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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Why is it okay for a 19 year old but not a 17 year old?

If they’re bad, they’re bad for adults, too?

If they’re not inherently bad, then they can be safely used by responsible 16 year olds as well as responsible 18/19 year olds?

We let 16 year olds operate deadly machinery traveling at many meters per second. Social media is at least less potentially harmful than automobiles.

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Because at some point you decide that some threshold is useful to have, and stop sealioning on the internet about it

This is the first I’ve heard the term sealioning. Just looked it up and man, it feels like one of those foreign words that perfectly describe something that we encounter all the time. Thanks!

Doesn't seem to relate to the Wikipedia definition:

> Sealioning is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity, and feigning ignorance of the subject matter

Well, I agree it isn’t the perfect context but it isn’t wholly out of left field either, depending on the user’s interpretation of the previous poster’s quibbling over age.

I don't think so. No one was asking for facts/evidence.

I disagree that the poster you replied to was “sealioning”. It seems he was using rhetorical questions to try to make an argument. Basically he was following The Socratic Method.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method

Essentially using questions to challenge assumptions in the form of argumentative dialogue.

This is a legitimate form of having a debate and it has been used for thousands of years. To compare it to the internet trolling practice of sealioning where somebody just asks for evidence repeatedly is disingenuous

Agreed. If something like "sealioning" is first order bad faith argumentation, this falsly accusing someone of doing it, hoping observers don't notice the difference, is second order bad faith.

It's a bunch of rapid-fire questions about a topic that's been well trodden, and on top of that just a bunch of whattaboutisms. It's classic sealioning.

> machinery traveling at many meters per second

Such as a bicycle. And not a car, in almost every country in the world.

Social media is also bad for adults. It's a lot harder to prevent adults from making bad choices for themselves than it is for kids.

How many 16 year olds learned to steal cars from social media?

Is this the social media's error or the car manufacturer's error? Or maybe it's really law enforcement's error?

Or maybe the parents and every other adult in the lives of these children that failed to teach them that stealing a car is wrong, no matter how easy it is?

I agree with it being a part failure on the parents. But let's be honest. Even kids raised in good homes can be shitheads or influenced by them. It makes sense why some of my friends parents didn't like their kids hanging with us. I get it now...If I had kids, I too would probably make prejudice judgments about shitty parents and wonder if I should let my kids hang with them knowing they are unsupervised or in a place with immature guardians.

The adults in these childrens lives don't have the same level of access to these kids as the people on social media. Parents are only human, they can only be 'on' so many hours of the day. The phone and the neverending stream of toxicity is always there waiting for every free moment.

I think the video stayed up too long. Normally you would learn shit like that from your older cousin who learned it from someone in Juvi or your uncles lock picking magazine. Now-a-days you can literally learn it on youtube or from the dark corners of discord chats.

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