have learned WAY more from artists I have found on instagram, and for a paltry $600 compared to the thousands I absolutely wasted on university classes led by professors who I discovered too late were incompetent.

the sad thing is that in a lot of professions like this you need social media to promote your work

Isn't Hacker News social media though?

Are you at all concerned that you aren't inoculating them to deal with the real world now in a safer space? In the future it will all be unlocked at once and they may be unable to deal with the addictive nature of this stuff.

They might also not know how to interact properly in the real world.

It’s a prisoner’s dilemma which is why the companies need to be regulated.

Very similar to child labor laws where there were lots of firms refusing to use it, but were getting put out of business by those who did. Solution: use the law to force everyone onto equal ground.

Otherwise many many avenues of improvement for our society are impossible to take for the two reasons you and GP mention.

I agree

I get really concerned about this as someone who worked in universities for a while. Watching the 18 year old kids get targeted by the credit card/loan/predatory industries made me really sad.

> In the future it will all be unlocked at once and they may be unable to deal with the addictive nature of this stuff.

I’m adult. I’m still unable to deal if I don’t implement heavy restrictions on every screen I use. I don’t even have Tiktok, FB, IG or Twitter, just HN and reddit. I know how addiction feels, and this feels like it. Social media is poison.

Sometimes, but I take the view of “control what’s normal” as much as I can. I want them to react to weird stuff like it’s weird and unfamiliar.

I do talk to them about things at different levels as they get older. They will have to manage it all themselves one day, but I’m going to keep them away from it as long as I can.

For me, not at all. Along the same line, I don't expose the kids to tiny bits of pornography or heroin either. These examples may sound like hyperbole, but not everything can be prevented with vaccine methodology, imo. If kids need tiktok to know how to interact properly with the world, that's a failure of parents and society. Maybe they'll instead be one of the few with cognitive superpowers that include independent thought, creativity, and attention.

I don't think parents can just keep their kids off of social media, at least teens. How are they supposed to function socially if they're not even able to enter the spaces where a huge amount of the socializing is happening? What about during the pandemic, when it was virtually all online? If the goal is to promote their mental health and their growth, cutting them off from their peer group doesn't seem like a promising strategy.

It seems silly to blame the parents when the world has shifted around them, outside of their control.

The space you call social media, is not a space where children learn social behaviours.

Why do you say that? I'm part of one of the earlier cohorts (I assume) to go through high school on Facebook, and absolutely a huge part of my social life was on Facebook. I organized our senior ditch day on Facebook. My awkward first attempts at flirting were on Facebook.

I'm not saying it's a good or healthy space for teens to socialize, but I do contend it's an important one.

Facebook of your youth is completely different system.

Maybe so, but my claim is that social media is an important part of our social landscape, one that you can't simply deprive a kid of without consequence, not that Facebook is this or is that.

You can absolutely function perfectly fine without social media as a kid or adult.

Hypothesis/opinion: a large portion of the world has no access to the internet or social media and those people are doing better in terms of mental health than those with access.

Also there's a significant amount of kids without access (because their parents don't let them) even in the Western world and they seem to be doing fine (if not better) as well.

It's not that you need to log on to an app to function, it's that to function socially, you need to be in contact with the people in your community. In a community with limited Internet access, of course that happens in person. But that isn't really comparable to not being on the internet in a community that generally is.

I'm sure plenty of teens would do fine without social media, some would probably prefer it because some people prefer limited social contact, but we can't make a blanket statement that we can yank kids offline and it'll all be fine.

The criticism I'm hearing in this thread seems to be, "parents are doing something uncomplicatedly irresponsible, it's obvious kids should be off social media," but frankly the analysis I'm seeing behind that is pretty thin (I'm gathering this is more a gut feeling for people than a reasoned position? Which is valid and all, it just doesn't make for good discussion since it can't be transmitted to or evaluated by another person), and this is a complex issue without such simple solutions.

You don’t need these apps to do what you are asserting though. I am probably a part of the same cohort as you in terms of when social media arrived on the scene. I used Facebook to socialize, but ultimately my meaningful socialization came through in-person contact and was primarily organized through phone calls and texting. Facebook was kind of a sideshow. Later the same was true of Instagram. I eventually got rid of my social media accounts and my social life was unchanged, because almost none of the socialization that goes on in these sites is substantive in any way.

Cool, but since we've had different experiences, can we not both acknowledge our experience might not be representative and that we shouldn't be making proscriptions for how other people raise their children?

Social media is a really broad term.

Facebook of your youth is a social network. TikTok is also a social network. Maybe try launching TikTok for once and let me know whether you’d want to grow up like that.

I can't imagine unironically saying fam or poggers either, but I don't need to, that slang isn't for me. So I don't really see the point.

Help me understand the difference between this conversation and the general phenomenon of looking at what the kids are doing and finding it weird and scary. Because everything I did as a teen was supposed to destroy my generation, too.

Are you comparing slang words to tech engineered addiction machine that is a source of mental illnesses, or am I missing something?

Social media is addictive and harmful. The fact that TikTok looks weird to the olds, is not.

it’s how everyone organizes meeting in real life when it happens, without social media you are very often left out

Many teens did not isolate. They had no reason to. Virtual relationships are low value, and I encourage my kids to do things in person.

Well those are certainly views you're entitled to. Many of my most meaningful friendships have been with people I've never met in person. Teens are/were able both to contract and to spread COVID, which are two excellent reasons they might have isolated during the stay at home/shelter in place advisories.

That said, encouraging your kids to interact in person seems reasonable to me.

> if they're not even able to enter the spaces where a huge amount of the socializing is happening

That’s anti-socializing. That is nothing but huge skinner boxes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

On one side parents who are likely overworked, on the other a group of corporation filled with some of the top minds of our era focused on building the most addictive product imaginable. The deck is stacked very strongly against parents and it's completely unreasonable to not hold greater accountability towards these massive corporations.

I think you can reformulate the old "bank debt" adage for social media and still have it hold true:

If 10% of your users are using your product wrong, the users are at fault. If 90% are using it wrong, it's your fault.

As a parent I can assure you that both things need to happen.

It’s like how cigarettes weren’t allowed to be advertised to children. Sure, parents were responsible for teaching kids not to smoke but companies need to also be held accountable for the well-being of their product and it’s users too. It’s not an either / or. There is enough responsibility for all parties to be accountable.

What if you consider social media to be like cigarettes?

I don't see regulators pushing for Meta and Google to be broken up, or for ISPs to nuke TikTok in the USA. It's been talked about for years but nothing ever happens.

I took it to mean the age restrictions and restrictions on advertising to kids, not an anti-trust action.

> What if you consider social media to be like cigarettes?

Well, then people should show some ID before using the internet or something to prove they are adults? How do you enforce that? at the ISP level? at the device level? At the website level? Genuine question. Who's responsibility is that? In a society where nobody wants to be responsible for anything?

To buy ammo online, you need to upload a photo of your drivers license. It’s much, much cheaper to buy ammo this way.

So there are regulated industries where age restriction is already being handled.

Even if you did, parents shouldn't allow their kids to get cigarettes. Parents trying to get out of parenting is getting old already.

Are you a parent? It certainly doesn't sound like it. While you might be able to keep a preteen away from things, once they are teenagers you can not prevent then from doing something they want to do. The amount of teenage pregnancies in states where they preach abstinence instead of doing sexual education is a pretty strong proof of that.

I think you're being too harsh on the parents. I don't know a single parent who allowed their kids to get cigarettes, but I also don't know a single teen who ever said "I'd like to smoke but my parents don't allow it so no, thanks". They just smoked behind their parents' backs.

I feel the comparison to cigarettes is apt: I know of children who had an "official" Facebook account for their parents and a "real" one for their school friends. And while I'm not sure I 100% agree with the lawsuit, I think it's worth asking: given how much money these companies invested in hooking teens up and how much they profited from it, should they also be held accountable for the negative effects of said hooking up?

And if the cigarette companies advertise to the kids? And the second hand smoke is everywhere (everyone else using them) and are almost ubiquitous now? Such that the only way around that is to cut those kids off from society?

I agree with you on parenting, but I won't, for a second, let these companies off the hook for the damage they cause.

Give them an inch, they'll take your entire soul if they can and it will help their quarterly P&L. Don't forget it.

> And if the cigarette companies advertise to the kids?

It's illegal. Tiktok, Facebook, ... nonsense on the other hand isn't, because these platforms aren't responsible for the content they broadcast, by regulation. So should these regulations change?

Of course, I know it's illegal. I'm using the comparison to highlight it.

It's as if we're allowing cigarette companies to be all pervasive through general access and direct advertising to our kids, and then saying: "but the parents shouldn't let them smoke, man, they're not responsible parents".

I think that's unfair at this stage.

Yes, perhaps regulation needs to change.

The law has far more power over corporations than society has over parents and parents have over children. We are better off doing what is most effective: regulate the industry.

I think you over-estimate how much control parents do have, or even should have, over their own children.

Have you ever been a child? Kids don’t live in isolation.

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