Lets ban TV, video games, rock and roll music and dungeons and dragons, too. When I was growing up, those were what was harming children at an industrial scale.
> I think it is a very good thing that alarms were rung about teen smoking, teen pregnancy, drunk driving, and the exposure of children to sex and violence on TV. The lesson of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is not that after two false alarms we should disconnect the alarm system. In that story, the wolf does eventually come.
That page also shows some graphs that to this day still surprise me, namely, the way in which rates of depression and psychological stress among teens explode around 2010. Unlike TV and DnD, this time we do have data, and it looks bad.
[1] https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
It was something like "The Japanese plan is to make our children stupid with their animations to overtake us"
It might be true but also you don't put your child in front of the TV at 3 years old...
It is like serving them beer and then blaming the Belgians for turning our kids into alcoholics.
Censorship is often justified by comparisons to physical substances like this - chemicals can irreparably harm your body, therefore ideas can irreparably harm your brain. I don't believe that these are the same. There's no way to really prove it, but there is a way to prove that censorship (which is what banning social media amounts to) _is_ objectively bad.
Kids are gonna be able to once in a while get their hand on porn, a beer, a cigarette or whatever.
The problem is the lack of supervision and parents who use devices to avoid having to take care of their children.
However Tiktok is banned in China; the domestic app Douyin promotes content differently.
I mean if you look at how some of those 40-50 year olds are behaving in public and voting maybe they were right?
Forgetting the adults in the room who still want to lean into all kinds of disingenuous what-aboutism for a moment, and just considering kids who are understandably self-interested in defense of their addictions.. really now. How could a generation of people who grew up wanting to be influencers actually be ignorant of the effectiveness of algorithmic manipulation? It's a contradiction. So why the insistence on some absurd comparison to old media? I'm all for nuance but there's not much of that to be had. I'd settle for a little reflection, sincerity, and logical consistency.
The same is true of the second call. If we dismiss the need to explain why this case is different as just disingenuous what-aboutism to be ignored the argument is left as "if one takes this as problematic then it's clear how it'll be problematic to counter". There's still no persuasion of why it's differently problematic if you don't already see reasons why yourself, just the assertion it is if one thinks enough (which could be asserted about anything true or false).
I think the biggest things that make this problem unique from the media context GP provided are:
- The individualized and targeted nature of the algorithmic feed being a different type of influence concern than content for mass or group consumption.
- The above individualized nature leading into much stronger "echo chamber" polarization, especially when combined with the endless and always on nature of the feeds.
- The content itself is delivered in many more technological layers of dark patterns than traditional mass/group media ever carried.
The only argument I hear a lot which I exclude from my list is the quality/type of content. I think, if you remove the above problems, the content would really not be as different from typical content as we'd like to think. I know others disagree and say it's the short nature itself which is harmful but I don't think that's actually a new unique argument to why people are worried about this latest media trend.
Everyone on every point of the political spectrum claims that the basic principle is true. That we can be manipulated to believe untrue things and to behave inappropriately and in maladaptive manners. We just tend to disagree on which media and which content does so.
1. The concerns about D&D were quite different. Most parents admired the creativity involved in role-playing. The concerns came from a relatively small subset of parents who were concerned about the morality of the subject matter (monsters, demons etc.). For the record, I thought at the time that these concerns were pretty silly and had little merit, and still do.
2. Just because there have been moral/social panics in the past, doesn't mean the concerns about social media today are invalid. Sometimes worries are wrong, sometimes they are right. Having been wrong before does not make it rational to never be concerned again.
3. It is entirely possible that concerns about high-volume TV watching were correct. Just because my generation (X) survived the TV era does not mean we came out of it unscathed. Much of the ignorance and obnoxiousness of our current age may very well be caused by today's middle aged people growing up watching television. (Or maybe it was the lead paint our parents grew up with?)
You could get reprieve.
With TikTok on mobile, it's ubiquitous.
This type of hyper fixation on TikTok is pop science and self soothing. It springs from the generational anxiety that the kids are not okay and something must be wrong with them. TikTok can be that boogey man for boomers, gen x and millennials. Same as older generations felt about TV, video games, rock and roll music, and D&D.
Have you ever considered that maybe people were right about all that stuff? The problem so many people have is they either aren't forward thinking enough or only look back a few years at most when arguing against "moral crusaders."
Take for example violence in movies and videogames. Back in the 80s, the MPAA came down hard on the Friday the 13th movies, and the violence level in those movies absolutely pales in comparison to what you see now in Saw X, a mainstream R-rated horror movie. In the early 90s, there were federal hearings about violence in video games, Mortal Kombat being the prime example. Compare what gave people heart attacks back then to what the latest Mortal Kombat game features. Maybe those people were right all along, and we should have done something other than just laugh at their concerns?
With the benefit of decades of hindsight, there's a lot of issues in society where the "slippery slope"-ists turned out to be right.
College lit professors are now saying they get kids in their class who've never read a book from cover to cover. Those that have, say their favorite book is a YA book like Percy Jackson. Most can't even focus on something like a sonnet. This was described by a professor at Columbia, and they say that this is a recent phenomena and it's the majority of their students now.
Something has fundamentally changed, and there's evidence that points to kids missing key developmental windows. It's not just them on social media either, it's probably also their parents who are on their phones and not interacting with their kids who need that to develop normally.
The damage from social media is widespread, well-studied, and unequivocally harmful to millions of people. There is no equivalence, it's a different technology with objectively worse impacts.
I'd be fine with that, if it means I never have to hear that robotic argument ever again.