Comment by dagss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dagss | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

As a Norwegian teen parent: Seeing all the issues cropping up which is /enabled/ (not saying caused) by social media, you don't need to look for ulterior motives. I believe these bans are honest attempts to fix real problems.

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.

> Social media is a HUGE shift to society

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.

I cannot upvoter you enough. I'm a parent of teens as well. To those in doubt: Talk to some teachers of 8 to 18 year old kids/young adults.

As a parent, too, this is a parental responsibility, schools can (and do) ban smartphones as well.

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.

If there were drug dealers selling meth outside schools we would not leave it up to parental responsibility.

It's both, in my opinion. As a parent I find I need support from school/authority. And I expect vice versa.

I wonder why Poland doesn't have these problems even though everyone uses social media including teens.

Doesn't it?

Nope.

The question isn't whether there are harms - the questions is whether the approach - a ban based on age, and therefore some sort of ID, has a hidden agenda.

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.

There is also the possibility that this is not a well thought-out announcement (which they say will take effect by spring so things can change) by a PM with perhaps only a few weeks left in the job...

Of course.

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......

Good point. Future historians looking back will likely consider 2015/2016 to be the point when we entered the social-media-epoch. Both Brexit and Trump where mainly social-media-driven phenomenon.

Wasn't Obama as well?

Always difficult to define a year exactly. Obama a/b-testing campaigns was definitely a step on the way.

2008? You mean Habbo, MySpace or Bebo?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19331681.2014.89... or https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3719417/

"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."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com