>In both of these cases (and in others), the harms are there for children and adults, but it’s only children who get banned.
>I don’t use TikTok and it’s no skin off of my back if it gets banned. Banned or not, though, I don’t see a reason to ban it only for children. It doesn’t seem to be more harmful for them. They don’t seem to be using it lots more than adults.
>If you’re going to ban TikTok because it’s harmful or for geopolitical reasons, fine. But ban it universally; if we’re not willing to do that, stop pretending that a child-only ban is principled. A child-only ban is what you do when you want to do something but can’t think of anything better to do, and you don’t want to impact voters.
There are now enough statistics to prove that social media has a negative impact on the mental health of users, especially children and adolescents. Even Meta has kept a study on this topic under wraps. What OP is doing here is putting adults and children on the same level and saying that what applies to children must also apply to adults. The difference, however, is that we as adults have a responsibility toward children. Children enjoy special protection in society and, for good reason, are subject to limited criminal liability. We do this because we assume that children belong to a vulnerable and easily influenced group, and lack the mental and moral maturity to adequately assess their actions. We assume that adults have the necessary mental and moral maturity to adequately assess the consequences of their own actions, which is why they are granted more rights but also more responsibilities than children. OP does not reveal any contradiction or other ‘gotcha’ moment here, unless he generally takes issue with the relationship of responsibility between adults and adolescents.
> There are now enough statistics to prove that social media has a negative impact on the mental health of users
Yes, but the point of the article is compared to what.
I feel negative after 15 minutes on twitter (depending on the topic, of course), but I feel far less negative than if I'd tried getting similar info from legacy sources (10x slower, and with 10x the suits, lipstick, and ads).
The point isn't that social media are supposed to make users feel good, but that they're important information tools - a window to the world - and the alternatives - ignorance or less diverse more bloated sources - aren't the answer.
The solution isn't banning; it's the same as what we do with every single other useful but potentially dangerous thing: fires, pools, beaches.. - education. Perhaps secondary school could have modules for how to responsibly use social media, set and manage expectations/anxiety, when to use it (some people recommend not before sleep etc).
Banning only removes upside and delays downside. Education lessens/removes downside altogether with full upside.
It is broadly accepted that you cannot educate a toddler or even young child to expect them to be able to self control all the time due to lack of brain development (frontal cortex or what have you).
But what if a significant portion or maybe even all humans’ brains never get to the point where all supernormal stimuli can be educated against, and it is just an inherent mechanical weakness?
Is that not just slippery slope? If supernormal stimuli are broadcast across a population and we are helpless to prevent mind control then sure we should probably ban that. If the argument then is “yes but that’s exactly what TikTok is”. Well the US did actually manage to muster the political will to ban that for everyone. Of course it’s not being enforced because of reasons but it does seem like if the population believes they are being mind controlled the will is there.
Yes, this is a classic example of a programmer (or data scientist in this case) believing their expertise in one areas generalises to topics which they don't fully understand.
It would be a fun exercise to replace social media with alcohol in this article so that it argues we shouldn't ban children from drinking because drinking is bad for adults too.
Or things like cigarettes, guns, driver’s licenses, junk food, etc.
Even for those though, opinions are all over the place: Everything from "no rules" to "kids should be allowed to own drink alcohol under the supervision of their parents" to “it’s fine for adults to drink, but not kids” to “alcohol should obviously be banned for everyone."
For most of these we settled into a happy medium that generally everyone feels is acceptable, but we still change our opinions semi-frequently: Cigarettes being a great example in our lifetime.
I get the argument that social media is probably closer to junk food than to firearms, but:
a) Plenty of people argue that junk food should be banned for kids too! Or at least tightly regulated.
b) It’s definitely not consensus opinion that social media is more like junk food than, say, cigarettes. People will vehemently argue either side of that.
True, but misleading. There are practical blocks to children drinking alcohol: they can't buy it from shops or bars. In the UK, you can buy it from 18, and you can consume it in a pub/restaurant from 16 but only with a meal and supervised by an adult. In France, you can buy it in bars from 16.
An analogy would be that social media consumed by children is surely less harmful when it's a parent holding their own phone towards a child to show them a few selected photos from their Instagram feed. I doubt most people would object to that, even those that want to ban social media from children.
Yeah, but that pedantry did not add much. Yes, we do not ban children from drinking but there are still limits on their ability to buy and consume. A responsible adult needs to be present when children consume alcohol in many countries.
My son had no problem getting a beer with his meal at 15 in Munich. We were there, though, so it was supervised. It was also Radlers, so half beer, half soda.
But they can't legally purchase/access it without the involvement of an adult, unlike social media. You could argue that the parents sanction social media use by giving their kids a phone/computer without any sort of parental controls, but most parents probably have neither the resources nor proper knowledge of how to sufficiently provide a safe platform for their children.
You are aware that pay as you go sims are available from literally every store in the United Kindom, and any child can just buy one within minutes if they are so inclined?
Not to mention that using social media does not require a phone number, and wifi is practically ubiquitous.
I think this is a good point. What differentiates alcohol and social media? Well, social media is not physically addictive, but it's pretty clearly psychologically addictive. Along those lines it would be hard to argue that children should have unfettered access to social media. Social media is also _not_ like TV in that there's psychologists and algorithmic engineers working hard to make these types of apps as addictive as possible. Not to mention the fact that children obviously can't consent to having their data harvested, most ADULTS don't understand the ramifications of that, much less children.
All of this also applies to adults, I don't like how corporate profit-seeeking algorithms dictate public discourse and I think it's perfectly reasonable to combat this. The great question is how to do so without trampling on people's right to freedom. The EU tends to combat "misinformation", but this has loads of problems, and I think it misses the mark of what the problem truly is. In my opinions it's the algorithms that maximize fear responses and lead people down rabbit holes that's the true problem.
I think the best way to combat it is by supporting federation and decentralization of the internet and attacking the advertising industry that maximizes eyeballs and time spent on the platform, rather than providing service to paying users. It also has the beneficial side-effect of increasing freedom of thought and speech rather than limiting it.
I know some people see the fragmentation of communities as the leading cause of echo-chambers, but this is not my impression. Actually, the smaller internet communities are often less extreme than algorithmically dominated central-hubs. Pseudonymous small communities function more like the local village that tends to mitigate extremism as the loudest, more extremist, community members can be challenged, without those challengers drowning in potential oppressive moderation and hive-mind mentality.
That is the real issue. The problem is that the things that cause the addiction and harm are the same things that are useful for generating profit and spreading propaganda. I'm not sure I see a viable solution that doesn't involve some people willingly giving up a very large amount of wealth or power.
Banning children from drinking never really made much sense. A glass of wine or beer for kids in their early teens was very normal in Europe until recently (and still unofficially is) and we have not turned into hellhole. The temperance movement is/was uniquely American stupidity.
We shouldn't ban children from drinking. It doesn't even help, because kids drink anyway, just illegally and largely unsupervised by adults. I certainly drank like a fish when I was underage.
Let me make a parallel argument: We shouldn’t ban drinking and driving. It doesn’t even help, because people do it anyway.
You seem to be setting the bar at “if anyone violates the law then the law is a failure and should be revoked.” But that’s why we have court systems. They don’t just determine if someone broke the law, but also what to do when people inevitably do. You’re operating in a world where the only restrictive laws we should have are ones where it eradicates certain behaviors 100%.
You’re basically arguing against having laws rather than the merits of the law and its efficacy. Also “drinking like a a fish” when you were a kid was terrible for your development even if you turned out ok. Many people do not. It’s not even debatable, we know the numbers on this.
The point is the enforcement/adherence part. They are saying “people do it anyway, therefore we shouldn’t have the law.“ What you are arguing is actually more valid than their argument.
> We shouldn’t ban drinking and driving. It doesn’t even help, because people do it anyway.
> Do you see the trouble with the logic here?
I think you misunderstood my comment. The second sentence was not intended to be an argument or justification for the first sentence. The first sentence stands alone: I think it's unprincipled to ban children from drinking. The second sentence is merely a corollary. Also, I think that legalization and the introduction of adult supervision would ameliorate some of the problems associated with youth drinking, would "moderate" it to some extent.
My view is that the government should not try to be a parent, should not restrict personal freedom, not even of kids, except in so far as one's exercise of freedom harms others, and even there it has to be significant harm, e.g., you can ban violence but not hurting someone else's feelings. The drunk driving laws, which apply to all ages, may be justified by the known role of drunk driving in car crashes. The same principle apples to public smoking bans: the issue is not the first-hand smoke, which is your own business, but rather the second-hand smoke, affecting people who choose not to smoke.
Preventing children from smoking has entirely to do with the very well established and understood health impacts on children as they develop, same as alcohol. It is not because of secondhand smoke. The latter informs where we can smoke, such as (not) around a hospital.
> Preventing children from smoking has entirely to do with the very well established and understood health impacts on children as they develop, same as alcohol.
There are very well established and understood health impacts on adults too, for both smoking and alcohol.
> It is not because of secondhand smoke. The latter informs where we can smoke, such as (not) around a hospital.
Duh? I mentioned second-hand smoke in the context of "public smoking bans," by which I meant smoking in buildings and other public areas. That has nothing specifically to do with children. So it appears that once again you misunderstood my comment.
Banning social media will never work, just as banning prostitution, drugs cigarettes and gambling don't work (in a broad scale). What we can do is change the public (and our) perception of it. Understanding you have a problem is always the first step in any N-step program for whatever addictive substance. Most adults don't see their own consumption and behaviour around social media as harmful or problematic or simply deny they have a problem - just as is the case with any other substance. That is where we have to start. Once we (as in we as society) start agreeing that social media on average (!) is harmful, the narrative shifts. Right now parents don't think they do anything wrong by giving a 10year old a smartphone unsupervised. Everybody in society would look condascending on the parents if they hand out cigarettes to a 10yo child - probably even calling the cops. THAT is the sentiment in society where we need to be. It starts with us adults condemning social media use first, else all attempts to outlaw or ban it will fail.
It seems like the things we ban for children are things that we might ban for everybody, but can get away with for children. Very few of those things are conclusively proven to be harmful -- perhaps firearms, motor vehicles, and smoking, and even those things put up a pretty good fight to stay alive as long as they did.
Smoking is an interesting case. Vanishingly few people who smoke learned to do so as adults. Virtually all started as kids. Likewise, virtually all marketing of smoking was directed towards kids. Banning smoking among kids had the side of effect of reducing it in adults without the impossibility of an overall ban.
Social media is an interesting example. Of course it influences behavior. That's its purpose. Otherwise all of the advertising revenue poured into the social media industry would be wasted. The most successful social media businesses I'm aware of all started being marketed primarily to young people.
It's a shame the age-scaled tobacco ban (I think it was proposed in the UK) never went though. You just start raising the legal age for tobacco by one year, every year. Eventually, nobody alive will still be a smoker and you can ban it outright without having taken it away from anyone.
It's the same kind of bad line of argumentation we disputed for decades with banning piracy (implicit assumption that every pirated copy was a sale lost).
Aaaacckkkktuuaally, at my kids school vaping is now an epidemic of sorts. It's much cheaper, it's cool, you get it easily via Snapchat. Many kids later pick up smoking (anecdotally).
> it’s easy to tax other people - the rich, bankers, benefits scroungers, energy executives
Taxing the working class is the easiest: do vat tax, force income tax. Tere is no way taxing rich or executives is comparably easy.
--
Let's not bother with taxing the rich to see what could happen when smallest number of people accumulate wealth in X times faster than anyone else.
And don't tell me "it's natural order of things", dying from desease in 35 is natural, dying in childbirthing is natural, becoming a monopoly is natural, circumventing competition is natural. Does not mean we need to keep doing these things.
> the working class is the easiest: do vat tax, force income tax. Tere is no way taxing rich or executives is comparably easy
Marginal land value tax rates. Use beneficial ownership data, and land ownership records, which should all be digitized by now, and apply a tax
rate according to total ownership and “urban-ness” of the land. Since businesses have to pay also, it flows through to shareholders, and may serve as a counterbalance to businesses getting excessively large.
I agree, ban it for everyone. But starting with children seems like a good start for that seeing as we'd need to go against most of the biggest companies in the world with significant political influence.
My counterpoint would be that social media has a network effect. Its a lot harder for a parent to ban their own child from social media when all of their peers are on it, because it turns the child into a social outcast, at the worst years of someone's life to be a social outcast.
Also "do something, but not to the voters" is an invalid argument in this case. Anti-immigration policy is a good example of "do soemthing but not to the voters". This is do something to the only people in the voter's life that the voter cares about even more than themselves.
> We ban gambling for children, even though the vast majority of harm caused by gambling comes from adults. Now you could argue that more harm would befall children if we let them gamble, but I honestly don’t think you should.
> By and large, children don’t have money. And even if they do, they don’t have other people who are dependent on it. If children were free to gamble (they sort of already are, what with in-game microtransactions and variable rewards and all the features of gambling, just without the label), I still think that the majority of harm would be borne by adults. Additionally, alongside a child’s gambling ban, we heavily regulate the gambling industry for adults. Children’s social media bans don’t appear to come with similar adult regulatory scrutiny.
Kind of lost me here. I think we should ban gambling for children, even if they don't have money or people dependent on them. Children will steal their parents money to gamble or buy Roblox points.
Yeah, we have regulations on adult gambling. I wouldn't mind more regulations on adult social media use either.
I think we should consider stricter restrictions on harmful advertising way before we rush to lock down the internet in order to "save the children". I don't understand why we have accepted that it's companies' God-given-right to blast propaganda which only functions to drain the working class of their money (gambling) and their health (endless ads for poor dietary choices). Why not limit advertisements to at least just products that makes people's lives easier? I especially would love to see more advertisement for rehab centers for example.
The core point - that it's politically convenient to ban things for "other people", especially if they cannot vote you out - is well taken. And I share the scepticism about whether "do something" politics leads to good legislation. However, it is most definitely not hypocritical to have different rules for children and adults; the bodies and minds of children are not fully developed and there are many instances where research indicates they are both more prone to damage and unable to make effective judgement as to their own actions.
As to a social media ban making sense for children: should not the precautionary principle apply? To this end, who has the vested interests and deeper pockets to fund research backing the status quo? And yet where is the research indicating social media is good news for children?
Depressingly bad argument that seems to say: we think it’s bad for children and adults, but we don’t ban it for adults so we shouldn’t ban it for children.
I don’t think (could be wrong) the argument is don’t ban social media for children because we don’t ban it for adults… I think the argument is it is easier politically to regulate behavior of a population that doesn’t vote and is not us.
English societies have a long history of regulating the behavior of others - see English Poor Laws.
It’s an interesting perspective at least, I hadn’t thought of the social media ban in that way.
I happen to think we should still ban bad things (smoking, drinking, gambling, and probably social media) for kids. But I appreciate the argument.
It’s more accurately: but we _cannot_, or maybe even, do not have the political will to ban it for adults. The point is that it’s politically easy to ban something for those who cannot vote for you.
It feels like there's some glossing-over and circular logic here:
> Yes children show poorer impulse control than adults. But aren’t we all somewhat helpless in the face of the mighty tech companies?
The fact that adults can also have somewhat poor impulse control doesn't mean we should disregard the argument. And when it comes to the power of big tech - isn't that what regulation aims to mitigate?
> Brain development continues up until around 25 or so, and so it’s possible that social media does cause longer-term problems with brain development. Possible. Not proved. It’s possible social media causes long-term cognitive decline in adults. Possible. Not proved.
I don't know the studies well enough to know whether it's proved or not, but intuitively this feels like an obvious enough concern to at least be investigating it. Surely there are some general studies about whether mental health issues in early life are more likely to lead to long-term problems?
I feel like if the conclusion is "ban it for everyone too" I'm okay with it?
But the argument seems to get a little lost along the way.
Yes, adults are susceptible to the same vices as children. However (as the author writes) children have poorer impulse control. They are also less inclined to or unable to consider the repercussions of their actions.
You wouldn't try to get a toddler to stop smoking by telling them it'll put them at a high risk for cancer at old age.
Speaking of smoking, anti-smoking campaigns in the US in the 90s led to a vast reduction in teen use and adult use alike.
So there is notable lasting benefit in protecting children while they lack the foresight.
>Speaking of smoking, anti-smoking campaigns in the US in the 90s led to a vast reduction in teen use and adult use alike.
Late 90s... specifically after 1997 and early 2000s. But the anti-smoking campaigns before that were not effective. In fact, educating teens and adults on the dangers of smoking increased smoking. Smoking rates for teens peaked at 37% in 1997. it wasn't until the "Truth" campaigns where they focused on how the tobacco industry was basically a conspiracy, that smoking rates began to fall. And you can't pretend that tobacco taxes didn't play a part in reducing usage either.
One thing I have not seen come up in these discussions is how these bans interact with the network effects. They might actually be one of the most effective tools we have to fight back against and punish platform businesses.
I assume that something like a partially effective ban could have a devastating impact on social media because it may push active users in the teen / adolescent demographic below the critical mass necessary for self sustaining growth and retention.
Has anyone done any studies on where that tipping point / critical mass is? How effective do these bans have to be to achieve their intended outcome?
There are quite a few things wrong with this article, but above all, placing children on the same level as adults overlooks how crucial our early years are.
Overall, this blog post feels somewhat outdated.
I also can't clearly grasp the author's position: are they arguing that we should ban this for everyone, or not ban it at all? Or is the point simply that the people who write such bans or laws do so because the law doesn't apply to them?
>Frankly, social media is just too ingrained into the social fabric, and is just too useful and addictive to be banned. So if you have to do something and you can’t meaningfully do anything else…I guess it’s a ban for children.
this is something I've been dwelling on for the past couple days. I've avoided social media my entire adult life, and I'm realizing its akin to not having a car in a suburban sprawl, I can't interact properly with a lot of the modern internet, because of it.
Of course there are advantages, which I don't think i need to state in this community...
But i feel this is something people overlook when discussing banning social media for children. There is a balance to be struck, like anything.
I think the article misses the biggest point of the social media or any "ban" for children: the environment (social) effect.
(modern) children are essentially locked in their environment without much say. You go to school, you go to extra curricula activities. But the school you attend or other activities are often not your choice or in your control. On top of that, you often don't know better when it comes to what environments are actually available to you (or the effect of it).
This makes the dynamics completely different vs an adult.
I (adult) don't want to use social media? Fine I do that. Too big consequences in my immediate environment (all my friends/work use it) fine I'll change friends and work. Everyone is smoking but I don't want to? Fine I'll hang out with people that don't like smoking either. Hell I can even move country / location.
When everyone is smoking or using social media, a kid can't do anything about it. If that behavior is tied to social inclusion or "norm" then you're actively penalized for your choice and you can do almost nothing about it.
That's why we ban certain things for children. We know it won't work 100%, but taking it away from the school yard or social spaces have a profoundly different effect on children vs adult.
We can always dicuss WHAT to ban or not, but like the article, comparing adult to kids without acknowledging this is a red herring
The article is based on the assumption that when we ban things for children only, it is because we perceive them to be harmful to children only. I don't think that is true. Nobody thinks adults are immune from the negative effects of cigarettes or alcohol. But adults are, in general, allowed to harm themselves. Children are not, because there is an acceptance that children are less able to make informed decisions. You can take issue with that and obviously bright-line rules based on age are highly imperfect, but it's a very different discussion to the one the article is trying to have.
Granted, there is also evidence that social media has particularly harmful effects on children, which no doubt strengthens the argument. But in the general case bans targeted towards children are not (just) about that.
Ultimately the article seems to be trying to argue (implicitly) that we shouldn't ban, regulate or tax anything, because if we were to do that, we would then need to ban, regulate and tax everything in order to be "consistent". It's a common argument I see from libertarians online, including on HN. If you're going to ban guns, surely you should also ban knives and cars? If presented with a choice between permitting one specific thing or prohibiting all the things, most people will choose the former. But it's a false dichotomy. The law can treat different things and situations differently, even if those things/situations have some commonalities.
But also, the effects of some things on developing children are different (arguably more impactful) than on adults.
We talk about education, nurturing, etc, and how vital they are to children. We also know drugs that have different effects on children than on adults.
Why then it's so surprising social platforms could also have a bigger impact on children?
I read a strong libertarian bias here. To be consistent, should we prohibit cocaine and heroin for children? Historically, these were not banned. Should we ban cigarettes and alcohol for kids even though they are legal for adults?
I don't have a good answer regarding where to draw the line or how to actually enforce such restrictions. This is especially difficult because limiting digital access for kids is a great backdoor for surveillance and general information control.
However, I am near certain that in a few decades, people will view social media addiction much like substance abuse. It used to be the norm for writers and musicians to be drunk more often than not, but that is less accepted now. Currently, it is accepted that people spend hours a day on social media, and I am guilty as charged.
Eh, I feel like if we know there is a vulnerable population (children), and we know that the social media will cause harm (increased suicides, depression, etc), and we know that that ultimately it puts people in a place where they can't reasonably choose a better path (collective action, power imbalance, poor reasoning, no long-term perspective, social peer pressure, etc.), and where the parents are unable to reasonably control the behavior too, then a ban is warranted.
By that token, I honestly think we should ban more things that we know don't have an upside, and only have downsides, and the people who partake are generally doing so because of mental / physical shortcomings. In other words, if we know a reasonable person would not want to partake in a behavior unless due to manipulation and weakness, then I feel protecting that person is a kindness.
I myself have suffered from addictions that I can't seem to easily "choose to stop" even though I constantly wish I could. I really wish I wouldn't have been exposed to these things when I was younger and thought it was just fun. If I could, I would pay to go back and prevent my younger self from ever trying it -- because I had no way to know. And then I am a bit astonished none of the adults had that kind of concern. Sure a few people said "that stuff isn't good", but ultimately that lost to all the other factors (constant propaganda, ads, peer pressure, convenience, taste, addictive qualities, cost). It was never a "free choice" because there was huge information and power imbalance at play, and the "responsible adults" who could help did nothing.
Yep, this is definitely written by an LLM. I doubt any model is capable of reasoning this bad.
> “harmful compared to what?”
The kids can sniff glue all I care, at least we get some good punk rock out of it. That largely depends on their parents. But children spending time completely unsupervised with bunch of adult men only some of which are pedophiles while shooting into their brains 24/7 the most powerful advertisement ever known to man wrapped into an application that has the same operationational logic as one-armed bandit will not bring anything good to anybody - except loads of money to the tech bro’s. It is basically same as raising your children in a Las Vegas casino.
But you don’t have to take my word. You know you can just ask the kids who have been raised with social media, the first generation of which is adult now? Every single one of the zoomers say it sucks. That should be enpugh.
This isn't a one way door. It's a warranted societal experiment. Re-eval in 5 years, ask the kids, compare to other countries... this sort of do-nothing hand wringing is why we stagnate.
There are plenty of rules parents set for children that do not apply to the parents.
Likewise, there are drugs pediatricians won't prescribe for children under a certain age because they have different effects on developing children vs adults.
We treat people differently based on age for lots of valid reasons.
>We ban gambling for children, even though the vast majority of harm caused by gambling comes from adults. Now you could argue that more harm would befall children if we let them gamble, but I honestly don’t think you should.
Yeah only children stealing credit cards to satisfy their addiction.
I don't know if the poster ever saw a child but they are largely sociopathic for a long time and will go great lengths to get their will.
>In both of these cases (and in others), the harms are there for children and adults, but it’s only children who get banned.
>I don’t use TikTok and it’s no skin off of my back if it gets banned. Banned or not, though, I don’t see a reason to ban it only for children. It doesn’t seem to be more harmful for them. They don’t seem to be using it lots more than adults.
>If you’re going to ban TikTok because it’s harmful or for geopolitical reasons, fine. But ban it universally; if we’re not willing to do that, stop pretending that a child-only ban is principled. A child-only ban is what you do when you want to do something but can’t think of anything better to do, and you don’t want to impact voters.
There are now enough statistics to prove that social media has a negative impact on the mental health of users, especially children and adolescents. Even Meta has kept a study on this topic under wraps. What OP is doing here is putting adults and children on the same level and saying that what applies to children must also apply to adults. The difference, however, is that we as adults have a responsibility toward children. Children enjoy special protection in society and, for good reason, are subject to limited criminal liability. We do this because we assume that children belong to a vulnerable and easily influenced group, and lack the mental and moral maturity to adequately assess their actions. We assume that adults have the necessary mental and moral maturity to adequately assess the consequences of their own actions, which is why they are granted more rights but also more responsibilities than children. OP does not reveal any contradiction or other ‘gotcha’ moment here, unless he generally takes issue with the relationship of responsibility between adults and adolescents.
> There are now enough statistics to prove that social media has a negative impact on the mental health of users
Yes, but the point of the article is compared to what.
I feel negative after 15 minutes on twitter (depending on the topic, of course), but I feel far less negative than if I'd tried getting similar info from legacy sources (10x slower, and with 10x the suits, lipstick, and ads).
The point isn't that social media are supposed to make users feel good, but that they're important information tools - a window to the world - and the alternatives - ignorance or less diverse more bloated sources - aren't the answer.
The solution isn't banning; it's the same as what we do with every single other useful but potentially dangerous thing: fires, pools, beaches.. - education. Perhaps secondary school could have modules for how to responsibly use social media, set and manage expectations/anxiety, when to use it (some people recommend not before sleep etc).
Banning only removes upside and delays downside. Education lessens/removes downside altogether with full upside.
While I am prone to be against bans, I am curious how to deal with the biological problem of supernormal stimulus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
It is broadly accepted that you cannot educate a toddler or even young child to expect them to be able to self control all the time due to lack of brain development (frontal cortex or what have you).
But what if a significant portion or maybe even all humans’ brains never get to the point where all supernormal stimuli can be educated against, and it is just an inherent mechanical weakness?
Is that not just slippery slope? If supernormal stimuli are broadcast across a population and we are helpless to prevent mind control then sure we should probably ban that. If the argument then is “yes but that’s exactly what TikTok is”. Well the US did actually manage to muster the political will to ban that for everyone. Of course it’s not being enforced because of reasons but it does seem like if the population believes they are being mind controlled the will is there.
Yes, this is a classic example of a programmer (or data scientist in this case) believing their expertise in one areas generalises to topics which they don't fully understand.
It would be a fun exercise to replace social media with alcohol in this article so that it argues we shouldn't ban children from drinking because drinking is bad for adults too.
Has anyone even studied the effect of forcing ten year olds to drink a daily litre of vodka?
This is just called being teenager in the Balkans. Eventually we turn out fine.
Or things like cigarettes, guns, driver’s licenses, junk food, etc.
Even for those though, opinions are all over the place: Everything from "no rules" to "kids should be allowed to own drink alcohol under the supervision of their parents" to “it’s fine for adults to drink, but not kids” to “alcohol should obviously be banned for everyone."
For most of these we settled into a happy medium that generally everyone feels is acceptable, but we still change our opinions semi-frequently: Cigarettes being a great example in our lifetime.
I get the argument that social media is probably closer to junk food than to firearms, but:
a) Plenty of people argue that junk food should be banned for kids too! Or at least tightly regulated.
b) It’s definitely not consensus opinion that social media is more like junk food than, say, cigarettes. People will vehemently argue either side of that.
In most of Europe it's legal for Children to drink alcohol.
True, but misleading. There are practical blocks to children drinking alcohol: they can't buy it from shops or bars. In the UK, you can buy it from 18, and you can consume it in a pub/restaurant from 16 but only with a meal and supervised by an adult. In France, you can buy it in bars from 16.
An analogy would be that social media consumed by children is surely less harmful when it's a parent holding their own phone towards a child to show them a few selected photos from their Instagram feed. I doubt most people would object to that, even those that want to ban social media from children.
You should try to go to "most of Europe" and try to get alcohol as someone <16 and see how that goes.
The comment I replied to specifically said "ban children from drinking", not purchase alcohol.
For instance here in the UK it's legal for any child over 5 to drink in private.
Yeah, but that pedantry did not add much. Yes, we do not ban children from drinking but there are still limits on their ability to buy and consume. A responsible adult needs to be present when children consume alcohol in many countries.
My son had no problem getting a beer with his meal at 15 in Munich. We were there, though, so it was supervised. It was also Radlers, so half beer, half soda.
Drinking != Buying.
It is usually legal for parents to give under-18s a sip of an alcoholic beverage. It is not legal for under-18s to buy any such beverage in a shop.
But they can't legally purchase/access it without the involvement of an adult, unlike social media. You could argue that the parents sanction social media use by giving their kids a phone/computer without any sort of parental controls, but most parents probably have neither the resources nor proper knowledge of how to sufficiently provide a safe platform for their children.
You can't legally buy a mobile contract in the UK if you're under 18. So in most cases the parents did buy it for the child.
You are aware that pay as you go sims are available from literally every store in the United Kindom, and any child can just buy one within minutes if they are so inclined?
Not to mention that using social media does not require a phone number, and wifi is practically ubiquitous.
I think this is a good point. What differentiates alcohol and social media? Well, social media is not physically addictive, but it's pretty clearly psychologically addictive. Along those lines it would be hard to argue that children should have unfettered access to social media. Social media is also _not_ like TV in that there's psychologists and algorithmic engineers working hard to make these types of apps as addictive as possible. Not to mention the fact that children obviously can't consent to having their data harvested, most ADULTS don't understand the ramifications of that, much less children.
All of this also applies to adults, I don't like how corporate profit-seeeking algorithms dictate public discourse and I think it's perfectly reasonable to combat this. The great question is how to do so without trampling on people's right to freedom. The EU tends to combat "misinformation", but this has loads of problems, and I think it misses the mark of what the problem truly is. In my opinions it's the algorithms that maximize fear responses and lead people down rabbit holes that's the true problem.
I think the best way to combat it is by supporting federation and decentralization of the internet and attacking the advertising industry that maximizes eyeballs and time spent on the platform, rather than providing service to paying users. It also has the beneficial side-effect of increasing freedom of thought and speech rather than limiting it.
I know some people see the fragmentation of communities as the leading cause of echo-chambers, but this is not my impression. Actually, the smaller internet communities are often less extreme than algorithmically dominated central-hubs. Pseudonymous small communities function more like the local village that tends to mitigate extremism as the loudest, more extremist, community members can be challenged, without those challengers drowning in potential oppressive moderation and hive-mind mentality.
That is the real issue. The problem is that the things that cause the addiction and harm are the same things that are useful for generating profit and spreading propaganda. I'm not sure I see a viable solution that doesn't involve some people willingly giving up a very large amount of wealth or power.
Banning children from drinking never really made much sense. A glass of wine or beer for kids in their early teens was very normal in Europe until recently (and still unofficially is) and we have not turned into hellhole. The temperance movement is/was uniquely American stupidity.
We shouldn't ban children from drinking. It doesn't even help, because kids drink anyway, just illegally and largely unsupervised by adults. I certainly drank like a fish when I was underage.
Let me make a parallel argument: We shouldn’t ban drinking and driving. It doesn’t even help, because people do it anyway.
You seem to be setting the bar at “if anyone violates the law then the law is a failure and should be revoked.” But that’s why we have court systems. They don’t just determine if someone broke the law, but also what to do when people inevitably do. You’re operating in a world where the only restrictive laws we should have are ones where it eradicates certain behaviors 100%.
You’re basically arguing against having laws rather than the merits of the law and its efficacy. Also “drinking like a a fish” when you were a kid was terrible for your development even if you turned out ok. Many people do not. It’s not even debatable, we know the numbers on this.
Not quite. We regulate driving not drinking. The licence comes with strings attached. You don't take teen exam to become teen.
The point is the enforcement/adherence part. They are saying “people do it anyway, therefore we shouldn’t have the law.“ What you are arguing is actually more valid than their argument.
> They are saying “people do it anyway, therefore we shouldn’t have the law.
They, more precisely I, was not making such an argument, as I already explained in another comment.
> We shouldn’t ban drinking and driving. It doesn’t even help, because people do it anyway.
> Do you see the trouble with the logic here?
I think you misunderstood my comment. The second sentence was not intended to be an argument or justification for the first sentence. The first sentence stands alone: I think it's unprincipled to ban children from drinking. The second sentence is merely a corollary. Also, I think that legalization and the introduction of adult supervision would ameliorate some of the problems associated with youth drinking, would "moderate" it to some extent.
My view is that the government should not try to be a parent, should not restrict personal freedom, not even of kids, except in so far as one's exercise of freedom harms others, and even there it has to be significant harm, e.g., you can ban violence but not hurting someone else's feelings. The drunk driving laws, which apply to all ages, may be justified by the known role of drunk driving in car crashes. The same principle apples to public smoking bans: the issue is not the first-hand smoke, which is your own business, but rather the second-hand smoke, affecting people who choose not to smoke.
Preventing children from smoking has entirely to do with the very well established and understood health impacts on children as they develop, same as alcohol. It is not because of secondhand smoke. The latter informs where we can smoke, such as (not) around a hospital.
> Preventing children from smoking has entirely to do with the very well established and understood health impacts on children as they develop, same as alcohol.
There are very well established and understood health impacts on adults too, for both smoking and alcohol.
> It is not because of secondhand smoke. The latter informs where we can smoke, such as (not) around a hospital.
Duh? I mentioned second-hand smoke in the context of "public smoking bans," by which I meant smoking in buildings and other public areas. That has nothing specifically to do with children. So it appears that once again you misunderstood my comment.
>duh?
Come on.
and look at the results
It does help actually. Since it’s banned it’s not socially acceptable . And that makes it sort of regulated
> not socially acceptable
I think you misspelled "cool".
Banning social media will never work, just as banning prostitution, drugs cigarettes and gambling don't work (in a broad scale). What we can do is change the public (and our) perception of it. Understanding you have a problem is always the first step in any N-step program for whatever addictive substance. Most adults don't see their own consumption and behaviour around social media as harmful or problematic or simply deny they have a problem - just as is the case with any other substance. That is where we have to start. Once we (as in we as society) start agreeing that social media on average (!) is harmful, the narrative shifts. Right now parents don't think they do anything wrong by giving a 10year old a smartphone unsupervised. Everybody in society would look condascending on the parents if they hand out cigarettes to a 10yo child - probably even calling the cops. THAT is the sentiment in society where we need to be. It starts with us adults condemning social media use first, else all attempts to outlaw or ban it will fail.
Banning cigarette sales actually does reduce smoking.[1] The same way banning drunk driving reduces instances of drunk driving.
But it’s not either-or. We can do both: ban cigarette sales for kids and change our perception of it with informational campaigns.
[1]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7233410/
I would imagine banning something is a pretty good way to change the public perception of it.
It seems like the things we ban for children are things that we might ban for everybody, but can get away with for children. Very few of those things are conclusively proven to be harmful -- perhaps firearms, motor vehicles, and smoking, and even those things put up a pretty good fight to stay alive as long as they did.
Smoking is an interesting case. Vanishingly few people who smoke learned to do so as adults. Virtually all started as kids. Likewise, virtually all marketing of smoking was directed towards kids. Banning smoking among kids had the side of effect of reducing it in adults without the impossibility of an overall ban.
Social media is an interesting example. Of course it influences behavior. That's its purpose. Otherwise all of the advertising revenue poured into the social media industry would be wasted. The most successful social media businesses I'm aware of all started being marketed primarily to young people.
It's a shame the age-scaled tobacco ban (I think it was proposed in the UK) never went though. You just start raising the legal age for tobacco by one year, every year. Eventually, nobody alive will still be a smoker and you can ban it outright without having taken it away from anyone.
That's still planned in the UK; Conservatives and Labour are both filled with puritans.
>It’s like studying the social impact of vaping without considering the replacement activity (smoking).
That's not how this works. If you ban vaping, not everyone - and not necessarily most people who vape - would be smoking instead.
"X isn't as bad as Y" is not a good argument in favor of X. They can both be bad.
It's the same kind of bad line of argumentation we disputed for decades with banning piracy (implicit assumption that every pirated copy was a sale lost).
Aaaacckkkktuuaally, at my kids school vaping is now an epidemic of sorts. It's much cheaper, it's cool, you get it easily via Snapchat. Many kids later pick up smoking (anecdotally).
I don't think this detracts from OP's point.
> it’s easy to tax other people - the rich, bankers, benefits scroungers, energy executives
Taxing the working class is the easiest: do vat tax, force income tax. Tere is no way taxing rich or executives is comparably easy.
--
Let's not bother with taxing the rich to see what could happen when smallest number of people accumulate wealth in X times faster than anyone else.
And don't tell me "it's natural order of things", dying from desease in 35 is natural, dying in childbirthing is natural, becoming a monopoly is natural, circumventing competition is natural. Does not mean we need to keep doing these things.
> the working class is the easiest: do vat tax, force income tax. Tere is no way taxing rich or executives is comparably easy
Marginal land value tax rates. Use beneficial ownership data, and land ownership records, which should all be digitized by now, and apply a tax rate according to total ownership and “urban-ness” of the land. Since businesses have to pay also, it flows through to shareholders, and may serve as a counterbalance to businesses getting excessively large.
I agree, ban it for everyone. But starting with children seems like a good start for that seeing as we'd need to go against most of the biggest companies in the world with significant political influence.
My counterpoint would be that social media has a network effect. Its a lot harder for a parent to ban their own child from social media when all of their peers are on it, because it turns the child into a social outcast, at the worst years of someone's life to be a social outcast.
Also "do something, but not to the voters" is an invalid argument in this case. Anti-immigration policy is a good example of "do soemthing but not to the voters". This is do something to the only people in the voter's life that the voter cares about even more than themselves.
> We ban gambling for children, even though the vast majority of harm caused by gambling comes from adults. Now you could argue that more harm would befall children if we let them gamble, but I honestly don’t think you should.
> By and large, children don’t have money. And even if they do, they don’t have other people who are dependent on it. If children were free to gamble (they sort of already are, what with in-game microtransactions and variable rewards and all the features of gambling, just without the label), I still think that the majority of harm would be borne by adults. Additionally, alongside a child’s gambling ban, we heavily regulate the gambling industry for adults. Children’s social media bans don’t appear to come with similar adult regulatory scrutiny.
Kind of lost me here. I think we should ban gambling for children, even if they don't have money or people dependent on them. Children will steal their parents money to gamble or buy Roblox points.
Yeah, we have regulations on adult gambling. I wouldn't mind more regulations on adult social media use either.
I don't watch TV for years at a time, when I saw how many gambling ads are on now I was disgusted.
I think we should consider stricter restrictions on harmful advertising way before we rush to lock down the internet in order to "save the children". I don't understand why we have accepted that it's companies' God-given-right to blast propaganda which only functions to drain the working class of their money (gambling) and their health (endless ads for poor dietary choices). Why not limit advertisements to at least just products that makes people's lives easier? I especially would love to see more advertisement for rehab centers for example.
The core point - that it's politically convenient to ban things for "other people", especially if they cannot vote you out - is well taken. And I share the scepticism about whether "do something" politics leads to good legislation. However, it is most definitely not hypocritical to have different rules for children and adults; the bodies and minds of children are not fully developed and there are many instances where research indicates they are both more prone to damage and unable to make effective judgement as to their own actions.
As to a social media ban making sense for children: should not the precautionary principle apply? To this end, who has the vested interests and deeper pockets to fund research backing the status quo? And yet where is the research indicating social media is good news for children?
Banning things for other people is certainly easy for me because my students will spend the whole class on their phones if i dont.
Depressingly bad argument that seems to say: we think it’s bad for children and adults, but we don’t ban it for adults so we shouldn’t ban it for children.
I don’t think (could be wrong) the argument is don’t ban social media for children because we don’t ban it for adults… I think the argument is it is easier politically to regulate behavior of a population that doesn’t vote and is not us.
English societies have a long history of regulating the behavior of others - see English Poor Laws.
It’s an interesting perspective at least, I hadn’t thought of the social media ban in that way.
I happen to think we should still ban bad things (smoking, drinking, gambling, and probably social media) for kids. But I appreciate the argument.
It’s more accurately: but we _cannot_, or maybe even, do not have the political will to ban it for adults. The point is that it’s politically easy to ban something for those who cannot vote for you.
It feels like there's some glossing-over and circular logic here:
> Yes children show poorer impulse control than adults. But aren’t we all somewhat helpless in the face of the mighty tech companies?
The fact that adults can also have somewhat poor impulse control doesn't mean we should disregard the argument. And when it comes to the power of big tech - isn't that what regulation aims to mitigate?
> Brain development continues up until around 25 or so, and so it’s possible that social media does cause longer-term problems with brain development. Possible. Not proved. It’s possible social media causes long-term cognitive decline in adults. Possible. Not proved.
I don't know the studies well enough to know whether it's proved or not, but intuitively this feels like an obvious enough concern to at least be investigating it. Surely there are some general studies about whether mental health issues in early life are more likely to lead to long-term problems?
I feel like if the conclusion is "ban it for everyone too" I'm okay with it?
But the argument seems to get a little lost along the way.
Yes, adults are susceptible to the same vices as children. However (as the author writes) children have poorer impulse control. They are also less inclined to or unable to consider the repercussions of their actions.
You wouldn't try to get a toddler to stop smoking by telling them it'll put them at a high risk for cancer at old age.
Speaking of smoking, anti-smoking campaigns in the US in the 90s led to a vast reduction in teen use and adult use alike.
So there is notable lasting benefit in protecting children while they lack the foresight.
>Speaking of smoking, anti-smoking campaigns in the US in the 90s led to a vast reduction in teen use and adult use alike.
Late 90s... specifically after 1997 and early 2000s. But the anti-smoking campaigns before that were not effective. In fact, educating teens and adults on the dangers of smoking increased smoking. Smoking rates for teens peaked at 37% in 1997. it wasn't until the "Truth" campaigns where they focused on how the tobacco industry was basically a conspiracy, that smoking rates began to fall. And you can't pretend that tobacco taxes didn't play a part in reducing usage either.
One thing I have not seen come up in these discussions is how these bans interact with the network effects. They might actually be one of the most effective tools we have to fight back against and punish platform businesses.
I assume that something like a partially effective ban could have a devastating impact on social media because it may push active users in the teen / adolescent demographic below the critical mass necessary for self sustaining growth and retention.
Has anyone done any studies on where that tipping point / critical mass is? How effective do these bans have to be to achieve their intended outcome?
There are quite a few things wrong with this article, but above all, placing children on the same level as adults overlooks how crucial our early years are.
Overall, this blog post feels somewhat outdated.
I also can't clearly grasp the author's position: are they arguing that we should ban this for everyone, or not ban it at all? Or is the point simply that the people who write such bans or laws do so because the law doesn't apply to them?
>Frankly, social media is just too ingrained into the social fabric, and is just too useful and addictive to be banned. So if you have to do something and you can’t meaningfully do anything else…I guess it’s a ban for children.
this is something I've been dwelling on for the past couple days. I've avoided social media my entire adult life, and I'm realizing its akin to not having a car in a suburban sprawl, I can't interact properly with a lot of the modern internet, because of it.
Of course there are advantages, which I don't think i need to state in this community...
But i feel this is something people overlook when discussing banning social media for children. There is a balance to be struck, like anything.
I think the article misses the biggest point of the social media or any "ban" for children: the environment (social) effect.
(modern) children are essentially locked in their environment without much say. You go to school, you go to extra curricula activities. But the school you attend or other activities are often not your choice or in your control. On top of that, you often don't know better when it comes to what environments are actually available to you (or the effect of it).
This makes the dynamics completely different vs an adult.
I (adult) don't want to use social media? Fine I do that. Too big consequences in my immediate environment (all my friends/work use it) fine I'll change friends and work. Everyone is smoking but I don't want to? Fine I'll hang out with people that don't like smoking either. Hell I can even move country / location.
When everyone is smoking or using social media, a kid can't do anything about it. If that behavior is tied to social inclusion or "norm" then you're actively penalized for your choice and you can do almost nothing about it.
That's why we ban certain things for children. We know it won't work 100%, but taking it away from the school yard or social spaces have a profoundly different effect on children vs adult.
We can always dicuss WHAT to ban or not, but like the article, comparing adult to kids without acknowledging this is a red herring
The article is based on the assumption that when we ban things for children only, it is because we perceive them to be harmful to children only. I don't think that is true. Nobody thinks adults are immune from the negative effects of cigarettes or alcohol. But adults are, in general, allowed to harm themselves. Children are not, because there is an acceptance that children are less able to make informed decisions. You can take issue with that and obviously bright-line rules based on age are highly imperfect, but it's a very different discussion to the one the article is trying to have.
Granted, there is also evidence that social media has particularly harmful effects on children, which no doubt strengthens the argument. But in the general case bans targeted towards children are not (just) about that.
Ultimately the article seems to be trying to argue (implicitly) that we shouldn't ban, regulate or tax anything, because if we were to do that, we would then need to ban, regulate and tax everything in order to be "consistent". It's a common argument I see from libertarians online, including on HN. If you're going to ban guns, surely you should also ban knives and cars? If presented with a choice between permitting one specific thing or prohibiting all the things, most people will choose the former. But it's a false dichotomy. The law can treat different things and situations differently, even if those things/situations have some commonalities.
But also, the effects of some things on developing children are different (arguably more impactful) than on adults.
We talk about education, nurturing, etc, and how vital they are to children. We also know drugs that have different effects on children than on adults.
Why then it's so surprising social platforms could also have a bigger impact on children?
I read a strong libertarian bias here. To be consistent, should we prohibit cocaine and heroin for children? Historically, these were not banned. Should we ban cigarettes and alcohol for kids even though they are legal for adults?
I don't have a good answer regarding where to draw the line or how to actually enforce such restrictions. This is especially difficult because limiting digital access for kids is a great backdoor for surveillance and general information control.
However, I am near certain that in a few decades, people will view social media addiction much like substance abuse. It used to be the norm for writers and musicians to be drunk more often than not, but that is less accepted now. Currently, it is accepted that people spend hours a day on social media, and I am guilty as charged.
Eh, I feel like if we know there is a vulnerable population (children), and we know that the social media will cause harm (increased suicides, depression, etc), and we know that that ultimately it puts people in a place where they can't reasonably choose a better path (collective action, power imbalance, poor reasoning, no long-term perspective, social peer pressure, etc.), and where the parents are unable to reasonably control the behavior too, then a ban is warranted.
By that token, I honestly think we should ban more things that we know don't have an upside, and only have downsides, and the people who partake are generally doing so because of mental / physical shortcomings. In other words, if we know a reasonable person would not want to partake in a behavior unless due to manipulation and weakness, then I feel protecting that person is a kindness.
I myself have suffered from addictions that I can't seem to easily "choose to stop" even though I constantly wish I could. I really wish I wouldn't have been exposed to these things when I was younger and thought it was just fun. If I could, I would pay to go back and prevent my younger self from ever trying it -- because I had no way to know. And then I am a bit astonished none of the adults had that kind of concern. Sure a few people said "that stuff isn't good", but ultimately that lost to all the other factors (constant propaganda, ads, peer pressure, convenience, taste, addictive qualities, cost). It was never a "free choice" because there was huge information and power imbalance at play, and the "responsible adults" who could help did nothing.
Yep, this is definitely written by an LLM. I doubt any model is capable of reasoning this bad.
> “harmful compared to what?”
The kids can sniff glue all I care, at least we get some good punk rock out of it. That largely depends on their parents. But children spending time completely unsupervised with bunch of adult men only some of which are pedophiles while shooting into their brains 24/7 the most powerful advertisement ever known to man wrapped into an application that has the same operationational logic as one-armed bandit will not bring anything good to anybody - except loads of money to the tech bro’s. It is basically same as raising your children in a Las Vegas casino.
But you don’t have to take my word. You know you can just ask the kids who have been raised with social media, the first generation of which is adult now? Every single one of the zoomers say it sucks. That should be enpugh.
Writing articles with no suggestion of anything to improve the status quo is also easy
This isn't a one way door. It's a warranted societal experiment. Re-eval in 5 years, ask the kids, compare to other countries... this sort of do-nothing hand wringing is why we stagnate.
"Rules for thee and not for me."
There are plenty of rules parents set for children that do not apply to the parents.
Likewise, there are drugs pediatricians won't prescribe for children under a certain age because they have different effects on developing children vs adults.
We treat people differently based on age for lots of valid reasons.
>We ban gambling for children, even though the vast majority of harm caused by gambling comes from adults. Now you could argue that more harm would befall children if we let them gamble, but I honestly don’t think you should.
Yeah only children stealing credit cards to satisfy their addiction.
I don't know if the poster ever saw a child but they are largely sociopathic for a long time and will go great lengths to get their will.
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Also, if you get off on taking out your anger on others, enforcement for other people is fun - and stress relieving!
Hah. Try that in the Balkans, with some one your own size, and let me know after how many weeks the concussion effects go away.
It’s literally why the balkans is the way it is.
I guess I should have added a /s, but it thought it was obvious.
Why the Balkans?