The kids with phones are alright
heatherburns.tech
heatherburns.tech
What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids. Its not good for their attention spans or mental health to a much greater degree than other forms of media.
Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones, but they should be able to use them without being engulfed in social media content that has been shown to have a negative impact on them. Whether its algorithmic feeds targeting particular age groups or short form video content that is reducing attention spans and the ability to concentrate.
I have no idea how an adult filming young girls on a train has anything to do with social media bans. The Senior Legal Officer is absolutely entitled to having a phone, but absolutely not to use it however he means. The teenagers are entitled to having a phone, but potentially may have limits to how they can use those devices.
Just because there are adults with full agency that do the wrong thing, doesn't mean we should remove protections on young people. Just because adults with full agency drive recklessly, doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds the ability to drive.
I'll say it. Kids shouldn't have phones until the age of 16.
F2P games with dopamine drip loot boxes and things of that nature seem super unhealthy for kids, I can’t even imagine what it’s doing to their impulse control. I am unable to tolerate games like that myself, probably because I grew up with regular video games that didn’t use psychological tricks and pay to win ecosystems to induce people to spend money. If I had grown up playing them I probably wouldn’t know any different, like the fish asking “what the hell is water” when asked “how is the water this morning?” By an older fish.
Yes I needed a smartphone to test on
People come up with all sorts of random scenarios, that aren't even related to "prove" something...
A bus-tracking app on my phone completely changed how I interact with public transit, and made it significantly better. I remember waiting for the bus when I was 14, and I would not wish this to anyone.
A maps app is great when you are going to less-familiar places - either into the big city, or into large parks (although not every kid is ready to be hiking in the parks before 16)
I spent all of my childhood with a (large and ugly) digital camera on my belt. Phone is much smaller, and for the kind of pictures I was taking, the lower quality does not matter that much.
Hadn't got the bus straight from school to my grandma's house, needed to go home first (walkable) and pick up something.
Missed the bus then that was due, and waited over an hour for the next one.
So I was now best part of 2 hours late, and I didn't have a phone yet....
A flip phone for kids who are out of the house regularly with some contacts is fine.
No need to be a Luddite, but what do kids possibly get out of a phone? If I didn't have work and to chauffeur people around, id toss mine too.
This aspect needs talking about way more especially when the parents don't admit to it and to being the instigator
The question isn't just "what do the kids get out of it", it's also what do the parents: they get surveillance and some kind of reassurance. But at what cost?
> online content
There is nothing that they get from online content on a phone that they would not get better on an actual computer. My children already have computers (raspberry pis) at home and don't need a phone to access content. Plus, unlike a phone, they are able to use a computer to create content which is a much better perspective with technology than the mindless consumption that is now commonplace.
In far more cases than is ideal, the phone gives them an element of freedom/safety from their living situation.
Imagine a kid whose own parents are abusing them, or an LGBT kid growing up in a deeply conservative family, and one day the government suddenly decides you don't deserve being able to connect with support resources...
In answer to your first question, what do we do. We regulate the platforms, not the users.
There are loads of things that can be done to reduce online harm, that don't just say "OK, you're over this age, you can experience online harm now".
Platforms can become legally responsible for content, they can be compelled to be transparent about their feed algorithms, enable monitoring via public APIs. We can ban infinite scroll. There are so many policy levers that can be pulled, without getting the ban-hammer out for people of an arbitrary age, and without forcing the rest of us to hand over our IDs to platforms.
I'm not asking "what do we do" but that plenty of people write articles poking holes in current policy or suggested future policy, but lack providing a potential solution.
I pulled a few alternatives out there. What's your take?
From my perspective I think we do need to ask social media companies to reduce algorithmic feeds that create echo chambers or as you say provide transparent metrics on this. Social media companies should potentially ban infinite scroll/short form video content, however this is going to be difficult to do if its based on age as it will fall back to the ID/age verification issues.
Feeds should also not show content considered R18+ unless manually hidden, this shouldn't be able to be removed. There is some horrifying content that can pop up on these platforms that young people shouldn't see unsolicited.
Otherwise, I think my perspective here is very similar. I'd personally emphasise legal publisher responsibility, a repeal of Section 230 in American.
By absolving social media platforms of legal responsibility for the content they publish, we've allowed some very unpleasant scenes to flourish in the most mainstream of places.
Well with you on the issues of addictive design. I'd throw in data harvesting, sketchy advertising, and increasingly platform- level political bias.
Age restrictions simply increase the age at which users are exposed to harms, rather than addressing those harms themselves.
These platforms have become staggeringly wealthy and powerful, it is them what needs to be controlled, not kids.
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
I think scale is important here too. If you've got a user-base that's an appreciable proportion of a country's population, you're a utility. My energy supplier has a tiny fraction of the customers of say, Meta, and is subject to considerably stronger oversight.
Section 230 is not what allows Facebook to push lies.
Eliminating section 230 will fix the problem though, by banning all user generated content from the internet forever. No more SaaS in general.
So, legal limits - if your behaviour constitutes harassment especially if you're targeting certain individuals, then it's likely to be illegal. Or if your behaviour constitutes 'disturbing the peace' in some vague way the police might put a stop to it.
But beyond that you're talking about the law but not everything is about the limits of the law, and the law is only a loose guide on morality. You can behave in a legal manner and still be doing something most people would consider wrong.
If you take your camera and try to record someone's kids up close in the park, you should absolutely expect to be told to GTFO, possibly by a whole gang of people. "Oh but it's in public I'm not breaking any laws, you have no expectation of privacy here" doesn't mean squat. Nor is it OK to film a bunch of girls like a drunken old pervert and try to say "It's not illegal".
Which is why others on the train were not happy with it.
You can't lace beer with crack and sell it. Not to a 12yo, not to a 50yo. Regulate the proverbial crack, then we see if further regulations are required.
Earlier this year (0):
> “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,”
From 9 years ago (1):
> Facebook showed advertisers how it has the capacity to identify when teenagers feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”
0 - https://www.biometricupdate.com/202602/meta-plans-launch-of-...
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/01/facebook-...
Social media needs to be heavily regulated to the point where it's safe for everyone, or banned entirely. I don't understand why there's this belief it should have a right to exist when basically everyone agrees it's a net negative to society.
so Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit are all social-media, because all are ad-supported, and all are focused on user-generated content. HN is focused on user-generated content, but not ad-supported (okay, technically HN is 'advertising for YC', but in practice, the site isn't optimized to get you doom-scrolling so you click on more ads), and a website with a comment section, if it's like a blog or something where the majority of the content is generated by the website owner, isn't focused on user-generated content.
The combination of user-generated content + advertising, however, seems to create websites that will try to get their users addicted to the site, which can harm the lives of their users.
Mastodon doesn't have this problem.
Pixelfed doesn't have this problem.
Lemmy doesn't have this problem.
Peertube doesn't have this problem.
But "social media laws" would hit all of these as well.
> giving access for free to the whole world, literally, is technically impossible.
Again, this is what Mastodon is doing. This is also how email works.
And its not technically impossible. Its impossible when you have investors who demand 30x growth at all costs.
Its a capitalism issue, with game theory pushing worse and worse solutions to extract smaller percentages of profit.
Email and mastodon and pixelfed and peertube are all federated. Everyone can run their own server, pay others, or join others.
Federated services can still work today.
And yes Tiktok started in 2016 along with Mastodon. Ok. Mastodon's success isnt bound up in venture capitalism or hockeystick growth or 100x returns. Its completely organic growth that doesnt have anything to do with money. People share and talk about stuff all the time, and there's no profit motive in nearly anything. No advertisements, no upsells.
And enshittification and extractive "growth" applies strongly to Tiktok, and that smell pervades everything about it. Advertisements, making usage worse, worse payouts to user/advertiser/influencer. Everyones there for the views and the quick dollars. But they attract more people BECAUSE of the predatory pirahna-dollar water, and the hopes of making it big.
Now, how to properly regulate and enforce it in a way that's not going to undermine other rights and freedom, that's not an easy task for sure.
And yes, they are toxic. And yes, just as other toxic products (i.e. cigarettes or alcohol) there should be an ongoing discussion on its regulation for both adults and teenagers. Even if it's not 100% enforceable.
- ASKfm
- Flickr
- GitHub
- Google+
- JustPaste.it
- Tumblr
- Vine
- VKontakte (VK)
- YouTube
This is obviously outdated but it can give an idea.
It is based on user-generated content, it has a comment system, followers and stars (similar to "likes"). There is even an attention economy, and some gamification.
Social media doesn't have to be bad, it just needs to be social.
That said, with bans upcoming or in force in a lot places, what measures should we monitor to see improvements in wellbeing etc. (screen time isn't one there, I'd say)? What do we do if those do not go up noticably?
Social Media allowed ordinary people to challenge on a global scale the oficially-sanctioned narrative. A generation has already grown with full distrust on what they learn from traditional media.
With that picture, addressing the (undeniable) negative effects of Social Media is only the sales pitch for introducing new legislation. The true goal of the legislation however is not to "save the children", but rather to ensure that the next generations will be obedient and meek.
Hasn't been true for a while. Now it grants people with money and state actors unprecedented control over what ordinary people are allowed to see and mold them to desired narratives.
But it's obvious that social media also still allows grassroots action and organization in ways that simply weren't possible under old media. We need to be careful when talking about regulating or banning social media outright that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater - we will be losing freedoms when we lose it and centralizing control of media and communication with governments and corporations (even more so than with the big social media silos now.) And freedoms lost aren't easily gained back.
Then again, as I’m writing this, how much of that was due to manipulation and promotion by adversarial powers… almost nothing is truly organic anymore, or at least you can’t tell if it is, and I suppose that’s what you’re getting at.
Yes, but over time, even pre-Internet generations have learned to be skeptical of everything watched or read online. Children growing up in this environment will almost certainly adapt and learn to do the same.
So, at best, laws restricting Social Media are a nanny state overreach, and at worst dystopian Big-Brother-style narrative control.
We have witnessed a similar overreach in the distant past with printing-press regulation laws [1]. But at the time, they power structure was different so they could instate an outright ban without hiding behind "think of the children" or the Red Scare.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...
This is sort of true, but there is definitely a scale of development that means the most harm will be done the earlier you start. Same with access to pornography. People's brains don't suddenly become immune to it at 18, it's just that that's the age of legal responsibility that ties in with other things.
Men who turn 18 don't suddenly become disposable meat-based gun-holders in times of war, and yet we still treat them that way.
In any case, this is whataboutery. There are lots of harmful things that adults are allowed, but lots that are banned for everyone. There are lots of things that cannot be sold without meeting safety standards (cars, electricals), or that are only sold subject strict controls (prescription drugs, guns). We do not allow adults to have whatever they want.
We therefore then tack other restrictions to those age brackets.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-anxious-generation-how-the-...
What you'll get is restrictions on speech. UK arrests thousands every year for what essentially amounts to mean tweets. There have been people that comment publicly on horrendous crimes that get harsher sentences than those that commit the crimes.
At any point in time politicians could have enforced existing terms of service violations like kids must be 13 or older. But they choose to look the other way and target only things that's a threat to their political future.
Social media helps organization and political action. Maybe you don't like the outcome at this point in time but it's a powerful weapon against those in power. It's no wonder politicians will try to neuter it. But it will not help anyone but themselves.
What are they arrested for, or are you disputing the number?
The statical lie with the UK numbers is the vast majority of cases are about the use of messaging services in domestic violence cases.
I feel like it's a significantly freer society when others can't threaten to murder me without consequences.
>and all the people of the right
Tell that to the Tory MP who had me arrested for upsetting them, or the UKIP goon's forcibly removed me from their "Free Speech Conference"
The Tories were barely right-wing, and they were in power for 14 years, not 20+, and for the first 4 they were in a coalition with the lib dems.
Look at the immigration numbers in the UK to see how not right-wing they were. Insane to think that's actually right wing.
> or the UKIP goon's forcibly removed me from their "Free Speech Conference"
The UKIP conference removing you is not evidence of general soft power in the UK.
There are 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages. It's not heavily reported for some reason but it's very real.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
Seems good to me
> The former childminder from Northampton, who is married to a Conservative councillor, had posted an abhorrent message on X, calling for people to "set fire" to hotels housing asylum seekers following the murder of three young girls at a dance class in Southport in July 2024.
> Yet the fact both men were able to address a huge crowd in London is perhaps evidence that there is rather more leeway for free speech in this country than those likening the UK to a "tin pot dictatorship" suggest.
Seems fine?
Sorry, I'm confused by the question.
Criminal threats with appropriate punishment, and regular old hateful speech is ongoing.
Meanwhile there's been two arrests around two prominent right-wing politicians getting threats and celebration of death this week. And they're all silent again.
I said "regulate the proverbial crack" and gave two concrete examples of things going wrong. At no point did I hint at "stop people from conversing freely".
But it's true there is a lot of coordinated censorship even without state interference. But this tends to resolve itself as there is a market opportunity to create a better product. This coordination and censorship campaign has led to the acquisition of Twitter, which lifted its restrictions and other companies more or less followed suit because an open platform is obviously better for most people. And you had offshoots like Bluesky that had the old centralized censorious pre twitter acquisition policies, and things work out in the long run
What's gotten worse in some countries is the government censorship which I'm against.
If the market is fair and leveled. Which is not the case without intervention as we know for hundreds of years at this point. And governments clearly started to no intervene even when their own laws would require it.
> which lifted its restrictions
This is categorically not true. Twitter home page is massively censored and coordinated. And this was quite obvious around Charlie Kirk's death, when normalization of racism was heavily promoted, and without a doubt promoted. Not before that, and after that was so obvious that they touched the algorithm for that (I have a far right racist fake account there to monitor this specifically). Also from Musk's own words, when Grok didn't lie for them. And since controversial topics, like racism, alt-right, etc spreads better, "lifting restrictions" mean exactly to form public opinions towards these. The market is not fair even towards ideas for a long time (and probably it was never true).
Do you see how these two statements are in conflict?
What is being censored? You don't like some speech but that's proof that restrictions on speech have been lifted. Get your narrative consistent at least. There's either vile speech due to lifting speech restrictions or there are still restrictions so these opinions are suppressed.
The charlie kirk stuff wasn't censored. You can still find it there. I see daily conspiracy theories about his wife being involved. Before the acquisition you had a satirical newspaper banned for referring to someone by their biological sex. Do you see the difference?
I guess you could have the opinion that normie moderate speech is censored but thats just silly.
> Do you see how these two statements are in conflict?
It's not in conflict. Both can be true at the same time. Also, there is nothing which is not "controversial".
> You don't like some speech but that's proof that restrictions on speech have been lifted.
Still, nothing in conflict. I can have problem with some speech, and I can support full blown free speech at the same time. Also, there is literally nobody who supports uncontrolled free speech. Not even, who lie to themselves that they support that.
> The charlie kirk stuff wasn't censored.
It wasn't "censored" in the sense, that you can find whatever you want. That was true on Twitter always in every single topic, even before Musk. It was censored how you can find it. Which is the case even by government censorship. You can find Mein Kampf even in countries where it's completely banned. You can find weed everywhere, the difference is only how.
If you don't see the contradiction around censorship while seeing a ton of controversial opinions, I don't know how to convince you. It reminds of the quote "It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible."
- There are 100 controversial opinions - 50 is censored - you can see 50 all the time
Also, you ignored all of the explanation which explained to you why your “censorship” and mine are different. And make your whole question nonsense. Because you predictably used “leftist”, and I anticipated that the problem is empathy.
Went through quite literally hundreds of accounts through it.
I posted "So you're blaming jews then?" to a clearly anti-semitic comment and poof. Gone
Are you confusing subreddit chosen restrictions (like minimum karma) and banning?
But we gave legal immunity to the corporate executives that forged fire testing certificates and caused the actual fire that killed over 100 people
And when I say we have Russia-style corruption no one believes me
40 years are not kids bro. and wasn't jailed
>The 49-year-old was given a 10-week suspended jail sentence.
He was arrested, jailed, tried and convicted. He was not imprisoned, which I did not say he was. The only thing I misremembered is the age.
The actual criminals that caused death of a hundred people have not been charged with any crime.
Amazing how pointing out obvious corruption is unpopular here. Or do people honestly believe that making video about a crime should be punished more than the crime itself?
Somebody is peddling lies in your direction. These claims don’t hold up to any sort of cursory examination.
“ No evidence established direct connections between Georgescu's campaign and Russian state actors. There were only assertions that there must have been due to his rapid rise on social media”
And:
the "National Liberal Party paid for a campaign on TikTok that ended up favoring ... Georgescu" and not Russia as previously presented to the Constitutional Court.
Also:
On 28 April 2025, right-wing conservative Hungarian think-tank Mathias Corvinus Collegium filed a complaint with the European Ombudsman because the European Commission denied access to the documents containing information on the EU's DSA proceedings in the case.
That’s not something you would expect from a proper investigation. The whole thing is a mess and what we heard on the news at the time is essentially a made up story.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusations_of_Russian_interfe...
In events like these it can be useful to operate on the systems thinking maxim and strictly look at who benefited, as this is interesting in itself without entertaining the suggestion that they engaged in anything illegal.
When it comes to social media in politics, I believe the burden of proof is on those who claim a net benfit. Centralization of traditional media is generally regarded as bad for open democracies, and the ultimate owners of almost all social media globally can be counted on one hand with fingers to spare.
As the quotes I included say, there was no evidence that Russia was behind the interference. They did track who paid for Tiktok "influencers" but it was ended up at "the National Liberal Party" - which means it was not foreign interference as pretty much all media in the world reported. If you wan to claim there was without anyone disputing it, you absolutely should provide evidence!
I think the only irregularity was that the Tiktok paid influencers were not disclosed properly. But the same has happened in so many other countries (even in Sweden where I am - the biggest party had to go through a huge scandal about doing just that) without ending up nullifying the result of elections. Of course, if they did not like the results enough, I'm sure similar shenanigans would've been utilized.
Millions of employed might disagree.
Define social media, specifically name the sites you're talking about. And explicitly state the ill health that follows when you consume social media
I actually love your example of selling an otherwise good product with a poisonous ingredient and I think the most middle-of-the-road weapon against the negatives of social media is to remove those ingredients. For example, no infinite scroll, no algorithmic ordering, forced slow loading if you've been on it for more than a certain number of minutes, etc. (I'm just spitballing). In other words, undo/ban all technological features (or "ingredients") of the things that the social media companies have done that are deliberately meant to pull on weaknesses in human psychology. They know they're doing it. They hire experts to do it.
You've already got the receipt for this. That memo isn't a company that stumbled into harm and feels bad about it. It's one picking a launch window based on when the people who'd object are busy.
Do we know this? As far as I can tell, the studies are ambivalent at best. Some kids are damaged, others benefit.
After all, novels were once considered harmful [0] but we now consider not being able to read a novel to be harmful.
[0] https://archive.nytimes.com/op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0...
1. Novels and phones are not the same tech. This is not 'generational quibble'; I am simply stating a fact. Just from pure historical perspective, written words were, correctly mind you, called out in that they will likely result in people not being able to commit as much to memory[1]. Move from written to printed produced even more of a change[2]. I am not saying those changes are ( were ) automatically bad, but it is important to recognize where they do fail. Surely, you would not argue that phones did not change the way people ingest information -- and if you wouldn't, the only question becomes whether you are honest enough to say what their particular failure modes are.
2. The nature of the tech in question is different. Written word is static and literally placed upon a page with the intent of the words staying there. Revisions result in a new physical book. The book does not suddenly become unreadable, because someone sent its publisher an order. The physical book does not track your progress to determine what passage made you most entertained to make sure next book is even more entertaining.
I will stop here, but surely you can see where I am going with this...
<< After all, novels were once considered harmful [0] but we now consider not being able to read a novel to be harmful.
Novels by themselves are not harmful the same way using a phone by itself is not harmful. Apart from everything else, as noted in previous paragraph, you can use the phone for more than reading. The comparison is simply not complete or close to exhaustive to allow for a proper comparison.
[1]https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html [2]https://www.amazon.com/Gutenberg-Galaxy-Making-Typographic-M...
The point is that older folks view new technologies as harmful, for a few reasons:
1. Any change is harmful as we get older. We grew up in one version of our society, and if society changes we view those changes as harmful because we become less comfortable in our own society.
2. Douglas Adams' quote [0]:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
It's the same mechanism at work for novels as for phones - the resistance to new technology looks exactly the same. We now look back at that resistance to novels as strange because we grew up with novels and consider them a normal (even outdated) part of our society. Future generations will look back at our resistance to phones as strange because to them phones will be a normal (even outdated) part of their society.
[0] the whole essay is talking about the same thing: https://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html
edit: formatting. So much formatting
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48897104
On an unrelated note: yes, I also don't understand how this incident has to do much with social media bans…
> Just because there are adults with full agency that do the wrong thing, doesn't mean we should remove protections on young people. Just because adults with full agency drive recklessly, doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds the ability to drive.
also agree wholeheartedly.
Sorry, under 18, should be 100% no to political ads. These companies know who is under 18.
Will we ban posters along highways that advertise car wreck lawyers? Where do you draw that line?
A targeted example for this case would be to switch the digital billboard to tampons because they read your number plates, visually identified the driver is a woman, and your recent texts with a friend mentioned needing some.
Quite a few places around the world have already done so, on the basis that they are an eyesore. Where there's a will there's a way.
There's a reason you get kids toys during the after-school section, and wills and funeral planning during the day
IMHO it's not healthy for anyone. From kids, to retired pensioners not knowing what to do with their time, to profesionalls doing linkedin "hacking" and "networking" on twitter, etc.
For this specific issue, the solution is simple and straightforward: shaming. None confronted the pervert in the train, because no one knows what is acceptable today and what is not.
Huh? That's exactly what they did to the pervert on the train, because they knew that wasn't acceptable today
These are capital crimes against humanity. The notion that we just have to accept it is absurdity.
I am.
Regulate social media if that is the case.
Bans are ineffective anyway - if you doubt that, compare and contrast the outcomes of Prohibition and the War on Drugs, versus regulating Tobacco companies...
Shoving a pillow over the dial-up modem because I didn't know you could turn off the dial sound....
The article is, I think, making several points at once:
- some of the people involved in creating this new legislation are already responsible for the harms the legislation alleges to mitigate. We've already heard (here on HN at least) that Meta lobbies FOR age restrictions; now with this incident we have a civic leader abusing their position of power and targeting exactly the people this raft of legislation allegedly protect (although it might be stretch to assume this person is involved in bringing in said legislation; they might be quietly avoiding talking about it because they know they're part of the problem). We should be questioning who's responsible for the legislation and inspecting their motivations publicly. We should be questioning their motivations, and challenging the efficacy of the proposed solutions given the background of motivations of those proposing them. We should be challenging the decision-making: where's the evidence the mitigations will work? (and this is all in addition to the perceived harms to all adults from the increased breadth and accuracy of the dragnet surveillance the solutions create).
- we don't need this kind of legislation to help raise reasonably-minded children. We should be targeting the perpetrators of the harm, not targeting near-adults who are (potentially) being harmed. The current legislation is victim-blaming, not prosecuting the perpetrators. The situation described is somewhat allegorical, rather than "here, social media is good"
I think it's also saying this:
- how else are people, adults, near-adults, children, going to learn of, and discuss, situations like the one described, without social media? "The Kids" have been using social media for the last ten years, and many of them are, despite the harms, growing up sane, self-controlled, able to stand up for themselves.
The article is making me reflect on our household's ban on our teen using social media. We don't want them getting wrapped up in constant one-up-ing, gossiping, body-shaming, discrimination, and other social ills that go around, but we are also denying them some ability to discuss these issues, learn about them, find support from peers and experts. (I mean, they can... they can use the wider web and can talk with their parents, friends, and teachers, in person; but those media are slower or more awkward for being "in your face")
This is the low-hanging-fruit, for those of us who KNOW it's an addiction and are actively trying to quit, but struggling to limit our usage. I use leechblock NG which is amazing for browser-based sites, but wouldn't really help a kid who's having the isuse on apps.
There are many further steps to take, but I think we should all align on the most obvious ones first and build up from there.
Call it something like the matrix.
Isolating specialized customized algorithms tube to be addicted to specifically you and tuned to keep you away from other humans forever.
Instead of identity barriers like in the UK they should simply ban "accounts".
Regulators should say: ok you can serve kids and women and whoever else but you have to creat 20 channels and you can't differentiate and everyone just picks a username that isn't protected and they shout into the group chat and nobody knows who anyone is except the provider and everyone sees the same thing.
Ok this is an exaggeration to make the point.
We can't even see what other people are being shown.
You can't even opt out of being secretly show things.
It's evil.
I want a feed that is 100% public. Every single thing they show me is shown to everyone. Like radio or something.
An extreme example, all genocides are done by people who want to set the world right. It just how they see right is warped.
heh. no.
Because of chungus memes? I think you might be over reacting there bro
Like all risks it doesn’t affect all kids equally either.
Some are less vulnerable for various cognitive reasons just like some are less prone to chemical addiction.
Kids with wealthier and/or more engaged parents or parents with more free time are also less vulnerable. Wealthier kids have more activities available and can often afford to have one parent stay home.
Lastly kids in healthier communities or suburbs or safe urban settings where they can roam free are less vulnerable.
They children of the poor, those with ADD or ASD conditions, and those with less third spaces or other activities are most vulnerable to becoming addicted to endless stupefying doom scrolling and addictive games that pre-train them for future gambling addiction.
It’s not just kids either. The elderly and the isolated become addicted to this stuff.
Addiction engineering is the problem, whether it’s via a phone, a web site, or a chemical.
IMO if you intentionally and knowingly engineer something for addiction you are committing a form of assault.
Make it illegal to advertise to anyone under the age of 18. Make it illegal to trade data about anyone under the age of 18.
What incentive would then remain? I don't think they will do it for the long term gains of training behaviour for when they are old enough to exploit. Companies that engage in behaviour like this are notoriously immune to long term ideas.
It’d be almost impossible to pick and choose so just tax all of it. I think the knock on effects would be positive. It’s an almost unmitigated vice at this point and is the main engine behind this stuff.
They would definitely do that. It is a pretty basic idea to advertise to kids so there will be a customer base in later years. There was related emails leaked too
The problem is bullets, which guns just happen to make go very fast.
Whilst I agree that addictive things can be bad how far does this ago? Food manufacturers purposely make foods that are addictive. Video game companies use ways to make games more addictive.
Companies make things that we want and sometimes we get addicted to wanting it too much.
We don't need to get bogged down in this question before doing the first obvious thing and banning the most addictive things known to exist.
A bit of a weird tangent from what apparently is harassment in a train or something like that? I admit it's hard to follow what is going on.
In many countries cultures, strict parents/laws are seen as loving and protecting. Being told "don't drink untl you're at least 20" isn't seen as "forbidden fruit" you're being denied.
I definitely think it is a result of learning more responsible habits from adults, with supervision of what and how much they are allowed to drink. There is a huge difference between having a glass of wine (and maybe starting with diluted wine as mine did) with a family meal and spirits with mixers with friends who themselves do not have good habits.
I think this applies to a lot of other things too: kids need to learn good habits and behaviour from adults in general. I sometimes wonder whether the worst effect on kids of phones is that they get less attention from distracted adults.
On the other hand, I totally agree with your last point! I find it quite plausible that maybe parents having phones directly detracts from the quality of the parenting that a child receives; if we're saying these devices/apps are literally addictive, it stands to reason that a parent might get hooked to the detriment of their child, and with a modern perspective of addiction, it's not due to a character flaw as much as just a fundamental bug in our biology and psychology as humans. It would honestly make more sense to me to restrict the use of smartphones/social media for parents than children, but of course that has zero chance of happening (and there are are surely a myriad of downsides for this approach as well), so in general I'm just skeptical of this sort of thing being enforced from the top-down despite being pretty extreme in my left-wing views (and therefore not particularly adverse to government regulation in cases where I think it makes sense).
It meant when I got to university I knew how much I could drink (although as a student I was too poor to drink much anyway haha) whereas there were people drinking like half a bottle of vodka.
I don't drink any alcohol nowadays so it's not like it turned me into an alcoholic either.
16 year olds can currently have them with a meal in a restaurant or pub. Until a few years ago it was 14.
> It meant when I got to university I knew how much I could drink (although as a student I was too poor to drink much anyway haha) whereas there were people drinking like half a bottle of vodka.
I gave my kids some alcoholic drinks for just that reason.
no. it isn’t.
my apologies for sounding more blunt than im meaning to, but, im not at all sure where i would fall on the idea of banning kids from having social media powered phones, but i know they’re not a “necessity”.
It isn't yet.
> Sooner or later people have to use it, unlike alcohol.
So far I've avoided having a smart phone, I've not had a mobile phone since flip phones - I went off always being contactable about that time, having had bleeding edge sat phones for decades.
I have a land line, an answering machine, travel, purchase, am part of several overlapping businesses and deliver work for clients.
eMail, cash, debit cards still get me by <shrug>
Would you care to elaborate how you don't think a phone is not “practically necessary”?
I have never personally met someone like you. I've never known someone who personally met someone like you either. Theoretically, nothing is a necessity. That's why I wrote “practically”. Practically nobody lives like you do.
Can you rephrase sans the cascading negatives. To restate, I have a full life in a G20 country, I don't own or use a smart phone.
> I have never personally met someone like you.
There are many people on the planet.
> Practically nobody lives like you do.
There are many people like me .. you don't met them via your smart phone.
But I've had plenty of moments in my life without a phone, be it the battery is dead, or I've lost/broke it. And I've survived fine.
I've had to re-engineer some parts of life, but yet I remain...
But it's not really a fair comparison, because alcohol has a very direct detrimental effect on brain development. Many things can have a detrimental effect, but alcohol always does. Which is probably why they raised the age to 18.
It seems like, in this situation, we watch primarily non-phone-enabled virtues save the day: a clear sense of right and wrong, assertiveness, courage, steadiness in a tense situation, an attentive social environment with bystanders who both noticed and backed each other up…
Even having practiced some of those skills in moving through the world, I worry that, if I were a phone-carrying person, I’d be tempted to “just record it and let the internet sort it out.” Which is orthogonal to fixing the wrong in the moment.
In some places, payment requires a phone. Tracking unreliable public transit requires a phone. Getting rideshare requires a phone.
The issue probably isn't the phone but letting them outside in the first place.
We can’t just pretend that it’s possible to live an adult life without one in 2026. In 2008, certainly, but that’s not the world these kids grew up in.
But we’re talking about kids, which is a whole different matter.
I've still managed to exist in society and do everything I need to do with all the more "analogue" systems we have.
Having to ring a friend from a phone box because I'd lost my phone the night before we were meant to meetup was fun
Desperate reaching. People who carry phones are bad people, I mean FFS, get real
However, if a school district wants to restrict the use of smartphones during the school day for all students, I would be OK with that.
echo "0.0.0.0 youtube.com www.youtube.com m.youtube.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
So it's a flat no
Why do people get so weird about the shorts tab? There are perfectly good videos in there, they're just tilted weird. You can fit quality content into 3 minutes.
And remember Elsagate? That was entirely landscape videos.
There is whole world to read and discover before switching to passive videos. Or even spend time here lol
Notice how Shorts recently removed the dislike button?
The method of ingestion for short form video content is what I dislike, it encourages endless consumption. Each video is immediately followed by another video. It’s very hard to critically consume that style of content when you don’t have time to think about what you’re watching or just watched once another video starts playing. I believe this leads to uncritically believing whatever you’re watching.
The format itself incentivizes sensationalism and puffery, I feel like I’m ingesting questionable information every time I’ve watched short form videos. That’s the main reason I reject short form video content outright, it just feels .. ‘wrong’ somehow.
Yeah but I don't control the people posting.
> you don’t have time to think about what you’re watching or just watched once another video starts playing
Mine doesn't go to a new video until I tell it to, which is the same for shorts and non-shorts.
Hard to argue below 18 actually needs more. Wants, sure, but then whole cancerous can of worms is opened and good luck there.
Both of my kids went to public school. My sisters kids both went to a private school. The policy was the same at both places. Kids come in the classroom, turn off their phones, put in a pouch at the front of the class. At the end of the class, kids get their phones back.
Apparently since there is little or no time between classes, I guess with the lack of time to be on their phones, in person conversations have increased and more face-to-face interactions are the norm. Its faster and easier to meet someone down the hall then it is to go through the process of texting someone, which is the entire point.
The goal was to create enough friction (psychological or real) so kids simply revert back to just meeting up at a regular spot to catch up, as opposed to constantly being on their phones. The school admins I talked to said its really pushed kids back into communicating like humans. Many have forgone their phones in between classes, except a quick check for emergency purposes, that sort of thing.
Kind of fascinating to hear to be honest.
Do teens need phones? Sure, they need a phone. Arguably any child old enough to know how to make a phone call needs one. But do they need a miniature computer to scroll through AI slop 10+ hours a day?
These aren't the same question. Confusing these two is dangerous.
Kids don't want to call, and parents don't want to receive calls except for critical situations. Only elders and scammers are actually phoning.
> AI slop
Same deal as what the GP is pointing at: you need to train kids to deal with slop, and not have them face it on their own at once at some arbitrary adult age.
Sure. That's why I have mine mainlining China White. How will they learn to deal with addictive substances unless they're waist-deep in it?
Letting choose a different path than you is IMHO the minimum you should be doing.
we warn kids about the impacts of heroin, we don’t shoot them up with it.
On paper yes, biologically not really
People who are not yet ready to have full agency of their own lives is more or less the definition of children.
Does she also expect children to have full time jobs, pay taxes, pay all their own bills and rent, etc etc?
Just because there are adults that abuse their agency of the use of alcohol (alcoholism) doesn't mean we should remove restrictions on young people.
Just because there are adults with full agency who drive recklessly doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds to drive cars.
I know a few upper-crust families, including a hereditary title. They all care about their children, like the majority of human beings. But this blogger doesn't think we hate posh people enough, so necessarily they abuse their young.
It snacks of "jews will eat your baby". It's not the vitriol that offends me, it's the stupidity.
I grew up in a listed house with twelve fireplaces and a stable block with coach houses (plural). There were three crown princes in my boarding house at school. My godfather's house is a tourist attraction and my godmother was on the board of ICI. My mother's garden is on the horticultural circuit. My sister got married in Westminster Abbey. One brother used to play polo and the other just made equity partner at deloitte. I can probably get twenty OBEs on the phone. One of my friends has a net worth of €500b, and this year i have declined three invitations from him just to avoid the air travel.
When i was young and everything was black-and-white, i hated all rich people. I chiselled my privilege out of my accent and worked manual jobs. Now i hate the system, and i take the people in the system as i find them. My circle includes people from all walks of life, and I get invited to opera and to warehouse parties alike.
Anyways, your quite pedestrian life story changes none of the data, e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduce...
Being aware of said data is not "hatred" or seeing things black and white.
My bullet point would probably be "champagne socialist" or "trustafarian"; you can tag me as such; the truth is never libel.
The old pervert using his camera shouldn't be doing that. His behaviour was not OK.
Nobody is talking about keeping kids off social media because their behaviour is not OK. They're talking about keeping kids off social media because they believe it's harmful to them, and that the companies designing the products know it's harmful and addictive.
We can disagree about whether or not that's true, or what actions might be helpful (or not), but there is no common thread with the example given.
And also the article they link to, went to the effort to black out their faces.
Giving addictive and attention stealing tech to children from a young age is like giving drugs to rats, they will continue to hit the feeder bar until they effectively kill themselves.
> If the point was that solid it wouldn't need to make this multi-step analogy.
Analogies are always useful to show logical similarities in somebodies thinking pattern. The fact you dismiss them shows you have no interest in thinking about anything other than your own point. Again thats fine, we can agree to disagree. I wonder if you will show me the same courtesy.
Beyond that, like any parent, you have a lot of latitude in how you choose to treat your children, but I'm not going to agree that isolating them from computers is helping just because you frame it as "gentle", and I'm not going to say that we should replicate that elsewhere.
No one's proposing banning teenagers from owning smart phones entirely. I would agree that not allowing 17 year old girls going out to have phones on trains would be bad policy, if that was actually a thing anyone was suggesting. It's unclear how any of the teens in the anecdote at the start of the story would be affected by the proposed legislation at all.
> It’s watching precisely why young adults need phones, the agency to use them, and the life skills to make their ways in the world with their phones in their pockets.
The link between creepy old men being called out and documented on a train and whether or not 14 year olds should be spending 8+ hours a day scrolling tiktok is unclear to the point of feeling like I'm missing something in the article. I guess the idea is that teens are being punished? And we should be holding our leaders accountable instead of restricting the teens? The counter argument to this would be "holding our leaders accountable" looks a lot like "passing regulations to keep children from being harmed by digital nicotine"
> Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday
This is the same reason I think we should give 13 year olds a couple of cigarettes a week, just enough for them to still feel sick from the nicotine and start to figure out how to integrate into adult society.
We've long accepted that certain activities carry enough harm that people under a certain age lack the development for it to be fair to expect them to engage with it in a healthy manner. Does it deny 14 year olds some agency that we don't allow them to ride motorcycles? Yes. Is it sound policy? I think so. We have plenty of evidence for real harms in teenagers with regards to social media, a fact that took me a long time to accept while I worked in the industry, but is plainly obvious in the data and studies done on it over the past decade.
Same for AI.
Smartphones are fomes peccati.
Smartphones aren't, some apps on them are.
(besides being unneeded or a nuisance in some situations)
Once the app store and opened the gate for social media to wonder in, that is when these things got turned into potential addiction machines.
The "addictive" insisting by 2 new ones in short time? Getting bot vibes. "We need to classify social media as an addictive substance" more or less. Is that from someone's e-safety commissioner? Or someone wanting back-pay compo right back to MySpace addiction. An absurd idea.
"Some people can't control themselves around video games therefore video games bad", that's what social media has copped.
"Addictive" might mean a bloody well designed user interface that users like. Making buttons easy to access and responsive feedback and just the right amount of visual cues and spicy labels, all in harmony as designed and delivered via well engineered mechanisms. "Too addictive, you must now jump through regulatory hoops". No!
How dare they show people stuff!
Reminds me of the perpetrators of crimes against women who blame what women wear. "She provoked me by showing her ankles! I didn't like it but the next day she was showing me her ankles again!"
But they're not, parents aren't employing the very tooling available right now. SM platforms already have a minimum age, and yet many parents are literally friends with their 8yo childs faked profile
Like SM companies
Edit: now fixed, thanks mods
The former is no issue. I just don't think the author's take is nuanced as they think.
Kids (Age 5-13) safety is of ultimate importance. Devices, independently are also a major issue in schools. Social media use of bullying also is a major issue. To the point they are banned.
Should we ban schools then? Because school grounds are famously place where the most bullying, especially kids 5-13 (which you highlighted yourself), is happening. Or maybe ban real life interactions? Because you can meet someone who will bully you or be of bad influence?
We both know that’s not the right way, just like banning social media is not solving any problems. It’s just a convenient argument to introduce internet-wide surveillance, as well as to take away any autonomy or rights kids may have. Instead of investing in moderation, and actually scrutinizing big tech, which is the real cause of more bullying, shorter attention spans, and whatever else people say is wrong with the kids these days.
Social Media worked out that way. So did device addiction.
It's great to find ways to socialize, and those ways existed before, and will also exist after.
The exclusion of current forms of social media and connectivity as default doesn't mean better solutions don't step up.
I'm not really sure of the tying of schools to phone bans in schools. Schools aren't perfect, but they have a legal liability to keep kids safe (or safer). Devices and social media don't.
A large part of this is life coming at parents faster than they can keep up, let alone stay one season ahead of their childs growth. This would probably be a way.
Societally, rules and laws, including public health are a social contract and agreement on how to live together in a tight place.
Inside the home, though, is the opportunity for parents to learn and expose as they wish.
Solving today's social media can solve a ton of problems, or at least provide an impetus for it to improve. Schools are supposed to be safe places for kids, right? And the entire unfiltered outside world was coming into it via device.
For example, one solution is parents getting literate in tech enough to know how to lead young people before this even becomes a conversation. One way to do this is to offer unlimited screen time for creating, and much less for passive consuming. The generation that wants to experience the real world through a little screen has it backwards, and that's coming form the people who built the little digital world too.
I'm not anti-technology for young people at all. I'm anti-addiction and anti-manipultion by unlimited people and parties interested in reaching eyeballs.
Parents, legally, are required to provide a safe and growing environment.
The amount of administrative tasks, bureaucracy and complexity an adult, let alone a parent, has to navigate on a daily basis has increased 100x since the 70’s. It is very convent for corporations but less convenient for parents. Just look at the amount of legal contract you have to sign relating to data, Eula, etc.
> Parents, legally, are required to provide a safe and growing environment.
True, but be carefull, people might solve the problem in ways you don’t expect.
For example if someone races near a kids playground on electric skateboard at 50 km/h, and authorities keep ignoring the issue, they might just hit an unexpected obstacle
The differences with bullying via social media are: the difficulty to escape it in space or time as well as its reach. I don't think we can argue that social media is not an issue on these fronts.
> A little later in life, when internet as a whole was majorly taking off, it helped me actually socialize.
I agree, but I also have to wonder if the nature of the Internet has changed to the point where the benefits are secondary to the costs. In the early days, it was far easier to access the positives and far easier to ignore the negatives since we made explicit decisions about where to go. While you can still do that today, by avoiding social media, it is far more difficult. The mainstream has consolidated to the point where you pretty much have to isolate yourself to avoid it. Much of what mainstream social media sites provide is pushed to the user in some for or another. On top of all of that, the online world had far less reach in the past. At least when I was younger, the bullies simply didn't go online and while exploitive people were online there seemed to be far fewer of them.
As for the Internet wide surveillance: I don't think that is the driving force behind the current regulations. We already have Internet wide surveillance. That is why your proposal is all the more important, the bit about moderation and scrutinizing big tech, because we let them get away with far too much.
Just log off of Instagram / TikTok / wherever. Or block the people bothering you. If anything I'd say digital bullying is easier to escape because unlike school kids aren't required to be on those sites six to eight hours a day, and blocking someone needs a lot less effort and cooperation from adults than reporting them to school authorities.
A large number of youth will do that, but there is also a reason why children and youth are considered a vulnerable population.
I cannot speak too much on youth since most of my experience is with children. While some of them are more than happy to navigate their social lives by choosing who their friends are and ignoring those who cause them grief, where possible (as you suggested, there is the physical proximity in schools to complicate things), a great many more want to belong. They want to belong even where they are unwelcome and the unwelcomeness is manifested as bullying. What little I've seen of teens suggests that much the same does happen, only the bullying is meaner.
And that only addresses bullying. It does not address content directed towards adults, much of which is perfectly fine for younger people to know but they should also learn about it under the guidance of an adult so they don't come to think it is acceptable or the norm. It also fails to address the manipulative nature of some sites, something that they probably haven't learned to recognize never mind how to handle.
Yes, in a sense, you can turn off the problems and a lot of the problems will just go away. I'm not going to say they will disappear completely. Remember, social media has a larger audience and the others in that audience may bring it back to real life. Also remember that the people we are discussing don't always have the wisdom or experience to turn it off. Heck, a lot of adults don't have that wisdom or experience (but, at least for adults, we can claim they ought to know better).
Are you sure about that? So far the negatives vastly outweigh the positives. Imagine a statement:
> as a concept there isn’t an issue with a social credit score / great firewall / reeducation camp as long as they are done by a competent well-meaning person
If people truly agreed that children needed to be protected from the desires of others, teaching them that a particular religion is the true one would be restricted until they were of an age where they could provide informed consent.
For some, communication devices are the only way to escape that particular abuse.
There's lots of ways to capture bullying. But it might be hot water right? What if it was a watch with a camera? What if it was a camera alone? :)
Bullying is serious enough it can't be conflated with the desires of device manufacturers and social media platforms to manufacture young consumers of their feeds.
An issue here is the unfiltered internet is not capable of raising children, as much as they want to be exposed to everything, it doesn't work out the same for every child based on a whole host of independent factors than those who take the position above.
That doesn't mean I agree with the general thrust of taking technology away from kids and young adults....I don't. But I do think we should probably understand the bad that we are taking with the good.
You can just not have phones, but it's socially isolating. You have to frequently audit what's on their phones because they often won't volunteer what's happening. You take them out of one group chat only to have the bullies reappear in another one.
Old fashioned bullying kept regular business hours. This gives them a portal into your home life 24/7, and that's the best case, when you put a ton of effort into managing it.
And if you're not having this problem somehow, you might want to double check and make sure your kid isn't the bully.
What works needs to be found.
I hear this plenty, but kids are literally forced to go be with their peers (hopefully including some friends) for 6+ hours a day (in my country). Don't they have enough time to arrange their social lives in person?
It’s not as bad as phone apologists say.
The author leaps from a proposed ban on 15 year olds using tiktok to wholesale bans on smartphones.
I think the argument upthread about "conflation" has a point, but .. it's social media itself that forces the conflation. You can't just have a social network that lets you communicate with your community, it has to get tied up with international politics and exploitative advertising.
The tech industry obviously jumped onto it because it's a rhetorically powerful argument but it tells you very little what the systemic consequences are ten years down the road.
The abuse question .. well, "social justice" is a term that starts fights, but there have been a lot of people who've been able to get some sort of justice only because they raised their cause on social media, having been ignored by the authorities. #MeToo is probably the big example, culminating in the Epstein revelations.
You may disagree with the author's conclusions, but that doesn't make the article nonsense.
The article explains why that was not irrelevant.
- I have not heard of a general cell phone ban for children and youth. They may "ban" the use of phones in schools (in reality: phones must remain in a bag or locker) and parents may choose to forbid their children from having phones (which is difficult to enforce after a certain age), but nothing general.
One may argue that children and youth may use phones to document improper or abusive situations in schools, which certainly can happen, but that is not the dominant use of phones by children and youth in schools and there are other avenues to document such circumstances.
- Most of the regulations we are discussing today are related to access to adult content or sites that are run in an exploitive manner (e.g. "the algorithm"). I have heard of no prohibitions of children and youth accessing sites outside of that context, even though there is plenty of room to question where the boundaries should be.
So I will agree that the author is either misrepresenting or conflating the regulations, to the point where the article is nonsense.
This is insane.
So which should we choose as society, removing the 99% harm or keep the 1% usefulness?
Also we should note that the children in this example were 16 and 17 years old, so above the age of many of the suggested restrictions.
I don't disagree that big adtech's reliance on dopamine-driven addictive behavior is real evil, but regulations that at least wall kids off from that makes sense and there's all kinds of research to suggest as much, in contrast to a personal essay about a video online.
> These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults.
Really? I would have said the opposite. Part of the problem is she lumps the affluent and the wealthy together. The affluent professional class go out of their way to encourage independence. They are the people who take gap years to travel, who are pushed to go away to university rather than a local one while living at home (a Scottish "policy wonk" should notice that the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews are full of affluent kids from the South of England).
The story is powerful and i agree with some of the conclusions, but forcing the conclusions to fit narrative that all bad things are the other sides fault is terrible.
(It's remarkable how many of the top-level comments are pointing out this sort of problem with the article content.)
It's complete nonsense. The conversation in the UK right now isn't about whether or not teenagers should be allowed to own cell phones; it's about whether they should be allowed to have access to the myriad of addictive and harmful apps and services available on those devices, often maliciously targeted at them.
The drunk pervert filming them on the train has nothing to do with this argument. He's using his phone like a camera. Teenagers are allowed to have cameras, and assuredly every one of the girls he was filming had a camera of some sort on them of their own. Nobody was on uneven ground in this situation technologically.
If people actually were worried about perverted adults preying on children, they would take a look at the countless examples of perverted adults preying on children via their social media accounts and devices. It's been open season on children online for the past decade.
If people actually cared about accountability, they would stop pushing for age-verification laws, and start penalizing social media companies for their laissez faire attitude towards inappropriate sexual conduct, because currently, sites like Instagram and TikTok cater directly to pedophiles and do absolutely nothing about the predatory behavior coming from their user base towards children that are clearly too young to legally use social media in most parts of the world (<13 in the USA).
We need to reframe this whole conversation. It's not about keeping kids away from social media. It's about keeping trillion-dollar businesses from profiting off of children while actively doing harm to them with addictive algorithms, misinformation, and exposure to malicious actors.
If you read the investigations into CSA, the vast majority is being commuted by white men, white men like the man in this video
>No one is being raped on social media
Who said they were? It's a bit off that you're waving out Sexual Assault in reference to literally everything else.
Do we need to speak to the police about you
What offences would those be? It isn’t an offence to record somebody on a train or else the person who recorded the video of the guy also committed an offence (and neither that person nor the guy did).
Didn’t read past that part. Mindless outrage culture is neither intellectually interesting nor healthy to be around.
But the main point here is that a guy was taking pics of some teens "secretly". Right?
The controversy about teens' rights to use cellphones and how to use them is quite debatable since it implies modern cultural behavior on tech and social media.
Except this is exactly what Heather Burns is doing.
Not this guy, who (I had to check) was apparently following the law(?) and the article even admits this:
> as far as policymakers are concerned, it’s the senior legal officer with the phone who is rightfully entitled to have the phone and use it any way he pleases
(if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article)
It's just a strange argument to say we should loosen the regulations when you have people like Heather exhibiting the problematic behavior that these laws are supposed to protect people from.
i feel like there's a time and a place to split hairs on whether or not legality clears moral wrong doing, and this is certainly not that time nor place. in what universe are these even remotely equivalent without broad abstractions?
* elite boomer filming underage girls for his own gratification
* bystanders filming a perpetrator mid-act
heather touches on those willing to get hung up on this stretch of an inconsistency and even links her other Darnella test post.
> (if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article)
that is literally the article. she's a tech policy writer critiquing the policy framework.
in general the weird undertones of your comment feel like you're asserting heather is like morally compromised or something and that the article is worth dismissing. if there was some discussion about the actual stuff she's talking about in this article i'd be singing a different tune right now, you know about whether or not under 16 bans punish young people for stinky perf perpetrator behavior... but since there isn't it feels even crazier that you're dotting this with your assessment that heather is somehow being the problematic one here. wat
But then the rest of the article is a load of nonsense about legislation that doesn't even exist.
The article mentions 15-16 years of age.
The best practice is to keep kids off smartphones with full internet, full social media, touchscreen and scrolling at least until 13.
It doesn't mean they can't have other kinds of devices.
This is a wide open market category.
Also vast majority of devices run a Linux kernel....
I think smart phones are really cool when they aren't in the attention economy. But high performance but low power draw chips and media accelerators unintentionally allowed for these kind of social media setups to be viable.
We've gone back to heavy CPU burning applications rather than nimble and efficient. Not to mention the amount of background processing for tracking.
Even Microsoft was once sued for how much energy they wasted with nonsense.
Before phones/computers/internet, it was garbage on television channels. Propaganda on 24/7 “news” channels, “reality” tv shows, etc.
Maybe we should've shown a little more spine when they asked us to build a medium for the strong would use to prey on the weak. Maybe we're the problem.
I'm not advocating for a return to that, but that was one of the highlights of the era.
Unfortunately, a lot of people run teenage software on adult hardware and that is a wild combo.
the adults of today, albeit the younger ones, were kids growing up with post-IM world. the ones before that could speak with their friends from their homes instead of only meeting in person (due to telephones). we all are products of the environment we were raised in. but despite those learnings, it seems like we are not self-regulating as a society.
charity begins at home, and before bringing children in a conversation, we should think if we all are alright.
I read the whole article to find these offences.
Found none.
Isn't this what happens in Islamic countries all the time though?
Meanwhile the article you link to, blacks out their faces.
The kids in that sense, are just a convenient vessel for an argument; the same way they function for the author of that article.
> the impetus for the most authoritarian internet regulation in the UK, including the <16s ban, has come from the affluent/wealthy/1% elite on the political right wing
Very strong take with no justification at all. What we observe is that many developped countries with different political orientations are currently taking action against harm caused by social media and more generally by excessive screen time. This is not about political right wing.
>It’s easy to understand why: the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. They never have. And they never did themselves,
Really sounds like a frustrated person that projects his own problems on the rest of the world. And totally not relevant to the debate about the impact of social media on teenagers.
I mean social media is simply misanthropic. If humanity had any balls it'd burn these places down. Calling banishment from social media a punishment is a stretch. The point of these decrees has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with persecuting adults for behaving in ways the state doesn't like. The author's read is just weird