I hope the U16 ban in Australia works and more countries adopt that approach.
As to our children, they have never had either a smartphone or unmonitored access to the internet. It's that simple.
Through the twist of fate that is the pandemic combined with living in public housing, they were already home-schooled as they didn't need to be around other adolescents watching "Game of Thrones" or porn, or listening to Black Metal or the more ignorant kinds of Hip Hop (glorifying wealth, violence, objectification of women, and braggadocio).
We are each the product of many different cultures, which we then combine into our own individual cultural worldview. Few people appear able to apersonally evaluate their cultural tendencies, so they are susceptible to influence from the dishonest, immoral and/or belligerent.
They were raised with compassion and taught why we should be as compassionate as possible to every single person, and that makes them a delight for every single person they encounter. I have found that surrounding them by good people, ideas, attitudes, and behaviors was important to their development.
Keeping them away from submorons who are both ignorant and overconfident is an important factor in the development of young adults. I know this deeply because -- while not myself belligerent -- I was a total dipshi_t as a teenager.
I do not blame my parents for my idiocy, for they worked their asses off to provide for us. I blame our society for not facilitating our being able to have responsible adults around to educate myself and my peers.
My first rule of parenting is to not let children raise children. When left to their own devices (PNI), they tend to gravitate to the worst ideas, and the younger kids will learn from their elders' abyssmal examples.
It is true, those (relatively younger) children think that they still hold the Gramcsian hegemony-like hold on what’s considered to be the “truth”, and hence the non-“extreme”, but that has stopped happening with the advent of social networks and the democratization of information (think of how happy everyone was about that democratization via social media when the Arab Spring started).
Somebody should write a study to show the correlation between the pension funds getting bigger and bigger and the number of companies getting in/out of the the S&P500 or Dow Jones getting lower and lower over time. That second number getting lower and lower means less innovation, means less real wealth going into the future, means less real money for people who are now in their 30s and 40s.
I’d say that many of the NIMBY policies also respect that premise, i.e. government-supported decisions that help keep the wealth among the elderly by (artificially) keeping the existing home prices up (and it is known that those houses are some of the most important assets that said elderly people own).
Previously, when some new social shift occurred there would be an initial conservative backlash. However, over time as people were exposed to the change they would see that it wasn't actually the end of the world and find ways to adapt their views to find a "new normal" that allowed the old and new to coexist.
That doesn't seem like it's the case anymore. People are fed a constant stream of media designed to keep them afraid of anything that's different such that they don't have a chance to experience the other side and find a middle ground.
Seems pretty extreme to me.
I wonder how accurate this is.
I have no account in any social media except in LinkedIn (which I see more as a job portal than social media), and that's how I raise my kids. I live without facebook, instagram, twitter, or whatever else and I'd risk to say life is better without those.
"For instance, news stories that express outgroup animosity are 67% more likely to be shared on social media (Rathje et al., 2021). "
They are holding an extreme view and posting it online.
Personally, and this is a bit of a "hot take", but I think some people trying to define a difference is just trying to justify continue using HN and forums like Reddit while still hating on social media or wanting it banned. To be consistent with getting off social media, I think one ought to get off HN and Reddit completely as well (use a site blocker extension). But yeah this is a bit of an inflammatory opinion, I understand.
That being said, voting mechanisms which change the order of user-contributed content is hallmark of social media shared by Hacker News. I like to think, though, that this place has a strong enough community to prevent the voting dynamics from devolving to what you see on the most politicized subreddits. (I'll mention that the quality on here is in no small part the result of dang's diligent moderation, btw!)
An interesting message board to compare Hacker News with in this regard is actually 4chan. The former is maybe less social media like inasmuch as we have no inline images here, so there is no room for the sort of meme culture you see on the latter. On the other hand, 4chan is entirely bereft of voting (and even accounts to assign karma to, although reusable tripcodes come the closest), and as such is in some ways even more egalitarian (in contrast to non-anonymous social media).
The former are general concepts, while the latter are specific companies that are arguably damaging enough to be worth banning at the level of the whole society (except maybe in their home countries, which of course makes the situation harder to deal with).
we already know the answer to the ills of social media, the better solution would be to force companies to have chronological feeds and non algorithmically targeted suggestions.
Why? Because the good it adds to society is trivial. You know how I know? Because I know plenty of people who do not use it and they are getting along just fine. I also know people who pretty much do not use the internet outside of work and get along fine.
We are told we need these things by people who are selling us these things.
And what you are saying is we should teach these kids how to live in a horrible, distorted attention economy that is warping our social norms to an extreme instead of building them a healthy society and economy.
Most people do not live online. They use the Internet because they need to (and usually hate it while they do) or simply as a tool to communicate or amuse.
They don’t care about AI, or federated this and that, or about open source, or about walled gardens, or any of that sort of stuff.
And in this case you have a handful of companies that are responsible so it will be much easier to enforce vs trying to prevent every small shop from selling stuff illegally.
If you take that time period out, there is no decrease from the start of the war on drugs till the first iPhone in youth use of drugs.
Lastly, you forgot all these big companies started off as small, hard to regulate websites, which will be where kids flock to avoid 'teen accounts' and 'bans' and everything else
Point: We have banned murder, which obviously does not work perfectly.
If you believe that people do not kill because it is illegal, you are on a shaky ground.
Crime statistics imply that most murders are results of either passion or pre-meditated/ well planned. These have nothing to do with legality of it. We have to have the law for an entirely different reason.
there is no nuance - if you made murder legal there would be A TON of murders, it is that simple (I personally might pop a cap in couple of people that have wronged people I love)
This is an assumption.
> it is that simple (I personally might pop a cap in couple of people that have wronged people I love)
I dont think so. I will bet good money that you don not have what it takes to kill. Most people do not.
of course it is an assumption (lets keep it that way :) )
The supposition that there are significant number of murderers walking among us that would not murder because it is illegal has no basis.
btw this is an assumption too :)
I will bet good money that you don not have what it takes to kill. Most people do not.
you are forgetting that humans by their very nature are animals... and also predators. you are thinking about a little more civilized humans, your Mom and Pop in Boise, Idaho. in large parts of this Earth human life is expendable - civilized places have laws in place to ensure this be the case. I am certainly not saying that if you legalize murder we'd all start shooting each other but there is a much better change that happens than that "most people won't have what it takes..."
People understanding the negative consequences of potential actions is a bedrock of society.
If a person is not amenable to acting out of compassion for others, they should at least have a fear of the repercussions for being violent towards them.