The problem is not phones. Phones are fine. The problem is specific apps that make use of addiction engineering. These are bad on desktops too but the extreme portability of phones makes them a hundred times more potent.
Like all risks it doesn’t affect all kids equally either.
Some are less vulnerable for various cognitive reasons just like some are less prone to chemical addiction.
Kids with wealthier and/or more engaged parents or parents with more free time are also less vulnerable. Wealthier kids have more activities available and can often afford to have one parent stay home.
Lastly kids in healthier communities or suburbs or safe urban settings where they can roam free are less vulnerable.
They children of the poor, those with ADD or ASD conditions, and those with less third spaces or other activities are most vulnerable to becoming addicted to endless stupefying doom scrolling and addictive games that pre-train them for future gambling addiction.
It’s not just kids either. The elderly and the isolated become addicted to this stuff.
Addiction engineering is the problem, whether it’s via a phone, a web site, or a chemical.
IMO if you intentionally and knowingly engineer something for addiction you are committing a form of assault.
> IMO if you intentionally and knowingly engineer something for addiction you are committing a form of assault.
Whilst I agree that addictive things can be bad how far does this ago? Food manufacturers purposely make foods that are addictive. Video game companies use ways to make games more addictive.
Companies make things that we want and sometimes we get addicted to wanting it too much.
HN title automangler automangled this title. It references a specific song: “The kids are alright”, and removing the “The” reduces the impact of the reference.
This whole article just boils down to the argument "If badly-behaved adults are allowed to have cameras, why shouldn't well-behaved children have access to for-profit social media platforms designed to addict them and feed them misinformation?"
It's complete nonsense. The conversation in the UK right now isn't about whether or not teenagers should be allowed to own cell phones; it's about whether they should be allowed to have access to the myriad of addictive and harmful apps and services available on those devices, often maliciously targeted at them.
The drunk pervert filming them on the train has nothing to do with this argument. He's using his phone like a camera. Teenagers are allowed to have cameras, and assuredly every one of the girls he was filming had a camera of some sort on them of their own. Nobody was on uneven ground in this situation technologically.
If people actually were worried about perverted adults preying on children, they would take a look at the countless examples of perverted adults preying on children via their social media accounts and devices. It's been open season on children online for the past decade.
If people actually cared about accountability, they would stop pushing for age-verification laws, and start penalizing social media companies for their laissez faire attitude towards inappropriate sexual conduct, because currently, sites like Instagram and TikTok cater directly to pedophiles and do absolutely nothing about the predatory behavior coming from their user base towards children that are clearly too young to legally use social media in most parts of the world (<13 in the USA).
We need to reframe this whole conversation. It's not about keeping kids away from social media. It's about keeping trillion-dollar businesses from profiting off of children while actively doing harm to them with addictive algorithms, misinformation, and exposure to malicious actors.
Did the UK get rid of the Muslim rape gangs already? No one is being raped on social media, yet all the hysteria is focused on social media when it should be focused on a completely different issue that actually harms children in real life on a massive scale - outside and unrelated to the internet.
The problem is not the ability to communicate, but rather the addiction generated by those algorithms. They should absolutely be regulated, for all ages.
That is a fair take. Yes the kids are particularly susceptible to these things but some equally concerning behavior comes from adults that one wished the knew better.
Unfortunately, a lot of people run teenage software on adult hardware and that is a wild combo.
this. the problem with a lot of "think of the children" argument is that we often rule out the failure in whatever policing is needed for the general public.
the adults of today, albeit the younger ones, were kids growing up with post-IM world. the ones before that could speak with their friends from their homes instead of only meeting in person (due to telephones). we all are products of the environment we were raised in. but despite those learnings, it seems like we are not self-regulating as a society.
charity begins at home, and before bringing children in a conversation, we should think if we all are alright.
There's a few pensioners who go in my local pub, they're substantially more "addicted" to their phones than any tween, and manage to believe literally anything that comes across their screen. Even when thoroughly debunked by the rest of us...
What’s easier: waiting until your child is mature enough before giving them a smartphone, or trying to regulate social media companies and every addictive website?
He was only caught because he was on his phone and someone could see his screen. No one would stand up for the girls if he was wearing one of those meta glasses taking the same pics.
This essay extends one anecdote involving 16+ year old teenagers to the unsupported conclusion that kids should have phones and those who wish to restrict that are all wealthy 1% right wing authoritarians. Then with the personal note it seems clear that the core of the essay stems from the author's own personal trauma/experience.
I don't disagree that big adtech's reliance on dopamine-driven addictive behavior is real evil, but regulations that at least wall kids off from that makes sense and there's all kinds of research to suggest as much, in contrast to a personal essay about a video online.
The extra irony in this is that it's Labour and not the Tories that are implementing these policies, but not the policies that are cited here because they're made up.
Kids with phones are alright. Attention economy of social media is not. As did tabaco companies, they (soc. media tech giants) push proposals to regulate phone use based on age in hopes that the their information asymmetry advantage and addictive dark patterns that are the problem in the first place won't be regulated and they can keep exploiting the public held in their trap by network effect.
The scale is completely different. It's like arguing a bomb, a gun and a knife are exactly the same thing and we shouldn't bother thinking about where we draw the legality line
Do people want to restrict 16 year olds with phones? That seems like a really bad idea. For 10 year olds it makes sense, but 16 is nearly adult; they need to really learn this responsibility. And of course they need a phone when they go out like these girls.
A bit of a weird tangent from what apparently is harassment in a train or something like that? I admit it's hard to follow what is going on.
My question to these sorts of articles is, okay so what do we do then?
What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids. Its not good for their attention spans or mental health to a much greater degree than other forms of media.
Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones, but they should be able to use them without being engulfed in social media content that has been shown to have a negative impact on them. Whether its algorithmic feeds targeting particular age groups or short form video content that is reducing attention spans and the ability to concentrate.
I have no idea how an adult filming young girls on a train has anything to do with social media bans. The Senior Legal Officer is absolutely entitled to having a phone, but absolutely not to use it however he means. The teenagers are entitled to having a phone, but potentially may have limits to how they can use those devices.
Just because there are adults with full agency that do the wrong thing, doesn't mean we should remove protections on young people. Just because adults with full agency drive recklessly, doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds the ability to drive.
Isolating specialized customized algorithms tube to be addicted to specifically you and tuned to keep you away from other humans forever.
Instead of identity barriers like in the UK they should simply ban "accounts".
Regulators should say: ok you can serve kids and women and whoever else but you have to creat 20 channels and you can't differentiate and everyone just picks a username that isn't protected and they shout into the group chat and nobody knows who anyone is except the provider and everyone sees the same thing.
Ok this is an exaggeration to make the point.
We can't even see what other people are being shown.
You can't even opt out of being secretly show things.
It's evil.
I want a feed that is 100% public. Every single thing they show me is shown to everyone. Like radio or something.
I think most reasonable people can agree social media/internet can be a dangerous place where your images will be taken and posted to others without your consent. This isn't a matter of age.
Except this is exactly what Heather Burns is doing.
Not this guy, who (I had to check) was apparently following the law(?) and the article even admits this:
> as far as policymakers are concerned, it’s the senior legal officer with the phone who is rightfully entitled to have the phone and use it any way he pleases
(if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article)
It's just a strange argument to say we should loosen the regulations when you have people like Heather exhibiting the problematic behavior that these laws are supposed to protect people from.
If we assume this guy was taking photos for his own private collection, there's a hilarious irony that the person who took the video, and then posted it onto Twitter. Managed to expose the victims photos that he took, AND ALSO many other photos of their faces to the world.
But then the rest of the article is a load of nonsense about legislation that doesn't even exist.
But the main point here is that a guy was taking pics of some teens "secretly". Right?
The controversy about teens' rights to use cellphones and how to use them is quite debatable since it implies modern cultural behavior on tech and social media.
The article spends a long time conflating actual proposed policy in the UK with things that aren't being proposed and sound much worse. I did some googling, the UK's gone a bit further than the US in proposing that < 16 year olds can't use social media with real age verification instead of current "I promise I'm over 13" approaches, curfews on social media specifically for 16-17 year olds that are opt-out, and smart phones must be put away at school.
No one's proposing banning teenagers from owning smart phones entirely. I would agree that not allowing 17 year old girls going out to have phones on trains would be bad policy, if that was actually a thing anyone was suggesting. It's unclear how any of the teens in the anecdote at the start of the story would be affected by the proposed legislation at all.
> It’s watching precisely why young adults need phones, the agency to use them, and the life skills to make their ways in the world with their phones in their pockets.
The link between creepy old men being called out and documented on a train and whether or not 14 year olds should be spending 8+ hours a day scrolling tiktok is unclear to the point of feeling like I'm missing something in the article. I guess the idea is that teens are being punished? And we should be holding our leaders accountable instead of restricting the teens? The counter argument to this would be "holding our leaders accountable" looks a lot like "passing regulations to keep children from being harmed by digital nicotine"
> Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday
This is the same reason I think we should give 13 year olds a couple of cigarettes a week, just enough for them to still feel sick from the nicotine and start to figure out how to integrate into adult society.
We've long accepted that certain activities carry enough harm that people under a certain age lack the development for it to be fair to expect them to engage with it in a healthy manner. Does it deny 14 year olds some agency that we don't allow them to ride motorcycles? Yes. Is it sound policy? I think so. We have plenty of evidence for real harms in teenagers with regards to social media, a fact that took me a long time to accept while I worked in the industry, but is plainly obvious in the data and studies done on it over the past decade.
Tax social media and other forms of attention products. Time users spend on these products is time taken away from earning revenue that can be taxed. Balance must be restored. If viewers’ available time/ability is harvested so that they have less taxable income, transfer the tax to where the wealth generation is being transferred to.
This is a weird take. I don't understand how what this guy did or didn't do with his phone has any relevance for whether kids should have phones or do certain things with them. About the most I could say is that I would agree that many of the problems with phones are problems for adults as well as kids.
We need limits though and that's the whole point. The effect of doom scrolling on the young brain is something we can't just turn a blind eye to. Add to it bad people trying to hurt the young ones and using them
> the cultural values that a detached elite wish to impose on their offspring for life have been transposed into law, policy, and regulation, and from there, into the personal lives of young people
Isn't this what happens in Islamic countries all the time though?
77 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadThe article mentions 15-16 years of age.
The best practice is to keep kids off smartphones with full internet, full social media, touchscreen and scrolling at least until 13.
It doesn't mean they can't have other kinds of devices.
This is a wide open market category.
Also vast majority of devices run a Linux kernel....
Like all risks it doesn’t affect all kids equally either.
Some are less vulnerable for various cognitive reasons just like some are less prone to chemical addiction.
Kids with wealthier and/or more engaged parents or parents with more free time are also less vulnerable. Wealthier kids have more activities available and can often afford to have one parent stay home.
Lastly kids in healthier communities or suburbs or safe urban settings where they can roam free are less vulnerable.
They children of the poor, those with ADD or ASD conditions, and those with less third spaces or other activities are most vulnerable to becoming addicted to endless stupefying doom scrolling and addictive games that pre-train them for future gambling addiction.
It’s not just kids either. The elderly and the isolated become addicted to this stuff.
Addiction engineering is the problem, whether it’s via a phone, a web site, or a chemical.
IMO if you intentionally and knowingly engineer something for addiction you are committing a form of assault.
Whilst I agree that addictive things can be bad how far does this ago? Food manufacturers purposely make foods that are addictive. Video game companies use ways to make games more addictive.
Companies make things that we want and sometimes we get addicted to wanting it too much.
We don't need to get bogged down in this question before doing the first obvious thing and banning the most addictive things known to exist.
Edit: now fixed, thanks mods
It's complete nonsense. The conversation in the UK right now isn't about whether or not teenagers should be allowed to own cell phones; it's about whether they should be allowed to have access to the myriad of addictive and harmful apps and services available on those devices, often maliciously targeted at them.
The drunk pervert filming them on the train has nothing to do with this argument. He's using his phone like a camera. Teenagers are allowed to have cameras, and assuredly every one of the girls he was filming had a camera of some sort on them of their own. Nobody was on uneven ground in this situation technologically.
If people actually were worried about perverted adults preying on children, they would take a look at the countless examples of perverted adults preying on children via their social media accounts and devices. It's been open season on children online for the past decade.
If people actually cared about accountability, they would stop pushing for age-verification laws, and start penalizing social media companies for their laissez faire attitude towards inappropriate sexual conduct, because currently, sites like Instagram and TikTok cater directly to pedophiles and do absolutely nothing about the predatory behavior coming from their user base towards children that are clearly too young to legally use social media in most parts of the world (<13 in the USA).
We need to reframe this whole conversation. It's not about keeping kids away from social media. It's about keeping trillion-dollar businesses from profiting off of children while actively doing harm to them with addictive algorithms, misinformation, and exposure to malicious actors.
If you read the investigations into CSA, the vast majority is being commuted by white men, white men like the man in this video
>No one is being raped on social media
Who said they were? It's a bit off that you're waving out Sexual Assault in reference to literally everything else.
Do we need to speak to the police about you
Unfortunately, a lot of people run teenage software on adult hardware and that is a wild combo.
the adults of today, albeit the younger ones, were kids growing up with post-IM world. the ones before that could speak with their friends from their homes instead of only meeting in person (due to telephones). we all are products of the environment we were raised in. but despite those learnings, it seems like we are not self-regulating as a society.
charity begins at home, and before bringing children in a conversation, we should think if we all are alright.
People who are not yet ready to have full agency of their own lives is more or less the definition of children.
Does she also expect children to have full time jobs, pay taxes, pay all their own bills and rent, etc etc?
Smartphones are fomes peccati.
I don't disagree that big adtech's reliance on dopamine-driven addictive behavior is real evil, but regulations that at least wall kids off from that makes sense and there's all kinds of research to suggest as much, in contrast to a personal essay about a video online.
An extreme example, all genocides are done by people who want to set the world right. It just how they see right is warped.
heh. no.
Because of chungus memes? I think you might be over reacting there bro
A bit of a weird tangent from what apparently is harassment in a train or something like that? I admit it's hard to follow what is going on.
On paper yes, biologically not really
What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids. Its not good for their attention spans or mental health to a much greater degree than other forms of media.
Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones, but they should be able to use them without being engulfed in social media content that has been shown to have a negative impact on them. Whether its algorithmic feeds targeting particular age groups or short form video content that is reducing attention spans and the ability to concentrate.
I have no idea how an adult filming young girls on a train has anything to do with social media bans. The Senior Legal Officer is absolutely entitled to having a phone, but absolutely not to use it however he means. The teenagers are entitled to having a phone, but potentially may have limits to how they can use those devices.
Just because there are adults with full agency that do the wrong thing, doesn't mean we should remove protections on young people. Just because adults with full agency drive recklessly, doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds the ability to drive.
Call it something like the matrix.
Isolating specialized customized algorithms tube to be addicted to specifically you and tuned to keep you away from other humans forever.
Instead of identity barriers like in the UK they should simply ban "accounts".
Regulators should say: ok you can serve kids and women and whoever else but you have to creat 20 channels and you can't differentiate and everyone just picks a username that isn't protected and they shout into the group chat and nobody knows who anyone is except the provider and everyone sees the same thing.
Ok this is an exaggeration to make the point.
We can't even see what other people are being shown.
You can't even opt out of being secretly show things.
It's evil.
I want a feed that is 100% public. Every single thing they show me is shown to everyone. Like radio or something.
Except this is exactly what Heather Burns is doing.
Not this guy, who (I had to check) was apparently following the law(?) and the article even admits this:
> as far as policymakers are concerned, it’s the senior legal officer with the phone who is rightfully entitled to have the phone and use it any way he pleases
(if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article)
It's just a strange argument to say we should loosen the regulations when you have people like Heather exhibiting the problematic behavior that these laws are supposed to protect people from.
But then the rest of the article is a load of nonsense about legislation that doesn't even exist.
But the main point here is that a guy was taking pics of some teens "secretly". Right?
The controversy about teens' rights to use cellphones and how to use them is quite debatable since it implies modern cultural behavior on tech and social media.
No one's proposing banning teenagers from owning smart phones entirely. I would agree that not allowing 17 year old girls going out to have phones on trains would be bad policy, if that was actually a thing anyone was suggesting. It's unclear how any of the teens in the anecdote at the start of the story would be affected by the proposed legislation at all.
> It’s watching precisely why young adults need phones, the agency to use them, and the life skills to make their ways in the world with their phones in their pockets.
The link between creepy old men being called out and documented on a train and whether or not 14 year olds should be spending 8+ hours a day scrolling tiktok is unclear to the point of feeling like I'm missing something in the article. I guess the idea is that teens are being punished? And we should be holding our leaders accountable instead of restricting the teens? The counter argument to this would be "holding our leaders accountable" looks a lot like "passing regulations to keep children from being harmed by digital nicotine"
> Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday
This is the same reason I think we should give 13 year olds a couple of cigarettes a week, just enough for them to still feel sick from the nicotine and start to figure out how to integrate into adult society.
We've long accepted that certain activities carry enough harm that people under a certain age lack the development for it to be fair to expect them to engage with it in a healthy manner. Does it deny 14 year olds some agency that we don't allow them to ride motorcycles? Yes. Is it sound policy? I think so. We have plenty of evidence for real harms in teenagers with regards to social media, a fact that took me a long time to accept while I worked in the industry, but is plainly obvious in the data and studies done on it over the past decade.
Same for AI.
Isn't this what happens in Islamic countries all the time though?