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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with your framing at all that we need to do something and it because to be done immediately, so it seems basically impossible to have any sort of reasonable discussion if things seem so dire to you that this seems self-evident rather than needing some further justification. In general I feel like any assertions about the need for something immediately like this should have a fairly high bar for justifying them.

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Do you have teenage kids? It feels highly urgent to me because the generation of kids aged 12-21 are severely impacted by the harms and cultural distortion these services cause. I think it would be hard to imagine their hold on this generation and the impact without first hand observation.

I'd argue that any teenagers who go from having access today to not having it tomorrow are probably not going to magically become different in the ways you desire; it seems a lot more likely to have effects on kids who are younger and haven't already been influenced by it, but at that point we're actually talking about trying to make a structural changes to make things different in the long term. That type of thing seems very strange to enact by making a blanket regulation on the supposed victims of the harms than on the perpetrators of it.

Think of it like current kids being bombarded by cancer-causing radiation. The sooner you get them out of it the better. Yes, it is better still to never have been exposed, but the second best time to stop it is now.

This kind of absurd hyperbole is the clearest sign of a moral panic.

That's basically the point I was trying to make with my initial response; I think any claim that something is so urgent that we need to act now even with a solution that everyone admits isn't great should be scrutinized pretty thoroughly, because historically calls like this are at least as likely to be a way of manufacturing consent as they are to actually be some emergency, especially when the emergency apparently is not clear enough without needing a lot of explanation.

If you think the big social media companies are literally bombarding kids with radiation, I'm confused why you still don't seem to consider it at least as urgent to shut down the radiation-generating companies.

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