Governor Newsom signs bill to protect kids from social media addiction
gov.ca.gov
gov.ca.gov
You get a cabinet with a bunch of cubbie holes, kids put their phone in at the beginning of class, they take it out at the end of class. They can even lock and each kid takes a key with them if theft is a concern. It doesn't seem that complicated. They have these things outside every SCIF. I know they exist.
But you don’t even have to take the phone out of the possession of the student.
They use these at some phone free concerts.
I don't understand why this is hard to enforce, or requires special laws. We had rules about not using (feature) phones back when I was in middle school (~2002), and you just kept your phone in your backpack/pocket until the class was over. It worked.
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/student-discipline-are-...
If someone brandished a knife at my workplace they would be immediately fired, never to return. At SPS that's just a stern talkin' to.
I have four kids in school and while extreme incidents are rare, if I set my kid to school with a phone it would be to contact me in an emergency. I completely agree with no phones out, on silent, etc., but I’m unsure how I feel about schools taking away tools that could be used to get help.
If a child says they don’t have any cigarettes or a knife etc. etc. are you going to search them?
Most kids follow the rules. A few troublemakers with phones won’t make a difference and can be easily handled by existing disciplinary actions.
Just as a proxy, weee use is against the rules by definition for middle and high schoolers
Heck even when I was in school kids had beepers (late 80s - early 90s) when they were not allowed to.
I don't get it, people break rules so just don't have them? What? Why would we do that?
So the current situation with out-of-control phone use in schools is interesting/puzzling to me, because clearly something's changed since then—but I don't think "better smartphones" are the differentiating factor here. Something's shifted with how schools enforce (or don't enforce) these policies, or with kids' relationship to their phones (and believe me, I was plenty hooked on mine back then too :P), or something else entirely.
It's also puzzling when people argue that smartphones have opened a Pandora's box that makes it impossible to control student behavior—because I know firsthand that that's not true!
[1] I think the threat of punishment also forced us to be relatively discreet about it. If you're texting in class, you have your phone on silent, brightness all the way down, barely sticking out of your bag...
[2] Some teachers admittedly gave more of a shit than others, but I rarely saw students taking advantage of that in a disruptive way—the most blatant thing you'd see is a kid listening to music on headphones during art class or something. I might've been the biggest offender in that regard, because I would occasionally bust out a Wiimote and N64 emulator to play Mario 64 on my phone, but I knew when I could get away with that and when I couldn't.
Kids complain to parents.
Parents complain to teacher. Teacher tells parent to pound sand. Parent complains to administration about unfair teacher. Administration takes a “customer is _always_ right” mindset for various reasons, and teacher told to not enforce. Or the rule is changed.
Some parents refuse to allow their child to do anything wrong (by moving the goalposts of “wrong”, assuming their child is always right, etc), some have anxiety if they can’t reach their child instantly via text, some parents refuse to enforce rules they don’t understand or agree with.
Have you ever gotten into that situation, as a kid, where you argued with an adult about how stupid their kid was? That's the summum of the situation you just described. Good times.
When you were in high school, none of your teachers had grown up with smartphones. Today, many have, maybe even a majority depending on the teacher demographics at a particular school.
Not saying this is the entire explanation, or exactly what it might explain, but it seems likely to at least be related somehow.
To elaborate: Certainly for me as a highschooler, I was bored out of my mind with how easy and mind-numbing the curriculum was, and as my mother refused to let me drop out and try for college early, I felt stuck for years just feeling utterly imprisoned and wasting my time. Books, drawing, writing, sure, but no doubt about it, my phone (and through it, the internet) was also one of my big escapes back then.
Noted because yeah, I can actually tell that prior to thinking about this now, in the place of many teachers I might have been very sympathetic to teens using their phones "discretely", even if it might not at all be the best thing for most of them. Especially anyone for whom it's the only source of entertainment or anti-boredom.
Can't say I understand it for elementary schoolers, or students who are obvious underperformers, but it does seem teachers who grew up with smartphones before they were out of high school could be a big aspect, just from the empathy factor.
They got addicted to the dopamine feedback loop smartphones provide when their brains were even further undeveloped and don't remember a time before that so this is their norm.
Parents have thrown up their hands and given up, pretending that it's impossible to avoid buying their kids expensive super computers engineered to steal the attention of their users rather than just buying their kids dumb Nokia bricks and letting them learn to be bored and cultivate the ability to direct their attention and concentration.
This is it. The other parts are tangential to the true cause.
Plus, the phones are much more expensive than they used to be. A teacher confiscating a phone could very well be confiscating $1,000+, making it a harder justify to a lot of parents.
I think the lack of discipline (not just punishment, but more order and integrity) in schools will only worsen the societal problems we are already seeing. Is there any reason to think that allowing kids to be thugs in school won't lead to them being thugs in life?
Yes, sorry, I meant enforcement in general. Parents and admins are absolutely a big part of that.
"A teacher confiscating a phone could very well be confiscating $1,000+, making it a harder justify to a lot of parents."
Those parents should probably reconsider their justification of buying a $1k device for a child if that child can't be responsible with it.
These parents not only want, but EXPECT, to be able to directly communicate with their child at any given time. It's also extremely common for them to track their children's phones via Life360 and thoroughly monitor every aspect of their kid's lives. This even, now, extends to college. Parents will literally email professors and perform tasks for their kids (or adults).
The helicopter parenting in the US has gotten completely out of control and nobody knows what to do. Kids aren't playing outside because of phones; they're not playing outside because parents are terrified.
Kids no longer even have to argue for their grades. The parents will, literally, side with their kid and force better grades for their kid. Parent-teacher conference isn't what you think it is anymore.
Teachers don't give a shit because they can't. Nobody supports them here. I mean, they can't even implement a late policy anymore. Seriously, if you don't accept an assignment that's 1 week late, you'll never hear the end of it. And then the principal complains, and then you're fucked. Which is why we have no late policy and infinite retakes and on and on. They couldn't enforce no phones because they have no power.
By the way, most parents I speak to would love to have their kids off their phones and focusing on school during the day. This whole "parents, emergency" argument seems highly suspicious to me.
Respectfully, most parents I've met do not agree with you. And I don't think that the random events like school shootings and bomb threats have helped them relax into the same environment we had in the 90's.
I’m certainly in the camp of personal devices having no place outside of a backpack. We shouldn’t let our anxiety run things.
The parent has to talk to the school on the phone to release their kid from class anyway.
What does this actually accomplish that improves kids' safety?
Especially when to satisfy their anxiety, they give their kids expensive electronics that drastically increase their risk for depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, disordered eating, executive dysfunction, etc.?
Solutions exist for those who care to look.
Phones are powerful tools. Ideally kids would learn how to use them properly while respecting their sharp edges. Ya know, more work for teachers on budgets that are already under attack and such.
> In talking to teachers across the country, the reasons phone policies don't work or are not implemented center on three main issues: safety (parents want their children to be reachable, especially during our era of heightened school violence), liability (phones are expensive, and in some districts, teachers have been held liable when they confiscated a phone the student later claimed was damaged), and lack of clear, consistent policy support (it can be difficult to rally an entire staff around a policy, maintain energy for its consistent enforcement, and make sure the work of its enforcement is upheld equitably).
Almost every kid has a phone...if the phone isn't in the cubby they aren't counted as being there. Cabinet locked at beginning of class.
There are only 2 students out of his entire year that don't have a phone and he makes allowances for them.
They have done well in districts my kids have been in.
State wide top down rules is too disconnected from the front lines for me to believe they’re anything but legislative theater.
They need a state law to back them up so that they can tell the parents to take it to their legislature instead of the principal.
> Enforcing limits on students is the job of parents
Luckily in California we understand the value of protecting kids over uninformed adults. That's why we require vaccines to attend school.
Oh, but they most certainly can. See the aforementioned vaccine laws. Or the law that provides free breakfast and lunch to every California student regardless of income. Of the law that requires dental coverage for anyone in the state under 18 (and provides it to those who can't afford it).
No matter how bad your parent is about feeding you, at least you know you'll get breakfast and lunch every school day, and you can get your teeth checked.
There are many laws that protect against poor parenting.
They have to manage day by day enforcement and so on.
I'm a student in an IT technical school. The only thing this affected is now instead of my classmates playing on their phones during class, they're now loudly playing card games - and now people who do want to learn can't because the teacher has to constantly stop and yell at the people playing cards.
I think students should be able to do whatever they want during breaks - they can do actually useful things with their devices, other than scrolling social media or playing games.
Also, this new ban completely eliminated kahoot and similar, since phones are collected at the start of the day and giving them out for a class involves incredible amounts of paperwork. (So much for modern teaching/learning methods)
From [1]:
> A co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill intended to protect children from the dangers of social media and other online content appeared to suggest in March that the measure could be used to steer kids away from seeing transgender content online.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/sena...
If they collect data and it turns out the laws aren't helpful or the laws are actually harmful, then the politician's career and reputation may be trashed. But if they pretend like the law can't possibly be bad and never check on that, then they're protected.
TikTok now has "feed mirroring" for adults to use with their teens, so they can see what the algorithm is pushing at them. And Instagram now has a teen mode that lets parents choose which topics show up in their feed and disables notifications at night.
If I am reading the legislation [0] correctly, teenagers now have to tell Spotify what song to play one after another, every single time one track ends. Unless someone has previously made a playlist (I think) - in which case you can only listen to playlists that you or (someone else has made) if you are a teenager.
I'm surprised that the music industry let this happen to them.
[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
I’m curious, have you read the book?
On the other hand, data on this issue is mixed, and some studies contradict one another.
Another quote from the article you linked
Haidt argues that waiting for stronger evidence could be even more dangerous. He writes: “If you listen to the alarm ringers and we turn out to be wrong, the costs are minimal and reversible. But if you listen to the skeptics and they turn out to be wrong, the costs are much larger and harder to reverse.” … as a mother, as someone who writes about the harms of tech and tech companies, I see his point.
totally onboard with the concept; but what is the burden of proof that a feed is "addictive"? If it falls on the state, then this probably won't have much effect (other than maybe to scare tech companies to be a bit more careful, which is maybe the best we can hope for)
Daily use growing? So basically social media companies' KPIs.
We had envisioned something like PADDs on Star Trek or the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but what we got was an jingly electronic mirror that bullies you. I don't know how we are so okay with this. Keeping phones out of schools is not the cure. Keeping evil and harmful apps off the phones is a more precise solution.
Most didn't actively make that choice. They were coerced, peer pressured, or otherwise tricked into making it.
> We had envisioned something like PADDs on Star Trek or the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but what we got was an jingly electronic mirror that bullies you.
Beautifully put.
As someone with a troubled teen and a witness to numerous other parents dealing with troubled teens, it's virtually impossible to prevent them from doing whatever they want these days unless you literally lock them up 24/7. Even then they will weaponize reporting you to CPS with lies about abuse. Many of these kids are growing up in perfectly decent homes and taught well by their parents, but they get influenced by their peers to cause trouble.
You should’ve been more involved earlier on if your kid is getting involved in gang violence, getting weapons, and is going to be out there shooting people. You failed big time.
A lot of these kids don’t grow up in good homes - the parents are negligent and incompetent. They play dumb just like you are doing.
Provide evidence for your claims, please. Having troubled children is bad enough without having to deal with this type of ignorance.
And yes, I'm mostly referring to Republican lead legislation that encourages or enforces conversion therapy, minority disenfranchisement (Haitians most recently, but also black, mMuslum, and Palestinian groups), and anti-LGBTQIA+ (more specifically anti-trans) actions.
Legislators want it, site owners want to be able to prove their users are real people, advertisers, as well, etc.
Can social media be addictive? Yes. Should we trust the government when it claims it wants to "protect the children?" Absolutely not.
This will end up being about enabling surveillance, harassment of minorities and policing political wrongthink, like every other such initiative. And it's kind of sad that Hacker News, which is usually critical of the motives of government almost to a fault, is willing to let its hatred of social media excuse naked and authoritarian power grabs like this.
Like y'all rise up if Apple tries to track CP on people's phones but if someone declared all social media illegal tomorrow most people here would have a party.
Used to be, you could buy a newspaper and print your viewpoint, but everyone could see it.
Now, you can trivially individually target users, invisible to any oversight.
How is that not an existential threat to democracy? (Whether from a foreign nation-state or anyone else is immaterial)
Western governments do a pretty good job of protecting kids from labour exploitation, for example.
But that's because it's relatively easy to enforce. Protecting them from other harms is more difficult and involves tradeoffs with personal or parental freedoms.
I really don't think these initiatives are intentional power grabs... although you're correct that opportunist entitites will exploit these regulations to empower themselves.
The moment I hear a politician say "protect the children" is the moment that I want to know what kind of garbage they're trying to pull under our noses. It rarely comes across as being little more than a pretext to pass some other agenda through.
Also, it shouldn't be the role of social media to ensure the existence of Israel, even if one assumes that opposition to their actions in Gaza is de facto opposition to their existence as a state, which I wouldn't.
Also what you're describing immediate, unfiltered journalism which provides one of the strongest arguments against having social media be regulated by governments. Seeing the cruelty and violence of government unfiltered by media gatekeepers and in realtime is a good thing. Americans should have the opportunity to question their government's unwavering support for Israel and the consequences of their own imperialism.
Of course social media can also be just as much a platform for propaganda and misinformation as traditional media, but it's also easier to undermine than traditional media. We need a way for the masses to be able to publish to the masses, and social media is currently the best option to allow that, even with its downsides.
Sorry I call bull on this. In the first part of your comment you say 'agree 100%' and in the latter part you yourself say 'how low support has plummeted' and imply social media is to blame. In what way is 'low support' == 'agree 100%' ? It sounds like you're calling for some form of censorship to enforce 100% agreement.
But it's not just funny sad: it also has real effects on real people and invokes the use of force in a situation where there is no coercion or damage being done.
The mitigations for the actual situation would be much different than the performative situation. Anxiety/depression in minors has indeed gone up since 2019. But the causes are not screens. Rising housing, food, etc prices relative to incomes, the whole worldwide pandemic, knowledge of environmental damage, and increasing totalitarianism and conflicts around the world account for most of that.
In terms of what government can do, they can address the core issue of fractional reserve banking without periodic debt forgiveness meaning there is always more debt than money supply leading to worse lives and conflict for everyone including young people. To truly make peoples lives better we should have government act to create a sustainable system not pretend mandating what's on screens will fix things.
Health advisory on social media use in adolescence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35874670 - May 2023 (169 comments)
Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35095031 - March 2023 (189 comments)
Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901571 - February 2023 (640 comments)
Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31405859 - May 2022 (474 comments)
Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268222 - May 2022 (1074 comments)
Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25928310 - January 2021 (348 comments)
Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998698 - November 2016 (548 comments)
Edit: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/social-media-teens-menta... ("Social media harms teens’ mental health, mounting evidence shows. What now?")
> Researchers delved into whether the platform’s introduction across college campuses in the mid 2000s increased symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. The answer was a clear yes, says MIT economist Alexey Makarin, a coauthor of the study, which appeared in the November 2022 American Economic Review. “There is still a lot to be explored,” Makarin says, but “[to say] there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, to that I definitely object.”
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20211218 ("Social Media and Mental Health")
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29296-3 ("Windows of developmental sensitivity to social media")
[1] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/01/24/parenti...
[3] https://recursiveadaptation.com/p/the-growing-scientific-cas...
Policy makers do the job the public says and the public is fine not arguing for new systems, just improving their own lot through minor reforms. See teacher strikes; soon as they get theirs, they quit bothering with the labor organization…more pageantry, little else
If healthcare was the tent pole of our economy; still needs STEM Ed, still needs technology, still needs the physical logistics we have; doesn’t need stupid jobs people could do on down time
We need to stop with the minor reformism of trickle down which was only ever an obfuscated sarcastic joke about poor people
> Psychologist Candice Odgers recently stated the skeptics' case in an essay in Nature titled The Great Rewiring: Is Social Media Really Behind an Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness?
The second and third are by the same person, who keeps mentioning his new book for some reason.
The fourth includes a counterpoint:
> “Those who feel worse may turn to social media for solace or community,” Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, said of the research. “It’s not a vacuum, it works both ways."
The fifth is an opinion piece by a computer scientist about careers.
Oh, you added some more while I was writing this. Stop it?
So for the two extra ones: the APA one opens with "Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people." The other one is by the same guy as the NYT opinion piece, who incidentally also has a new book out on the subject.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/421...
Continued unregulated access to social media is likely to cause harm to children and teens, based on available evidence. Not having access? What harm does that cause?
My reply to that is that in fact newspapers, paperback romance and adventure novels, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock music, television, video games and pornography probably have been broadly harmful (particularly to children and teenagers) but we didn't have a detailed neuroscientific description of the mechanism of harm when they were introduced, so the people pointing out the harms were ignored or shouted down, and now that those things are no longer in the news, people believe they know all they need to know about them, with the result that most believe that the verdict of history is that those thing are benign.
And it is tricky because all of those things plus social media and Youtube can be and often are used in such a way that they do not cause harm. And they all have positive effects as well as harmful effects.
(I must confess to being a jazz user.)
You forgot to mention the letter P, which of course stands for Pool.[0]
Seriously, I don't see how one can even call this a falsifiable theory, let alone a "fact". Care to elaborate as to why you believe this?
Bill text:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
> “Addictive feed” means an internet website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users are, either concurrently or sequentially, recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information provided by the user, or otherwise associated with the user or the user’s device, unless any of the following conditions are met, alone or in combination with one another: (1) The information is not persistently associated with the user or user’s device, and does not concern the user’s previous interactions with media generated or shared by others. [And some other more trivial exceptions.]
So basically it's banning suggestion algorithms accompanied by tracking. And since I personally hate suggestion algorithms accompanied by tracking, it's hard to feel very upset by a law against it ... except that makes me feel sleazy and unprincipled if I base this only on my own preferences. The general idea is to prevent the unwitting sinking into echo-chambers where the world is made to look a particular way by a feedback effect (an automated one, in fact). That might be a good law.
I do, as I think you asked somebody else, [edit: as somebody else asked somebody else] object to the inaccurate use of the word "addiction".
Now how is this offensive to you?
Also, to argue back, we have to actually read the fucking things.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social...
[2] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/social-media-teen-mental-h....
What a silly statement. There is 100% such a thing as social media addiction and it is real.
Apps consume mass amounts of data in attempts to keep you using their app for as long as possible and build a uniquely tailored experience just for you to keep you coming back.
So, you can still use TikTok or Facebook or Instagram, just without the hyper-personalized discovery/FYP/etc feeds.
I'm cautiously optimistic, since this kind of block doesn't really create a moat around existing businesses. And frankly, I like that kind of non-personalized feed sometimes.
EDIT: Downvoters, that's from the text of the bill itself. I recommend reading it if you don't trust (or don't like) this TL;DR.