We need to stop this helicopter civilization bullshit.
We're building 1984 to protect from god knows what imaginary harms.
Stop putting plastic wrap around people's freedoms, liberty, and right to privacy.
We're building 1984 to protect from god knows what imaginary harms.
Stop putting plastic wrap around people's freedoms, liberty, and right to privacy.
We will look back at handing kids phones with instagram like giving kids cigarettes and think wtf were we doing.
In dealing with the ills of social media, you do what you do with every other negative externality - you tax it. At least the parts of it you don't like.
Designing privacy, freedom, and liberty destroying mechanisms is not the way.
Big social wants these regulations to pass so that they can get better identity tracking for ads targeting. To them it doesn't matter if the tech ushers in 1984. It makes them more money.
The argument, which has some pretty decent evidence behind it, is that prohibition is the thing that kills people. Because it has to be smuggled, dealers switch from "normal" hard drugs to overdose triggers like fentanyl with 1000x the potency because then they only have to smuggle 0.1% as much of it, which in turn kills people because street dealers cut it improperly and users get wildly different effective doses or drugs cut with dangerous contaminants.
Notice that meth literally is legal in the US. Essentially anyone can get amphetamines by going to a doctor and telling them you have the symptoms it gets prescribed to treat. It's even prescribed to kids. The primary barrier is having health insurance and the ability to take off work during the day every month to get a refill. Which is why the people dying of overdose are the people priced out of that system, who wouldn't be if they could buy it at Walmart, but because they can't they resort to the entirely unregulated black market and die of a fentanyl overdose.
Are you saying that we should let children smoke and just tax it because its better for their liberty and freedoms?
Or are you saying we should just tax social media for adults but banning it for kids is ok
A good example is the Jonathan Haidt/Aaron Brown fiasco from a few years ago. Brown has been methodically trying to stop the stampede off yet another pseudo-scientific cliff but not enough people are listening.
https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...
https://reason.com/video/2024/04/02/the-bad-science-behind-j...
https://reason.com/2023/05/30/not-every-study-on-teen-depres...
> In a recent article for Reason, I argued that the hundreds of studies that New York University professor Jonathan Haidt has assembled to support his claim that social media is causing the teen mental health crisis not only don't back up his claim; they undermine it.
Age verification campaigners like Haidt play a smooth game but consistently downplay how useless social science actually is for answering questions like this:
> I didn't express "concerns" about specific studies; I argued that the majority of the 301 papers cited in his document are garbage. I went through each category of studies on Haidt's list, chose the first one that studied social media and depression to get a random sampling, and then showed that they were so embarrassingly bad as to be completely useless. They were guilty of coding errors, fatal defects hidden in mid-paper jargon, inappropriate statistics, longitudinal studies that weren't longitudinal, experiments in name only, and red flags for hypothesis shopping and p-hacking (that is, misusing data analysis to yield results that can be presented as statistically significant).
It's possible that in the past few years a wealth of robust evidence has suddenly emerged but it seems doubtful.
This stuff does matter. If you misdiagnose the problem then congrats, you just let governments censor the internet - quite possibly creating a China style totalitarian system that pretends to be democratic along the way - and kids will still have the same problems. A bad outcome!
The interpretation is interesting. Probably, a lot of people don't like criticism of academia or have already made an emotional investment in the social media hypothesis, but aren't sure how to respond to Brown's critiques of the studies. So it just swings up and down with otherwise no engagement.
I wouldn't be surprised if 20 years from now we see social media as just another hysterical reaction that generated a generation of bad law, wrecking, or diminishing a number of lives, for no good reason at all.
Edgar Friendly got it right, back in 1993:
> See, according to Cocteau's plan, I'm the enemy. Cause I like to think, I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind if guy who wants to sit in a greasy spoon and think, "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon, butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in a non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jello all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to. Okay, pal? I've seen the future, you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sittin' around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake singing "I'm an Oscar-Meyer Wiener".
Sounds like denial or tunnel vision.