Social media by itself isn't all bad - if used correctly, it's an amazing way to connect.
The problem can be isolated to algorithmic feeds [0]. They encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice and unrealistic standards. If you can eliminate them, these services magically become tools rather than escapes.
Yup. And the pressure accumulates and manifest differently.
There are a lot of issues using the Like/View/Click/Upvote count as a feedback signal of what to learn, pay attention too and emulate.
Also the whole imposed subscribe/follow model.
Unless "action" excludes things like "liking", commenting, and posting, this isn't true. Most feeds start out by trying to encourage "like" interactions because that's generally the easiest thing to directly optimize for. Next they encourage things like getting the viewer to post their own content, or leave a comment, or share the post.
I'd be happy to write more about how these algorithms work if you're interested.
People keep on insisting it is true, whole also showing a complete lack of understanding of what an algorithim actually is. It is the same level of garbage misunderstanding of "chemicals are bad for you".
> in eleven out of the twelve areas of concern that were studied (such as loneliness and eating issues), more teen-age girls said that Instagram helped rather than hurt.
That's a data point that seems to have gotten lost in most of the coverage. Although you might argue that data based on what teenagers report is dubious at best anyway.
How did the study compensate for the incentive for participants to give the answers that are least likely to result in them having their Instagram taken away?
I think it's that YouTube can be a nutritious meal (even though its frequently not), where as Instagram and Tiktok are both almost always McDonald's (with a few exceptions).
Either that, or YouTube runs a better PR campaign, I guess.
I hazard a guess it's the PR campaign. YouTube Kids does not look like it's anywhere near successful as it should be yet they didn't get article after article yelling at them like Instagram did.
I think it's more that the adults that are complaining know about nutritional content on YouTube and don't know about it on the newer platforms.
I'm sure there were people complaining about YouTube being nothing but trash when the easiest things to find on the platform were car accident videos and pirated Family Guy clips and you had to spend more than a few minutes on the platform to find the interesting content.
> His real concern were platforms that are specifically engineered to “keep the child’s eyes glued to the screen for as long as possible in a never-ending stream of social comparison and validation-seeking from strangers”—platforms that see the user as the product, not the customer. “How did we ever let Instagram and TikTok become a large part of the lives of so many eleven-year-olds?” he asked.
How are you surprised by this? YouTube is an entirely passive platform for the vast majority of its users. It wouldn't have a lot of the problems being talked about in this article because of that.
I don't use Insta or Tick Tock so I can really compare them, but I know YouTube is constantly trying to push junk in front of my kids.
We have a YouTube time limit here at home and I often login to the kids accounts to prune their subscriptions and attempt to block the most egregious morons.
Yes, there's lots of garbage on YouTube, but it's still "passive garbage" for most people. It's the equivalent of parents limiting cartoons for their kids when TV was the popular medium.
This article isn't about that, it's about the impact of more interactive platforms, which have the potential to affect people much more deeply.
Questionable. It purports to ask a question, to which both active and passive use are relevant, then focuses on only one of those. Selective presentation is itself a kind of bias.
I'll answer your question with a question: why do you think "entirely passive" makes everything OK? It's not like there haven't been stories about how people, sometimes specifically kids, passively follow the algorithmic recommendations into a rabbit-hole of questionable or even actively harmful content. Yes, active use brings new social-anxiety "quest for likes" problems, but if the question is "should they be using it all" - as it supposedly is in this case - then that covers passive use as well.
> thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse
What percentage of people can do something to improve their appearance? 32% doesn’t seem like a high number to me. You’re looking at photos of well dressed, fit people. Why shouldn’t that motivate a person to do something to improve himself or herself?
Because it's not just about clothes. It's about the photoshopped silky smooth skin, with the perfect highlights/tones/lines, and the luscious lips, and just-the-right-amount-of-body-fat thighs and abdomen, which are unachievable no matter how much you dress nice and be fit.
The subreddit "instagramreality" shows just how unattainable and unrealistic images on social media can be.
If you look at /r/Instagramreality, on reddit, you'll see that people on instagram don't just look good, they use filters and editing to change their face-shapes, body-shapes, and almost anything else.
There's zero way that people can look as "good" as many of the popular instagrammers.
32% is huge. If we said one in three girls have mental disorders, that would be considered rather high.
Pictures on Instagram are not only often of models with eating disorders, but are then modified with apps to further 'beautify' the picture by airbrushing skin and accentuating curves. It's not motivational to see unrealistic standards that half the population can't achieve.
Should we be using them at all? Yes, probably. Being able to connect with my friends and peers digitally was a mindblowing experience in high school. The problem is social media has pivoted away from social connection and been entirely re-focused on media consumption. Honestly, at this point I want Myspace back.
Wait, you are old enough to remember MySpace, but young enough to have had social media in high school (I assume on a smartphone)? I didn’t realize that those two things overlapped.
Not on smart phones because iPhone came out in 2007 but I remember when Facebook opened to the general public in 2006. I was in high school at the time and we were all still on Myspace when our older friends had graduated, gone to university, and were able to sign up for Facebook with their school emails. The FOMO at the time was real.
My Facebook is on a separate e-mail because I first signed up during the period you had to have your high school network verify you. I had transferred into the school, so the first try through no one recognized me.
I am in this group. I scraped together enough cash for a smartphone my senior year of high school (2009-2010). Before that, I used AIM and Twitter via SMS. And uploaded photos to Facebook via MMS, I believe.
Graduated high school in '08, had myspace (and feature phones), msn etc., at the start and by the end had early smartphones, facebook etc. Hiptop (sidekick in the US?) were quite popular too.
Graduated high school in 2007 in Slovenia. Saw the heyday of public IRC chatrooms (city based), tail end of MySpace, heyday of personal blogs, the beginnings of Facebook, but Twitter took off like wildfire in our corner of the world. Everyone was on twitter, especially tech enthusiasts. My Twitter account dates to July 2008.
My Instagram user ID is sub 1,000,000 :)
The really cool kids in college had hacked iPhones from Italy and USA. I think iPhone 5 was the first officially available for us ... I managed to import an iPhone 4 but missed the jailbreak by 3 days and couldn't use cellular on my phone for years. It was basically an expensive iPod touch. Good times.
Because it's just like the question about teenagers and sex: irrespective of whether we think they should, they're going to do it anyway. So all we can do is allow them to make informed decisions and urge them to protect themselves.
Firstly, about half of all people in the US reach their majority without having sex; I suspect the numbers for social media use are less rosy, so assuming the two are similar, there's room for improvement.
Secondly it's trivial to keep early teens off of social media, and (from my experience), the later that they start using social media, the less of an impact it has on their wellbeing.
12+ year olds will never be successfully kept off social media. You might think your child is "safe", but you're most probably wrong and your relationship with your child is damaged.
12+ year olds are fully capable of downloading a game from torrents and applying the crack, going to Facebook or Instagram is trivial to them. You could try not to give them a phone - and they will most likely try to buy or steal one. You could try to block the network and they will look up a Youtube tutorial about VPN apps - and now some Chinese company is reading their personal data...
> thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. Another slide offered a blunter conclusion: Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.
In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [0] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [1]. I have to wonder if it's related.
> These revelations sparked a media firestorm. Instagram Is Even Worse Than We Thought for Kids, announced a Washington Post article published in the days following the Journal's scoop. "It's Not Just Teenage Girls: Instagram Is Toxic for Everyone," claimed an op-ed in the Boston Globe. Zuckerberg's public comments about his platform's effects on mental health appear to be at odds with Facebook's internal findings, noted the New York Post.
I find it interesting to see the traditional media's position here considering... Facebook effectively beats them at their own game! Advertising revenues are down for every legacy news outlet while Facebook is growing its add business year after year. So of course they are not going to be thrilled about that particular company.
> In a defiant post published on his Facebook account, Mark Zuckerberg pushed back, stating that the motives of his company were "misrepresented." The very fact that Facebook was conducting this research, he wrote, implies that the company cares about the health impact of its products. Zuckerberg also pointed to data, included in the leaked slides, that showed how, in eleven out of the twelve areas of concern that were studied (such as loneliness and eating issues), more teen-age girls said that Instagram helped rather than hurt.
Especially with lockdown, I can see how social media probably helped teenagers. And that's the tip of the iceberg; for LGBTQA+ youth it can literally save a life.
Also, notice how Zuckerberg is "defiant" when he contradicts large media conglomerates?
I think that this is incorrect framing, or at least incomplete framing. The question we should be asking is why are so many parents letting their young kids use these platforms.
In fact, why are kids before high school getting cellphones? And even if they do, why are they being allowed to use these apps?
I’m not saying the responsibility does not lie with these companies, but for some reason parents’ role seems to be entirely missing in all these narratives.
That devolves into the age-old debate of restriction vs regulation. What devices should children have access to, and what devices are a problem? A laptop can just as well be used as badly as a cellphone in this context. Video games on home consoles can have just as much of a psychological effect as hate-mongering social media. I have had similar opinions (even reflected them in a past comment), but upon some feedback and introspection I've come to realize that forbidding kids from accessing something as ubiquitous as cellphones can't be viable. There is no set standard where you can draw a line that an individual is mature enough to handle social media, and there's no set consensus about when and how harmful it is that it would warrant bans. A handful of researches and surveys show that a section of children may face self-esteem issues from Instagram, but that's really not much to go on.
btw, I share the same bewilderment for children participating unrestricted in social media. I just don't have an answer to a practical standard of restriction. It seems like this generation's children will grow up having social media as a natural, integral part of society. So what it should boil down to, in my opinion, is to make social media spaces as safe, civil and habitable with laws, as you make the open world that children are exposed to. Regulate these platforms stringently, with constant supervision from public bodies, just as the police monitors real-life public spaces.
> It seems like this generation's children will grow up having social media as a natural, integral part of society.
So, perhaps the same argument should apply to unfettered access to online porn as well, yes? If not, why not?
Perhaps we should allow kids unfettered open access to porn as well.
I fully understand that the above is a provocative argument and am not suggesting we do that, but IMHO there is only a very fine line between the two since both are very addictive and at a young age can result in psychological harm.
Is there, really? Watching porn is not something you see people admitting to publicly. In the majority of the world it has originally been considered a taboo (or an outright crime), or at most a guilty pleasure. Porn is not a way of socializing or keeping up with trends or discussing politics, social media is. The two have fundamentally different purposes and reason for existence.
Please note that I am not making any case for allowing children to use social media. I have myself kept away from it, and I indeed consider it just as poisonous for the mind as you do. My point was that it's inconsequential now to try to put bans on the overall broad concept of social media. For better or worse, social media is already an essential part of the world's collective information infrastructure. Society has already shaped itself to accommodate its dominance. Even if you cut access to one platform, there will always be another to take its place. But social media, as a concept, can't go away. It's too late for that now, and the right way to go now is to regulate mainstream social media such that it becomes a safe space for people of all ages.
I don’t disagree with the latter part, 2nd para, of your comment.
My original comment was that the parents’ role is sorely missing from all the narratives and it needs to be there. That is all. I fully support regulating any and all social media. It’s not either/or, it’s both.
Hacker News etiquette is to take the strongest form of people's arguments. There's a lot of space between "ban then from cellphones" and "give them completely unfettered, unmonitored access to everything". Your comments jump between one and the other with no in between.
You're not exactly being charitable to the person you're arguing against, but taking your slippery slope at face value, we already have a generation of adults who basically grew up with unfettered access to online porn, and sensationalist headlines notwithstanding, we're basically fine, or at least not any more fucked up than baseline. (The first half of the 20th century saw people grow up with decades of carnage, so the baseline is pretty lenient.)
Plenty of parents likely do not let their kids use social media. How effective do you think that is? Kids can and will circumvent their parents' restrictions.
You can certainly make it harder by not giving your kid a cell phone, or giving them a dumbphone. But the article makes a good point that it's a tricky line between protecting your kid and effectively ostracizing them. Especially during the pandemic. Could you imagine being a kid who can't see their friends, can't text them, can only send them emails? You'd have effectively no social contact.
And you can't govern by telling people to be better parents. If one set of parents has a social media addicted child, that's on them. If ten million parents have a social media addicted child, you have a policy problem.
How come scale (“ten million”) makes it a policy problem? There are a whole heck of a lot of poor parenting practices out there, manny practiced at scale.
In the short term, very. In the long term, as in once the kids are off to college and so on, who knows. But, overall I think much more effective than the households/kids with unrestricted access.
> your kid and effectively ostracizing them.
This is an interesting one. If the kids are educated as to why a certain action is being taken, as opposed to just No then kids can accept the policy and be fine with it. Messaging such as Signal or iMessage is allowed, but I just don't understand as to why kids have to share million selfies each day. So anything out of the Zuck-factory is a complete no-no.
Bottom line, I'd rather ostracize kids in the short term than cause longer term psychological harm.
> If ten million parents have a social media addicted child, you have a policy problem.
I never said don't do policy, but that is not a substitute for better parenting.
Let me ask this, will the same parent who allow their kids unfettered access to social media allow their kids similar access to porn websites? I'm pretty sure they won't. Which is why it's not either/or, it's both. This is why I said that the narrative is incomplete.
Based on my own experience, not so much. I managed to sign up for & use facebook on a dumb phone against my parents wishes, and I wasn't particularly technically proficient at the time. I only got caught when I logged into the account on the family computer, and angling the screen away from my parents made them suspicious.
They also implemented various blocks, both on the router and with software on the PC. This taught me about DNS, proxies, VPNs and Tor, and led to me seeing a lot of messed up things, since I was so curious to see what they didn't want me to see.
Simply preventing your kid from doing something leads to them learning how to sneak past you. As you said,
> If the kids are educated as to why a certain action is being taken, as opposed to just No then kids can accept the policy and be fine with it
I'm curious. Do you have kids or have you been a kid somewhat recently? The latter is true for me. I find it pretty surprising that you'd imagine that you can keep kids away from social media. Even if you explain it, an 11 year old isn't going to understand the long term psychological implications of social media. They're just going to understand that you're keeping them away from their friends. Do you honestly think any average child will wait until college to circumvent their parents?
That said, I'm sympathetic to your viewpoint. I would certainly not provide unfettered access to social media to my children (if I had any). And there should be some amount of advertising/training around healthy digital habits. But it's a little more nuanced than just blaming parents for being incompetent.
If the kids are educated as to why a certain action is being taken, as opposed to just No then kids can accept the policy and be fine with it.
My parents explained the reason for not allowing me some music: I listened nonetheless as I found the rule unreasonable. DARE explained drugs were bad, but they weren't being honest about the stuff they were saying. My mother forbid me from eating hard candy for years because I choked one. It embarrassed me and I did it nonetheless if she weren't around. I know I'm not the only one that does this. In other words, explanations are only helpful if they are truthful and seem reasonable to the child. Forcing a child or teen to be an outcast isn't generally reasonable. (the child choosing is fine).
Messaging such as Signal or iMessage is allowed, but I just don't understand as to why kids have to share million selfies each day. So anything out of the Zuck-factory is a complete no-no. Bottom line, I'd rather ostracize kids in the short term than cause longer term psychological harm.
You know, messaging isn't realistically better if they are being ostracized. You could teach someone rules about it and keep an eye on activity. Some things will simply be out of your control, though. Being ostracized can very easily cause long term psychological harm and it easily leads to bullying as well - after a while, you wind up out of the loop and have trouble talking to your peers. Folks go to therapy to learn how to undo this. You probably recognize it in folks that have overly strict parents.
Our 13-year-old doesn't have IG/FB/Twitter and he is fine, and even proud about it. He does have Minecraft, Discord, and other video games (and some access to YouTube at his other house, but he doesn't have an account). There are of course problems with every platform, but we have watched a bunch of the social media documentaries and talked about it, and he's aware that what he is "missing out on" is primarily the kind of interaction that won't leave him feeling good. Being off "social media" doesn't mean being without communication with other kinds online.
The question we should be asking is why are so many parents letting their young kids use these platforms.
Because their friends use it, and you are raising adults who will almost certainly use it so you might as well let the children learn some things.
In fact, why are kids before high school getting cellphones? And even if they do, why are they being allowed to use these apps?
Because if you don't allow the middle schooler to have one, it seriously changes who they can effectively be friends with as it affects how easily they can communicate with others. It happens to adults, too: Some basic jobs wouldn't hire folks without a phone (Don't know if that is still the case) and folks aren't generally as close to people they cannot easily communicate with.
They are allowed to use the apps in part because of ignorance and in part because kids will be kids. I watched a good amount of TV shows that my mom disallowed and bought music she disapproved of: I expect similar things with kids and apps.
There is simply no way for a parent to know everything a child does, especially as they age into pre-teen ages.
Someone else touched on the fact that as it becomes more common, keeping your kids from having access to technology only serves to make them be excluded from social engagement.
But the other side of this, and I honestly think a much bigger driver than anyone wants to give it credit for, is that it allows parents to surveil their kids to an unprecedented degree, and for better and for worse, parents are not going to pass up an opportunity to keep better track of their kids.
You'd never get a kid to keep a device on them that only tracked them. The fact it can also play games or go online is basically a bribe to be monitored.
Talking to friends is great and it’s normal for the medium we use to do that to evolve.
Talking to strangers and to brands is pure poison. It’s the common thread between all of the problems on all of these platforms.
Imagine social media where every account is private by default, there are no brand accounts, and a user can only have ~1000 “friends”. The feed would be a purely chronological list of their updates, no algorithm.
Then it’s closer to a digital version of real life. Not an endless stream of ads and arguments.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadThe problem can be isolated to algorithmic feeds [0]. They encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice and unrealistic standards. If you can eliminate them, these services magically become tools rather than escapes.
[0] https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful
There are a lot of issues using the Like/View/Click/Upvote count as a feedback signal of what to learn, pay attention too and emulate. Also the whole imposed subscribe/follow model.
Unless "action" excludes things like "liking", commenting, and posting, this isn't true. Most feeds start out by trying to encourage "like" interactions because that's generally the easiest thing to directly optimize for. Next they encourage things like getting the viewer to post their own content, or leave a comment, or share the post.
I'd be happy to write more about how these algorithms work if you're interested.
That's a data point that seems to have gotten lost in most of the coverage. Although you might argue that data based on what teenagers report is dubious at best anyway.
Title should be changed.
And yet again, YouTube somehow escapes scrutiny. Funny how that always seems to happen.
Either that, or YouTube runs a better PR campaign, I guess.
I've never used Instagram or Tiktok so can't comment.
I'm sure there were people complaining about YouTube being nothing but trash when the easiest things to find on the platform were car accident videos and pirated Family Guy clips and you had to spend more than a few minutes on the platform to find the interesting content.
> His real concern were platforms that are specifically engineered to “keep the child’s eyes glued to the screen for as long as possible in a never-ending stream of social comparison and validation-seeking from strangers”—platforms that see the user as the product, not the customer. “How did we ever let Instagram and TikTok become a large part of the lives of so many eleven-year-olds?” he asked.
How are you surprised by this? YouTube is an entirely passive platform for the vast majority of its users. It wouldn't have a lot of the problems being talked about in this article because of that.
We have a YouTube time limit here at home and I often login to the kids accounts to prune their subscriptions and attempt to block the most egregious morons.
This article isn't about that, it's about the impact of more interactive platforms, which have the potential to affect people much more deeply.
Questionable. It purports to ask a question, to which both active and passive use are relevant, then focuses on only one of those. Selective presentation is itself a kind of bias.
What percentage of people can do something to improve their appearance? 32% doesn’t seem like a high number to me. You’re looking at photos of well dressed, fit people. Why shouldn’t that motivate a person to do something to improve himself or herself?
The subreddit "instagramreality" shows just how unattainable and unrealistic images on social media can be.
There's zero way that people can look as "good" as many of the popular instagrammers.
Pictures on Instagram are not only often of models with eating disorders, but are then modified with apps to further 'beautify' the picture by airbrushing skin and accentuating curves. It's not motivational to see unrealistic standards that half the population can't achieve.
Come on now. Don't bodyshame people are lean or fit.
Most access was still from a PC though
My Instagram user ID is sub 1,000,000 :)
The really cool kids in college had hacked iPhones from Italy and USA. I think iPhone 5 was the first officially available for us ... I managed to import an iPhone 4 but missed the jailbreak by 3 days and couldn't use cellular on my phone for years. It was basically an expensive iPod touch. Good times.
Secondly it's trivial to keep early teens off of social media, and (from my experience), the later that they start using social media, the less of an impact it has on their wellbeing.
12+ year olds are fully capable of downloading a game from torrents and applying the crack, going to Facebook or Instagram is trivial to them. You could try not to give them a phone - and they will most likely try to buy or steal one. You could try to block the network and they will look up a Youtube tutorial about VPN apps - and now some Chinese company is reading their personal data...
In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [0] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [1]. I have to wonder if it's related.
> These revelations sparked a media firestorm. Instagram Is Even Worse Than We Thought for Kids, announced a Washington Post article published in the days following the Journal's scoop. "It's Not Just Teenage Girls: Instagram Is Toxic for Everyone," claimed an op-ed in the Boston Globe. Zuckerberg's public comments about his platform's effects on mental health appear to be at odds with Facebook's internal findings, noted the New York Post.
I find it interesting to see the traditional media's position here considering... Facebook effectively beats them at their own game! Advertising revenues are down for every legacy news outlet while Facebook is growing its add business year after year. So of course they are not going to be thrilled about that particular company.
> In a defiant post published on his Facebook account, Mark Zuckerberg pushed back, stating that the motives of his company were "misrepresented." The very fact that Facebook was conducting this research, he wrote, implies that the company cares about the health impact of its products. Zuckerberg also pointed to data, included in the leaked slides, that showed how, in eleven out of the twelve areas of concern that were studied (such as loneliness and eating issues), more teen-age girls said that Instagram helped rather than hurt.
Especially with lockdown, I can see how social media probably helped teenagers. And that's the tip of the iceberg; for LGBTQA+ youth it can literally save a life.
Also, notice how Zuckerberg is "defiant" when he contradicts large media conglomerates?
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...
In fact, why are kids before high school getting cellphones? And even if they do, why are they being allowed to use these apps?
I’m not saying the responsibility does not lie with these companies, but for some reason parents’ role seems to be entirely missing in all these narratives.
btw, I share the same bewilderment for children participating unrestricted in social media. I just don't have an answer to a practical standard of restriction. It seems like this generation's children will grow up having social media as a natural, integral part of society. So what it should boil down to, in my opinion, is to make social media spaces as safe, civil and habitable with laws, as you make the open world that children are exposed to. Regulate these platforms stringently, with constant supervision from public bodies, just as the police monitors real-life public spaces.
So, perhaps the same argument should apply to unfettered access to online porn as well, yes? If not, why not?
Perhaps we should allow kids unfettered open access to porn as well.
I fully understand that the above is a provocative argument and am not suggesting we do that, but IMHO there is only a very fine line between the two since both are very addictive and at a young age can result in psychological harm.
Is there, really? Watching porn is not something you see people admitting to publicly. In the majority of the world it has originally been considered a taboo (or an outright crime), or at most a guilty pleasure. Porn is not a way of socializing or keeping up with trends or discussing politics, social media is. The two have fundamentally different purposes and reason for existence.
Please note that I am not making any case for allowing children to use social media. I have myself kept away from it, and I indeed consider it just as poisonous for the mind as you do. My point was that it's inconsequential now to try to put bans on the overall broad concept of social media. For better or worse, social media is already an essential part of the world's collective information infrastructure. Society has already shaped itself to accommodate its dominance. Even if you cut access to one platform, there will always be another to take its place. But social media, as a concept, can't go away. It's too late for that now, and the right way to go now is to regulate mainstream social media such that it becomes a safe space for people of all ages.
My original comment was that the parents’ role is sorely missing from all the narratives and it needs to be there. That is all. I fully support regulating any and all social media. It’s not either/or, it’s both.
You can certainly make it harder by not giving your kid a cell phone, or giving them a dumbphone. But the article makes a good point that it's a tricky line between protecting your kid and effectively ostracizing them. Especially during the pandemic. Could you imagine being a kid who can't see their friends, can't text them, can only send them emails? You'd have effectively no social contact.
And you can't govern by telling people to be better parents. If one set of parents has a social media addicted child, that's on them. If ten million parents have a social media addicted child, you have a policy problem.
In the short term, very. In the long term, as in once the kids are off to college and so on, who knows. But, overall I think much more effective than the households/kids with unrestricted access.
> your kid and effectively ostracizing them.
This is an interesting one. If the kids are educated as to why a certain action is being taken, as opposed to just No then kids can accept the policy and be fine with it. Messaging such as Signal or iMessage is allowed, but I just don't understand as to why kids have to share million selfies each day. So anything out of the Zuck-factory is a complete no-no. Bottom line, I'd rather ostracize kids in the short term than cause longer term psychological harm.
> If ten million parents have a social media addicted child, you have a policy problem.
I never said don't do policy, but that is not a substitute for better parenting.
Let me ask this, will the same parent who allow their kids unfettered access to social media allow their kids similar access to porn websites? I'm pretty sure they won't. Which is why it's not either/or, it's both. This is why I said that the narrative is incomplete.
Based on my own experience, not so much. I managed to sign up for & use facebook on a dumb phone against my parents wishes, and I wasn't particularly technically proficient at the time. I only got caught when I logged into the account on the family computer, and angling the screen away from my parents made them suspicious.
They also implemented various blocks, both on the router and with software on the PC. This taught me about DNS, proxies, VPNs and Tor, and led to me seeing a lot of messed up things, since I was so curious to see what they didn't want me to see.
Simply preventing your kid from doing something leads to them learning how to sneak past you. As you said,
> If the kids are educated as to why a certain action is being taken, as opposed to just No then kids can accept the policy and be fine with it
That said, I'm sympathetic to your viewpoint. I would certainly not provide unfettered access to social media to my children (if I had any). And there should be some amount of advertising/training around healthy digital habits. But it's a little more nuanced than just blaming parents for being incompetent.
My parents explained the reason for not allowing me some music: I listened nonetheless as I found the rule unreasonable. DARE explained drugs were bad, but they weren't being honest about the stuff they were saying. My mother forbid me from eating hard candy for years because I choked one. It embarrassed me and I did it nonetheless if she weren't around. I know I'm not the only one that does this. In other words, explanations are only helpful if they are truthful and seem reasonable to the child. Forcing a child or teen to be an outcast isn't generally reasonable. (the child choosing is fine).
Messaging such as Signal or iMessage is allowed, but I just don't understand as to why kids have to share million selfies each day. So anything out of the Zuck-factory is a complete no-no. Bottom line, I'd rather ostracize kids in the short term than cause longer term psychological harm.
You know, messaging isn't realistically better if they are being ostracized. You could teach someone rules about it and keep an eye on activity. Some things will simply be out of your control, though. Being ostracized can very easily cause long term psychological harm and it easily leads to bullying as well - after a while, you wind up out of the loop and have trouble talking to your peers. Folks go to therapy to learn how to undo this. You probably recognize it in folks that have overly strict parents.
Because their friends use it, and you are raising adults who will almost certainly use it so you might as well let the children learn some things.
In fact, why are kids before high school getting cellphones? And even if they do, why are they being allowed to use these apps?
Because if you don't allow the middle schooler to have one, it seriously changes who they can effectively be friends with as it affects how easily they can communicate with others. It happens to adults, too: Some basic jobs wouldn't hire folks without a phone (Don't know if that is still the case) and folks aren't generally as close to people they cannot easily communicate with.
They are allowed to use the apps in part because of ignorance and in part because kids will be kids. I watched a good amount of TV shows that my mom disallowed and bought music she disapproved of: I expect similar things with kids and apps.
There is simply no way for a parent to know everything a child does, especially as they age into pre-teen ages.
But the other side of this, and I honestly think a much bigger driver than anyone wants to give it credit for, is that it allows parents to surveil their kids to an unprecedented degree, and for better and for worse, parents are not going to pass up an opportunity to keep better track of their kids.
You'd never get a kid to keep a device on them that only tracked them. The fact it can also play games or go online is basically a bribe to be monitored.
Talking to strangers and to brands is pure poison. It’s the common thread between all of the problems on all of these platforms.
Imagine social media where every account is private by default, there are no brand accounts, and a user can only have ~1000 “friends”. The feed would be a purely chronological list of their updates, no algorithm.
Then it’s closer to a digital version of real life. Not an endless stream of ads and arguments.