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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

I’m normally anti-regulation as well, but as a parent I’m fully on board with this. The amount of peer pressure to be on social media is insane.

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Because regulation worked so well in eliminating peer pressure for drinking, smoking, and drugs.

It absolutely did for smoking and drunk driving.

Regulation worked remarkably well on smoking.

Growing up in the 80s, no one I knew avoided cigarettes because of regulations. Cigarettes were easy to get your hands on as a kid, even though it was illegal to sell to children. We avoided cigarettes because we had a general understanding of the health risks, because we knew our parents would beat our asses if they caught us smoking, and because smoking makes your clothes smell like shit.

Yet that wasn't enough to stop your generation from smoking, they added even more regulations and then the generation after yours stopped.

You also had to go in store to buy cigarettes, so the application of regulation would work a little differently in the case of social media.

How so?

A massive, decades-long decline in the habit? Stemming from ad restrictions, warning labels, media campaigns, taxation, legal action by states/Feds, etc.

Have you not seen people vaping at a young age now?

Vaping isn't the same thing as smoking.

I agree it is different, but the jury is out on whether it is better. Banning "social media" is likely to push users to a "lite" version of it. I'm not convinced that will be better.

I would call IRC "social media lite", and it is indeed better.

They are consuming nicotine, and tobacco companies are invested in / are the companies producing products in that space. It seems functionally to be the same.

Only if you ignore... a lot. Cancer rates, smoking sections in restaurants, the smell, the yellow grime and used butts sprinkled everywhere, the impact on asthmatics... Smoking a cigarette gets you a lot more than just the nicotine.

A smoker moving to vaping is an enormous benefit to health and society.

That sounds like you are being disingenuous. Smoking sections haven't been a thing in the US for a long time (I went to the last one I could find around 2009). Waste from single use vapes is also a huge problem. Similarly there are health effects specific to vaping, time will tell if cancer is among them.

> Smoking sections haven't been a thing in the US for a long time...

Yes, the regulations that made this happen are good. That's my point.

> Waste from single use vapes is also a huge problem.

Nothing like the cigarette butts that used to be everywhere.

> Similarly there are health effects specific to vaping, time will tell if cancer is among them.

We've plenty of data to safely conclude vaping is safer than smoking tobacco. That doesn't make it safe, but it's absolutely safer.

Nicotine by itself is harmless besides the addictiveness. A nicotine addiction is not going to drastically affect your mental state or cause socially disruptive behavior like domestic violence or armed robbery so it’s really nothing to be concerned about.

No, they are not remotely the same. Nicotine isn’t really that harmful, but combustion byproducts very much are. Also the effects on bystanders are orders of magnitude better.

Most of the harm from smoking comes from the smoke, not the nicotine or associated addiction.

Vaping is way cooler than smoking.

Vaping (non flavored) vapes has basically a negligible impact on your health.

This must be why there’s not 50 vape shops in my town with big neon signs.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see vaping turn into a prescription-only smoking cessation aid, but it's not smoking. I'm 100% happy with even a one-for-one replacement of smoking for vaping, even in kids, given the dramatically lower risk of resulting health problems.

It's more influence than actual regulation enforcement. Smokers these days are seen as social pariahs in some circles.

Drinking, smoking and drugs don't depend on a central point of control. Social media companies of any significance can be counted on two hands, and are accountable to corporate boards.

Absolutely. Almost no kids smoke cigarettes (vaping non flavored varieties have almost no risk associated with it) and drunk driving is a shadow of what it used to be. Getting alcohol for someone under 21 is not child’s play either.

Eliminating all laws banning smoking and drinking up until a certain age would not make one single person safer. Are you in favor of parents moderating access to drugs and alcohol for their kids at any age?

I'm fairly sure more 13 year olds are on social media, than are drinking, smoking, or on drugs.

Are you asserting that parents should not have the rights to determine this for their own children?

Are you a parent? It's not as easy as saying "no social media" to your kids. In this day and age, it's basically equivalent to saying "you can't have friends". Online is where kids meet, hang out, converse etc. I'd LOVE to go back to the days before phones and social media, where kids played with neighbours and ride their bikes to their friends house, but that's slowly slipping away.

We try pretty hard to get our kids to play with their friends in person (we invite them or give rides to playdates) but what do they do when they meet up? Sit on the couch with their tablets and play virtually in Roblox :-)

When my friends would meet up in the 80's-90's, quite a bit of Nintendo happened. Is it really that different? The proportion of video games should eventually drop (not to zero), in favor of (if you're lucky) talking and whatever music bothers you the most.

You organize playdates for middle & high schoolers?

They didn't say anything about the age of their kids. Roblox is played by almost all ages.

>Are you a parent?

I have 5 children. Does that count?

> It's not as easy as saying "no social media" to your kids.

I didn't. I taught them about risks so they'll have tools. But social media isn't where life-changing harm came from.

The harm came from growing up in a world with 24/7 adult presence and zero places to roam. It's development-ruining hellscape that 10k years of children didn't have before.

I'm almost invariably anti-regulation, but in this case - absolutely!

There's extensive evidence that social media is exceptionally harmful to people, especially children. And in this case there's also a major network effect. People want to be on social media because their friends are. It's like peer pressure, but bumped up by orders of magnitude, and in a completely socially acceptable way. When it's illegal that pressure will still be there because of course plenty of kids will still use it, but it'll be greatly mitigated and more like normal vices such as alcohol/smoking/drugs/etc. It'll also shove usage out of sight which will again help to reduce the peer pressure effects.

This will also motivate the creation/spread/usage of means of organizing/chatting/etc outside of social media. This just seems like a massive win-win scenario where basically nothing of value is being lost.

Do you also think that children should be allowed to buy cigarettes? I'll be honest, I am not certain that social media is any less deleterious than tobacco.

I'm a pretty pro-market guy, but there are times when the interests of the market are orthogonal to the interests of mankind.

I can pretty confidently say that the half a million deaths a year attributable to smoking is a little more deleterious than getting bullied online and the suicides which follow. Many orders of magnitude more.

Just because one thing is worse than the other doesn't mean the less-bad thing is suddenly good.

The original statement was:

> "Do you also think that children should be allowed to buy cigarettes? I'll be honest, I am not certain that social media is any less deleterious than tobacco."

To which I pointed out that cigarettes kill far more people than social media. And your response was somehow that I'm implying that a less-bad thing is good? Are you sure you're following the conversation? It's really not clear that you're addressing anything I said, and it's unclear what your point is.

I was following the conversation. You seemed to be implying that social media restriction was unnecessary.

If you weren't, then I think you were being a bit pedantic, because I don't think the person you were replying to was literally suggesting that millions of smoking deaths were equivalently bad to social media. Context matters, and the context of the conversation is legal restriction of social media.

Either way, feel free to ignore my comment if it bothers you.

Yes, parents should not have unlimited rights to determine what is good/bad for their children.

Social media is a powerful, addictive and dangerous. Pretty much anywhere on this earth, parents will end up in jail or lose custody of their kids, if they give them harmful substances like drugs. Social media should be regulated like how drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes are regulated.

Because drug regulations are so effective with no collateral damage at all. /s

Parents can make accounts to use on collaboration with their children.

The law prevents the corporation from directly engaging with the child without parental oversight.

Parents don’t have the right to get their kids a tattoo, vote or buy alcohol before a regulated age. Is this different?

Actually, in many states there is no minimum age to get a tattoo with parental consent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_tattooing_in_t...

Likewise for cosmetic surgical modification of the penis by a doctor, or puncturing the earlobe by a non-medical-professional.

That is…shocking

Missouri law allows minors to consume alcohol if purchased by a parent or legal guardian and consumed on their private property.

edit: Apparently Missouri is not the only state. I had trouble finding a definitive list though. There are also other exceptions such as wine during religious service.

While there are exceptions, and in general exceptions seem pretty common, they still require businesses to officially get approval and it gives power to parents to enforce rules that would otherwise be hard to do so. Even with the exceptions for children to legally be allowed to drink, I would be surprised if that led to more kids drinking than alcohol obtained illegally, which means the question should be back on how well does the law work (obviously not perfectly, but there is a large gap between perfect and so poorly that it is useless purely from an efficiency perspective).

So your answer is yes?

Your position is that decisions about youth access to social media should be fully taken from the parents and made by govs instead. Penalties can be assumed from your examples.

This is the reality that you want imposed on parents and children - yes?

Is your position that no age limits should exist for anything?

I never said that. You introduced that notion to the conversation.

There's actually a really simple and elegant penalty - forfeiture of the device used to access the social media. With all seized devices to then be wiped and donated to low income school districts/families. This gets more complex when using something like a school computer, but I think it's a pretty nice solution outside of that. That's going to be a tremendous deterrent, yet also not particularly draconian.

Yep thats what low income families need: more cell phones.

Now they too can get on social media!

This is already the reality for alcohol and plenty of other things. Maybe not everywhere. Reality check: parents giving unrestricted access to these things are usually perceived as irresponsible.

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