Rendered at 09:01:49 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
NoPicklez 12 days ago [-]
My question to these sorts of articles is, okay so what do we do then?
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.
gherkinnn 12 days ago [-]
Social media, as we have it today, is not healthy for anybody. It is bad, truly bad, and the companies responsible know 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”
Thank you, it's been infuriating reading these social media bans for children, as if when kids suddenly turn 16 or 18 or whatever magical nimber the courts come up with, they are suddenly immune to the psychological tricks from multi million dollar companies hiring the best psychologists with no morals money can buy.
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.
RandomLensman 12 days ago [-]
I don't think there is that agreement that it is in total a net negative to society.
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?
m000 12 days ago [-]
I agree that the positive effects of Social Media is understated, and probably on purpose.
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.
krige 12 days ago [-]
> Social Media allowed ordinary people to challenge on a global scale the oficially-sanctioned narrative.
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.
krapp 11 days ago [-]
It is still true. People with money and state actors have always had unprecedented control over what ordinary people are allowed to see... before the internet they were the ones controlling all of the corporate media. You don't think the press was molding people to desired narratives back then?
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.
solumunus 11 days ago [-]
It still cuts both ways. Almost seemingly the entire internet was talking about the Epstein files non stop for months on end. Pre social media that anti establishment narrative wouldn’t have taken hold to nearly the same degree in my opinion. Unfortunately a lot of the discourse was complete nonsense, and misinformation was rife, but it still put the US government under A LOT of pressure, to the point where the AG was fired.
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.
m000 11 days ago [-]
> 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.
Yeah it allowed them to challenge traditional narratives like the earth is not flat and getting the measles vaccine is a good thing.
jhbadger 12 days ago [-]
For starters, what's "social media"? It's kind of a undefinable phrase. Obviously Facebook and Instagram are agreed to be "social media".But is Youtube social media? How about HN? Or any website with a comment section?
achenet 12 days ago [-]
I'd argue that generally speaking, the problematic social media tend to be ad-supported websites that focus on user-generated content.
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.
darkwater 12 days ago [-]
Some nitpicker will probably come with "and what about...??" because we are on HN but I think you basically nailed the definition.
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.
nekusar 12 days ago [-]
The problem is capitalist companies using heavily gamified psychology to prey on people.
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.
darkwater 12 days ago [-]
They are fundamentally different because they are not centralized and, if they are going to be centralized at some point, they will need to find a revenue stream because giving access for free to the whole world, literally, is technically impossible.
nekusar 12 days ago [-]
You basically restated that its all about profit, and centralization.
> 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.
darkwater 12 days ago [-]
But email is not centralized, and it grew when Internet was really different. Mastodon - which was born in this new Internet - is used by a very small fraction of Twitter/IG/TikTok/Facebook users. I mean, TikTok and Mastodon started both in 2016 and see the difference now...
nekusar 12 days ago [-]
> But email is not centralized, and it grew when Internet was really different. Mastodon - which was born in this new Internet - is used by a very small fraction of Twitter/IG/TikTok/Facebook users. I mean, TikTok and Mastodon started both in 2016 and see the difference now...
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.
darkwater 11 days ago [-]
Yeah, and that's exactly the point: they should be regulated if they are ads driven and focused on engagement at all cost.
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.
korse 12 days ago [-]
irc doesn't have this problem
bombcar 12 days ago [-]
Ignoring the capitalism and the money, those still can have the bad effects of social media, just perhaps not amplified for money extraction.
neutronicus 12 days ago [-]
I’d start with “platform on which it’s possible to become an Influencer” and work backwards.
krapp 11 days ago [-]
So all platforms. Unless you have a definition of "influencer" more rigid than "person with some degree of influence." Because that includes Hacker News.
roundabout-host 12 days ago [-]
Or WhatsApp? Or Matrix? Or SMS? Or the telephone network? Or email? Or Google Docs?
GuB-42 12 days ago [-]
When I had to fill up the ESTA form to enter the US, this is what was in the "social media" drop down list:
- ASKfm
- Facebook
- Flickr
- GitHub
- Google+
- Instagram
- JustPaste.it
- LinkedIn
- Tumblr
- Twitter
- Vine
- VKontakte (VK)
- YouTube
This is obviously outdated but it can give an idea.
jhbadger 12 days ago [-]
That's interesting - Github as social media? That's an idea of would never have thought of in a million years. Personally, I'd be glad if a child of mine hung out there - not at all like something like Instagram or Facebook.
GuB-42 11 days ago [-]
I was also surprised, but it makes sense.
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.
blt 11 days ago [-]
github's original tagline was "Social Coding".
neuralRiot 10 days ago [-]
I would like to recommend a book where the author explains with scientific fundaments why lower age kids are more damaged from social media exposure.
Many things are harmful for everyone, yet we only ban them for children because banning them for everyone would create huge uproar. Make tobacco illegal and then we can talk about social media.
xorcist 12 days ago [-]
Case in point. There is no chance tobacco would be declared legal if it was invented today. Don't you agree?
criddell 12 days ago [-]
How do you reconcile this idea with the fact that marijuana is being legalized all over the place?
bluecheese452 12 days ago [-]
1. Marijuana was not invented today.
2. Marijuana is not tobacco.
krapp 11 days ago [-]
Tobacco wasn't "invented" any more than was marijuana, both are naturally occurring plants which have been cultivated and used for thousands of years.
Fricken 12 days ago [-]
Marijuana is not a recent invention
simplyluke 12 days ago [-]
Not really. The US has widely legalized gambling of various forms (sports, prediction markets, etc) in recent years. I'd argue that even more so than nicotine there is zero benefit to gambling.
graemep 12 days ago [-]
Tobacco is legal because of large numbers of addicts which would create a huge market for illegal supplies. The UK plans to phase out tobacco by raising the age at which it can be legally bought every year.
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.
NoPicklez 11 days ago [-]
People don't actually think that's the case. However it is obviously an age in which we believe kids can start to have more agency over their own lives and make bigger decisions because they have matured (hopefully) enough to do so.
We therefore then tack other restrictions to those age brackets.
philipallstar 12 days ago [-]
> Thank you, it's been infuriating reading these social media bans for children, as if when kids suddenly turn 16 or 18 or whatever magical nimber the courts come up with, they are suddenly immune to the psychological tricks from multi million dollar companies hiring the best psychologists with no morals money can buy.
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.
antii 12 days ago [-]
[dead]
roundabout-host 12 days ago [-]
A concrete example is the annulation of the 2024 Romanian elections. It probably happened because a certain candidate was able to manipulate the TikTok algorithm using (undeclared) paid influencers and spam.
brabel 12 days ago [-]
Really bad example. From the Wikipedia article:
“ 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.
Not a good counterexample either. The link to Russian intelligence services may not be proven, but nobody seems to dispute that there were paid influencers? Also that this was not declared anywhere and the money was at best grey in origin?
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.
bombcar 12 days ago [-]
The problem with all these is that the mythos of democracy depends on pretending that individuals and the people at large are making intelligent decisions based on available true information - instead of what it really is.
brabel 12 days ago [-]
> The link to Russian intelligence services may not be proven, but nobody seems to dispute that there were paid influencers?
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.
bko 12 days ago [-]
Just saying "regulate" it is not an answer and won't give you the results you think.
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.
ruszki 12 days ago [-]
Currently, the fact that these large platforms can block you and they block you randomly (which is the case of Reddit for me, because I dared to use privacy protecting extensions when I commented on a subreddit to which I wasn’t subscribed; Instagram permanently blocked me because I used VPN when I wanted to login) is way larger restriction on my speech than removing these harmful platforms completely. Currently, I’m not allowed to react to others at all on some of these platforms. Even TV is better, because there is contact information for all of them.
bko 12 days ago [-]
Sure there was basically a cartel in social media. You saw coordinated censorship campaigns to ban the former president of the United States for example. But I wouldn't discount the amount of political interference there as well. The last administration admitted to flagging individual posts for the social media companies.
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
> this tends to resolve itself as there is a market opportunity to create a better product
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).
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
Twitter was an easy one to get a ban from, just by saying "this is racist" or "racism is bad" and you're gone.
Went through quite literally hundreds of accounts through it.
bko 12 days ago [-]
It's censored and there is a ton of controversial opinions being spread?
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.
ruszki 12 days ago [-]
> It's censored and there is a ton of controversial opinions being spread?
> 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.
bko 12 days ago [-]
I see crazy stuff relating to conspiracy theories about Kirk every day. It's not censored.
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."
ruszki 12 days ago [-]
Maybe this will help, but I know that your cognitive dissonance will find something else:
- 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.
inigyou 12 days ago [-]
If it tends to resolve itself then why has it got worse not better? reality seems to contradict your position.
bko 12 days ago [-]
How has it gotten worse? You have a lot more freedom on all social media platforms than you did 4 years ago.
What's gotten worse in some countries is the government censorship which I'm against.
inigyou 12 days ago [-]
??? no you don't, if you disagree with Musk on Twitter your account gets visibility-limited and if you want to use Reddit it's hard to even get an account that's allowed to post anywhere and not shadowbanned
bko 12 days ago [-]
I get a ton of ppl on my feed that I do not follow that say awful things about Musk daily. What are you talking about?
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
Reddit is a platform that LARP's about "freeze peach", but you get an automated site-wide ban for nothing. And it will link you to the post, it has now deleted to try and show you what was banned.
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?
Nursie 12 days ago [-]
> UK arrests thousands every year for what essentially amounts to mean tweets.
Somebody is peddling lies in your direction. These claims don’t hold up to any sort of cursory examination.
Hikikomori 12 days ago [-]
Regulate the algorithmic feeds and similar non opinionated regulations rather than content itself.
kraf 12 days ago [-]
I'm not familiar with what you're talking about. Can you share a real world example of a case like this? You're saying a social media comment about a crime is somehow punished harshly and much harsher than the crime itself?
bko 12 days ago [-]
Here's an example of Westmidlands police bragging about arresting a 12 year old for racist posts.
There are 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages. It's not heavily reported for some reason but it's very real.
If you walk through a town shouting racist stuff you'll get arrested too, and rightly so.
asdiovjdfi 11 days ago [-]
In my Northern European small city, just yesterday, there was some non-native shouting "WHITE NIGGA" at children in the city center. Nothing happend to him.
bigstrat2003 12 days ago [-]
The kid is 12 years old. If he ran around shouting racist stuff in town, that should be addressed by his parents, not by an arrest.
Are you sure that link's the one you meant to share?
> 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?
philipallstar 12 days ago [-]
> Are you sure that link's the one you meant to share?
Sorry, I'm confused by the question.
ceejayoz 12 days ago [-]
The link seems to make the opposite point you intended.
Criminal threats with appropriate punishment, and regular old hateful speech is ongoing.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
The right love to play-down the woman who called for terrorist attacks on British streets as "just a tweet".
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.
philipallstar 12 days ago [-]
The link is far broader than that, but even in this case: there was no threat. No more than a university lecturer tweeting that he wanted a white genocide.
"ISIS never threatened anybody, they just called for bombs to be set off"
inigyou 12 days ago [-]
So people are getting arrested for tweeting they want to set fire to a hotel full of people?
Seems good to me
kolektiv 12 days ago [-]
It's a common (and somewhat right-wing) trope, but it's not really true. Thousands of people aren't arrested for "mean comments" or similar. That isn't to say the UK has no problem with the balance of freedom of expression and regulation, but it is nothing like the impression you'd get from some sources. There are some high-profile cases which are commonly misrepresented to support these claims.
philipallstar 12 days ago [-]
It is definitely true. It's "right wing" because the soft power is with the left (or was until maybe very recently) and so only principled people of the left (e.g. Bill Maher) and all the people of the right (either principled on speech or saying things that are more likely to be censored) are going to be talking about it.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
What on earth are you on about, we've had 20+ years of right-wing governments.
>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"
philipallstar 10 days ago [-]
> What on earth are you on about, we've had 20+ years of right-wing governments.
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.
bko 12 days ago [-]
> Thousands of people aren't arrested for "mean comments" or similar
What are they arrested for, or are you disputing the number?
inigyou 12 days ago [-]
Lucy Connolly was arrested for threatening to kill a thousand people, for example.
recursive-call 12 days ago [-]
I think generally the argument is that these usually aren’t credible threats, they’re hyperbole, and the police are overstepping by arresting people for saying they’ll do something when they have no evidence that that person would actually do that. A free society doesn’t arrest someone for saying “I’m going to burn down so-and-so’s house.” It waits until you actually go to so-and-so’s house with a can of petrol, and then arrests you.
ceejayoz 12 days ago [-]
> A free society doesn’t arrest someone for saying “I’m going to burn down so-and-so’s house.”
I feel like it's a significantly freer society when others can't threaten to murder me without consequences.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
It's always weird that these "freeze peach absolutism" never seem to notice that death, is the ultimate censorship
XorNot 12 days ago [-]
Sending death threats has never been legal.
The statical lie with the UK numbers is the vast majority of cases are about the use of messaging services in domestic violence cases.
bombcar 12 days ago [-]
It’s the same problem as amber alerts - the stories you here about are the dramatic stranger danger ones, but the vast majority of the statistics are “boring” custody disputes.
12 days ago [-]
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
They were credible threats though, as the people were doing EXACTLY what she called for
buttercraft 12 days ago [-]
The poster up thread said people were being arrested for "mean tweets" and now you've moved it to "but those death threats weren't serious!" No, the original claim was dishonest bullshit.
12 days ago [-]
gherkinnn 12 days ago [-]
I have no idea what you're on about.
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".
philipallstar 12 days ago [-]
Regulating access to speech platforms is a difference of degree, not a difference of kind, from regulating speech.
marcosdumay 12 days ago [-]
Requiring universal access is a form of regulation, and the OP asking for regulating the platform, not the access.
ClumsyPilot 12 days ago [-]
We imprisoned kids for making an offensive video of a burning cardboard xopy of grenfell tower
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
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
>We imprisoned kids for making an offensive video of a burning cardboard xopy of grenfell tower
40 years are not kids bro. and wasn't jailed
>The 49-year-old was given a 10-week suspended jail sentence.
ClumsyPilot 10 days ago [-]
> They were arrested on suspicion of a public order offence and taken into custody
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?
chrisjj 12 days ago [-]
> Social media, as we have it today, is not healthy for anybody.
Millions of employed might disagree.
rwmj 12 days ago [-]
I'm trying to work out what this means. The "millions" employed at Meta?
bcjdjsndon 12 days ago [-]
> Social media, as we have it today, is not healthy for anybody
Define social media, specifically name the sites you're talking about. And explicitly state the ill health that follows when you consume social media
netniuq 12 days ago [-]
We regulate the platforms, not the users:
We ban (most? all?) targeted advertising.
If we still have to go further, we force tech giants to publish their recommendation algorithms and aggregated user data (e.g. statistics about time spent on what types of content on the platform by user cohort)
If we still have to go further, we can adapt policy restricting concrete addictive usage-patterns (e.g. the infinite scroll proposal recently discussed here[1])
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.
jml78 12 days ago [-]
We ban targeted ads. Great but then what? My oldest is 17, no targeted ads to him so that means he gets a million political ads. To me, it is just as problematic. I would argue that under 18, there should be zero ads. Yeah I know it will never happen.
black_knight 12 days ago [-]
Ban political ads? That one seems like an immediate win anyways.
dgellow 12 days ago [-]
You think a 17 years old should be protected from political content? They are pretty much an adult and are able to vote in some places…
black_knight 12 days ago [-]
I don’t think political ads should be legal. Political information should be freely available to all, including children. But in no way should we be bombarded with the manipulation from whatever political entities have the most cash at hand.
dgellow 12 days ago [-]
That’s a different claim then, you’re against political ads as a whole, not based on age. The fact that your teenager is 17 doesn’t feel relevant for your position
jml78 10 days ago [-]
As I responded above, my 17 can't vote in the coming election and my 13 year old gets the same ads.
Sorry, under 18, should be 100% no to political ads. These companies know who is under 18.
bombcar 12 days ago [-]
I suspect that political ands anre more about laundering money from campaigns to friends than about actually affecting the election.
jml78 10 days ago [-]
He isn't eligible to vote this coming election. So fuck yeah he shouldn't have to sit through that bullshit.
sssilver 12 days ago [-]
I'm extremely against ads, so I sympathize greatly with your sentiment. But what does it mean to "ban targeted advertising"?
Will we ban posters along highways that advertise car wreck lawyers? Where do you draw that line?
literalAardvark 12 days ago [-]
That's contextual advertising, not targeted as such.
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.
swiftcoder 12 days ago [-]
> Will we ban posters along highways
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.
inigyou 12 days ago [-]
That is called contextual advertising, not targeted
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
How do you "ban targetted ads", every advert is targetted. TV advertising is targetted.
There's a reason you get kids toys during the after-school section, and wills and funeral planning during the day
specproc 12 days ago [-]
What it has to do with social media bans, is that the incident was propagated on social media. The author is arguing that the ability to shame others on the internet, should not be restricted to the old and powerful.
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.
NoPicklez 12 days ago [-]
Well your ability and areas you can shame people might be limited until you're of age.
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.
specproc 12 days ago [-]
The author is highlighting an ugly contradiction in a policy that is being rolled out across the anglophone world as we speak. I see plenty less-substantive think pieces on this site, I don't feel it's necessary for every blog post to be accompanied by policy recommendations.
I pulled a few alternatives out there. What's your take?
NoPicklez 12 days ago [-]
I still don't see the ugly contradiction. The guy was caught and shunned by the general public regarding their actions, the guy could've used a video camera and it would be no different. Again, just because a group of adults have used a piece of technology incorrectly, doesn't mean the identified risks of those devices for young people people are any different. Just because there are drunks walking around committing offences doesn't mean we should allow underage people drinking.
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.
specproc 12 days ago [-]
Interesting framing in "we should ask" and "social media companies should ban". We have sovereign states that make laws, companies must comply with them if they wish to make money in our markets.
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.
rpdillon 12 days ago [-]
Section 230 is very important for all website operators. It doesn't just protect big companies. If you repeal it, now you're making every blog owner responsible for whatever some idiot says in the comments section.
specproc 12 days ago [-]
As noted elsewhere in this thread, scale is important: I think it's entirely reasonable to have different rules for platforms with millions of users.
mrguyorama 12 days ago [-]
The real problem Section 230 was built to solve was the prevent email companies and places like Flickr being burned down by the feds for all the child porn in inevitably ends up holding.
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.
rpdillon 9 days ago [-]
That's worth discussing, but you recommended a repeal.
duskdozer 12 days ago [-]
To me Section 230
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.
seems less justifiable as an excuse for platforms that consist primarily of externally created content, have very large amounts of varied content, and select and target specific subsets of that content to present to specific users. It would seem more justifiable if it were random, or not individualized, or chronological.
specproc 12 days ago [-]
Aye, it's the curation, innit. If the platform is making opaque decisions on what you see, then it should be accountable for what it's showing you.
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.
sdevonoes 12 days ago [-]
The problem to solve is addiction. When I was a kid I could spend the whole day and week in front of the play station… but my parents thought me that, well, that’s not normal (and ofc sent me to sleep every other night). Why social media or phones is different? Parents need to teach these kind of stuff to their kids. It’s the same for drugs, sex, money or any other thing
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
And as a kid I'd risk being shouted at, and/or grounded to get onto the playstation at night, and the same with my computer.
Shoving a pillow over the dial-up modem because I didn't know you could turn off the dial sound....
zug_zug 12 days ago [-]
My proposal for step 1 -- Allow people to "ban themselves" from certain social media for certain period. Every platform/app MUST support the ability to set limits on usage for all time periods (hour/day/week/month) and enforce those. Also allow the user to set blacklist times. Also allow the user to set a "cooldown" period on any blacklist changes.
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.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
A BIG BIG problem, and part of the reason that we're so stuck where we are now. Is that parents just don't bother to actually employ, or enforce these systems anyway.
marcus_holmes 12 days ago [-]
> 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.
Do we know this? As far as I can tell, the studies are ambivalent at best. Some kids are damaged, others benefit.
rafaelero 12 days ago [-]
The current consensus is that the effects of social media on mental health are in between minimally detrimental to non-existent.
iugtmkbdfil834 12 days ago [-]
Probably the same way we know most things. We know it affects us and we extrapolate.
marcus_holmes 11 days ago [-]
And every generation thinks the tech that the next generation grows up with is harmful.
After all, novels were once considered harmful [0] but we now consider not being able to read a novel to be harmful.
Hmm, the argument is interesting, because it sounds convincing until you start examining it in greater detail. Allow me to point out how it is missing a mark.
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.
The point is not to say that "these two things are equivalent", or even "these two things are equally harmful".
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.
3. The mental models and priorities that the new technologies require are not the same as the old tech requires. E.g. reading a book requires the ability to keep attention on one thing for hours, while scolling a phone feed requires a completely different version of attention. Kids have been trained on the latter, and we older folks view their inability to do the former as damage, because in our upbringing, this would be damage. But it's adaptation to the changing environment rather than damage - the kids are growing up in a different environment than the one we grew up in, and they are adapted to that, while we are not.
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.
Start by putting the people making money off it in prison.
These are capital crimes against humanity. The notion that we just have to accept it is absurdity.
nobodywillobsrv 12 days ago [-]
Stop calling it social media.
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.
anon291 12 days ago [-]
Kids shouldn't have smartphones until much later, like late teenage years.
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.
gib444 12 days ago [-]
Then first we need to fix the issues in the parents, especially those with only one kid, reading social media and low rent news sites, who believe their kid is constantly in immortal danger, thereby forcing the phone upon the kid, in an attempt to ease their insecurities
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?
anon291 12 days ago [-]
What mortal danger would necessitate a smart phone versus a dumb phone? I don't understand
gib444 12 days ago [-]
It's the live GPS tracking they want. Kidnapping?
anon291 11 days ago [-]
Unless you're divorced or super rich there's basically no reason to worry about kidnapping.
gib444 11 days ago [-]
I know. That's not what the news and social media is telling people however.
pendenthistory 12 days ago [-]
Until lately I thought messaging apps like WhatsApp is ok, but this summer my eleven year old niece has been depressed, crying at the summer lake house with extended family because she can see her friends hanging out on WhatsApp. Incredibly toxic. Basically she can't enjoy the adventures we have here because of it. Even a simple thing like group chats completely destroy their brains.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
Taking a kid away from their friends to do some "forced fun", is the issue here. No the group chat.
NoPicklez 12 days ago [-]
You don't need to convince me, my point was that they can have them but with limited capabilities, like only being able to SMS and call.
swiftcoder 12 days ago [-]
> No need to be a Luddite, but what do kids possibly get out of a phone?
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...
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
There's more than social media for that.....
dgellow 12 days ago [-]
Based on what? Your personal feelings? You think kids don’t get anything from online content and interactions with other kids via their phone?
anon291 12 days ago [-]
I get nothing but depression from online interactions with other people and nothing but joy with my in-person interactions. I'd rather my kids start drinking and hang out at a bar or develop a smoking habit and hang at a hookah cafe than make 'friends' online to be perfectly honest -- at least that's normal in the grand scheme of things. They wouldn't be the first teenagers to do that and it's healthier for your social life.
> 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.
whazor 12 days ago [-]
I'm not 100% sure yet but I think an iPhone can be configured such that toxic social media apps cannot be used.
recursive-call 12 days ago [-]
it’s incredibly simple. put parental controls on the phone. when i was a kid i couldn’t download any apps without my dad’s approval, and none of the major social medias have a functioning web experience on mobile, they just redirect you to the app store page
trymas 12 days ago [-]
> What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids.
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.
swiftcoder 12 days ago [-]
> What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids
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...
curtisblaine 12 days ago [-]
Question: aren't you allowed to photograph or film anyone you want in public? Or the target being underage somehow removes this right? I always thought you can film whoever you want, but you can't publish what you filmed in some cases.
dvdkon 12 days ago [-]
It really matters which country you're talking about, because depending on that you'll get answers from "filming in public is effectively forbidden" to "film and publish whatever you want".
Nursie 12 days ago [-]
There are various limits on this, likely country dependent. And being free from legal sanction doesn't mean being free from public condemnation and shaming.
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".
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
Depends on usage, and it's a data protection breach if you don't publish the data controllers contact info.
marcus_holmes 12 days ago [-]
There's a difference between legal and ethical.
NoPicklez 12 days ago [-]
Lets say that was true legally, its certainly frowned upon and you will be shamed for being an adult blatantly filming underage girls on a train without their permission or reason.
Which is why others on the train were not happy with it.
the_other 12 days ago [-]
> I have no idea how an adult filming young girls on a train has anything to do with social media bans.
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")
ymolodtsov 12 days ago [-]
> What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids
Who said we know?
charlieyu1 10 days ago [-]
I grow up with ICQ and Geocities when I was 14 and I'm fine.
throwfaraway135 12 days ago [-]
Kids need freedom to make their own decisions, without that they won't grow to be self realized adults.
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.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
>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
12 days ago [-]
philipallstar 12 days ago [-]
> Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones
I am.
fragmede 12 days ago [-]
> Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones
I'll say it. Kids shouldn't have phones until the age of 16.
pmg101 12 days ago [-]
The smartphone free childhood movement is explicitly saying children shouldn't have phones (until 14). I'm broadly with them although with nuance.
yogorenapan 12 days ago [-]
I got my first bug bounty at 16. Not having access to compute would've drastically changed the direction of my life. I wouldn't have been able to afford university & would likely be working on a farm right now like my cousins
fragmede 12 days ago [-]
Access to a desktop computer vs a smartphone that they bring to bed with TikTok on it are different though. What was your bug bounty for?
dgellow 12 days ago [-]
As a kid I was using my PSP to browse the web at night. Will you also restrict a Nintendo DS, a Switch, and any other device that comes with a web briwser?
yogorenapan 11 days ago [-]
IOS and MacOS priv esc.
Yes I needed a smartphone to test on
fragmede 11 days ago [-]
That's awesome! Testing on, with a non-zero amount of adult supervision isn't the same thing as being given a phone with Snapchat and TikTok to take to bed at night though. I'm open to setting it to a different age. I didn't do a ton of research before picking 16. But also it's not like I'm actually in charge of anything either.
adrian17 12 days ago [-]
AFAIK a nontrivial (5-10%?) fraction of population own a smartphone without any bigger computing device.
bigfishrunning 12 days ago [-]
I would doubt many of them are using those smartphones to collect bug bounties.
NeutralCrane 12 days ago [-]
Well they didn’t say 16 years olds should not having access to compute so your point is irrelevant.
theamk 12 days ago [-]
Pretty sure that to get a bug bounty one needs to study things first, and this takes quite a bit of time.
yogorenapan 11 days ago [-]
Yup. I started learning at 10 mostly messing about with modding and dumb script kiddie stuff. You don't just get a computer one day and get an exploit out the next
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
This is what aannoys me about all the discussions on these issues.
People come up with all sorts of random scenarios, that aren't even related to "prove" something...
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
I got my first legal threat for reporting a vulnerability at 14 :(
theamk 12 days ago [-]
Don't your kids go anywhere by themselves? Or do they stay at home / only get ferried by the parents?
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.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
I once nearly had the police called on me for being missing as a kid.
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....
burnt-resistor 12 days ago [-]
Limited, locked-down smart watches is what most kids need.
quickthrowman 11 days ago [-]
That is the solution my sister and brother-in-law chose for my 10 yo nephew. He can call home and a few family members and do whatever other limited things an Apple Watch can do. I wear a regular mechanical watch and have never used an Apple Watch so I’m not exactly sure what else it can do, lol.
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.
roundabout-host 12 days ago [-]
Not unconditionally, but some truly benefit from them, if the parents teach them not to use social media in a harmful way.
StingyJelly 13 days ago [-]
Kids with phones are alright. Attention economy of social media is not. As did tabaco companies, they (soc. media tech giants) push proposals to regulate phone use based on age in hopes that the their information asymmetry advantage and addictive dark patterns that are the problem in the first place won't be regulated and they can keep exploiting the public held in their trap by network effect.
Kiro 12 days ago [-]
Attention economy is a red herring. HN shows that you don't need to do much to be more addictive than TikTok. It's human nature.
inigyou 12 days ago [-]
You just need easy access to an unpredictable reward. Humans or other animals will pull the lever as much as possible to try to catch a high reward.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
"Updoots to the left"
toasty228 12 days ago [-]
The scale is completely different. It's like arguing a bomb, a gun and a knife are exactly the same thing and we shouldn't bother thinking about where we draw the legality line
novia 12 days ago [-]
FTA: "essentially punishing them for the sins of Big Tech"
ColdStream 12 days ago [-]
All popular systems with negative impacts will always have a claim to virtue.
An extreme example, all genocides are done by people who want to set the world right. It just how they see right is warped.
ceayo 12 days ago [-]
> all genocides are done by people who want to set the world right
heh. no.
bcjdjsndon 12 days ago [-]
> Attention economy of social media is not
Because of chungus memes? I think you might be over reacting there bro
aaron695 12 days ago [-]
[dead]
api 13 days ago [-]
The problem is not phones. Phones are fine. The problem is specific apps that make use of addiction engineering. These are bad on desktops too but the extreme portability of phones makes them a hundred times more potent.
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.
Lerc 13 days ago [-]
Would it not be a better approach to remove any incentive to provide an addictive product. Companies don't do that just to be evil. Evil is just the byproduct of money.
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.
api 13 days ago [-]
At the very least I think we should seriously consider taxing advertising.
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.
ozgrakkurt 12 days ago [-]
> I don't think they will do it for the long term gains of training behaviour for when they are old enough to exploit.
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
Timwi 7 days ago [-]
I think it should be illegal period. Advertisement is deliberate manipulation by exploiting known psychological vulnerabilities in humans. It's a despicable thing to want to do intentionally. It should be a criminal offense.
Telaneo 13 days ago [-]
I agree. Even the platonic ideal of something like Facebook isn't really a problem (assume a Facebook with a chronological feed which shows nothing but what your friends and liked pages have posted, and it'll be a lot less addicting than what we have today, and a lot more social!). It's possible to have a phone and not have any apps on it which are engineered to make you addicted. If the relevant companies behaved themselves, we wouldn't be in this rut (or at least not as deep into it).
api 13 days ago [-]
Facebook was on balance good until the algorithmic timeline.
Timwi 7 days ago [-]
I was on LiveJournal a long time ago and I distinctly remember seeing Facebook, when I first tried it after everyone couldn't stop talking about it, as an unviable alternative precisely because it didn't show exactly what you subscribed to without filtering or manipulation. So either the algorithmic timeline was always there, or it was introduced early on before Facebook got big.
Telaneo 6 days ago [-]
I remember when it was just chronological, but it's been a long, long while since then. It might have been as far back as 2010 or earlier that change happened, but it was already 'big' by the time the change happened. I vaguely remember there being outrage because it was yet another change, along the same lines as all the design changed people also complained about, but complaining alone didn't prevent Facebook from keeping the changes.
NoPicklez 12 days ago [-]
> IMO if you intentionally and knowingly engineer something for addiction you are committing a form of assault.
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.
Timwi 7 days ago [-]
> Whilst I agree that addictive things can be bad how far does this ago?
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.
jimbokun 13 days ago [-]
The problem isn’t guns.
The problem is bullets, which guns just happen to make go very fast.
api 13 days ago [-]
Guns have only one main function. Phones have thousands.
roundabout-host 12 days ago [-]
Also, you cannot block one harmful one without blocking a thousand legitimate ones.
mcv 12 days ago [-]
Do people want to restrict 16 year olds with phones? That seems like a really bad idea. For 10 year olds it makes sense, but 16 is nearly adult; they need to really learn this responsibility. And of course they need a phone when they go out like these girls.
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.
alwa 12 days ago [-]
Seems wise to experience at least a little bit of “functioning as an adult in the world” independently of phone habits…
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.
sheept 12 days ago [-]
The severity depends on where you are, even within a country, but in many places you can't authentically "function as an adult in the world" without a phone, unless you want to roleplay an adult from the previous century.
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.
RealityVoid 12 days ago [-]
This is obviously an overstatement. Sure, a phone is convenient, but we managed to function just fine without smartphones. I assure you, it's possible to do all those things without a phone.
fragmede 12 days ago [-]
Without knowing where GP is posting from, you can't make that claim. We can want and wish it were true, but there exist places where it's no longer possible to do things without a phone because the service requires signing in online, or the form is only available via the website, there is no paper version anymore. Parts of the world are moving on from bits of paper, no matter how much you don't want that to be true. Parts of the world also aren't, we simply don't know where GP is so you can't make that claim.
RealityVoid 12 days ago [-]
OP is from Palo Alto, so, obviously, the closest thing to a hellscape you can possibly get. /s
simonask 12 days ago [-]
We managed without smartphones before smartphones were a requirement for participating in society. That is, if you’re a millennial or older.
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.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
Meh, I've been a drunken idiot who's lost his phone on multiple occasions.
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
Timwi 7 days ago [-]
Strange thing to be publicly proud of.
bcjdjsndon 12 days ago [-]
> if I were a phone-carrying person, I’d be tempted to “just record it and let the internet sort it out.”
Desperate reaching. People who carry phones are bad people, I mean FFS, get real
GeekyBear 12 days ago [-]
Personally, I would rather see public resources used to teach parents how to use the existing controls (in iOS and Android) to restrict what their own kids can do on their own smartphone.
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.
burningChrome 12 days ago [-]
>> if a school district wants to restrict the use of smartphones during the school day for all students
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.
Triphibian 12 days ago [-]
Where's the setting to make YouTube not display shorts?
Settings -> time management -> short feed limits -> 0 minutes
Triphibian 12 days ago [-]
It took some digging but I found that setting on browser. Thank you. I'd love a big toggle for "brain fucking" that you could just set to off.
Triphibian 12 days ago [-]
And of course these settings do nothing if he just opens any browser and watches YouTube logged off.
kakacik 12 days ago [-]
New Commodore flip phone - has google maps and whatsapp for calls and video, otherwise a dumb phone.
Hard to argue below 18 actually needs more. Wants, sure, but then whole cancerous can of worms is opened and good luck there.
Triphibian 12 days ago [-]
He has a Lightphone which he hates. That's how I know it is working. He built a gaming PC last year, so I am aware that Pandora's box is open there. But look, it has been thirteen years of playing whackamole with YouTube. I can't keep him off it. They watch it at school. They give him chromebooks that I have no control over. And the stuff I do have control over the control is tenuous. I have largely given up. He is pretty much grown now. But man, has it felt like gaslighting when people are like, "Do parenting. Use the settings. Get a dumb phone. Problem solved."
Triphibian 12 days ago [-]
And have you ever tried to find or access parental settings on a school Chromebook?
stickfigure 12 days ago [-]
Is this mobile app only? I don't see "time management" on the website.
Timwi 7 days ago [-]
I tried on both phone and desktop and couldn't find that alleged setting either.
pluralmonad 12 days ago [-]
This works for me:
echo "0.0.0.0 youtube.com www.youtube.com m.youtube.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
amtamt 12 days ago [-]
One really does that on phones?
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
You'd have to root it....which breaks most functionality even if you do it.
So it's a flat no
InvisibleUp 12 days ago [-]
That’s all of YouTube. There’s some good stuff on there, just not in the “Shorts” tab.
Dylan16807 12 days ago [-]
> There’s some good stuff on there, just not in the “Shorts” tab.
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.
jhbadger 12 days ago [-]
Exactly. Drew Talbot's brilliant "Bistro Huddy" (which anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant whether as a server or in the kitchen can relate to) is done as Youtube shorts because that makes sense for comedy sketches. What exactly is wrong with a short vertical video? Just that it reminds people of Tiktok?
quickthrowman 11 days ago [-]
You can post short regular YouTube videos, I have dozens of favorites that are under 30 seconds long, some are only a few seconds long. The YouTube algorithm didn’t always punish short videos.
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.
Dylan16807 11 days ago [-]
> You can post short regular YouTube videos
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.
inigyou 12 days ago [-]
Because the incentives are very different which leads to different content being available.
Notice how Shorts recently removed the dislike button?
aethertron 12 days ago [-]
There are good Shorts. One problem is a flick of the thumb scrolls you down to the next, then the next, and many are crap. The uncertainty about whether you're going to see crap or gold is part of what makes recommendation-based infinite scrolling addictive.
kakacik 12 days ago [-]
Never done that, muscle memory is simply not there. But then again i dont watch youtube on phone, computer with ublock origin is vastly superior experience.
There is whole world to read and discover before switching to passive videos. Or even spend time here lol
Dylan16807 12 days ago [-]
And that uncertainty doesn't apply to watching normal videos? I dunno, if shorts gets unreliable because it ran out of the channels I regularly visit then I just leave.
inigyou 12 days ago [-]
It doesn't because in the normal video interface you select what to watch next.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12 days ago [-]
> And of course they need a phone when they go out like these girls.
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.
makeitdouble 12 days ago [-]
> make a phone call
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.
jjulius 12 days ago [-]
I'm a parent in my 30's. Call me up anytime, for whatever. Always down to chat!
Brisk4t 12 days ago [-]
> Kids don't want to call, and parents don't want to receive calls except for critical situations.
Curious where this idea comes from, most parents I know (including mine) would much rather call than text. Discord and your average x-stack in a game are also a good sign that voice chat isn't really something people of any age are averse to.
mcv 12 days ago [-]
My kids call. Only they tend to call through Discord or Whatsapp instead of just using the actual phone, for some reason. But they call, and they pick up when I call them. They also call their friends for gaming.
Timwi 7 days ago [-]
I'm in my 40s and I also prefer to call people on Discord, Telegram, Signal or (if no other option available) WhatsApp. The phone dialer is just inconvenient, while the above-mentioned chat apps have all the contacts listed and easy to access. There's also a slight worry about being charged for every phone call and every SMS and having to worry about your phone plan and texting plan separately from your data plan; maybe that's not a thing anymore but it used to be really worrying, so it gives me more peace of mind to only have to worry about the data plan and nothing else.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12 days ago [-]
>Same deal as what the GP is pointing at: you need to train kids to deal with slop,
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?
makeitdouble 12 days ago [-]
If you're waist deep in China White, you may as well teach your kids about it, get them as much knowledge as possible, and how to stay clear of it.
Letting choose a different path than you is IMHO the minimum you should be doing.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12 days ago [-]
Maybe back in some earlier era when we all had so many children that 3 or 4 were basically disposable, stupid parenting methods like "letting them learn to deal with this ruinously dangerous vice on their own" would have worked (or maybe there's a reason no one did that then). But for those of you that have just the one or two, this is well beyond reckless. Nothing I could ever say will persuade you otherwise, and even observation of reality won't help since the aftermath will play out for 50 or more years. Good luck, you'll need it.
abc42 12 days ago [-]
I'm for very restrictive digital device and service use for children and I also think that 16 is roughly the age when most or all of those restrictions can be lifted.
mdavid626 12 days ago [-]
Give them a bottle of scotch and pack of cigarettes as well.
toofy 12 days ago [-]
yeah i’m not sure where people are coming from when they imply the best way to fight off an extremely addictive thing is to use it.
we warn kids about the impacts of heroin, we don’t shoot them up with it.
mdavid626 12 days ago [-]
Feels like the seventies. Remember the time when tobacco CEO-s sweared, that they didn’t know cigarettes are unhealthy?
toasty228 12 days ago [-]
> but 16 is nearly adult
On paper yes, biologically not really
testing22321 12 days ago [-]
Do people really want to restrict 16 year olds with alcohol? 16 is nearly adult, they need to learn responsibility
mirashii 12 days ago [-]
This metaphor, while it seems intended to challenge the OP, kinda reinforces it. Many countries and cultures give some limited access to alcohol at a younger age, and the result is generally that they end up having fewer instances of problematic binge drinking when they come of age. A little bit of exposure instead of complete abstention helps people learn to have a healthier relationship than letting them hit 21 and dropping them into the deep end unrestricted.
skhr0680 12 days ago [-]
Teenagers learning how to have a couple of beers with a meal would be an improvement on them turning 18/20/21 and going and getting hammered on shots
schnitzelstoat 12 days ago [-]
In Europe, I think it is more common tbh. Even in the UK my dad would let me try making cocktails etc. at the weekend when I was 17.
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.
graemep 12 days ago [-]
Its usually in the UK in my experience to give teenagers wine, beer or cider with meals.
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.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
The UK law on drinking is age 6 :D
tonyedgecombe 12 days ago [-]
I think the evidence points the other way. Giving younger people a drink with their meal during adolescence leads to more drinking problems later in life.
graemep 12 days ago [-]
As far as I know the evidence points to getting drunk younger leads to more drinking problems later in life. Drinking moderately younger leads to fewer.
saghm 11 days ago [-]
Is that data from kids who drank without adult supervision? It's hard to tell without more context if you're proving or disproving the point that's been made, which is that maybe learning how to drink responsibly with parents could lead to better outcomes than binging with buddies at parties when there are no adults around, which is a lot more common when adult are super strict about it (I'm saying this as someone who literally never drinks and never has; I've literally not had a beer or a glass of wine in my life, so I'm about as far from an apologist as I can imagine)
graemep 11 days ago [-]
IIRC its kids who drank without adult supervision or with adults who allowed them to drink excessively (e.g. people who had alcohol problems themselves).
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.
saghm 11 days ago [-]
I don't think you're wrong, but I also don't think that keeping phones from kids will really make a huge impact. I have trouble imagining that the same parents who are (according to this framing) using phones as an excuse not to interact with their kids in as healthy ways wouldn't suddenly start interacting with them in healthy ways if the kids started needed more attention; they'd probably just interact with them in other unhealthy ways, which would not be possible to enumerate in order to try to legislate against.
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).
tonyedgecombe 12 days ago [-]
I don't think so although I can't find the report I read right now.
socalgal2 12 days ago [-]
It's interesting how many conclusions are being assumed here
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.
Dylan16807 12 days ago [-]
What countries do you have in mind? I find it hard to believe you can tell teenagers not to do some kind of fun activity based purely on age and cause no significant feelings of forbidden fruit.
quotz 12 days ago [-]
In parts of europe you can legally drink wine and beer at the age of 14-16. In many parts of europe you start drinking alcohol at around 14-15 illegally but socially acceptable to some extent. I started at that age, which is the same age adolescents start going out and dating.
12 days ago [-]
mcv 12 days ago [-]
16 used to be the minimum drinking age in Netherland, until they raised it to 18. It wouldn't surprise me if there were still countries where it's 16.
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.
Dylan16807 12 days ago [-]
It would be nice to ease people into alcohol over a greater amount of time, but with phones you're using them constantly and "avoid it" or "only have two" are not workable solutions like they are with alcohol.
laserlight 12 days ago [-]
I appreciate giving another perspective, but alcohol is not a good analogue of phone. There's no need to “learn” how to use alcohol --- one can do without it. Yet, practically speaking, a phone is a necessity.
toofy 12 days ago [-]
> practically speaking, a phone is a necessity.
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”.
laserlight 12 days ago [-]
I could have been clearer. A phone is practically a necessity of modern life. Sooner or later people have to use it, unlike alcohol. Whether social media is a necessity is a different question. I bet everyone gets their own dose of it, whether they like it or not.
defrost 12 days ago [-]
> A phone is practically a necessity of modern life.
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>
laserlight 12 days ago [-]
> It isn't yet.
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.
defrost 10 days ago [-]
> Would you care to elaborate how you don't think a phone is not “practically necessary”?
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.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
I've had smart phones since the first Android, and my whole live revolves around my digital data (even more so when I have 2FA on everything)
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...
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
It really isn't
jimbokun 13 days ago [-]
> These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives,
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?
psd1 13 days ago [-]
"These are groups that i invented".
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.
customguy 12 days ago [-]
I've known plenty of very rich people and they're just normal people, every bit as capable of loving or abusing their children as anyone. So while I kinda agree with the first half, your comment smacks of knowing less extremely wealthy people and still being at the stage where you're just so happy you bumped into a few and feel the need to glaze them, lacking the outlook and the jadedness available to someone like me (not to mention someone who knows even more rich people, or even is a rich themselves).
psd1 12 days ago [-]
Triangulate this:
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.
customguy 11 days ago [-]
Aha! So you "hated the rich", now you turn around call people who say something negative about them as a class antisemites, basically using Jews to defend the rich against your own straw man / phantoms of the past.
Being aware of said data is not "hatred" or seeing things black and white.
psd1 11 days ago [-]
Sweetheart, on this showing, you could insult me for twelve rounds and not land a single blow.
customguy 11 days ago [-]
Then surely we shall go for thirteen at the least! I wasn't teying to be insulting though, I am just being playfully irreverent.
psd1 10 days ago [-]
Well, let's be friends then - I'm somewhat robust. But your calibration is off for good-natured ribbing. Either you skewer someone and they have the self-awareness to acknowledge it in good humour, or you reduce their life experience to a bullet point and not even a correct one.
My bullet point would probably be "champagne socialist" or "trustafarian"; you can tag me as such; the truth is never libel.
s5300 12 days ago [-]
[dead]
nyeah 13 days ago [-]
In TFA, the author says "agency" not "full agency." I also can't find all these other issues (jobs, etc) in TFA. Where are you getting this?
NoPicklez 12 days ago [-]
Well that's the question isn't it, agency but to what extent. It makes sense to allow teenagers to have more agency over themselves than a 10 year old, but clearly there is an argument for limiting their agency on social media platforms.
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.
jimbokun 13 days ago [-]
Is there a point you’re trying to make?
albedoa 12 days ago [-]
The point is very clear to the rest of us. You inserted the word "full" where the author was not talking about full agency. It's hard to believe that you don't follow.
DangitBobby 12 days ago [-]
We are arguing over how much agency children should have. The article argues they should have more, the comment you originally responded to said practically definitionally we limit the agency of children. The obvious implied point is that it's not unreasonable to think their phone use may be part of the agency that they are denied, and that would not be a departure from how children are treated.
Nursie 12 days ago [-]
I'm with the "This whole article is a non-sequitur" crowd.
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.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
I find it interesting too how the problem was "taking pictures of kids", and yet we have an edited, but not-anonymised video, that has LOTS of shots of the same kids, including the shots the man took. There's substantially more in this video than what the man did.
And also the article they link to, went to the effort to black out their faces.
p1necone 12 days ago [-]
"The kids are alright" is evergreen. So much of the <insert current generation who are teenagers> are doomed rhetoric is pure nonsense, a lot of that rhetoric is on here.
alt227 12 days ago [-]
Phones and social media are a completely new type of pacifying and attention stealing threat which we have only just begun to discover the effects of. This is not your standard 'kids are doomed' rhetoric.
karahime 12 days ago [-]
No, they're not, and yes, it is. I sincerely hope we do not take phones and other computers from future generations. That would be a terrible thing to do to them.
alt227 12 days ago [-]
I very much hope we continue to bring our children up outside of a digital world, encouraging them to interact and learn physically before introducing them to digital devices later in life when they can treat them sensibly as a small part of a healthy and full life.
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.
karahime 12 days ago [-]
Old style rat drug experiments with rats in a barren cage being administered morphine are barely a good behavioral model for rats, let alone people. This is the aforementioned moral panic language. If the point was that solid it wouldn't need to make this multi-step analogy.
alt227 12 days ago [-]
We can agree to disagree, thats fine. You give your kids mobiles and tablets from toddler age and I will bring mine up in the physical world and introduce them to tech gently over time, finally giving them full smart devices later in life when they are responsible enough to manage their own time.
> 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.
karahime 12 days ago [-]
You fall back on agree to disagree, twice, here, when you're accusing me of thinking only of my own perspective. It's not courteous to agree with something for the sake of agreement, nor is misrepresenting what we can say from an experiment useful for "showing patterns". You can use analogies without making poorly constructed, sweepingly grandiose ones.
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.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
Nobody is "taking phones and other computers"
throwaway27448 12 days ago [-]
Even if the kids ARE illiterate, society will adjust to cater to them. Everything will be fine.
amelius 12 days ago [-]
They will be dominated by smarter kids, maybe from other countries.
yowo 12 days ago [-]
I don't have a particular opinion about smartphone/social media ban for minors, but the argument made here is at best a strawman fallacy, there is no law that prevents minors from having a digital camera that can be used to collect evidence or document malicious actions, and they aren't more expensive than phones.
simplyluke 12 days ago [-]
The article spends a long time conflating actual proposed policy in the UK with things that aren't being proposed and sound much worse. I did some googling, the UK's gone a bit further than the US in proposing that < 16 year olds can't use social media with real age verification instead of current "I promise I'm over 13" approaches, curfews on social media specifically for 16-17 year olds that are opt-out, and smart phones must be put away at school.
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.
roundabout-host 12 days ago [-]
The harm mainly comes from the addictive, manipulative algorithm designed to provoke the user, and not from the ability to communicate.
travisgriggs 12 days ago [-]
Tax social media and other forms of attention products. Time users spend on these products is time taken away from earning revenue that can be taxed. Balance must be restored. If viewers’ available time/ability is harvested so that they have less taxable income, transfer the tax to where the wealth generation is being transferred to.
Same for AI.
ColdStream 12 days ago [-]
While I wish it wasn't framed in a 'lost revenue' sense, it isn't a bad idea. Would be funny if they were taxed based on how long people use it. At even $0.10 an hour of use, some of these companies would find the costs involved far too high to justify.
Papazsazsa 13 days ago [-]
The focus on children needing their phones controlled is the correct instinct, incorrectly applied to a too-narrow group.
Smartphones are fomes peccati.
RetroTechie 13 days ago [-]
> Smartphones are fomes peccati.
Smartphones aren't, some apps on them are.
(besides being unneeded or a nuisance in some situations)
ColdStream 12 days ago [-]
I have said it for a long time. Look at the original iPhone release. It was a hyper focused device that was designed to consolidate devices, make using a phone easier so that you could get on with your day.
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.
cubefox 12 days ago [-]
It already had a browser. You don't need an app when you have a browser. The addiction is built-in as a latent capability.
roundabout-host 12 days ago [-]
The browser itself is not the problem, but the way the platforms design themselves to be very addictive.
exodust 12 days ago [-]
> very addictive
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!
roundabout-host 12 days ago [-]
No, I don't think that it's about buttons and scrolling. It is simply about what the algorithm promotes. If you look at one thing, even if you decide that you don't like it, they show you more to provoke you. The algorithm should be limited to showing followed pages.
exodust 10 days ago [-]
> "show you more to provoke you"
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!"
mrguyorama 12 days ago [-]
This is delusional. Normal people have been calling social media addictive since before facebook existed.
exodust 10 days ago [-]
Sugar is addictive. TV is addictive. Reading is addictive. Stuff is addictive. Take some responsibility over your own impulses, desires, and life balance. "Govern me harder daddy" isn't something I subscribe to as a method of dampening the addictive forces surrounding us.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
>Take some responsibility over your own impulses
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
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
I mean, that's just saying it's 3rd party developers who are the fault.
Like SM companies
semiquaver 13 days ago [-]
HN title automangler automangled this title. It references a specific song: “The kids are alright”, and removing the “The” reduces the impact of the reference.
Edit: now fixed, thanks mods
retube 13 days ago [-]
Conflates a whole load of othogonal issues that really have nothing to do with each other
FeteCommuniste 13 days ago [-]
Interesting reversal of the "think of the kids" argument, though: think of the kids who could have used their phones to document their mistreatment at the hands of alcoholic perverts.
puchatek 13 days ago [-]
Reminds me of the "good guys with guns" narrative tbh. Being able to document such transgressions is not enough of an argument to do a mass rollout of ad display technology IMHO.
pjc50 13 days ago [-]
The ability to film people on their phone is not the same as the ad display technology.
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.
Barrin92 12 days ago [-]
the even more direct analogy is the Arab Spring, where social media and phones were widely advertised as a means to bring evil dictators down, as a democratic, youth empowering anti evil old pervert technology.
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.
mcmoor 12 days ago [-]
It's still funny how much it's celebrated because it brings down establishments, not realizing it'll also bring down their own. Reminds me of why no one should start biological warfare.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
MAD is another one, the concept of firing your nuke means you lost. So you have to spend a lot of money to have said nuke and keep it available, just so you DON'T use it...
thesmtsolver2 12 days ago [-]
What do you think about legalizing drugs?
pixl97 12 days ago [-]
In general it reduces underage usage as the sellers don't want to lose their sales license.
lstodd 12 days ago [-]
no one in the know cares about legal status of drugs as substances for personal enjoyment. see Shulgin.
j45 13 days ago [-]
Age 16-17 is very different than Ages 5-10 for kids to carry a device.
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.
simplyluke 12 days ago [-]
The UK is not proposing disallowing 16-17 year olds (or any children) from carrying smart phones on public transit, though, which makes the entire article fall apart.
The author leaps from a proposed ban on 15 year olds using tiktok to wholesale bans on smartphones.
Lerc 13 days ago [-]
Removing a means of bullying that leaves a trail is not the same thing as removing bullying. It's just removing undeniable bullying.
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.
roelmore 13 days ago [-]
Forgive me if I am misinterpreting or getting in the way of your primary point -- but I think it is relatively well recognized that, though cyberbullying might not be objectively worse than analog bullying (obviously direct physical abuse/altercations cant happen electronically....yet), the 24/7 pervasiveness, anonymity, lack of emotional feedback for the bully, reach, and permanence of cyberbullying has had a meaningful impact on the state of the bullying game and the impacts it has on children.
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.
nsxwolf 13 days ago [-]
I think a lot of people here just don't have kids of a relevant age yet. They assume either the bullying doesn't happen, or it isn't any different than bullying in person, or that it's easy to stop when it happens.
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.
fn-mote 12 days ago [-]
> You can just not have phones, but it's socially isolating.
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.
j45 12 days ago [-]
Agreed, students in schools seem to be regularly reporting an improved environment as unmanaged phone use went away.
Lerc 13 days ago [-]
Well I guess it is true that I don't have children of that age. My daughter is on the board of a charity that deals with youth issues though.
what 12 days ago [-]
So neither you, nor your daughter, have any experience with the issue?
Lerc 12 days ago [-]
I seem to recall both of us being children once, although admittedly not at the same time. The research my daughter does as part of her charity work probably counts as well.
j45 12 days ago [-]
Learning about something doesn't invalidate it entirely on that basis alone, just like the experience of one parent doesn't speak for all parents, or those concerned about the impacts of phones on kids (who are future adults).
j45 13 days ago [-]
I certainly wouldn’t speak about kids and bullying without knowing about both.
What works needs to be found.
j45 13 days ago [-]
Removing phones doesn't remove a means of bullying, it removes a magnifier and multiplier of bullying.
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.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
"A trail" that will be ignored by the very same authority figures who ignore literally violence done in front of them.
nrabulinski 13 days ago [-]
Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue. I’ve been bullied before social media was mainstream. A little later in life, when internet as a whole was majorly taking off, it helped me actually socialize. I met people some of whom I’m friends to this day, but more importantly - I could meet people to go out with, to talk to.
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.
j45 13 days ago [-]
Technologies when not learned by the people to use in proper ways, too often can be used against people by people with vested financial interests.
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.
ClumsyPilot 12 days ago [-]
> 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.
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
II2II 13 days ago [-]
> Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue. I’ve been bullied before social media was mainstream.
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.
FeteCommuniste 13 days ago [-]
> The differences with bullying via social media are: the difficulty to escape it in space or time as well as its reach.
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.
II2II 13 days ago [-]
> Just log off of Instagram / TikTok / wherever.
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).
ClumsyPilot 12 days ago [-]
> Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue
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
13 days ago [-]
ClumsyPilot 12 days ago [-]
Why are we conflating having a camera with social media that is addictive?
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
Because the article is nefarious
ceayo 12 days ago [-]
at the hands of alcoholic perverts who push this legislation onto them
pjc50 13 days ago [-]
I'm reminded of the way that universally carried high resolution cameras made UFOs and crop circles disappear, but police suddenly became a lot less trustworthy.
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.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
UFO's are still somehow always captured on the single dirtiest worst image sensor every produced by humans.
nyeah 13 days ago [-]
I agree that there are several different issues at work. Can you show an example of how TFA conflates some of them?
You may disagree with the author's conclusions, but that doesn't make the article nonsense.
titanomachy 13 days ago [-]
Not who you’re responding to, but I also don’t really think the article makes any kind of sensible argument that I can follow. Yes, it’s bad that a creepy drunk man used his phone to take pictures of teenage girls. Yes, it’s commendable that bystanders called him out. Yes, some countries are thinking of curtailing social media access for teenagers. I’m not sure what any of these things have to do with each other but the author presents them as somehow related, without drawing a coherent thread through them.
nyeah 13 days ago [-]
The article explains very clearly what these issues have to do with each other in this particular case.
titanomachy 13 days ago [-]
I don’t agree. Whether or not these girls had phones, or social media, was irrelevant in this case. And I’ve never heard anyone seriously argue that 16-year-olds shouldn’t have phones, or that 16-year-old girls are at fault when an old man secretly makes videos of them. Both these groups seem like imagined bogeymen that the article is railing against.
nyeah 13 days ago [-]
>Whether or not these girls had phones, or social media, was irrelevant
The article explains why that was not irrelevant.
12 days ago [-]
cmoski 12 days ago [-]
Who is saying 16yos shouldn't have phones though?
JSR_FDED 12 days ago [-]
Maybe if you have a certain frame of reference? I found it impenetrable.
II2II 13 days ago [-]
Perhaps there's stuff going on in the UK that I'm missing but:
- 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.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
Nah. there's not, the UK isn't banning phones at all. The article is wrong, and very likely just lying.
12 days ago [-]
rimeice 12 days ago [-]
> the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions.
This is insane.
abc42 12 days ago [-]
This is a great example of a thing that's 99% harmful being 1% very useful.
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.
ashu1461 13 days ago [-]
What’s easier: waiting until your child is mature enough before giving them a smartphone, or trying to regulate social media companies and every addictive website?
conductr 13 days ago [-]
The irony of this is the phone is an easy button for parenting. For that reason, I don’t think we should try to optimize around easy.
jimbokun 13 days ago [-]
Let’s do both.
xboxnolifes 12 days ago [-]
The latter.
throwaway_19sz 12 days ago [-]
That is a glaring false dichotomy.
tartuffe78 13 days ago [-]
Wait until they are 26?
jonstewart 13 days ago [-]
This essay extends one anecdote involving 16+ year old teenagers to the unsupported conclusion that kids should have phones and those who wish to restrict that are all wealthy 1% right wing authoritarians. Then with the personal note it seems clear that the core of the essay stems from the author's own personal trauma/experience.
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.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
The extra irony in this is that it's Labour and not the Tories that are implementing these policies, but not the policies that are cited here because they're made up.
12 days ago [-]
fantunes 13 days ago [-]
He was only caught because he was on his phone and someone could see his screen. No one would stand up for the girls if he was wearing one of those meta glasses taking the same pics.
Nursie 12 days ago [-]
And this is why we need to continue to shame "glassholes" whenever we encounter them.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
I mean they would, but of course he would get a level of plausible deniability.
graemep 12 days ago [-]
The political analysis there is completely wrong. How can she blame the "Tatler/Telegraph/Times set" for legislation passed by a Labour government? The opposition to this sort of legislation (e.g. the OSA) has largely come from the right.
> 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.
zahlman 12 days ago [-]
Indeed. More than enough reason to flag the submission, in my view.
(It's remarkable how many of the top-level comments are pointing out this sort of problem with the article content.)
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
Technically the OSA was passed by the last Tory gov and was implemented after they were ousted.
RIMR 13 days ago [-]
This whole article just boils down to the argument "If badly-behaved adults are allowed to have cameras, why shouldn't well-behaved children have access to for-profit social media platforms designed to addict them and feed them misinformation?"
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.
flumpcakes 13 days ago [-]
I agree with your sentiment completely. I think there's nuance that a lot of people don't bother with because of tribalism but your take is the one I most align with in this instance. Children do need protecting, I grew up with the Internet and it made me partly who I am today, but I also recognise it is completely different now. Gore/shock/NSFL websites being linked between friends as pranks are no longer a thing (thankfully), but we have replaced that with garden walls (Facebook, Reddit, YT, etc.) that are much more insidious and have mechanised the harm to children and young people to an unbelievable scale.
nyeah 13 days ago [-]
I disagree, but thanks for making a coherent argument. It's a ray of sunshine.
vitorfblima 13 days ago [-]
Yes, I don't know why it's being downvoted so much.
cynicalsecurity 12 days ago [-]
Did the UK get rid of the Muslim rape gangs already? No one is being raped on social media, yet all the hysteria is focused on social media when it should be focused on a completely different issue that actually harms children in real life on a massive scale - outside and unrelated to the internet.
selimthegrim 12 days ago [-]
If you're going to frame it that way, let's talk about the Muslim prosecutor that put them away and the Muslim home secretary trying to deport the ringleader.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
Meanwhile you have far-right leaders like a certain "Tommy Robinson" who openly advocate to "free the paedos" and openly admit to possessing CP
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
>Did the UK get rid of the Muslim rape gangs already?
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
roundabout-host 12 days ago [-]
The problem is not the ability to communicate, but rather the addiction generated by those algorithms. They should absolutely be regulated, for all ages.
gverrilla 12 days ago [-]
Trillion-dollar private businesses shouldn't exist in the first place. What did you expect from that??
avazhi 12 days ago [-]
Documenting offences?
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.
Alan_Writer 12 days ago [-]
Sadly, this happens all the time.
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.
big_paps 9 days ago [-]
I would say spending everyday hours on your phone especially on social media is way more harmful then being filmed by someone. That aside: This over-the-top behaviour is really damaging. That i sit here in Berlin and can watch how someone in Scottland is called out as a pervert over a minor event is modern lynch mob behaviour, and i am quite sure the intention of the people who spread this is less to protect the kids then just to feel moralic superior.
avaer 12 days ago [-]
I think most reasonable people can agree social media/internet can be a dangerous place where your images will be taken and posted to others without your consent. This isn't a matter of age.
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.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
If we assume this guy was taking photos for his own private collection, there's a hilarious irony that the person who took the video, and then posted it onto Twitter. Managed to expose the victims photos that he took, AND ALSO many other photos of their faces to the world.
But then the rest of the article is a load of nonsense about legislation that doesn't even exist.
trueno 12 days ago [-]
> was apparently following the law
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
j45 13 days ago [-]
It's important to define kids.
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.
roundabout-host 12 days ago [-]
So force parents to give them devices running an even more nonfree, even more crippled OS. At least on a smartphone you can run GNU/Linux.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
Huh? That's not defined in any legislation.
Also vast majority of devices run a Linux kernel....
roundabout-host 4 days ago [-]
GNU/Linux, not just Linux.
mumin00 12 days ago [-]
We need limits though and that's the whole point. The effect of doom scrolling on the young brain is something we can't just turn a blind eye to. Add to it bad people trying to hurt the young ones and using them
ColdStream 12 days ago [-]
I joking argue that we should cap computer speed at 486 level's. You can still do office stuff, some graphics and audio but you are not running a doom scrolling setup with that kind of limited hardware. You are barely running Doom!
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.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
I agree, but in that our constant drive for MORE and MORE compute is the real negative.
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.
cryptonym 12 days ago [-]
You don't need much client-side power to implement addictive UX.
BrenBarn 12 days ago [-]
This is a weird take. I don't understand how what this guy did or didn't do with his phone has any relevance for whether kids should have phones or do certain things with them. About the most I could say is that I would agree that many of the problems with phones are problems for adults as well as kids.
jgalt212 12 days ago [-]
So this woman is angry at a man with mental illness / alcoholism who happens to look like her ex husband? Am I missing something?
goalieca 13 days ago [-]
Personally, I don’t even think adults with phones are alright.
Cthulhu_ 13 days ago [-]
Yeah, age and maturity are two different things entirely. One of the bigger issues / trends right now is immature adults with power.
vinaigrette 13 days ago [-]
Maybe the problem is power
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
There's a few pensioners who go in my local pub, they're substantially more "addicted" to their phones than any tween, and manage to believe literally anything that comes across their screen. Even when thoroughly debunked by the rest of us...
lotsofpulp 13 days ago [-]
Remove the phones and the problem will remain, which is people’s desire to consume detrimental content, or content in detrimental amounts.
Before phones/computers/internet, it was garbage on television channels. Propaganda on 24/7 “news” channels, “reality” tv shows, etc.
ColdStream 12 days ago [-]
While that is true, the friction to access has been made far too easy. Adding in some inconvenience may actually be a good thing. It also helped that in the print/radio/television period, you couldn't hyper focus content at a specific individual. What was broadcast was free for all to see and critique.
I'm not advocating for a return to that, but that was one of the highlights of the era.
spaqin 12 days ago [-]
Oh the power may remain, but at least finally the buses and subways will be free of the constant noise of someone blasting short form content or games who doesn't have headphones. I'll take that.
__MatrixMan__ 13 days ago [-]
So it's not propagandists that are the problem, but rather the people they target? That's an odd take.
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.
squigz 13 days ago [-]
It's not that odd of a take to recognize that the people abusing their power and those eating it up are both part of the problem in their own ways.
ColdStream 12 days ago [-]
That is a fair take. Yes the kids are particularly susceptible to these things but some equally concerning behavior comes from adults that one wished the knew better.
Unfortunately, a lot of people run teenage software on adult hardware and that is a wild combo.
graemep 12 days ago [-]
I am not even sure kids are more susceptible. Plenty of addicted adults.
ColdStream 11 days ago [-]
More just a case of, kids are still learning from the world and can have a little less of a critical eye on these things. But like you said, adults haven't exactly used that critical eye themselves either.
rldjbpin 12 days ago [-]
this. the problem with a lot of "think of the children" argument is that we often rule out the failure in whatever policing is needed for the general public.
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.
chrisjj 12 days ago [-]
> a four-minute long documentary masterclass in bystander action, documenting offenses
The site reported an error at the time of viewing citing consumption
inigyou 13 days ago [-]
Why don't you? Everything should be archived.
curtisblaine 12 days ago [-]
> the cultural values that a detached elite wish to impose on their offspring for life have been transposed into law, policy, and regulation, and from there, into the personal lives of young people
Isn't this what happens in Islamic countries all the time though?
fumeux_fume 13 days ago [-]
So this is the new hot take? That kids need unfettered access to smart phones and the internet to toughen them up? Absolutely cringe.
nyeah 13 days ago [-]
TFA gives an example where kids are at risk and an old person is misusing a phone. It is clearly not advocating for this scenario to occur more often. Can you show anything else to indicate that the conclusion is "toughen them up"?
fumeux_fume 13 days ago [-]
> 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.
nyeah 12 days ago [-]
Ok fair.
marysol5 10 days ago [-]
I love the irony in posting the edited, but not anonymised video showing CLEARLY identifiable images of the girls.
Meanwhile the article you link to, blacks out their faces.
jzer0cool 12 days ago [-]
Who is recording? Who is watching? Who controls the data? All compounded issues when data is hardly ephemeral and is long-lived.
watutalkinbout 12 days ago [-]
We don't allow kids to smoke, presumably that's also something to do with limiting their agency?
iugtmkbdfil834 12 days ago [-]
Here is something I am not seeing anyone else addressing. Some yonks ago I was going to work by train and I stopped partially as a result of an incident on that train that involved someone recording my rather candid political conversation with a colleague. It is not the social media; tech etiquette needs to be seriously adjusted and while I am willing to give grace as we are trying to figure out proper balance as a society, I am not willing to have my life examined on the interwebz for everyone's amusement.
The kids in that sense, are just a convenient vessel for an argument; the same way they function for the author of that article.
camgunz 12 days ago [-]
Fine, let em have little video recorders then
kmitz 12 days ago [-]
I say this is a click bait article. The guy is taking a contrarian view on smartphone use by young people, with weak and very subjective arguments.
> 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.
3848484894 12 days ago [-]
he's just mad he can't groom kids on his dicord as easily anymore
throwaway27448 12 days ago [-]
> This runs against the grain of 2026 tech policy, which decrees that it’s young people who need their behavior censored and constrained, in ways that punish them for the actions of the perpetrator.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
- ASKfm
- Facebook
- Flickr
- GitHub
- Google+
- Instagram
- JustPaste.it
- LinkedIn
- Tumblr
- Twitter
- 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.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-anxious-generation-how-the-...
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.
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.
“ 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.
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.
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
https://substack.com/@mleverything/p-41310456
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).
Went through quite literally hundreds of accounts through it.
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.
What's gotten worse in some countries is the government censorship which I'm against.
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?
Somebody is peddling lies in your direction. These claims don’t hold up to any sort of cursory examination.
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...
https://x.com/WMPolice/status/1282627004018364416
> 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.
Seems good to me
>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.
What are they arrested for, or are you disputing the number?
I feel like it's a significantly freer society when others can't threaten to murder me without consequences.
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 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 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?
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
[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
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.
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.
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.
Shoving a pillow over the dial-up modem because I didn't know you could turn off the dial sound....
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.
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]:
3. The mental models and priorities that the new technologies require are not the same as the old tech requires. E.g. reading a book requires the ability to keep attention on one thing for hours, while scolling a phone feed requires a completely different version of attention. Kids have been trained on the latter, and we older folks view their inability to do the former as damage, because in our upbringing, this would be damage. But it's adaptation to the changing environment rather than damage - the kids are growing up in a different environment than the one we grew up in, and they are adapted to that, while we are not.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
These are capital crimes against humanity. The notion that we just have to accept it is absurdity.
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.
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?
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...
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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")
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
I am.
I'll say it. Kids shouldn't have phones until the age of 16.
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....
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.
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
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.
The problem is bullets, which guns just happen to make go very fast.
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.
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.
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.
Hard to argue below 18 actually needs more. Wants, sure, but then whole cancerous can of worms is opened and good luck there.
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.
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.
Notice how Shorts recently removed the dislike button?
There is whole world to read and discover before switching to passive videos. Or even spend time here lol
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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
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 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.
The author leaps from a proposed ban on 15 year olds using tiktok to wholesale bans on smartphones.
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.
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.
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.
What works needs to be found.
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.
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
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.
But then the rest of the article is a load of nonsense about legislation that doesn't even exist.
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
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.
I'm not advocating for a return to that, but that was one of the highlights of the era.
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.
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