Good start. But this still leaves them at the mercy of these tech companies.
Kids—especially pre-teens—should not have social media. There is just way too much evidence that this has harmed and is harming an increasingly class-segregated generation.
Gas stations are careful about selling cigarettes to kids. We need these developers to have even a shadow of that concern.
Not saying you're wrong, but it's more complicated than you think in many cases. The rot goes deep into society as a whole, which tech corpos then exploit.
A phenomenon that's facilitated by their access to screens. (There is a horrifying class divide emerging in the West in the 1:1 relationship between kids' screen time and the parents' wealth.)
30 years ago: Video games are harming our kids, ban it!
60 years ago: Rock and roll is harming our kids, ban it!
There is little evidence to support social media causes harm. Even correlations are weak. As a large study on the subject put it, the association of well-being with regularly eating potatoes was nearly as negative as the association with [social media] use.
This looks like yet another moral panic.
Maybe regularly eating potatoes is a lot worse for a person that most of us currently realize. (They do have an extremely high glycemic index and high levels of oxalic acid.)
Seriously though, the correlation is just weak - far to weak to actually draw conclusions from let alone ban it.
You have any pointers to well designed studies that show it's as innocent as a video game or rock and roll?
Are those kids spending more than 3 hours a day already suffering from depression/anxiety? What would those adolescents say about the impact of their classmates/school on their body image?
> We have gaps in our full understanding of the mental health impacts posed by social media but at this point cannot conclude it is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents. We must better understand the answers to key questions, such as, which types of content are most harmful and what factors can protect young people from the negative effects of social media.
This seems to recognize a lot more nuance than "the data seems pretty clear"
(To say nothing of what even "social media" is. Is HN social media?)
As did the Surgeon General in 1980 who warned kids were addicted to video games body and soul.
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/10/us/around-the-nation-surg...