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Comment by justaman | Hacker News Reader

I grew up as social media came into being(mid 2000s). When I was 13, I got Myspace. When I was 16, I got Facebook. It wasn't until well into college that I realized the impact social media had on my mental health. I would go further and say nobody until 18 should have social media, but that may be unrealistic in 2024.

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I grew up with the birth of the internet and social media and I have the opposite feeling. I know that sound the old one monologue but I came from the time that social media were exclusively social and not a bunch of people creating content endlessly in the hope of making tons of money in the internet. I used aol, Microsoft Messenger, Facebook and a very famous Google social media on my country, called Orkut. None of these gave me anxious to see what's happening or any negative thoughts. In fact In using the internet and social medja learned so many things, meet different people outside of my country and from other states and learned about other cultures and other languages. All these years and I think the way that social media works is rotting people's brain: people barely pay attention on you because they are too busy seeing their timeline, people even use it on traffic and all of these people are adults that doesn't knew about social media until some years ago. Internet and Social media for children must be supervised and not restricted.

I understand where you’re coming from but these were not social media.

I used Orkut too. It was a place to talk to your real-life friends, join local communities and organize events. You didn’t develop a personal following or post selfies looking for approval.

Social media, as we have it today, allows individuals to broadcast their twisted mind to millions, and not via text - only cute pictures, memes, and 30-second clips. These are worlds apart.

Setting it to 18 is obviously pretty ridiculous. That's just going to continue the weird trend of infantilizing people by pushing back the age at which they learn to deal with things that require self control.

At 16 there are at least 2 years where parents have the ability to actually interfere and help bring any negative effects under control.

Do you know at what age people are able to properly deal with things that require self control? I believe that part of the brain doesn’t mature until early 20s. At 18 a person is legally an adult so 18 seems like a much more reasonable cutoff than 16.

People don't just start being able to deal with things that require self control at a specific age. It has to be taught. Even sex ed recognizes that, where it's far more effective to teach kids how to be safe during it rather than to teach them that they can do what they want after 18.

If you push off the learning to when the person can legally just do whatever they want, all you're doing is abdicating parental responsibility and setting the person up for addiction as an adult.

Yes people should be taught skills to deal with making good choices and learning self control. But we don’t give kids heroin as part of the lesson in learning self control. The biological imperative for sex is overwhelming and there’s not much we can do to stop it. There is a way to stop companies from enticing kids with social media addiction though.

We would give them heroin in a controlled manner if the consumption of heroin was the primary means of social interaction for the majority of adults. The heroin analogy is eye catching, but ultimately nothing more than idiotic "think of the children"-esque hyperbole.

We agree that giving kids access to heroin as a way to teach self control is idiotic. What we don't agree on is that social media in its current incarnation is heroin like. I think it is.

..heroin was the primary means of social interaction for the majority of adults..

We aren't talking about adults we are talking about kids. That the majority of adults use social media for social interaction is a separate problem and in no way indicates that we should subject kids to something as highly addicting and harmful as social media (in its current incarnation).

There are tons of studies that show that social media harmful to peoples' mental health. It is profoundly dumb for society to subject kids to it. In same way it is profoundly dumb to let drug companies advertise. People are easily manipulated and kids especially so.

You're forgetting that my argument is that by pushing the age of access to social media up to 18 (as the person I replied to proposed), we'd be pushing teaching social media 'literacy' to when parents lose the tools they have to teach their kids. If an 18 year old gets debilitatingly addicted to social media, the most they can do is threaten to kick them out, which I'm sure you can agree isn't really a solution, but if say, a 16 year old does that, the parents can take away their phone and forcibly disconnect them in various ways until they find a healthier balance.

While social media is addictive and unhealthy, it is the primary means of social interaction among adults, thus, just as we introduce high schoolers to adult things like driving, sex, job interviews, citing other's work etc through partial exposure to such things (eg junior driving permits, sex ed, mock interviews or relaxed punishments for academic dishonesty), we should be teaching kids how to have a healthy relationship with social media through limited exposure BEFORE they turn 18.

To this extent, I prefer one of the other suggestions in this post, that there should be two 'tiers' of social media, kids should still be allowed to access small platforms, and in particular, forums. Those are easier to monitor for parents and lack many of the ills of more 'modern' stream-of-consciousness style social media. As an additional point in favor of that approach, forums were pretty instrumental to my development of programming skills as an early teenager. Without the ability to participate on forums, my skills would've been considerably stunted.

… we'd be pushing teaching social media 'literacy' to when parents lose the tools they have to teach their kids.

There are ways of teaching said literacy without allowing unrestricted access to social media. Your last paragraph suggest one such way.

It’s not an all or nothing type situation. I think it’s clear the essence of what is being discussed with the Florida law is that kids shouldn’t be granted unrestricted access to social media and those companies should be required to enforce access rules to people under a certain age.

I believe we are in agreement on this.

Wait you can buy heroin in Florida if you’re over 16?

There are some things society thinks people should not be allowed to be legally tempted with. Some people think one of those things is social media for people under a certain age.

I was just pointing out the absurdity of your hyperbolic comparison to heroin.

It wasn’t absurd. It established that pretty much everyone agrees that government intervention is sometimes needed to protect people from their impulses. The idea that everyone (especially kids) can simply exercise self control when it comes things as addicting as social media is absurd.

> It established that pretty much everyone agrees that government intervention is sometimes needed to protect people from their impulses.

Wait, do... do people actually buy that reason for the War on Drugs?

Yes. There are some things so unhealthy that it is worthwhile to try to prevent people from using them. Heroin is one such substance in some peoples’ mind. Gambling is something that can be very addicting and destructive and as such society tries to keep kids from partaking in it. Similarly it is wise and worthwhile to keep kids off of social media.

When people say "the brain is still developing until you're 25" it means "your brain is noticeably worse at learning after the age of 25". Noting that, should people learn self-control in the presence of social media before 25, or after 25?

I believe the part of the brian that deals with impulse control isn’t fully developed until early 20s.

We don’t willingly and willfully let kids have access to alcohol and heroin. By your reasoning it seems like we should so that they can learn self control.

I mean a lot of Europe has fairly low age limits for purchasing alcohol, and even lower for drinking it in private.

I believe 16-year olds can still buy wine and beer at the grocery stores in Denmark. I’ve heard it’s fairly common for 14-year olds to drink at home in the UK - though the 14-to-16 range may be delaying on average since ~2010.

I don’t believe many countries allow adults access to heroin. I believe prohibition does more harm here due to lack of quality control and testing but reasonable minds could disagree.

Age of first exposure is a fairly open question across the globe. Everyone is experimenting with whats best and whats tolerable.

We agree then that limiting access to alcohol is appropriate at some age level. Different countries do it at different ages. What is optimal is society dependent.

I gather then that we are in agreement that limiting access to social media is appropriate at some age level. We perhaps disagree at what age that ought to occur.

Under that framework, we should learn self control as early as possible. We learn faster at age 6 than at age 16.

My Dad taught me how to play video games when I was around 6. By “taught”, I mean he just let me play, but enforced a rule that I’d have to stop playing if I couldn’t hold an attentive and emotionally appropriate conversation with him while I was playing Ninntendo.

This was hard for me! I had a natural instinct to tunnel vision into the game and not hear anything anyone was saying to me. I’d also get upset at the game and get angry in my conversations.

Training this into me at a young age really helped my emotional regulation and ability to socialize around / during games and not get too sucked into them. This was especially important because I was quite ADHD and that adds a lot of emotional disregulation.

> When people say "the brain is still developing until you're 25" it means "your brain is noticeably worse at learning after the age of 25".

No, it means that your prefrontal cortex—which is involved in a wide range of higher-order cognitive functions (planning, decision making, working memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior, risk processing)—is still developing, so until it does fully develop (colloquially at age 25, but it can vary per individual), you may lack those skills because you physically lack the plumbing for them to be present:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_cortex

* https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...

> They also found important clues to brain function. For instance, a 2016 study found that when faced with negative emotion, 18- to 21-year-olds had brain activity in the prefrontal cortices that looked more like that of younger teenagers than that of people over 21. Alexandra Cohen, the lead author of that study and now a neuroscientist at Emory University, said the scientific consensus is that brain development continues into people’s 20s.

* https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/brain-development-25-ye...

Of course even post-"25" some folks still may lack them as well, but at that point there's no longer anything physically preventing you from doing so.

At 25 the brain is no longer plastic enough to learn self regulation. So if you wait till then to give people the chance to make mistakes you end up with a whole lot of women-children who can't function at all. The whole point is that you need to let people make mistakes so they can learn from them while they still can.

Saying that you have to wait to be an adult to make adult decisions is like saying that we shouldn't expose anyone under 3 to language since they can't speak.

Just curious, how did it affect your mental health?

I would sit on facebook, refreshing and doom scrolling endlessly. When fb messenger came out I was monitoring facebook messenger when it first came out to see who was online. I was always a pretty lonely kid, and I thought social media would connect me with people. It didn't really.

This reminds me of sitting around on AOL Instant Messenger, summer afternoons pre-2000.

Facebook came out when I was in college, and I resisted for one semester; then if felt "inevitable" [that I join] since almost all classmates were on thefacebook.

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At present, I do not carry a cell phone nor use email [it is heavenly, a rare gift]. When somebody is more than ten minutes late for a planned meetup, I depart.

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