Teen Social Media Bans Miss the Point

One can indeed argue what is the best way to deal with the problem of kids and social media, but I think the article is misrepresenting the situation.

I'm a college age gen Z, and don't really think you can fix much with a social media ban alone, even ignoring all the implications if it's enforcement.

People don't get dysmorphia because some computer program told them so. The "influencers" are just other victims of a fundamentally toxic culture, or leaches on that insecurity.

You could say it used to be better before the internet, and maybe you'd be right. But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. As long as there are humans communicating through any medium, there will be a culture that can harbor these destructive tendencies, and the bigger more sparse that culture is, the more extreme its ideas can get.

Chronological feeds or more civic accountability for any algorithmic feeds (like forcing companies to share data with researchers to study their effects) could be a generally great initiative, but simply banning social media for anyone won't do as much as you'd hope.

Looksmaxing, the latest of these strange internet-induced mental illnesses, literally began on a phpBB forum.

What should have been was what Cory Doctorow has pushed - forced open API integration. From there you can make your own clients, only see friends, de-gamify, chronological algorithm, etc.

But banning children? That's a fools game. But easy for the votes, cause politicians are attacking a population who can't vote, and are disenfranchised by default.

What we need less of are the attention-maximizing, eldritch-horror things that have stolen social media and now walk around wearing the skins of the entity that summoned it.

Facebook is not social media — if you don't believe me, go on Facebook and count how many posts are from people you had mutual interactions with and actively choosen to follow and how many are everything else (not including native ads, I understand the platforms have to make moeny).

It's the same issue, if not worse, on X/Twitter.

I wouldn't know the status of TikTok for the same reason I don't know what the current status of street drugs, but as I understand it you can't even meaningfully follow people on TikTok — it's just mindless consumption from people you don't know.

How can it be social media if there's no social component?

Email is social media; chatting with your guild members in World of Warcraft is social media. Until at least a few months ago, commenting on a pull request on GitHub was more social media than Twitter was.

The first step in dealing with the world is to look at things as they actually are, not as they were twenty years ago.

I am reminded of all the ridiculousness of the 1980s/1990s - "Its 10pm do you know where your kids are?" "I learned it by watching you dad!" Lawsuits around backwards message in music (Later PMRC), that Bevis and Butthead caused the child to burn down the trailer (fire! fire!)...

My kids hate social media for the most part - and are much more free range than their peers. Why? Because we did the hard work of parenting them! We were involved in their lives, from their grades to their social lives, to talking about the tech in their hand and the problems it can create.

We need to have a conversation about kids - about them being able to be outside, roaming, unattended without parents being arrested. About them having third spaces, about severe restrictions on their "freedom" in the world if we want to get to the heart of the issue. They are breaking this law because social media has become their "third space" that is parent free where they can explore and figure out the world.

The Study TFA references: "The most common reason children still had their social media accounts was that they had not yet been asked by the platform to verify their age."

So, basically the first quote is an attempt to manipulate people by appealing to a cliche. Who would have thought?

I feel like this is the key for fighting all negative behaviors.

Fill the time, burn the energy, with better stuff so that nobody has any left for the bad stuff.

It is not. The sources provided shows that the remaining 70% of teenagers that remain on the platforms are due to lack of enforcement from the platforms, not purposeful skirting of restrictions by the teenagers (VPN etc.).

The article further labels the teenage bans as a fight between adults and teenagers, as if the laws will breed resentment from children towards their parents. As far as I'm aware, that's not how teenagers view the issue of tobacco and alcohol bans around the world.

30% reduction is a successful start in the first year. I foresee further reduction in the coming years when less teenagers slip through the lack of enforcement and more of them pass the 16 year old threshold.

"In scary headlines like these, the adult man in the white van is the subject, and the child is the passive victim. The child can obviously be trained to identify that adult mans talking to them in white vans may require distance even if not every person doing so is a killer."

Failure? Or 30% improvement.

“While social media can be weaponized for bullying or hate, over half of all teens turn to social media as a source of social and emotional support.”

Teens also turn to drugs as a source of of social and emotional support.

“ Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults.”

Ironically the thesis of this article. In fact I would say by banning teens from social media, we may be implicitly increasing their agency, since they’ll have to figure out how to interface with a set of technolgies that are not optimized for them.

There’s something really dystopian to me about “designing for teens in mind” and I think maybe the unintended consequence of this kind of thinking is just - the continued marketable capture of segments.

What this person is basically advocating for is a new way for tech companies to extract more value from our youth.

The whole point of being a teenager is to generate your own ways to rebel against the fact that the adult world isn’t quite built for you.

This “facebook but for teenagers” is just another opiate for the masses.

The article is missing the point entirely. The conversation is not about “regulated spaces”, but removing them from spaces created entirely to drive advertisement, mindless engagement and consumption. If they find other spaces to join without that, perfect - it worked!

> The companion narrative to technological determinism is something I’d call adult saviorism. Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults. In this narrative, teens lack the media literacy or judgment to save themselves. The conclusion to this line of thinking, when it comes to regulation, is that teens need not be involved, since they themselves are compromised.

This totally devalues the long-accepted wisdom that adults are responsible for raising children and sometimes have to make decisions that children don't like but that are necessary and beneficial for their well-being.

In the author's narrative, teens who have no meaningful context in which to understand how their brains are being manipulated by multi-billion dollar companies for profit are somehow supposed to participate in proposing regulations that protect them from said companies.

> While adult saviorism is, in many ways, well-intentioned, often coming from a place of concern about child safety, it fails to recognize teens’ expertise and creativity in using technology. Most teens are skeptical that their parents and policymakers know better than they do about the good and bad of the online world, and for good reason. Consider the U.S. congressional hearing held in 2021, in which Facebook’s then global head of safety was asked by Senator Richard Blumenthal, “Will you commit to ending Finsta?” Needless to say, such embarrassing lines of questioning — which neither began nor ended with Blumenthal — should inspire very little confidence.

Teens think they know more than their elders?!? What an astonishing revelation!

This is such a straw man argument. Arguing that some geezer in Congress saying "Finsta" is evidence that adults are incapable of making sensible decisions about protections for children is a bad look for anyone associated with an institution of higher learning.

It's baffling to me that anyone has still not realized that.

What I would like to see is changes to the tax code to disincentivize the social media business model and the advertising industry generally. For example...

1. Tax the crap out of advertising revenue on social media platforms

2. Stratify the ads and ban the existence of paid tiers which include advertising. If you pay for something, you don't see ads, period

3. Ban the use of trackers and fingerprinting on any paid service without explicit opt-in

4. Create a tort for data leaks that travels with any company which handled the data. If anyone in the chain leaks it, you can take an action against all of them, and the penalties are individually assessed

5. Ban the collection and sale of profiling data for anyone under 18

6. Ban the ad-supported tier for anyone under 18

This heavily disincentivizes algorithms generally and makes paid tiers more appealing, which is much easier for parents to control. The problem with social media and teens is that teens can even sign up in the first place. Make them use a credit card, and you suddenly have a much higher barrier to entry. If I tried to subscribe my parents to HBO as a kid, it wouldn't have worked, and this is why. It wasn't because the government banned 14 year olds from seeing HBO.

Just because compliance isn’t 100% doesn’t mean there’s no benefit. Also these things can take time to work, but we do have evidence that bans reduce usage to an extent.

I should be able to give my 8 year old a mobile phone for their uses, pair it with my phone, and at any time of day be able to observe their activity on that phone - just as if I were watching what they were up to at the park, or while experimenting with matches in the garden, or riding their bikes on the street for the first time.

But there is a distinct desire by the operating system vendors to serve their true masters - ad agencies - and abrogate responsibilities of the users. “Filesystem, what filesystem?”

The idea of having a parent/child relationship encoded in the functions of the operating system is not in alignment with the idea that the true operators of the platform are faceless corporations, hell bent on harvesting every bit of data from every human being using their platforms.

With one simple trick, operating systems can change this equation entirely: give parents their rights and duties and responsibilities back. Let me see what my 8-year old is doing, in a fair and open and equitable fashion, so that I can - as a parent - fulfill my responsibilities to keep my children safe.

A phone is no less dangerous than a sharp kitchen knife. I’m perfectly fine with my 8 year old learning to use a kitchen knife properly - to gain their own agency over it as a tool - as long as I am able to observe their use of it.

And before anyone tries to make the argument “parents don’t do that, oh my god, you’re violating your child’s right to privacy” - no, that is not what I mean. A child should have privacy and they should learn to have agency over that privacy - but a parent is not absolved of the issue if that child falls of a cliff because of their negligence. Let the OS provide privacy - but let it also provide a means of review by the parents - who are the ones ultimately responsible for the child in the first place.

This needs to be an OS feature. Parents and children should, through the OS, be able to establish a strong, positive relationship with each other over this issue, with agency returned to the family unit.

Otherwise, we are creating totalitarian systems of control and putting them in the hands of people we simply cannot trust. The degradation of agency within the family unit is a function of commercial desire to exploit that lack of agency.

Operating systems, instead of serving ad agency masters, can go a long, long way to provide parents and children the right tools to solve this problem. They do, however, need to stop suckling at the teat of the nameless corporations who see the family unit as a nut that has to be cracked in order to extract the juice.

Someone’s nervous.