Honest question: Is this about anything else than forcing all citizens to ID themselves to the government before using digital services?
Examples I know about include 12-year-olds selling nudes, teen experimentation with alcohol being replaced with cocaine because cocaine is so easily available (the issue is the scale and how widespread cocaine is getting; not that it never happened before), several cases in Norway of 13-year-olds being recruited by the mafia to throw bombs at houses through the internet, violence etc. is up the roof, kids have 4 hours of sleep since they doomscroll all through the night, results in school are trending downwards, university reports that students are increasingly unable to concentrate...
Are there other solutions than bans to social media? Sure. Could this in theory have been fixed by better parenting? Sure.
But parents don't live in a vacuum. Parents and children alike rely on the culture around them.
Social media is a HUGE shift to society, and neither culture nor parenting practices has sufficiently adopted to handle it yet. Slowing the shift down a bit until norms and culture catches up doesn't seem like a bad idea.
"Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the presidency has been widely attributed to the use of social networking sites, mobile devices, and interactive websites to engage previously hard-to-reach populations in political activity. Campaign communication strategies may be applicable for youth health promotion efforts, particularly for the highly stigmatized issue of mental health. In this article, we examine elements of the 2008 Obama presidential campaign’s use of social media technologies and content designed to foster effective political participation among youth."
For under 16 there are tools built in Android and iOS to control and limit usage that parents can use. And at home parents can obviously also take the device(s) away.
Our teens are living through a changing time: peak unregulated social media, that I personally belive is approaching heroin level addiction and damage; covid lockdowns testing the very limits of Piagetian theory; AI in school and outsourcing understanding; very uncertain job market to enter into; possibly the collapse of AMOC; reaching Peloponnesian war level of unstable democracy; the true collapse of idealism, the birth of the mechanical man and the first total spiritual crisis
Our institutions absolutely can not react with the accelerated change, so I think the only thing a parent can do is act as individuals, teach their children, and position their families in the best way they can to weather the storm.
AI romantic partners are coming.
After all many of those harms you listed don't suddenly stop at 16.
Many campaigners see this approach as letting the tech companies off the hook - by removing children from the platforms is removes a key leverage point to get the tech companies to cleanup their act generally.
Obviously it's quite possible the not-so-hidden agenda is simply a political one of 'being seen to do something'.
I see that youtube is on the blanket banned list - which is a bit surprising given they are probably one of the more responsible platforms and it also contains lots of educational stuff.
One very odd thing about the ban is that discord is ignored ( both a cesspool and almost every adolescent male who plays online games is on it ), yet youtube is banned.
Youtube has to be one of the most policed platforms out there, and also has a lot of really good educational content.
Such choices can both be incompetance and a desire to force everyone ( as banning via ID means everyone has to ID to watch ) to ID to watch youtube......
like, the facebook pixel used to track you across the entire internet (or damn near close enough to it). and that was 10-ish years ago.
they’ve been doing this for a while now.
As for how effective the ban was on getting kids off social media in general, I think it's a long process that doesn't entirely sit on this change. Banning phones in schools has been a much faster more radical improvement.
It's going to take a lot more work to defeat the tech giants but I'm glad we are trying.
If this is built on open standards, so that anyone can use it for free, it would be a big positive step forward for everyone.
Look at how they flipped the switch on Mythos last week - do peope really believe these lunatic governments we’re all currently suffering from won’t go further after they start this? Some of you seem to think they still “ask” nicely... nope, they just do whatever they want now.
This is something government deeply cares about because the business that bought it needs there to be more workers so that the labor remains dirt cheap.
- Account age more than 16 years
- Age estimation
- Credit card
A lot of old people think a social media ban will bring back the good old days of their childhood where kids went outside. A lot of parents don't want to tell their kids "no" to social media because of "peer pressure", instead of just telling their kids to find better friends.
Only a small proportion of the population recognises this is about control. No major political party will speak out against this as they know being against it is a vote loser.
It's bad, shallow populism, but it's not some nefarious surveillance plan, as much as the yanks are going to paint it that way.
The HN bubble needs to realize that it's not that people don't care, it's that they really want this and also when it didn't work started complaining they wanted even more.
A certain type of people thrived in 1970's East Germany too, saying to themselves that it was for the greater good.
https://xcancel.com/BigBrotherWatch/status/20338777100076117...