Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.

> It's bizarre.

Is it, though? Once you've felt said social scorn enough you no longer see words as a way to make friends, so turning to beauty is the natural progression. People like to be around beautiful people – or at least so it appears to those looking from the outside in, right? If that doesn't work, then you can easily fall into a cycle of thinking "maybe this next surgery is the one that will make me beautiful enough!"

I talked so many times, tried to get an idea of what might drive him: travelling, learning, walking around in the mountain, making money, wasting money, drinking, smoking, drawing dicks on wall, anything! honestly, like "give me something to work with"...

He's been seeing a psychiatrist for a few years now... far as I can tell that is doing nothing...

He's a broken individual. I honestly do not know if there is a way back to reality for him (and so many others, these days)

In my culture this is exactly what family should do.

"Soft doctors make stinking wounds".

If she gets angry about it, then probably there is something deeper going on. Or, you're just asking the wrong way (if you come in assuming there's no meaning/purpose to her life, that could easily happen).

If there's something deeper going on, then social media just amplifies things. Specifically about cosmetics and the beauty industry - people have complained about the effects of supermodels on TV, movies, billboards, magazine ads etc. for more than 30 years, social media has just taken it to the next level.

I don't disagree with anything you said, but I do think it's important to add depth to the argument if we actually want to change the world for a better place.

> It's her life so I leave her alone, not my place to tell her what to do, and the emotional upheaval from her isn't worth it either.

Inverting the order of your explanations (to examine the weighting), we have:

    estimated low return for investment/effort
    avoidance of drama (the other's emotional upheaval) 
    relinquishment of participatory role in guiding the other
    relinquishment of influence/interest in the other's life

Can a person who obviously needs guidance/intervention not be worth the time ? Even though the person is in one's family ?

The narcissocial media actively create an illusion that gratifies loneliness and isolation. Modern urban life had already become a reality of denaturing, competition, isolation, and indifference. The antipatterns run deep.

But then you add...

> But it's crazy that a person can get this lost in life and become completely devoid of purpose and meaning.

Your family member seems to be in need of help. It takes a family/village, as they say. We too often omit to remind ourselves that a person becomes a person through other people. [1]

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_philosophy

The thing is, I'm sure for her it doesn't feel that way. She probably feels a lot of purpose and meaning in following all these people online and participating in social activities around them. That's part of the addiction too - it can feel meaningful for a long time.

I saw a couple of years of similar reactions from my sisters after they went through some difficult times without any of us knowing (since they were studying abroad and this was before easy internet calling). They'd get mad when asked seemingly innocuous questions, which turned out to be because the way the questions were phrased came off as insulting or dismissive of their problems in some way. We didn't even know about these problems since they never told us, but that didn't really matter for them.

It took years of slowly rebuilding trust for them to open up again.

No (wo)man is an island, entire unto itself.

I'd highly recommend the book "Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End" by Saito Tamaki, translated by Jeffrey Angles. First published in 1998 it describes the "hikikomori" social/psychological phenomenon, and ways treatment has been approached. Ultimately, Saito observes that nobody can "fix" the individual hikikomori directly— therapy must be multi-faceted, continuous, and ongoing, focused on reducing stigma and shame. And for all that, may ultimately not be effective.

I bring this up for several reasons. First, such conditions are especially underdiagnosed and misdiagnosed in girls and women. Second, even now ADHD is still heavily misunderstood with people focusing on the "hyperactivitiy" part, which is really only one variant. Third, the combination of isolation and focusing on something that doesn't seem to fit that (ie cosmetics and cosmetic surgery) screams coping mechanism and nervous system dysregulation to me.

30+ years ago such people would be forced out into the world. Some would be helped by this. Others would merely cope (ie masking). Some would be further traumatized by this and no one (including them) would recognize it. I've heard from many teachers who deal with ADHD/ASD students that it becomes pretty obvious that their parents are undiagnosed for these very same conditions.

Your sister might be described as a NEET in Western parlance but this isn't new or exclusive to the West. Japan has had hikikimoris from at least the 1990s.

It's worth adding that young people aren't stupid. Many of them recognize the hopelessness of their situation, economically speaking. Rents are crippling, home ownership looks increasingly impossibly to ever reach, student debt is potentially crippling and job prospects aren't great. We're crazy if we think young people don't recognize this so we have a hopelessness crisis on top of all of this.

So is social media allowing people to isolate and cope or is it the cause? Is ADHD/ASD more prevelant now? If so, why? Or was it just underdiagnosed and misdiagnosed until now? I don't know. To me it seems like it might exacerbate existing issues and it's only one facet of many of how our society is increasingly broken and failing young people.

The toxic part of social media is the online personas and interactions with strangers, who are perceived as friends.

There is a balance of letting kids have messenger and play games online with friends, than letting them have social media accounts, and burrow into cesspools of online activities that a lot of these social sites are.

Is it that she does not go out with friends?

I think her situation is not at all bizarre – I actually think it is overly normal.

Going out with friends: Fair enough, you sit at the same bar talk about the same things, etc.

I think we are in a crisis of communities. Even if your sister wanted to engage there are no good places to do it.

But after deleting addicting games/apps for my own good I now realize that reality is not only very complex, but also just as simple as niven's idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)

also: https://news.ycombinator.com :)

And be persistent to a degree, show her that you care and you are there for her (and actually be there for her, do something with her). Be understanding, some amount of video entertainment is okay. Be there for her, be patient, and know when to take a break about trying to change her bad habits.

I assume you also need to be prepared for the unfortunate possibility that she just won't budge and decides to spend her life in the matrix.

What can be done? Does anything need to be done? Is she doing harm to herself and others, or is that just your perception? Maybe she doesn't share your values. Maybe she senses your judgement. Do you really have her best interest in mind, or are you projecting an idea of what a good sister should be? As in you can't be proud of who she is. But why not? And why do you want to be? To what extent are you responsible? Should you feel guilty if you fail to change her? Should you feel dread if she is unable to change? Does she owe it to you to change herself? But who knows what the next thing will be that you find disappointing about her. Must she walk the tight-rope of your approval? What is your true opinion anyway? Is it truly good, and should anyone truly care?

Everyone has an idea of how life is and how it should be. Oh the problem is so very clear. If only everything was exactly the way I imagine it, oh if only, then there would be peace, happiness, and harmony for all! right? And yet we're endlessly frustrated by the life that could be, the life that should be, perpetually occupying the space beyond our finger tips.

i explained to my sibling the other day that we cannot live our lives however we wanted because of our layers of responsibility: first to ourselves (as a human beings in this civilization), then to our family and friends (who expect to count on us at some point), to the society we inhabit (i am currently an immigrant), the human race, and lastly the environment. those are not easy responsibilities and they could crush anyone. but absconding isn’t a choice: we’re not here for selfish reasons.

i think you should intervene, at whatever cost to you. because no one else would, and depending on how persistent you are, she’d be grateful for the care and attention you showed. because that’s the sort of action that pure love motivates. good luck

What you described may be body dysmorphic disorder. Social media aggravates that, but it is not the cause: BDD is a variant of OCD. Like OCD, it can be effectively treated with a specific kind of therapy (exposure and response prevention). I know a lot of people have replied to your post, but I don’t think anyone has mentioned this possibility yet.

I have instagram and almost never use it. It's addicting to me in a sense that when I have nothing to do I'll open up the app and endlessly scroll through the feed, check stories of people I follow. It made me uncomfortable because all of the stories of people I know looked fake somehow, everyone smiling, having a good time, making specific poses to look good on Instagram, but in reality their life is not full of roses. It made me uncomfortable when I had bad days, where I felt like I was never going to achieve the happiness people show on the social network. Luckily, wen this thought occurred, I was able to pinpoint it and say "well, this is NOT real, they are just faking it for likes and followers. you should feel good that you don't have this and you should value personal contact over likes on a website".

Since then I only use Instagram to browse for dog/pet videos.

But I have some acquaintances that they act like their life depends on instagram. Hell, I had a friend who spent all of her time watching stupid tiktok videos disseminating fake news and pseudoscience (and she was studying to become a psychologist), reading stupid things on facebook, and when she wasn't busy with this she would constantly complain to me how she self-evaluated that she had depression and anxiety, how her life is shitty. She was a pretty woman and all the time told me she wanted to change her appearance because of something she saw on facebook or tiktok, and I guess it wasn't enough for me to tell her she was perfect the way she is, even with her issues. She never listened and tried to convince me that the cosmetic changes she'd do weren't permanent.

Is she terminally online because she's ill or is she I'll because she's terminally online

My advice is to let her know that you think she has a media addiction, then at least she has some level of awareness.

this statement is foundational to secular ethics, and it is arguably part of the problem. Sometimes love requires helping when it hurts.

I mean I personally know people who rarely interact with others other than work, and do weird things like playing with electronics and games all day, mostly just for fun and not for profit. They are often happy as they are, I'm sure many of them are on this very website.

Your sister sounds a bit like the TikTok version of the weird nerd stereotype, replace the PCBs with cosmetics and games with celebrity gossip. Their influencers sell lipsticks instead of 3d printed desk toys and mechanical switches. For me it's difficult to recognize TikTok stuff as a legitimate interest and understand her devotion to it, but then many of the hacker stuff must seem the same to the people outside of these circles.

Not that I know her situation better than you do of course, this was more of a thought experiment on trying to understand a niche that I know very little about.

They said the same thing about TV for most of my childhood.

this is not the average social media user. the problem is addiction, not doing surgery to yourself. if social media was banned or age gated you would have to ban wikipedia next as its also very easy to get addicted to doing a tree traversal of interesting articles starting at the single one article you intended to read. also stack exchange. pardon my tone deafness to your tragedy, but this is a political issue, and your post is being used for political purposes. this is also a waste of my tax money and proof that taxation is theft. if i was a parent i would just be a good parent like my parents and slap my kids if they get addicted to upvoting shit on social media just as i would slap them if they get addicted to watching tv, playing arcade games (since i would provide them with real games and not gacha shit, the former which still had the addiction problem and the exact same dumb discussions in the 90s)

Clearly it's not. It's the life of those she copies and is influenced by. I strongly doubt any of the people like your sister are actually making actual decisions about their lives.

You absolutely should try getting through to her, because that's in her best long-term interest. She's literally destroying her life.

It's not about 'telling my sister what to do'. It's about helping someone sick (my conclusion from your superficial description, reality might be different?).

People have been warning about it since the birth of capitalism and consumerism, although even the most pessimistic ones didn't expect we'd get so far down the rabbit hole, the internet sped up the whole process a thousand times.

The loss of meaning will be the greatest thing we'll have to fight against in this century, we're just at the beginning.

> I just wish there was an easy way out of it.

I personally think it's lost for a few generations, people who fall into the rabbit hole while their brain is still developing will have absolutely no way out.

What makes the system thrive is the same thing that destroys individuals, the group goal is diametrically opposed to the individual needs

You are a part of the problem.

The average american adult went from socializing with friends and family 12+ hours a week few decades ago to less than 4.

If I really want to chat a little, I will go to one of the other small shops next to me and buy a beer/coffee and talk with the owner or whoever is outside the store.

Because I work from home most of my friends are at work during the day. But come evening and you can hang out for at least an hour, with someone you know, every single day if you want. There is no planning, you just go to the places you know people hang out, and they will be there. And if you don't want to talk much, you can just listen.

I feel I am blessed to have this because I was an expat for some years and you don't know what you have until you don't have it anymore.

People tend to rely far too heavily on the easiest way to convince themselves they're having valuable social interactions, whether it's social media or betting that their work friends will still be there when they get laid off. They'll rely on Tinder for sex and try to bridge that to something more meaningful out of thin air, or they'll buy a dog and hope that solves the problem. Some of these are uniquely millenial and onward, some others carry over from Gen X and boomer culture imo, whereby you isolate yourself from the rest of society in the suburbs or wherever and count on personal relationships you acquired for free.

Along with this, in many places we've let the catalysts for social growth get stripped away by commodity bullshit and simulated interaction. Costco is probably the closest thing many people have to bumping into someone, no shot are they going to do it at the adult version of the playground, because there often isn't one and they won't go. (obviously this is more true in some places and for some people than it is for people who've realized this or who innately direct their life this way).

My theory is that to meet a new person and have it be substantial, you basically need to spend a few hours, a few times per week, in the same space doing some arbitrarily interesting thing for a common reason, without being too eager but with a signaled sense of openness. You don't become a pro anything spending 30 min a week on it, and no valuable personal relationships come about that way either. That's how you met people in Uni, that's how you met people at work, you gotta branch off of those places and ya gotta keep it going gradually. If you don't live in a place that facilitates that, vote with your wallet and try to find a new one.

This goes for nature too, if you're only exposure is 2 days of hiking once a year when you travel, and the rest is spent in an office, it's not something you can remedy any other way.

If you drive to work 1 hour each way, and work 8 hours, you're probably doomed, unless you've already done all that and can keep your existing things going. It's just not enough margin, be real about what you're sacrificing and why.

It's really not that simple. The products have become so widespread and influential that they change the very culture of our society for the worse. It doesn't matter whether you abstain from using Instagram or not, some of your friends will still be more or less subtly influenced by its existence in your social interactions.

There's a nice quote from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, which IMO hasn't aged at all in 60 years: "Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind... The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance."

Now for this issue, there's harm being done to children, and the majority of users in the thread seem to be against government intervention; you say: "well if you don't like it, if you think it's negative, just don't use it, don't let your kids use it".

Kind of a random parallel to draw between the two stories, but it's funny the same logic doesn't seem to apply in both cases. Why wasn't for circular saws the response "if you think they're dangerous, don't use them" or "just keep your kids away from them"?

""" More specifically, we’d try to implement these four norms as widely as possible:

1. No smartphones before high school (as a norm, not a law; parents can just give younger kids flip phones, basic phones, or phone watches).

2. No social media before 16 (as a norm, but one that would be much more effective if supported by laws such as the proposed update to COPPA, the Kids Online Safety Act, state-level age-appropriate design codes, and new social media bills like the bipartisan Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, or like the state level bills passed in Utah last year and in Florida last month).

3. Phone-free schools (use phone lockers or Yondr pouches for the whole school day, so that students can pay attention to their teachers and to each other)

4. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. """

https://www.afterbabel.com/i/143412349/what-now

Then the government should step in, either should forceful action or through promoting healthier alternatives or shining a light on its damaging effects.

While technically true, this is a gross misrepresentation. Calling these sites and apps "communications platforms" makes them sound like they're just a mail service or a telephone. This is akin to referring to a casino as "the town square".

> That's a freedom you and everyone else can take advantage of also.

This "can" is only true in a strict legal sense, of course.

If that's true, the suggested measures: no phone before high-school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, ... do not seem crazy.

Kids cannot drink, cannot smoke, cannot have sex with adults, cannot buy firearms, etc.

There's a shitload of things kids cannot do: is it really an attack on free speech to have kids not have phones at school and wait until 16 before they can use these mediocre piece of shit social media platforms?

If it was only this simple. It's similar to the green bubble problem. Disallowing your kids to use these platforms leads to social isolation. All the other kids are on these platforms and a lot of the talk is about what happened on these platforms (it's similar with games like Roblox for a certain age bracket). Excluding them is also going to teenage mental illness due to exclusion.

It's only going to work if all parents would restrict access to these platforms, but that's not going to happen. A lot of parents do not see the issue or do not want to be the first mover.

After all, you're free to use or not to use tobacco and alcohol, right? So it should be every kid's choice.

In fact, why stop there? Why not allow fentanyl pills at the counter of every convenience store for anyone who wants them? You have the freedom to choose to use or not to use them, so there's no problem, right?

Relevant bit from the essay:

"But much of my book is about the collective action traps that entire communities of adolescents fall into when they move their social lives onto these platforms, such that it becomes costly to abstain. It is at that point that collective mental health declines most sharply, and the individuals who try to quit find that they are socially isolated. The skeptics do not consider the ways that these network or group-level effects may obscure individual-level effects, and may be much larger than the individual-level effects."

You’re conflating these tech platforms with freedom of speech. It might be helpful to the debate to separate out the addictive algorithm and user base from people’s right to think and speak freely.

Banning social media optimised for “engagement” at the expense of childrens (and adults) mental health does not remove any content from the internet that could not be expressed in a less toxic way.

The finesse is in defining social media in a way more complex than “this list of companies”, and I agree that (likely) no government would choose a definition that does not either have ramifications for free speech or is inadequate.

This is a social problem, not a parental one. When you allow for-profit companies (or anyone) to create addictive products that intermediate the social experience of an entire generation, how is a parent supposed to stand against that?

It's how kids interact and it defines their entire social experience. Disallowing them access is like sending your kids to school and not allowing them to talk to anyone.

We don't allow our kids to have access to alcohol or cigarettes because it's bad for them. How is this any different, when we know it's doing harm at scale?

Because "it's speech"? That doesn't hold up. Pornography is also generally considered protected speech, but no one lobbies for unfettered access for kids.

Beyond that, restricting social media does not infringe on free speech. That assertion is so obviously wrong on so many levels that it feels silly and pedantic to start itemizing them.

I would go and even claim I would ban all current social media platforms below 18. Ther are simply not enough protections, consistently, its place ripe for abuse and tons abuse is happening every day as we speak. I know we will keep our own kids off this for as long as possible, but eventually harm from absence will be greater.

Parents shouldnt be choosing lesser evil like that, just that some meta employees can cash half a million and think what a great addition to mankind they are, when reality is closer to definition of cancer.

Haidt argues these are a leading cause of an ongoing mental illness epidemic. Such a drastic claim deserves a thorough medical review and if true, these platforms must be regulated just like the Tobacco industry was.

> those who advocate censorship aren't advocating for freedom... they're advocating for their personal parental decisions to the be decisions of the entire nation.

Don't believe freedom of speech / freedom to information overrides the concern of Humanity collectively and progressively going ill, anymore than freedom to self-defense warrants the use of nuclear weapons for personal use.

That said, the burden of proof is on Haidt. It isn't uncommon for the older generation to be pessimistic or doomsdaying about the next one.

US companies have a qualified right to free speech https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/freedom-of-speec...

How about AI? If it is an algorithm that is talking to you, does it have the right to do all the things that are protected by 'free speech'?

And does it matter if the AI is commercial, or a home hobby project effort?

  > Restrict your children'ss access to these platforms.

And have a severally impacted/constrained social life?

People with all kinds of hobbies use those platforms to organize group activities. You are either on there or you miss out.

I dance tango socially. The tango community, world wide, has settled on FB. Or rather: if you are a dancer, teacher, organizer or DJ, you better be on FB or else you won't know where and when to dance, how to find students, get people to attend your event or get booked. I.e. even if you decided you didn't like FB, you have no choice but to join it and thus help cement their monopoly on how people with this hobby organize themselves.

you can ristrict how you can monitize a product - I think the problem would be much smaller if you have to pay a price congruent to the value you get. Only a few people would pay for Facebook.

you can make the platforms resposinsible for what is published on them and enforce that. they would never scale this much.

> And just like the Supreme Court wrote 30 years ago, the answer is the same today: if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them.

We have already collectively agreed that this is not an argument. That is why there are agencies like the FDA, etc.

These systems are the next step in the evolution of media. Media is a complex beast with tentacles into culture and politics and individual society. We’ve known this for a long time. What’s applicable here is Marshal McLuhan, media theory, and heck David Foster Wallace. A lot of this stuff was way ahead of its time, but that time has arrived.

“The medium is the message” was a genius insight. Extending it to algorithmic media has all sorts of (disquieting) implications.

That sounds exactly wrong. I think they want their "personal parental" decisions to not be the decisions of the entire nation, but "personal" and private to themselves and to be free from judgement for wanting this thing.

> prevented access to education medical information ... you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them.

This is pretty important to me:

Abusive parents deny their children access to communication platforms.

I believe these problems cause problems for the child if the child is already lacking support, but they also represent a way to escape that abuse, so I feel strongly that controlling access to asking-for-help is not okay;

This should not be a personal decision good people can make for themselves in their homes for their own kids, because they should be able to understand that "bad" people are actually using laws and rules like this to hurt children.

> I don't use any of these products

I think you're using one right now: Hacker news is absolutely a communications platform.

sure, but not everywhere is America and some places seem to manage without slippery-sloping to eternal damnation.

They are mostly advertisement platforms coupled to recommendation engines. The "communication platform" is just side business at this point. And it's being used to wave around as "free speech" when anyone dares to question the detrimental effect of the big mass mind control machine it actually is.

But we're presently in the middle of the long transition in which not everyone has figured that out yet, and in which we don't have a widely-agreed-upon moral stance on the subject that reconciles the need to do something about it with our existing value systems.

We're going to have to find it one way or the other, so the question is "when", not "if".

No doubt in 2174 we will have a bunch of new issues that are at different places in the pipeline. We'll probably be debating the ethics of mind-control implants or something. But in the meantime this one will solved.

What's the secret to doing that? No really. How do I unsubscribe from the tracking that these platforms do on the web and in my apps?

That's the rub! I can't not use (or be used) by these platforms -- no one can!

That may have been true once upon a time (i.e. back in the day when your FB feed was chronological and random posts from unrelated/unwanted crazies would not show up on your device unless a friend forwarded it to you).

Now they are psychological manipulators (remember https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every... ?) in a quest for advertising dollars at the expense of everything else.

To be clear, I find your thoughts interesting and worth understanding, but if you also believe that the government has zero business in public health decisions involving refined sugars, then we just fundamentally disagree about what good governance is. (nevermind the social media element, which is new and evolving and a higher-dimensional problem space)

And that's ok. I will likely vote and conspire against the interests of people like this (with that view of government) until I the day I die (or my mind is changed), and cultivate communities that openly resist building the world based on those assumptions.

This assumes that humans are rational agents. I think that drug addiction, wars in Israel and Ukraine, conspiracy theorists, and free-climbers sufficiently prove that this is not the case.

If only life were so easy, we would not even need to have this discussion.

Maybe it taught you that, but there are plenty of people that grow up on the Internet who do not learn these lessons. Take a look at any conspiracy message board, group, etc.

Akin to saying something like, "let it happen, that'll teach 'em"

Unfortunately, not everything works itself out.

Just don't smoke! Just don't drink alcohol! Just don't eat junk food! Just go to the gym!

> Restrict your children's access to these platforms

That's exactly what the article suggests should happen, plus some protections for children enshrined in law. You can find these suggestions at the end of the post, in the section "What now?"

I take issue with the argument that promoting these social media platforms is tantamount to fostering free speech and denouncing them amounts to eroding this right. No one should expect technology assisted broad cast abilities as part of a doctrine of governments and the State not restricting speech.

I also disagree with the notion that limiting certain addictive communications tools from minors is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech.

Big tech already plays a alrge part in how our society is shaped and defending them means they don't have to face their responsibilities. Boiling this down a mere question of "free speech" is a very amerocentric point of view.

Here, everyone has facebook, from your grandma to your little cousin. My family is spread all over the country and you can keep in touch via text, phone but seeing what they are doing with pictures on facebook is very convenient and helpful.

Yes, the older/younger crowd do eat up conspiracies on facebook, sadly. They also don't read news sites, all the news is from facebook and TV maybe (older crowd).

Still, you are missing out a lot if you don't have it here. For example like meeting new people even. That "friends of friends" feature is immense. Kind of a social proof that you are normal/not a creep/have friends.

In the end it comes down to education. The first 7 years at home are ridiculously important. Then you have primary school for another 8 years, which is almost as important.

You don't have kids do you?

What we are missing in our society today is some essential negative freedoms.

Most of us follow J.S. Mill's idea on restricting the influence of the state. See the many comments in this thread decrying government intervention to ban social media. That's a negative freedom, from tyranny.

Mostly, we tend to emphasise positive freedoms, freedom to; run a business, share speech, own technology. And that is good.

But there are negative freedoms, freedom from; coercion, the scourge of drugs, poverty, censorship. Obviously many positive freedoms can be expressed as negative ones, but how that logic is formulated in law really matters.

Now the controversial bit:

What we are missing is laws that give people freedom from technology The supposed "choice" to participate is not enough.

Like others here I've been a non participant in social media and smartphones. I'm not a Luddite, I'm a computer scientist, but I twigged this problem very early having dealt with addiction and recognising how abuse is mediated by technology. I even wrote a book about it [1].

The problem is, life is made very difficult for those who want to exercise choice. Presently one must live as a second class citizen, in what feels like racism and prejudice of technological snobbery. It is utterly unnecessary.

Governments do not need to ban smartphones or social media for kids or for anyone. Making this only about kids is a cop-out. It's leveraging emotional messaging to side-step a bigger problem nobody wants to face - that our whole society is under siege from technology overuse. The more general problem is that we've entered a period of technological over-reach. Kids don't just feel peer pressure to get a smartphone and social media, they live in a society that wants to mandate it.

Whether for kids or adults, we need to strongly protect the rights of those who want a less technologically mediated (and encumbered - yes it's not all "convenience") lifestyle. This needs us to maintain plurality of access;

   No services for government, schools, health available *only* on
   proprietary and "smart" platforms. Requirement to maintain
   traditional paper and interpersonal modes.

   End the insanity of a "cashless society", and "smart societies"
   that exclude basic human interaction and require and assume
   smartphones with apps.

   Strongly protect the rights of parents to choose how their kids use
   technology, for example in schools, and the attitudes they are
   raised with.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative...

[1] https://digitalvegan.net/

I don’t think this is a stupid comparison, as I believe these platforms can be very harmful to children.

I've tried reporting such posts multiple times but hate filled posts are neither removed, nor restricted. If a platform cannot provide adequate moderation, it should stop operating in my country and be held responsible for providing a platform for spreading hate pseudo-anonmously.

That's not true. Those things are limited in bubbles like the one of the rationalists as well, so free speech has nothing to do with why people don't develop these things. It's a matter of character; and obedience to a system that establishes the rules that evaluate social, academic and economic status.

The Supreme Court was capable of distinguishing between free speech and moron speech but the Party was too convincing.

Most of the parents of these kids don't have the required flow of information to handle their kids consumption. And more importantly, their stress levels are too damn high already. Which is also the result of the Party's long term strategy.

And if all the other parents say it's normal and the same for their kids, even those parents where it is not the case, which are those that know that's why their kids will be better off while everything collapses (vs making sure their kids are better off while nothing collapses), then there is no way but super-rationality to identify a problem and then there's the willpower to go against the accusations and the time required for researching strategies to deal with the problem while the rest of the world, and school, and one's own life keep working as they always did.

If there's bait, the untrained puppy bites. Unless the untrained puppy was trained to bite and puke it out afterwards to find hints at who put the bait right in the path of all those innocent puppies.

That's not going to fix the echo chambers, divisive conspiracy groups, anti semitic posts and generally all the other terrible uses for online platforms that contribute to the destabilization of our society.

You can't make a social problem go away by telling individuals "if you don't like this problem please avoid it". Similarly, you can't expect to tell people "the effects of methamphetamine are negative for our entire society so please don't partake". For problems that become a state, country or even world problem, something else is needed.

There's a very clear causal relationship between IG and mental health that goes beyond a moral choice and ideals of free speech

You either play the sisyphean game of personally blocking a billion dollar company from including you. Or you reach for the long arm of the law.

We all know FAANG gave us no choice but to use government ruling.

100% my reply to any critic of teenage social media, but the parents' stance is always "but then my kid is going to FOMO and feel left out".

I feel a distinct drain in the social energy when some of the people present have their eyes glued to their phones. It would actually be better if they weren't even there.

I think that feeling of draining comes from the fact that if you do want something from them, like asking what they're ordering for food, or if we should go to another venue, you have to put in more effort. They need to do a context switch in which they look at you blankly while you bring them up to speed on what is happening.

Watching your parents turn into smartphone zombies should be a warning sign, maybe even something to rebel against.

Unfortunately children do tend to pick up their parents' behaviors, bad and good.

I tell them they spend too much time watching videos and playing games and should "branch out" into new hobbies. Do they do this? No.

That is to say, I don't think hypocrisy has anything to do with it.

Media critics: the biggest hypocrites.

What we should do is make rules for social media platforms to disallow them to develop algorithms that make people addicted. You might think how do you define that, but the companies have already made a whole science out of it so it's not that abstract anymore. It would sure be an elaborate task and will surely result in a cat and mouse game, but at least the issue would be taken seriously and people will understand better that engaging with these platforms that try to push the edges is playing with fire.

For one thing, it's more robust. The environment is messy and control is often illusory at best. Control limits freedoms and introduces centralized points of failure that can be manipulated by bad actors. Making people strong and free creates more opportunity and innovation, even though it scares the people who long to be in charge of the centralized control.

What does it mean to strengthen people to make them immune to the harms caused by social media? I don't know exactly, but I bet we could find out.

They will figure out a solution very quickly or they will simply cease to exist, and either way the problem will be solved.

It’s the commercial side of the equation that’s the problem. It’s what gives these social media companies perverse incentives when it comes to engagement. So any social media site that can’t effectively tap into the US ad market at a significant scale will not have as much of a problem. I don’t think the pre-Facebook forums was as much of a problem even though they might have had some ads here and there.

So VPNs and all that just isn’t a concern. You don’t need a great firewall. You just need to regulate commercial business, which is not at all a crazy proposition.

The other side of this is that the US really, really should implement an effective federal ID system with two factor authentication. This is becoming commonplace almost everywhere else in the world, and not having it creates very serious security and privacy risks.

It would be like creating a bank account.

You could do plenty of other things. Anything you don't need an account for isn't covered. Depending on how the law is implemented, perhaps many forums wouldn't be covered?

I think it would result in kids going to websites that their parents haven't heard of yet and don't check ids.

But really, the best policy would be constant social and educational emphasis on device parental control feature awareness - similar to drunk driving campaigns. Get parents and guardians in the habit of taking 15 min to set up basic parental controls BEFORE handing devices to kids. Rather than the all-too-common mess of reacting to a problem by taking the kids phone or making them manually show everything after the damage is already done. Maybe also compel device manufacturers to incorporate a first-time-setup flow that has a specific soft ask of "Will this device be given to or borrowed by a child?" that then handholds the owner through setting up controls.

I am skeptical of this push to elevate internet anonymity to a new fundamental principle for organizing society.

Where did it do that?

This is why I can’t take any calls for banning social media for kids on HN seriously: The moment anyone introduced any legislation to limit social media access by age, this creates a de facto requirement to verify ID. The people in this thread would be up in arms as soon as the government tried to force companies to collect their ID to use social media.

This should be enough for the risk averse to take open devices away from children and bolster parents.

It’s not important to stop every possible access, simply that adults have the authority to say no and be supported by society instead of undermined.

Or just give them some money and something to do? Why fight fire with fire, just makes bigger fire

And even more importantly you're missing the point of why people go to social networks in the first place: because everybody they know is there! If it becomes cumbersome to access, most people won't go, and then there's no more appeal. It's not as if it was porn or stuff like that, that has a purpose on its own that makes people willing to circumvent the restrictions no matter what. Social networks are “networks” and if you break the network effect, you've broken the system. American people don't go on VK not because it's less good than Facebook, but because there's no point in doing so.

doesn't have to in the general case

maybe just have it at the OS level, have parents set up the phone, prompt on setup whether it's intended for use by a minor or not, use that flag to enable/disable access to social media

that's not really the same as banning social media for all minors and imo makes too much sense, more likely that congress will push something that fucks over anonymity more

Kids are given a phone and access to social media by their parents (who are also users most likely). I don't see parents saying oh please block this out of my kid's hands with deep packet inspection or ID checks. These people can just install Family Link or whatever and set limits, and be parents. But they just won't do it. Some don't even know it exists. Kids are clocking 5h+ of mobile use / day, with poor sleep patterns and digital hygiene. No limits. That's the real issue.

Stores that sell age restricted products already can also sell "adult passes".

Each adult pass costs less than $5, and contains a single use scratch off code that you can use to prove you are of age. When you want to sign up for social media or porn, you need a code. Mutiple companies can implement and sell them.

We really underestimate how negatively it's impacting our quality of life that we don't let ourselves get bored anymore.

My kids liked to listen to the radio while in the car. We stopped doing that - they fight it but we have conversations we otherwise wouldn't. Oh, and less Doja Cat in our lives isn't such a bad thing either.

It worked so well, that alcoholism rates in Sweden are higher than in some countries where the sales of strong alcohol are not a state monopoly. A closer look shows that even the neighboring Scandinavian countries are doing better..

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcoholis...

I am really really sorry to go off-topic here, but as an European this is... So strange and slightly hilarious to me. We went to a park. Or local river/lake.

There is a brand new, massive and beautifully designed mall in The Netherlands called Westfield Mall of the Netherlands.

I went there once to quickly grab something and I got hopelessly lost, even while my phone navigation actually was able to display and navigate the layout of the mall, due to the sheer size I underestimated the navigational challenge my little trip would pose.

The mall really blew me away with its beauty and I am still completely flabbergasted how this can work financially, I perhaps incorrectly assumedthat everybody is like me, ordering everything online.

Although hard to believe, your argument may actually have a lot of thruth in it.

It takes time though, but I see a trend and a hunger among people to reclaime physical spaces and to spend more time amongst each other, making room for chance encounters etc.

Ironically, the same logic often isn't appreciated for those who choose to legally carry a gun.

Let's be real, the last thing a frantic parent in the middle of an emergency wants to deal with is a couple of school bureaucrats while attempting to get in touch with their kid. There are good reasons why everyone adopted cell phone: to increase efficiency of communication.

What about if the kid's being bullied? Half the time the teacher will side with the bully, especially if the bully's a more popular kid.

Another way to frame this is that whatever factors were leading to teen suicides in the early 90s improved.

The question now is: are the same factors in play? The fact that rates were higher is not by itself a good reason to conclude that Haidt’s theory is wrong. The world has changed drastically, and a new upward trend is still a problem even if it never reaches previous highs. At a minimum, it indicates that something is going in the wrong direction after apparently going in the right direction for awhile.

Could the current trend be caused by the same factors in 1990s? Possible, but it’s also possible that social media is the problem in the same way airplanes cause global pandemics.

Even if the reasons are the old ones, we have a new operating environment to contend with.

Some of them only remember thing being bad and getting worse.

A 20 years old with basic education is fucked. They will be surviving not living the life.

Then social media reinforces the idea of being destined for failure with all of those 'successful' 'people'

My son got inspired to cook by watching youtube. My daughter loves Vihart and wants to study math in college. I use Reddit and HN, but no Facebook or Tiktok. We also pretty much all have elevated levels of anxiety and it's all due to things happening in real life. Too much homework, annoying coworkers, annoying neighbors.

And I also observe that my kids and their classmates are just so incredibly good. There is nearly zero bullying. My son got picked on recently and his classmates jumped up and formed a circle around him like heroes. There is zero tolerance amongst even middle-school kids for anti-LGBTQ sentiment that was just basic banter for kids when I was in school. I hear this from a lot of parents. I think Gen Z and Alpha have anxiety because the adults in charge of the world are such worse people than they are.

I can't see how this is true. Anecdotally, everyone I talk to, and you most comments in this thread (and any other thread) is full of people admitting that they A. use their phone too much B. wish they didn't and C. it makes them feel bad. Again, n of 1, but I've never met someone that openly wants to use their phone more or will say that social media has been great for them.

Admittedly I haven't read the research, but how does it come to the conclusion that social media isn't causing problems?

On the other hand, Haidt's response is also inadequate, simply because he doesn't really tackle the evidence Odgers cites.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2

The vast majority of my friends and "friends" on social media haven't posted anything for years. I think my last contribution was back in 2017.

I thought social media in general is boomer / gen X town nowadays.

To Haidt's credit he did at least try a rebuttal, which is better than most situations in modern academia where outside criticisms are just ignored entirely. But he lost that debate because his responses were bad, and in this article he doubles down on the bad arguments he made last time.

He attempts to suggest that the large number of studies he collected with Twenge means there must be something there. This argument fails because when Brown randomly spot checked some of his cited studies they were all of garbage quality. Often they had nothing to do with social media at all. Haidt's response was the same as in this article: they can't all be wrong! But yes, yes they can all be wrong and Brown has strongly shown that this is likely to be the case.

Then Haidt suggests that you can derive signal from a large pile of bad studies, because if the null hypothesis were true then you'd see random results. But you can't assume that due to publishing biases, spurious correlations and other problems. For example he says that if social media didn't affect mental health, then there'd be no gender signal. That doesn't make sense. It's possible for girls to have worse mental health, and spend more time on social media, and for social media to not be the cause.

After making spurious correlation/causation arguments and denying he's doing so, he moves on to an even worse problem making his entire theory is unfalsifiable:

> much of my book is about the collective action traps that entire communities of adolescents fall into when they move their social lives onto these platforms, such that it becomes costly to abstain. It is at that point that collective mental health declines most sharply, and the individuals who try to quit find that they are socially isolated. The skeptics do not consider the ways that these network or group-level effects may obscure individual-level effects, and may be much larger than the individual-level effects.

In other words you can't even attempt to establish causality by cutting out social media use and seeing if it affects depression, because he will just immediately change his claim to assert that it was the ambient social-media-ness of society causing the depression (a much harder hypothesis to prove), and thus individual interventions can't help. And because this hypothesis is so vague, he can always fall back to claiming that whatever group intervention size is tried it wasn't big enough.

His whole essay is full of problems like this. It's basically a Gish Gallop. Vast reams of unusable paper is presented, along with panicked assertions that it's unreasonable to request valid evidence or a testable hypothesis before making law, due to the nature of the (self declared) emergency: a classic circular argument of the sort that emerges way too often in public health spheres.

There's actually a better supported alternative line of work that shows a completely different and much stronger correlation related to political ideology. But of course Haidt would rather not discuss that, as it's not amenable to legislation.

Otherwise I find it interesting how people attribute toxic discussions to online media, when the wisdom of our elders were to never talk politics at dinners to avoid having people literally beating each other.

We can't be focusing on the absolute worse with the illest use cases, and make it into a societal problem. Looking at our world today, I genuinely think we're in a better place than three decades ago when we had absolutely none of our online networks.

This is a great analogy.

Fast information dis-eases our minds as fast food diseases our body.

If those pocket PCs had useful and creative apps only and maybe some non-addiction-optimized games they’d be fine. The problem is the apps, not the hardware.

With kids the absolute worst seem to be YouTube, TikTok, and Roblox. All three are banned in our house. The kids have their own devices (with monitoring) and can play games and explore other stuff but we do everything we can to keep addiction systems away. It works fine. Our kids engage with real people when they are available and tend only to go to the screens when bored.

We don’t have a hard time limit but if we notice too much screen time we set up play dates or book activities. They’ll go for those things over screens… or at least they do now that the worst stuff is gone.

Banning YouTube was the single highest impact one. The whole mood of the family and home noticeably changed. We got our kids back. They liked their friends again. To this day my #1 piece of parenting advice is to ban YouTube. A few others too but that one seems the worst for some reason.

Engagement maximizing algorithms and UI dark patterns work incredibly well to the point that they can behave like a drug.

I lack the domain knowledge to evaluate the evidence against the null hypothesis, so you may well be correct — you just haven't actually demonstrated it with your anecdote.

We see the problems with large scale social media in every culture, and the issues are the same everywhere.

The question should be raised if humans can actually deal with large scale social media. Perhaps, just like gambling, it should be outright banned or strictly enforced to comply with heavy restrictions

When I see Youtube trying to bait me into clicking on videos with disturbing, egregious, disgusting or sexualized thumbnails even though they have nothing to do with the keywords I entered in the search box, I fully disagree. There are also algorithms at play in order to maximise social media site bottom lines.

Some social media do promote and amplify some forms of content, in spite of the user, because it's lucrative to do so for them, otherwise they would not do it.

If you browse the internet without an ad blocker, you'll see these ads on mainstream websites that are optimized for clicks the exact same way.

Depends on the experimental design. If it was an RCT with sufficient sample size, it would be causal.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1414751/

Of course, how can anyone force them (as then they could argue that a platform is social media vs online forum or else) but that could be interesting.

Also it would prevent having to be on all the platforms, since you have to pay, one would choose the one(s) they strictly prefer/need, not literally all of them.

On the Internet it's easy to feel surrounded with people even though you're not really socializing. Low-res text-based interactions that characterize most social media today don't provide enough signal for people to develop their social skills adequately, and the asynchronicity doesn't help either. Most people won't just tell you how they feel about what you're saying, but in real life that's what body language and other indirect signals are for. We've all heard stories of zoomers being less socially capable than previous generations. Now consider that the social awkwardness is not only curious from an outside perspective, but is also a perpetual source of anxiety to the people affected with it and can lead to self-isolation and other unhealthy coping behaviors.

To me the single biggest problem with western society is the idea that happiness is the ultimate goal in life. Happiness is an emotion, and you can’t force your body to experience one emotion all the time. Equanimity is the goal, and emotional control. If you tell someone they’re supposed to be happy all the time, they’re going to think something is wrong with them when they’re inevitably not.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/198332459

Also 'Free Range Parenting'

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6250260-free-range-kids-...

for example, I had found the antsiness I was reading amongst children in classrooms about to be ridiculous. younger people having fidget spinners to pay attention.

then I took a class at community college, I've been out of school for a long time, and I experienced the same thing the first couple of sessions. then I realized that not only was I having the same traits, my ability to adapt was probably due to knowing it was not normal.

in another anecdote, when I go see even older people, baby boomers, their phone etiquette and attentiveness is waaay off. like, the more disconnected someone is, the more these new things adversely affect them.

I see this as akin to the opium dens. Popular at one point, and a smaller privileged group of people creating a social circle that opted out. We'll probably look back at this dopamine addiction pretty badly.

Also whatever we have now, a worse thing is coming yet. Or at least, a newer stranger one.

Literally no one believes this. I grew up playing Resident Evil and Grand Theft Auto.

What is a smartphone? Any computer capable of connecting to a cellular network? Is an iPod touch a smartphone? Would forcing everyone onto WiFi really change much? Is an iPod touch with a Bluetooth 5G modem a smartphone? Then what? Banning battery-powered computers? You've basically destroyed the economy with how many businesses rely on laptops and tablets these days. Ban the form-factor? Is the PS Vita a smartphone? Ban the operating systems? The architectures? Is a cellular Windows x86 Microsoft Surface a smartphone? Is an Apple Watch a smartphone?

Sounds a bit cliché but those days we used internet to escape the real world. Now it's backwards. But the real world is getting worse. Those days with internet 1.0 that was a wonderful digital world for lots of us.

Anecdotally, Instagram ranks much lower than Reddit for causing problems among the young kids I’ve worked with.

Reddit is an absolutely cesspool of misinformation, fake stories, propaganda, and rampant doomerism. Scrolling Instagram can’t hold a candle to the militant doomerism that seethes from sites like Reddit.

I think it’s an uncomfortable truth for techies who grew up with Reddit while sneering at photo sharing social media, but the content on Reddit is extraordinarily cynical and depressing.

I can ignore/laugh with/block/modreport That One Guy, I can't do anything about an infinite number of marketers.

whoops

And as for technological means of surveillance and content control, parents here on HN struggle to make that work. The average parent with average tech skills stands virtually no chance of making it work. Kids have been known to do things like get old phones from somebody in school and use it on the neighbor's wifi. Trying to control their devices and access to the internet is basically impossible.

Natural selection results in people and animals who are impulsive, selfish, greedy, and lazy, it's only by great effort that people can overcome this and be better animals. We naturally trend towards these base instincts like a child trends towards eating the bread and fruit on their dinner plate, ignoring their vegetables. Even children know that actions have consequences, and can demonstrate some self-control.

But social media is like a highly addictive candy bar. Completely unregulated, laden with high fructose corn syrup, MSG, and artificial flavors, and (for the sake of analogy) addictive drugs engineered with the only goal being maximum profit.

Human nature can only withstand so much! There's no reason to expect our brains to be strong enough to resist the machinations of millions of brilliant engineers with sophisticated technology trying to overcome our self control.

Sounds a lot like gambling. Perhaps we should regulate it the same way.

Like guns, we have a hard time coming to the right conclusions

I agree with you, but I believe these qualities are a bit more fixed that people are willing to admit. I'm not suggesting that we can't do better than we're currently doing. Instead that the impulse control & maturity required to handle smart phones and social media responsibly escapes most of the general population in a way that other technologies have not previously.

In other words, you can rightly yell at folks that they need more impulse control, intelligence, etc. But you'll be yelling into the void. Most people lack the mental tools to deal with these things successfully, and will keep coming up short.

1. No smartphones for kids before high school — give them only flip phones in middle school.

2. No social media before age 16.

3. Make schools phone-free, by putting devices in phone lockers or Yondr pouches.

4. Give kids far more free play and independence, including more and better recess.

I can't argue with any of the above.

The truth is Asian merit based dictatorship has transformed farm lands to economic giants within a generation, stable, peaceful society. Singapore wouldn't be where it is without government intervention. South Korea would've never been able to create Samsung without military rule. Japan certainly would not have survived a full open democracy. Taiwan wouldn't have lived to see TSMC without Chiang Kai Shek.

But China's model is not based on merit but on lineage. This is why that society will never be stable, peaceful like its neighbours. It's actually a lot worse than Western democracy and should serve as a warning to those that wish to experiment with benevolent dictatorship without merit.

Frankly, social media should maybe be highly regulated like prescription drugs. A lot of people can't handle social media and it is tearing democracy apart.

That argument is taken from thin air. There's nothing to substantiate it.

> Just because you as an old man view the younger generations social interactions

It's not about their social interactions, it's about the addictive properties of mobile phones in combination with social media.

> To me this seems like ...

And to me, you sound like an addict defending his addiction.