Banning Things for Other People Is Easy

>In both of these cases (and in others), the harms are there for children and adults, but it’s only children who get banned.

>I don’t use TikTok and it’s no skin off of my back if it gets banned. Banned or not, though, I don’t see a reason to ban it only for children. It doesn’t seem to be more harmful for them. They don’t seem to be using it lots more than adults.

>If you’re going to ban TikTok because it’s harmful or for geopolitical reasons, fine. But ban it universally; if we’re not willing to do that, stop pretending that a child-only ban is principled. A child-only ban is what you do when you want to do something but can’t think of anything better to do, and you don’t want to impact voters.

There are now enough statistics to prove that social media has a negative impact on the mental health of users, especially children and adolescents. Even Meta has kept a study on this topic under wraps. What OP is doing here is putting adults and children on the same level and saying that what applies to children must also apply to adults. The difference, however, is that we as adults have a responsibility toward children. Children enjoy special protection in society and, for good reason, are subject to limited criminal liability. We do this because we assume that children belong to a vulnerable and easily influenced group, and lack the mental and moral maturity to adequately assess their actions. We assume that adults have the necessary mental and moral maturity to adequately assess the consequences of their own actions, which is why they are granted more rights but also more responsibilities than children. OP does not reveal any contradiction or other ‘gotcha’ moment here, unless he generally takes issue with the relationship of responsibility between adults and adolescents.

It would be a fun exercise to replace social media with alcohol in this article so that it argues we shouldn't ban children from drinking because drinking is bad for adults too.

Banning social media will never work, just as banning prostitution, drugs cigarettes and gambling don't work (in a broad scale). What we can do is change the public (and our) perception of it. Understanding you have a problem is always the first step in any N-step program for whatever addictive substance. Most adults don't see their own consumption and behaviour around social media as harmful or problematic or simply deny they have a problem - just as is the case with any other substance. That is where we have to start. Once we (as in we as society) start agreeing that social media on average (!) is harmful, the narrative shifts. Right now parents don't think they do anything wrong by giving a 10year old a smartphone unsupervised. Everybody in society would look condascending on the parents if they hand out cigarettes to a 10yo child - probably even calling the cops. THAT is the sentiment in society where we need to be. It starts with us adults condemning social media use first, else all attempts to outlaw or ban it will fail.

It seems like the things we ban for children are things that we might ban for everybody, but can get away with for children. Very few of those things are conclusively proven to be harmful -- perhaps firearms, motor vehicles, and smoking, and even those things put up a pretty good fight to stay alive as long as they did.

Smoking is an interesting case. Vanishingly few people who smoke learned to do so as adults. Virtually all started as kids. Likewise, virtually all marketing of smoking was directed towards kids. Banning smoking among kids had the side of effect of reducing it in adults without the impossibility of an overall ban.

Social media is an interesting example. Of course it influences behavior. That's its purpose. Otherwise all of the advertising revenue poured into the social media industry would be wasted. The most successful social media businesses I'm aware of all started being marketed primarily to young people.

Depressingly bad argument that seems to say: we think it’s bad for children and adults, but we don’t ban it for adults so we shouldn’t ban it for children.

>It’s like studying the social impact of vaping without considering the replacement activity (smoking).

That's not how this works. If you ban vaping, not everyone - and not necessarily most people who vape - would be smoking instead.

"X isn't as bad as Y" is not a good argument in favor of X. They can both be bad.

> We ban gambling for children, even though the vast majority of harm caused by gambling comes from adults. Now you could argue that more harm would befall children if we let them gamble, but I honestly don’t think you should.

> By and large, children don’t have money. And even if they do, they don’t have other people who are dependent on it. If children were free to gamble (they sort of already are, what with in-game microtransactions and variable rewards and all the features of gambling, just without the label), I still think that the majority of harm would be borne by adults. Additionally, alongside a child’s gambling ban, we heavily regulate the gambling industry for adults. Children’s social media bans don’t appear to come with similar adult regulatory scrutiny.

Kind of lost me here. I think we should ban gambling for children, even if they don't have money or people dependent on them. Children will steal their parents money to gamble or buy Roblox points.

Yeah, we have regulations on adult gambling. I wouldn't mind more regulations on adult social media use either.

It feels like there's some glossing-over and circular logic here:

> Yes children show poorer impulse control than adults. But aren’t we all somewhat helpless in the face of the mighty tech companies?

The fact that adults can also have somewhat poor impulse control doesn't mean we should disregard the argument. And when it comes to the power of big tech - isn't that what regulation aims to mitigate?

> Brain development continues up until around 25 or so, and so it’s possible that social media does cause longer-term problems with brain development. Possible. Not proved. It’s possible social media causes long-term cognitive decline in adults. Possible. Not proved.

I don't know the studies well enough to know whether it's proved or not, but intuitively this feels like an obvious enough concern to at least be investigating it. Surely there are some general studies about whether mental health issues in early life are more likely to lead to long-term problems?

Banning things for other people is certainly easy for me because my students will spend the whole class on their phones if i dont.

I feel like if the conclusion is "ban it for everyone too" I'm okay with it?

But the argument seems to get a little lost along the way.

Yes, adults are susceptible to the same vices as children. However (as the author writes) children have poorer impulse control. They are also less inclined to or unable to consider the repercussions of their actions.

You wouldn't try to get a toddler to stop smoking by telling them it'll put them at a high risk for cancer at old age.

Speaking of smoking, anti-smoking campaigns in the US in the 90s led to a vast reduction in teen use and adult use alike.

So there is notable lasting benefit in protecting children while they lack the foresight.

> it’s easy to tax other people - the rich, bankers, benefits scroungers, energy executives

Taxing the working class is the easiest: do vat tax, force income tax. Tere is no way taxing rich or executives is comparably easy.

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Let's not bother with taxing the rich to see what could happen when smallest number of people accumulate wealth in X times faster than anyone else.

And don't tell me "it's natural order of things", dying from desease in 35 is natural, dying in childbirthing is natural, becoming a monopoly is natural, circumventing competition is natural. Does not mean we need to keep doing these things.

I agree, ban it for everyone. But starting with children seems like a good start for that seeing as we'd need to go against most of the biggest companies in the world with significant political influence.

The core point - that it's politically convenient to ban things for "other people", especially if they cannot vote you out - is well taken. And I share the scepticism about whether "do something" politics leads to good legislation. However, it is most definitely not hypocritical to have different rules for children and adults; the bodies and minds of children are not fully developed and there are many instances where research indicates they are both more prone to damage and unable to make effective judgement as to their own actions.

As to a social media ban making sense for children: should not the precautionary principle apply? To this end, who has the vested interests and deeper pockets to fund research backing the status quo? And yet where is the research indicating social media is good news for children?

I agree with author's points. I think we need to take one more step, to examine this harmness issue. Social media are harmful, but why do we care about them more than about idk radio? Well, because social media is much more widespread. And why it is widespread? Because of the advertising. And incidentally the whole other host of harmful things is so impactful because of the ads - drugs, gambling, garbage foods, etc.

To combat Tiktok or smoking or gambling yourself into bankruptcy we don't need to ban each of these individually (and fail to do so in the process). We need to ban advertising of them.

One thing I have not seen come up in these discussions is how these bans interact with the network effects. They might actually be one of the most effective tools we have to fight back against and punish platform businesses.

I assume that something like a partially effective ban could have a devastating impact on social media because it may push active users in the teen / adolescent demographic below the critical mass necessary for self sustaining growth and retention.

Has anyone done any studies on where that tipping point / critical mass is? How effective do these bans have to be to achieve their intended outcome?

My counterpoint would be that social media has a network effect. Its a lot harder for a parent to ban their own child from social media when all of their peers are on it, because it turns the child into a social outcast, at the worst years of someone's life to be a social outcast.

Also "do something, but not to the voters" is an invalid argument in this case. Anti-immigration policy is a good example of "do soemthing but not to the voters". This is do something to the only people in the voter's life that the voter cares about even more than themselves.

There are quite a few things wrong with this article, but above all, placing children on the same level as adults overlooks how crucial our early years are.

Overall, this blog post feels somewhat outdated.

I also can't clearly grasp the author's position: are they arguing that we should ban this for everyone, or not ban it at all? Or is the point simply that the people who write such bans or laws do so because the law doesn't apply to them?

>Frankly, social media is just too ingrained into the social fabric, and is just too useful and addictive to be banned. So if you have to do something and you can’t meaningfully do anything else…I guess it’s a ban for children.

this is something I've been dwelling on for the past couple days. I've avoided social media my entire adult life, and I'm realizing its akin to not having a car in a suburban sprawl, I can't interact properly with a lot of the modern internet, because of it.

Of course there are advantages, which I don't think i need to state in this community...

But i feel this is something people overlook when discussing banning social media for children. There is a balance to be struck, like anything.

Writing articles with no suggestion of anything to improve the status quo is also easy

The article is based on the assumption that when we ban things for children only, it is because we perceive them to be harmful to children only. I don't think that is true. Nobody thinks adults are immune from the negative effects of cigarettes or alcohol. But adults are, in general, allowed to harm themselves. Children are not, because there is an acceptance that children are less able to make informed decisions. You can take issue with that and obviously bright-line rules based on age are highly imperfect, but it's a very different discussion to the one the article is trying to have.

Granted, there is also evidence that social media has particularly harmful effects on children, which no doubt strengthens the argument. But in the general case bans targeted towards children are not (just) about that.

Ultimately the article seems to be trying to argue (implicitly) that we shouldn't ban, regulate or tax anything, because if we were to do that, we would then need to ban, regulate and tax everything in order to be "consistent". It's a common argument I see from libertarians online, including on HN. If you're going to ban guns, surely you should also ban knives and cars? If presented with a choice between permitting one specific thing or prohibiting all the things, most people will choose the former. But it's a false dichotomy. The law can treat different things and situations differently, even if those things/situations have some commonalities.

Let's do something about that awful feeling that someone somewhere is having a good time.

I think the article misses the biggest point of the social media or any "ban" for children: the environment (social) effect.

(modern) children are essentially locked in their environment without much say. You go to school, you go to extra curricula activities. But the school you attend or other activities are often not your choice or in your control. On top of that, you often don't know better when it comes to what environments are actually available to you (or the effect of it).

This makes the dynamics completely different vs an adult.

I (adult) don't want to use social media? Fine I do that. Too big consequences in my immediate environment (all my friends/work use it) fine I'll change friends and work. Everyone is smoking but I don't want to? Fine I'll hang out with people that don't like smoking either. Hell I can even move country / location.

When everyone is smoking or using social media, a kid can't do anything about it. If that behavior is tied to social inclusion or "norm" then you're actively penalized for your choice and you can do almost nothing about it.

That's why we ban certain things for children. We know it won't work 100%, but taking it away from the school yard or social spaces have a profoundly different effect on children vs adult.

We can always dicuss WHAT to ban or not, but like the article, comparing adult to kids without acknowledging this is a red herring

Eh, I feel like if we know there is a vulnerable population (children), and we know that the social media will cause harm (increased suicides, depression, etc), and we know that that ultimately it puts people in a place where they can't reasonably choose a better path (collective action, power imbalance, poor reasoning, no long-term perspective, social peer pressure, etc.), and where the parents are unable to reasonably control the behavior too, then a ban is warranted.

By that token, I honestly think we should ban more things that we know don't have an upside, and only have downsides, and the people who partake are generally doing so because of mental / physical shortcomings. In other words, if we know a reasonable person would not want to partake in a behavior unless due to manipulation and weakness, then I feel protecting that person is a kindness.

I myself have suffered from addictions that I can't seem to easily "choose to stop" even though I constantly wish I could. I really wish I wouldn't have been exposed to these things when I was younger and thought it was just fun. If I could, I would pay to go back and prevent my younger self from ever trying it -- because I had no way to know. And then I am a bit astonished none of the adults had that kind of concern. Sure a few people said "that stuff isn't good", but ultimately that lost to all the other factors (constant propaganda, ads, peer pressure, convenience, taste, addictive qualities, cost). It was never a "free choice" because there was huge information and power imbalance at play, and the "responsible adults" who could help did nothing.

I read a strong libertarian bias here. To be consistent, should we prohibit cocaine and heroin for children? Historically, these were not banned. Should we ban cigarettes and alcohol for kids even though they are legal for adults?

I don't have a good answer regarding where to draw the line or how to actually enforce such restrictions. This is especially difficult because limiting digital access for kids is a great backdoor for surveillance and general information control.

However, I am near certain that in a few decades, people will view social media addiction much like substance abuse. It used to be the norm for writers and musicians to be drunk more often than not, but that is less accepted now. Currently, it is accepted that people spend hours a day on social media, and I am guilty as charged.

Yep, this is definitely written by an LLM. I doubt any model is capable of reasoning this bad.

> “harmful compared to what?”

The kids can sniff glue all I care, at least we get some good punk rock out of it. That largely depends on their parents. But children spending time completely unsupervised with bunch of adult men only some of which are pedophiles while shooting into their brains 24/7 the most powerful advertisement ever known to man wrapped into an application that has the same operationational logic as one-armed bandit will not bring anything good to anybody - except loads of money to the tech bro’s. It is basically same as raising your children in a Las Vegas casino.

But you don’t have to take my word. You know you can just ask the kids who have been raised with social media, the first generation of which is adult now? Every single one of the zoomers say it sucks. That should be enpugh.

This isn't a one way door. It's a warranted societal experiment. Re-eval in 5 years, ask the kids, compare to other countries... this sort of do-nothing hand wringing is why we stagnate.

"Rules for thee and not for me."

>We ban gambling for children, even though the vast majority of harm caused by gambling comes from adults. Now you could argue that more harm would befall children if we let them gamble, but I honestly don’t think you should.

Yeah only children stealing credit cards to satisfy their addiction.

I don't know if the poster ever saw a child but they are largely sociopathic for a long time and will go great lengths to get their will.

Also, if you get off on taking out your anger on others, enforcement for other people is fun - and stress relieving!