Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness (afterbabel.com)

for example, I had found the antsiness I was reading amongst children in classrooms about to be ridiculous. younger people having fidget spinners to pay attention.

then I took a class at community college, I've been out of school for a long time, and I experienced the same thing the first couple of sessions. then I realized that not only was I having the same traits, my ability to adapt was probably due to knowing it was not normal.

in another anecdote, when I go see even older people, baby boomers, their phone etiquette and attentiveness is waaay off. like, the more disconnected someone is, the more these new things adversely affect them.

I see this as akin to the opium dens. Popular at one point, and a smaller privileged group of people creating a social circle that opted out. We'll probably look back at this dopamine addiction pretty badly.

But I'm interested to hear what you have to say about that. Why did social media enable fascism now, and why did fascism exist before it?

I lack the domain knowledge to evaluate the evidence against the null hypothesis, so you may well be correct — you just haven't actually demonstrated it with your anecdote.

If those pocket PCs had useful and creative apps only and maybe some non-addiction-optimized games they’d be fine. The problem is the apps, not the hardware.

With kids the absolute worst seem to be YouTube, TikTok, and Roblox. All three are banned in our house. The kids have their own devices (with monitoring) and can play games and explore other stuff but we do everything we can to keep addiction systems away. It works fine. Our kids engage with real people when they are available and tend only to go to the screens when bored.

We don’t have a hard time limit but if we notice too much screen time we set up play dates or book activities. They’ll go for those things over screens… or at least they do now that the worst stuff is gone.

Banning YouTube was the single highest impact one. The whole mood of the family and home noticeably changed. We got our kids back. They liked their friends again. To this day my #1 piece of parenting advice is to ban YouTube. A few others too but that one seems the worst for some reason.

Engagement maximizing algorithms and UI dark patterns work incredibly well to the point that they can behave like a drug.

1. No smartphones for kids before high school — give them only flip phones in middle school.

2. No social media before age 16.

3. Make schools phone-free, by putting devices in phone lockers or Yondr pouches.

4. Give kids far more free play and independence, including more and better recess.

I can't argue with any of the above.

Frankly, social media should maybe be highly regulated like prescription drugs. A lot of people can't handle social media and it is tearing democracy apart.

The truth is Asian merit based dictatorship has transformed farm lands to economic giants within a generation, stable, peaceful society. Singapore wouldn't be where it is without government intervention. South Korea would've never been able to create Samsung without military rule. Japan certainly would not have survived a full open democracy. Taiwan wouldn't have lived to see TSMC without Chiang Kai Shek.

But China's model is not based on merit but on lineage. This is why that society will never be stable, peaceful like its neighbours. It's actually a lot worse than Western democracy and should serve as a warning to those that wish to experiment with benevolent dictatorship without merit.

People tend to rely far too heavily on the easiest way to convince themselves they're having valuable social interactions, whether it's social media or betting that their work friends will still be there when they get laid off. They'll rely on Tinder for sex and try to bridge that to something more meaningful out of thin air, or they'll buy a dog and hope that solves the problem. Some of these are uniquely millenial and onward, some others carry over from Gen X and boomer culture imo, whereby you isolate yourself from the rest of society in the suburbs or wherever and count on personal relationships you acquired for free.

Along with this, in many places we've let the catalysts for social growth get stripped away by commodity bullshit and simulated interaction. Costco is probably the closest thing many people have to bumping into someone, no shot are they going to do it at the adult version of the playground, because there often isn't one and they won't go. (obviously this is more true in some places and for some people than it is for people who've realized this or who innately direct their life this way).

My theory is that to meet a new person and have it be substantial, you basically need to spend a few hours, a few times per week, in the same space doing some arbitrarily interesting thing for a common reason, without being too eager but with a signaled sense of openness. You don't become a pro anything spending 30 min a week on it, and no valuable personal relationships come about that way either. That's how you met people in Uni, that's how you met people at work, you gotta branch off of those places and ya gotta keep it going gradually. If you don't live in a place that facilitates that, vote with your wallet and try to find a new one.

This goes for nature too, if you're only exposure is 2 days of hiking once a year when you travel, and the rest is spent in an office, it's not something you can remedy any other way.

If you drive to work 1 hour each way, and work 8 hours, you're probably doomed, unless you've already done all that and can keep your existing things going. It's just not enough margin, be real about what you're sacrificing and why.

The average american adult went from socializing with friends and family 12+ hours a week few decades ago to less than 4.

If I really want to chat a little, I will go to one of the other small shops next to me and buy a beer/coffee and talk with the owner or whoever is outside the store.

Because I work from home most of my friends are at work during the day. But come evening and you can hang out for at least an hour, with someone you know, every single day if you want. There is no planning, you just go to the places you know people hang out, and they will be there. And if you don't want to talk much, you can just listen.

I feel I am blessed to have this because I was an expat for some years and you don't know what you have until you don't have it anymore.

I feel a distinct drain in the social energy when some of the people present have their eyes glued to their phones. It would actually be better if they weren't even there.

I think that feeling of draining comes from the fact that if you do want something from them, like asking what they're ordering for food, or if we should go to another venue, you have to put in more effort. They need to do a context switch in which they look at you blankly while you bring them up to speed on what is happening.

Watching your parents turn into smartphone zombies should be a warning sign, maybe even something to rebel against.

Unfortunately children do tend to pick up their parents' behaviors, bad and good.

Media critics: the biggest hypocrites.

I tell them they spend too much time watching videos and playing games and should "branch out" into new hobbies. Do they do this? No.

That is to say, I don't think hypocrisy has anything to do with it.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/198332459

Also 'Free Range Parenting'

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6250260-free-range-kids-...

To me the single biggest problem with western society is the idea that happiness is the ultimate goal in life. Happiness is an emotion, and you can’t force your body to experience one emotion all the time. Equanimity is the goal, and emotional control. If you tell someone they’re supposed to be happy all the time, they’re going to think something is wrong with them when they’re inevitably not.

On the Internet it's easy to feel surrounded with people even though you're not really socializing. Low-res text-based interactions that characterize most social media today don't provide enough signal for people to develop their social skills adequately, and the asynchronicity doesn't help either. Most people won't just tell you how they feel about what you're saying, but in real life that's what body language and other indirect signals are for. We've all heard stories of zoomers being less socially capable than previous generations. Now consider that the social awkwardness is not only curious from an outside perspective, but is also a perpetual source of anxiety to the people affected with it and can lead to self-isolation and other unhealthy coping behaviors.

Besides, Bitcoin miners don’t find anything noteworthy in that sense.

The vast majority of my friends and "friends" on social media haven't posted anything for years. I think my last contribution was back in 2017.

I thought social media in general is boomer / gen X town nowadays.

To Haidt's credit he did at least try a rebuttal, which is better than most situations in modern academia where outside criticisms are just ignored entirely. But he lost that debate because his responses were bad, and in this article he doubles down on the bad arguments he made last time.

He attempts to suggest that the large number of studies he collected with Twenge means there must be something there. This argument fails because when Brown randomly spot checked some of his cited studies they were all of garbage quality. Often they had nothing to do with social media at all. Haidt's response was the same as in this article: they can't all be wrong! But yes, yes they can all be wrong and Brown has strongly shown that this is likely to be the case.

Then Haidt suggests that you can derive signal from a large pile of bad studies, because if the null hypothesis were true then you'd see random results. But you can't assume that due to publishing biases, spurious correlations and other problems. For example he says that if social media didn't affect mental health, then there'd be no gender signal. That doesn't make sense. It's possible for girls to have worse mental health, and spend more time on social media, and for social media to not be the cause.

After making spurious correlation/causation arguments and denying he's doing so, he moves on to an even worse problem making his entire theory is unfalsifiable:

> much of my book is about the collective action traps that entire communities of adolescents fall into when they move their social lives onto these platforms, such that it becomes costly to abstain. It is at that point that collective mental health declines most sharply, and the individuals who try to quit find that they are socially isolated. The skeptics do not consider the ways that these network or group-level effects may obscure individual-level effects, and may be much larger than the individual-level effects.

In other words you can't even attempt to establish causality by cutting out social media use and seeing if it affects depression, because he will just immediately change his claim to assert that it was the ambient social-media-ness of society causing the depression (a much harder hypothesis to prove), and thus individual interventions can't help. And because this hypothesis is so vague, he can always fall back to claiming that whatever group intervention size is tried it wasn't big enough.

His whole essay is full of problems like this. It's basically a Gish Gallop. Vast reams of unusable paper is presented, along with panicked assertions that it's unreasonable to request valid evidence or a testable hypothesis before making law, due to the nature of the (self declared) emergency: a classic circular argument of the sort that emerges way too often in public health spheres.

There's actually a better supported alternative line of work that shows a completely different and much stronger correlation related to political ideology. But of course Haidt would rather not discuss that, as it's not amenable to legislation.

Ironically, the same logic often isn't appreciated for those who choose to legally carry a gun.

What about if the kid's being bullied? Half the time the teacher will side with the bully, especially if the bully's a more popular kid.

Let's be real, the last thing a frantic parent in the middle of an emergency wants to deal with is a couple of school bureaucrats while attempting to get in touch with their kid. There are good reasons why everyone adopted cell phone: to increase efficiency of communication.

Anecdotally, Instagram ranks much lower than Reddit for causing problems among the young kids I’ve worked with.

Reddit is an absolutely cesspool of misinformation, fake stories, propaganda, and rampant doomerism. Scrolling Instagram can’t hold a candle to the militant doomerism that seethes from sites like Reddit.

I think it’s an uncomfortable truth for techies who grew up with Reddit while sneering at photo sharing social media, but the content on Reddit is extraordinarily cynical and depressing.

Sounds a bit cliché but those days we used internet to escape the real world. Now it's backwards. But the real world is getting worse. Those days with internet 1.0 that was a wonderful digital world for lots of us.

I can ignore/laugh with/block/modreport That One Guy, I can't do anything about an infinite number of marketers.

whoops

There is a brand new, massive and beautifully designed mall in The Netherlands called Westfield Mall of the Netherlands.

I went there once to quickly grab something and I got hopelessly lost, even while my phone navigation actually was able to display and navigate the layout of the mall, due to the sheer size I underestimated the navigational challenge my little trip would pose.

The mall really blew me away with its beauty and I am still completely flabbergasted how this can work financially, I perhaps incorrectly assumedthat everybody is like me, ordering everything online.

Although hard to believe, your argument may actually have a lot of thruth in it.

I am really really sorry to go off-topic here, but as an European this is... So strange and slightly hilarious to me. We went to a park. Or local river/lake.

It takes time though, but I see a trend and a hunger among people to reclaime physical spaces and to spend more time amongst each other, making room for chance encounters etc.

I am skeptical of this push to elevate internet anonymity to a new fundamental principle for organizing society.

Stores that sell age restricted products already can also sell "adult passes".

Each adult pass costs less than $5, and contains a single use scratch off code that you can use to prove you are of age. When you want to sign up for social media or porn, you need a code. Mutiple companies can implement and sell them.

This should be enough for the risk averse to take open devices away from children and bolster parents.

It’s not important to stop every possible access, simply that adults have the authority to say no and be supported by society instead of undermined.

This is why I can’t take any calls for banning social media for kids on HN seriously: The moment anyone introduced any legislation to limit social media access by age, this creates a de facto requirement to verify ID. The people in this thread would be up in arms as soon as the government tried to force companies to collect their ID to use social media.

For one thing, it's more robust. The environment is messy and control is often illusory at best. Control limits freedoms and introduces centralized points of failure that can be manipulated by bad actors. Making people strong and free creates more opportunity and innovation, even though it scares the people who long to be in charge of the centralized control.

What does it mean to strengthen people to make them immune to the harms caused by social media? I don't know exactly, but I bet we could find out.

And even more importantly you're missing the point of why people go to social networks in the first place: because everybody they know is there! If it becomes cumbersome to access, most people won't go, and then there's no more appeal. It's not as if it was porn or stuff like that, that has a purpose on its own that makes people willing to circumvent the restrictions no matter what. Social networks are “networks” and if you break the network effect, you've broken the system. American people don't go on VK not because it's less good than Facebook, but because there's no point in doing so.

They will figure out a solution very quickly or they will simply cease to exist, and either way the problem will be solved.

It would be like creating a bank account.

You could do plenty of other things. Anything you don't need an account for isn't covered. Depending on how the law is implemented, perhaps many forums wouldn't be covered?

I think it would result in kids going to websites that their parents haven't heard of yet and don't check ids.

What we should do is make rules for social media platforms to disallow them to develop algorithms that make people addicted. You might think how do you define that, but the companies have already made a whole science out of it so it's not that abstract anymore. It would sure be an elaborate task and will surely result in a cat and mouse game, but at least the issue would be taken seriously and people will understand better that engaging with these platforms that try to push the edges is playing with fire.

Kids are given a phone and access to social media by their parents (who are also users most likely). I don't see parents saying oh please block this out of my kid's hands with deep packet inspection or ID checks. These people can just install Family Link or whatever and set limits, and be parents. But they just won't do it. Some don't even know it exists. Kids are clocking 5h+ of mobile use / day, with poor sleep patterns and digital hygiene. No limits. That's the real issue.

But really, the best policy would be constant social and educational emphasis on device parental control feature awareness - similar to drunk driving campaigns. Get parents and guardians in the habit of taking 15 min to set up basic parental controls BEFORE handing devices to kids. Rather than the all-too-common mess of reacting to a problem by taking the kids phone or making them manually show everything after the damage is already done. Maybe also compel device manufacturers to incorporate a first-time-setup flow that has a specific soft ask of "Will this device be given to or borrowed by a child?" that then handholds the owner through setting up controls.

It’s the commercial side of the equation that’s the problem. It’s what gives these social media companies perverse incentives when it comes to engagement. So any social media site that can’t effectively tap into the US ad market at a significant scale will not have as much of a problem. I don’t think the pre-Facebook forums was as much of a problem even though they might have had some ads here and there.

So VPNs and all that just isn’t a concern. You don’t need a great firewall. You just need to regulate commercial business, which is not at all a crazy proposition.

The other side of this is that the US really, really should implement an effective federal ID system with two factor authentication. This is becoming commonplace almost everywhere else in the world, and not having it creates very serious security and privacy risks.

doesn't have to in the general case

maybe just have it at the OS level, have parents set up the phone, prompt on setup whether it's intended for use by a minor or not, use that flag to enable/disable access to social media

that's not really the same as banning social media for all minors and imo makes too much sense, more likely that congress will push something that fucks over anonymity more

Where did it do that?

Or just give them some money and something to do? Why fight fire with fire, just makes bigger fire

Relevant bit from the essay:

"But much of my book is about the collective action traps that entire communities of adolescents fall into when they move their social lives onto these platforms, such that it becomes costly to abstain. It is at that point that collective mental health declines most sharply, and the individuals who try to quit find that they are socially isolated. The skeptics do not consider the ways that these network or group-level effects may obscure individual-level effects, and may be much larger than the individual-level effects."

US companies have a qualified right to free speech https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/freedom-of-speec...

How about AI? If it is an algorithm that is talking to you, does it have the right to do all the things that are protected by 'free speech'?

And does it matter if the AI is commercial, or a home hobby project effort?

Then the government should step in, either should forceful action or through promoting healthier alternatives or shining a light on its damaging effects.

While technically true, this is a gross misrepresentation. Calling these sites and apps "communications platforms" makes them sound like they're just a mail service or a telephone. This is akin to referring to a casino as "the town square".

> That's a freedom you and everyone else can take advantage of also.

This "can" is only true in a strict legal sense, of course.

This assumes that humans are rational agents. I think that drug addiction, wars in Israel and Ukraine, conspiracy theorists, and free-climbers sufficiently prove that this is not the case.

If only life were so easy, we would not even need to have this discussion.

I would go and even claim I would ban all current social media platforms below 18. Ther are simply not enough protections, consistently, its place ripe for abuse and tons abuse is happening every day as we speak. I know we will keep our own kids off this for as long as possible, but eventually harm from absence will be greater.

Parents shouldnt be choosing lesser evil like that, just that some meta employees can cash half a million and think what a great addition to mankind they are, when reality is closer to definition of cancer.

100% my reply to any critic of teenage social media, but the parents' stance is always "but then my kid is going to FOMO and feel left out".

Maybe it taught you that, but there are plenty of people that grow up on the Internet who do not learn these lessons. Take a look at any conspiracy message board, group, etc.

Akin to saying something like, "let it happen, that'll teach 'em"

Unfortunately, not everything works itself out.

Now for this issue, there's harm being done to children, and the majority of users in the thread seem to be against government intervention; you say: "well if you don't like it, if you think it's negative, just don't use it, don't let your kids use it".

Kind of a random parallel to draw between the two stories, but it's funny the same logic doesn't seem to apply in both cases. Why wasn't for circular saws the response "if you think they're dangerous, don't use them" or "just keep your kids away from them"?

you can ristrict how you can monitize a product - I think the problem would be much smaller if you have to pay a price congruent to the value you get. Only a few people would pay for Facebook.

you can make the platforms resposinsible for what is published on them and enforce that. they would never scale this much.

> And just like the Supreme Court wrote 30 years ago, the answer is the same today: if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them.

We have already collectively agreed that this is not an argument. That is why there are agencies like the FDA, etc.

I've tried reporting such posts multiple times but hate filled posts are neither removed, nor restricted. If a platform cannot provide adequate moderation, it should stop operating in my country and be held responsible for providing a platform for spreading hate pseudo-anonmously.

""" More specifically, we’d try to implement these four norms as widely as possible:

1. No smartphones before high school (as a norm, not a law; parents can just give younger kids flip phones, basic phones, or phone watches).

2. No social media before 16 (as a norm, but one that would be much more effective if supported by laws such as the proposed update to COPPA, the Kids Online Safety Act, state-level age-appropriate design codes, and new social media bills like the bipartisan Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, or like the state level bills passed in Utah last year and in Florida last month).

3. Phone-free schools (use phone lockers or Yondr pouches for the whole school day, so that students can pay attention to their teachers and to each other)

4. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. """

https://www.afterbabel.com/i/143412349/what-now

After all, you're free to use or not to use tobacco and alcohol, right? So it should be every kid's choice.

In fact, why stop there? Why not allow fentanyl pills at the counter of every convenience store for anyone who wants them? You have the freedom to choose to use or not to use them, so there's no problem, right?

It's really not that simple. The products have become so widespread and influential that they change the very culture of our society for the worse. It doesn't matter whether you abstain from using Instagram or not, some of your friends will still be more or less subtly influenced by its existence in your social interactions.

There's a nice quote from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, which IMO hasn't aged at all in 60 years: "Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind... The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance."

You either play the sisyphean game of personally blocking a billion dollar company from including you. Or you reach for the long arm of the law.

We all know FAANG gave us no choice but to use government ruling.

This is a social problem, not a parental one. When you allow for-profit companies (or anyone) to create addictive products that intermediate the social experience of an entire generation, how is a parent supposed to stand against that?

It's how kids interact and it defines their entire social experience. Disallowing them access is like sending your kids to school and not allowing them to talk to anyone.

We don't allow our kids to have access to alcohol or cigarettes because it's bad for them. How is this any different, when we know it's doing harm at scale?

Because "it's speech"? That doesn't hold up. Pornography is also generally considered protected speech, but no one lobbies for unfettered access for kids.

Beyond that, restricting social media does not infringe on free speech. That assertion is so obviously wrong on so many levels that it feels silly and pedantic to start itemizing them.

If it was only this simple. It's similar to the green bubble problem. Disallowing your kids to use these platforms leads to social isolation. All the other kids are on these platforms and a lot of the talk is about what happened on these platforms (it's similar with games like Roblox for a certain age bracket). Excluding them is also going to teenage mental illness due to exclusion.

It's only going to work if all parents would restrict access to these platforms, but that's not going to happen. A lot of parents do not see the issue or do not want to be the first mover.

That sounds exactly wrong. I think they want their "personal parental" decisions to not be the decisions of the entire nation, but "personal" and private to themselves and to be free from judgement for wanting this thing.

> prevented access to education medical information ... you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them.

This is pretty important to me:

Abusive parents deny their children access to communication platforms.

I believe these problems cause problems for the child if the child is already lacking support, but they also represent a way to escape that abuse, so I feel strongly that controlling access to asking-for-help is not okay;

This should not be a personal decision good people can make for themselves in their homes for their own kids, because they should be able to understand that "bad" people are actually using laws and rules like this to hurt children.

> I don't use any of these products

I think you're using one right now: Hacker news is absolutely a communications platform.

You’re conflating these tech platforms with freedom of speech. It might be helpful to the debate to separate out the addictive algorithm and user base from people’s right to think and speak freely.

If that's true, the suggested measures: no phone before high-school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, ... do not seem crazy.

Kids cannot drink, cannot smoke, cannot have sex with adults, cannot buy firearms, etc.

There's a shitload of things kids cannot do: is it really an attack on free speech to have kids not have phones at school and wait until 16 before they can use these mediocre piece of shit social media platforms?

What's the secret to doing that? No really. How do I unsubscribe from the tracking that these platforms do on the web and in my apps?

That's the rub! I can't not use (or be used) by these platforms -- no one can!

What we are missing in our society today is some essential negative freedoms.

Most of us follow J.S. Mill's idea on restricting the influence of the state. See the many comments in this thread decrying government intervention to ban social media. That's a negative freedom, from tyranny.

Mostly, we tend to emphasise positive freedoms, freedom to; run a business, share speech, own technology. And that is good.

But there are negative freedoms, freedom from; coercion, the scourge of drugs, poverty, censorship. Obviously many positive freedoms can be expressed as negative ones, but how that logic is formulated in law really matters.

Now the controversial bit:

What we are missing is laws that give people freedom from technology The supposed "choice" to participate is not enough.

Like others here I've been a non participant in social media and smartphones. I'm not a Luddite, I'm a computer scientist, but I twigged this problem very early having dealt with addiction and recognising how abuse is mediated by technology. I even wrote a book about it [1].

The problem is, life is made very difficult for those who want to exercise choice. Presently one must live as a second class citizen, in what feels like racism and prejudice of technological snobbery. It is utterly unnecessary.

Governments do not need to ban smartphones or social media for kids or for anyone. Making this only about kids is a cop-out. It's leveraging emotional messaging to side-step a bigger problem nobody wants to face - that our whole society is under siege from technology overuse. The more general problem is that we've entered a period of technological over-reach. Kids don't just feel peer pressure to get a smartphone and social media, they live in a society that wants to mandate it.

Whether for kids or adults, we need to strongly protect the rights of those who want a less technologically mediated (and encumbered - yes it's not all "convenience") lifestyle. This needs us to maintain plurality of access;

   No services for government, schools, health available *only* on
   proprietary and "smart" platforms. Requirement to maintain
   traditional paper and interpersonal modes.

   End the insanity of a "cashless society", and "smart societies"
   that exclude basic human interaction and require and assume
   smartphones with apps.

   Strongly protect the rights of parents to choose how their kids use
   technology, for example in schools, and the attitudes they are
   raised with.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative...

[1] https://digitalvegan.net/

  > Restrict your children'ss access to these platforms.

sure, but not everywhere is America and some places seem to manage without slippery-sloping to eternal damnation.

Banning social media optimised for “engagement” at the expense of childrens (and adults) mental health does not remove any content from the internet that could not be expressed in a less toxic way.

The finesse is in defining social media in a way more complex than “this list of companies”, and I agree that (likely) no government would choose a definition that does not either have ramifications for free speech or is inadequate.

Haidt argues these are a leading cause of an ongoing mental illness epidemic. Such a drastic claim deserves a thorough medical review and if true, these platforms must be regulated just like the Tobacco industry was.

> those who advocate censorship aren't advocating for freedom... they're advocating for their personal parental decisions to the be decisions of the entire nation.

Don't believe freedom of speech / freedom to information overrides the concern of Humanity collectively and progressively going ill, anymore than freedom to self-defense warrants the use of nuclear weapons for personal use.

That said, the burden of proof is on Haidt. It isn't uncommon for the older generation to be pessimistic or doomsdaying about the next one.

That's not true. Those things are limited in bubbles like the one of the rationalists as well, so free speech has nothing to do with why people don't develop these things. It's a matter of character; and obedience to a system that establishes the rules that evaluate social, academic and economic status.

The Supreme Court was capable of distinguishing between free speech and moron speech but the Party was too convincing.

Most of the parents of these kids don't have the required flow of information to handle their kids consumption. And more importantly, their stress levels are too damn high already. Which is also the result of the Party's long term strategy.

And if all the other parents say it's normal and the same for their kids, even those parents where it is not the case, which are those that know that's why their kids will be better off while everything collapses (vs making sure their kids are better off while nothing collapses), then there is no way but super-rationality to identify a problem and then there's the willpower to go against the accusations and the time required for researching strategies to deal with the problem while the rest of the world, and school, and one's own life keep working as they always did.

If there's bait, the untrained puppy bites. Unless the untrained puppy was trained to bite and puke it out afterwards to find hints at who put the bait right in the path of all those innocent puppies.

I don’t think this is a stupid comparison, as I believe these platforms can be very harmful to children.

And have a severally impacted/constrained social life?

People with all kinds of hobbies use those platforms to organize group activities. You are either on there or you miss out.

I dance tango socially. The tango community, world wide, has settled on FB. Or rather: if you are a dancer, teacher, organizer or DJ, you better be on FB or else you won't know where and when to dance, how to find students, get people to attend your event or get booked. I.e. even if you decided you didn't like FB, you have no choice but to join it and thus help cement their monopoly on how people with this hobby organize themselves.

I take issue with the argument that promoting these social media platforms is tantamount to fostering free speech and denouncing them amounts to eroding this right. No one should expect technology assisted broad cast abilities as part of a doctrine of governments and the State not restricting speech.

Just don't smoke! Just don't drink alcohol! Just don't eat junk food! Just go to the gym!

> Restrict your children's access to these platforms

That's exactly what the article suggests should happen, plus some protections for children enshrined in law. You can find these suggestions at the end of the post, in the section "What now?"

They are mostly advertisement platforms coupled to recommendation engines. The "communication platform" is just side business at this point. And it's being used to wave around as "free speech" when anyone dares to question the detrimental effect of the big mass mind control machine it actually is.

There's a very clear causal relationship between IG and mental health that goes beyond a moral choice and ideals of free speech

That may have been true once upon a time (i.e. back in the day when your FB feed was chronological and random posts from unrelated/unwanted crazies would not show up on your device unless a friend forwarded it to you).

Now they are psychological manipulators (remember https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every... ?) in a quest for advertising dollars at the expense of everything else.

Big tech already plays a alrge part in how our society is shaped and defending them means they don't have to face their responsibilities. Boiling this down a mere question of "free speech" is a very amerocentric point of view.

Here, everyone has facebook, from your grandma to your little cousin. My family is spread all over the country and you can keep in touch via text, phone but seeing what they are doing with pictures on facebook is very convenient and helpful.

Yes, the older/younger crowd do eat up conspiracies on facebook, sadly. They also don't read news sites, all the news is from facebook and TV maybe (older crowd).

Still, you are missing out a lot if you don't have it here. For example like meeting new people even. That "friends of friends" feature is immense. Kind of a social proof that you are normal/not a creep/have friends.

In the end it comes down to education. The first 7 years at home are ridiculously important. Then you have primary school for another 8 years, which is almost as important.

These systems are the next step in the evolution of media. Media is a complex beast with tentacles into culture and politics and individual society. We’ve known this for a long time. What’s applicable here is Marshal McLuhan, media theory, and heck David Foster Wallace. A lot of this stuff was way ahead of its time, but that time has arrived.

“The medium is the message” was a genius insight. Extending it to algorithmic media has all sorts of (disquieting) implications.

You don't have kids do you?

That's not going to fix the echo chambers, divisive conspiracy groups, anti semitic posts and generally all the other terrible uses for online platforms that contribute to the destabilization of our society.

You can't make a social problem go away by telling individuals "if you don't like this problem please avoid it". Similarly, you can't expect to tell people "the effects of methamphetamine are negative for our entire society so please don't partake". For problems that become a state, country or even world problem, something else is needed.

I also disagree with the notion that limiting certain addictive communications tools from minors is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech.

To be clear, I find your thoughts interesting and worth understanding, but if you also believe that the government has zero business in public health decisions involving refined sugars, then we just fundamentally disagree about what good governance is. (nevermind the social media element, which is new and evolving and a higher-dimensional problem space)

And that's ok. I will likely vote and conspire against the interests of people like this (with that view of government) until I the day I die (or my mind is changed), and cultivate communities that openly resist building the world based on those assumptions.

But we're presently in the middle of the long transition in which not everyone has figured that out yet, and in which we don't have a widely-agreed-upon moral stance on the subject that reconciles the need to do something about it with our existing value systems.

We're going to have to find it one way or the other, so the question is "when", not "if".

No doubt in 2174 we will have a bunch of new issues that are at different places in the pipeline. We'll probably be debating the ethics of mind-control implants or something. But in the meantime this one will solved.