Instagram Teen Accounts
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Or how to ignore the fact that the problem with social media is not harmful content, it's the social media itself. The addiction, the loss of time, and the constant comparison with others. Go design a social media without those.
The nature of social media just leads to it's very unhealthy problems. By taking away the ability for social media to make viral posts, you take away a lot of the reason people use it. To see popular posts and memes. Then nobody uses it, so nobody sees the ads, so advertisers leave, etc etc.
Personally, I'd be happy if we all went back to interest forums that aren't reddit. But I'm not going to pretend that age is going to come back without deeply overreaching legislation.
Connect with just your friends and family, and optionally groups/pages.
My goodness I wish I could go down to just friends and family on Facebook. Maybe 6 months ago they started aggressively showing other groups I don't care about. Right now, it showed:
3 posts from pages or friends I follow
17 from pages I have never cared about or followed
1 from a page I follow
23 from pages I have never followed
It feels more like reddit than what I care about most - my friends and family.
Unfortunately it doesn't get rid of sponsored posts or reshares of pages/links from friends, but its closer.
Even that has two major flaws:
First, people while using it compare other's highlights to their own norm. Look, this couple can afford a fancy vacation while we don't.
Second, it was still a tool to peer int other people's lives, and gossip.
The most attention capturing innovations will take the market. If Facebook didn’t stay on top of it, someone else would.
There is very little parasocial relationship on the platform although this could definetly grow as channels become a medium for influencers.
It’s crazy that Americans can be on Instagram 8 years before having a sip of alcohol.
We should raise the COPPA consent age at least 16, but probably 18.
And their citizens can sign up for Instagram. “Oh, I’m Russian, we don’t have that.”
And realistically, if Meta et al wanted to stop harming entire generations of developing minds, they could obviously use their immense data infrastructure to separate actual Russian from allegedly-Russian children.
So all you really need is corporate buy-in (and toothsome regulations is a perfectly fine way to produce buy-in where markets fail to do so)
Edit: realized you’re talking about the case of Russian services being marketed to American children. That too seems straightforward to produce meaningful obstacles, with sufficient appetite from regulators.
In reality, your smart 10 year old isn’t powering the toxic social dynamics of social media. It’s the armies of average intelligence kids seeking engineered dopamine hits.
Network effects work for network dissolution just the same as they work for network growth, which is of course why Meta would never voluntarily do anything that could kick off the popular kids, even if your prodigy could bypass it with no problem.
Note: “All those kids are already addicted and so they’ll be highly motivated too!” is a call to action, not to inaction.
How often do you see 14 year olds joyriding cars?
(Allllll the time. My kids figured out how to bypass the pihole within a day, without even knowing I’d installed it.)
Same for the school; they don’t want kids YouTubing in class, but “a laptop for everyone” is the standard now, the teachers do a lot on Teams, etc. Kids are smart and motivated, and they share techniques. They find ways.
Plus, expect more services to verify IDs in an effort to combat AI spam.
Because there's not really a service for that. However, there are turnkey plugins for keeping <18 year olds off your site.
> Raising the age likely just means more hassle
It either increases the hassle, or increases the effectiveness- not both. If you're not verifying ages, then who cares what the number is?
I struggle to think of time on Instagram being well spent. Perhaps less badly spent?
Also I wonder how they'll do age verification and "parent" verification, might end up being very trivial for most teens to work around the restrictions using secondary accounts. Thinking about it, the policy might be more for show than anything else.
There are a lot of people that use Instagram to follow artists for inspiration for art. This seems like a pretty good way to spend time.
Still not letting my kids have social media accounts (FB, IG, TT, X) until their later teens (messaging groups with friends they already have -- Messenger Kids, despite being a FB app, is pretty good for that).
They just want to ensure that when the kids become "of age", that they'll still be on Meta's services in some shape or form.
What happens when these strict restrictions cut someone off from their support systems?
Always lacking in these conversations is a proper definition of "social media". Kids want to talk to their friends, many want to be social, so if we're going to talk about the dangers of social media we need to be specific. E.g. the problems with algorythmic content are entirely different to the issues of bullying and inappropriate direct messaging. Conflating them under a "social media is bad" banner doesn't help us build healthier, safer systems.
It is insane that someone thinks that an impressionable child/young adult wasting ~ 1/16 of their waking time every day on this drivel is OK! But, I guess profit motive gotta win over sanity.
I could justify "5 minutes", maybe "10 minutes". But I am not the one making money from selling their attention and selling them pointless shit.
In my household the policy is and remains: kids can have instagram/facebook/tiktok/$latestMindRottingShit when they buy their own phone and their own cell plan.
At least a handful of the "cool kids" from my school are wildly successful millionaires.
Pressure can turn some people into diamonds (you, apparently), but it can also crush them psychologically.
I agree that anything past 15 minutes undeniably unhealthy. But large masses of people are very commonly online for hours upon hours. And all along and alongside there's TV.
So this 60 minutes seems very out of touch.
And I would consider myself a failure as a parent if my kid aspired to such a low standard as "like large masses of people"
> It is insane that someone thinks…
This is overly critical. Social media is an addiction. We're an a new epidemic and we have to assess how to respond. We should be discussing treatments in a similar vein of drug rehabilitation.
So I think shooting for your kids to only get 15 minutes is the right value, but very tricky and risky in how one gets there.
Have you been through a drug addiction? I have. I wouldn't compare having an account on a social media platform to being addicted to hardcore drugs. It doesn't make you sound very smart.
Social media is addictive, like a drug addiction. And there's a spectrum to it.
Gee I wonder how that can go wrong.
Based