As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15 (or some other number, higher or lower I don't care). I'm pretty sure they're worse than cigarettes for the future of humanity.
Agreed. Teachers are seeing the massive benefits from banning phones entirely during school hours. I think once we get data from bans for certain things like social media for kids, we'll all want to get on the wave.
Basic human decency says your workplace environment should be chill enough to let you take breaks as you, yourself, dictate. If you're underperforming because of it, you're fired. Enforcing a rule as you claim strips the employee of what little respect they have left. To be honest, your suggestion is sickening to me.
Highly skilled jobs can absolutely be 'perform or be fired', because you're paying for a person's ability to do a specialized thing, and there's usually only so much specialized work to be done.
But there are also a lot of 'we need bodies at a low cost' jobs.
And those latter jobs run on work_output : labor_cost, which can always be maximized by making fewer workers do more.
(Consequently, why the real goal for people studying / graduating in the modern economy should be to find a way to get into the former jobs...)
Yes, and this dichotomy has been analyzed by political and economic theorists for centuries and everyone except autocrats and slave owners has agreed that the conditions surrounding the "work_output : labor_cost" jobs you describe are a huge miscarriage of justice and ought to be discarded with the past. Whether that is predicted to occur via bloody revolution or capitalist accelerationism is a matter of your particular economic and philosophical taste. But every ethical human being says we shouldn't treat people like that.
Teachers are not good indicators of measuring 'benefits', as they are both the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body, they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be, and they are also grading the success - which all too often comes down to compliance.
That's why if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are diametral or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test. If control group with smartphones gets consistently less points by graders who do not know them or their smartphone habits as compared to those who live in digital exile, we can talk. Until then, 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.
Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study. For me, that's an indication that the outrage is pearl-clutching.
How do you a double blind sutdy on smartphones? It seems to me that the group that would get smartphone would understand they’re the smartphone group, and the one without would know they don’t have one.
> they are... the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body
> 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.
To clarify, do you think that phones or the removal of phones leads to these outcomes? Do you think that teachers like or dislike phones? Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?
> they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be
Some do. Are teachers the only ones?
> if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are [detrimental] or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test.... Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study.
I am not sure how you would set this up in a way that does not fall victim to a dozen confounding variables. There have been comparisons of standardized tests before and after phone bans, of course, but those also fall victim to similar statistical issues.
You also can't have double-blind study on something both the participant and teacher know is present or not.... But that doesn't mean the study is invalid, it just means you have to account for it.
> Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?
My point is that if you ask wagonmakers what they think about cars, you won't get many positive replies, but enthsiastic ones where city governments decide to go full Amish. New times and new technology necessitate changing the craft, and the methods of yesteryear, though trained into teachers, just don't work anymore. Change is scary.
This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.
Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.
And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.
So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
> This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.
The interesting tidbit in the case of social media and smart phones is that they are at least partially pushed by the parents (I've seen plenty of examples of parents demand that their children have smartphones at school).
> Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.
> And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.
I think there is a difference though. There is the "off my lawn" crowd of "children today are so bad because..." sure, but I think they are not the ones demanding social media bans. The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.
> So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
Just the fuck you rich, I'm buying a football team for a laugh human beings. Not that Warren would necessarily buy a football team for laugh, but that "kind".
The issue isn't that billionaires aren't human, the problem very much is that billionaires are regular petty spiteful human beings with poor judgement, impulse control, odd beliefs and an the utter lack of checks and balances that can be disregarded when a human has a billion and more.
NotAllBillionaires, sure .. but it only takes a few to screw over millions of other humans on a whim.
Frankly, imho, billionaires shouldn't even exist. No one person can get that much wealth, that much power, that much influence, without losing their humanity, their decency. It's just not possible because the only way to accrue that much wealth is to do horrifically indecent things.
So, do I recognize what you're saying? Certainly. But I won't be shedding a tear of sympathy for them. I lose all sympathy for them when they step on the necks of everyday people to get where they are.
> The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.
Do the stats prove that cell phones are the cause of the dire mental health indicators? Or at least that there is a correlation?
> This time might be different. But it's probably not.
And this is an appeal to tradition.
This article[1] from 2024 discusses this the studies on this topic. It seems to me the results are mixed, but conclusions range between social media being neutral to harmful. There is a lot in that article, so it's worth a read.
When appealing to the authority of academic studies, it's very important to be aware of the replication crisis for studies in the field of Psychology specifically, which is one of the worst offenders. Reproducibility has been found to be as low as 36% [1].
That was not an appeal to the authority of academic papers so much as the OP trying to give context for the information that has informed their position.
Your responses have been an appeal to tradition (“every generation thinks that”), and a dismissal of the information because of the reproducibility crisis.
Ie you are arguing that we (humans) struggle with discerning Truth, and therefore we are wrong, and everything is fine.
But taking the negative position is just as epistemologically flawed. Hence the OPs attempt to discuss the best data we can find.
Letting people figure out cigarettes were bad for them took a very long time, and if social media is another form of addiction why not treat it how we treat other addictive products?
We could assume that this time is different and people, well children and minors specifically, will learn to avoid the addiction rather than banning them like alcohol, cigarettes and gambling.
This time might be different. But it's probably not.
"but this time it's different" has also been a universal historical argument
>The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture.
Honestly you could just cut and paste the same arguments about jazz music in the 1920s or rock music in the later 20th century and they'd be indistinguishable. Just replace the mentions of jazz with social media topics and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference whether it was an article today or 100 years ago. "Health professionals" wringing hands about social media and jazz music in hilariously similar terms a century apart to a bunch of old people who are convinced the kids these days are going to shit because of the things they like to pay attention to.
Young people ARE SUPPOSED TO make poor decisions and be stressed out about it.
Middle aged people are supposed to clutch their pearls and wail about how this time it's different and truly awful (but what we did as kids was reasonable)
Just nitpicking your first sentence: prohibition broadly works, just in the US (at least) it breeds negative externalities that don't seem worth it in balance.
Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever.
My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.
>My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.
I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard and if you have the attitude that things aren't hard that tends to be true. Don't set your kid up for failure.
Many countries have the driving license at 16. In France it’s accompanied by a parent; in USA it’s the full driving license (I’ve learnt at 13 and never had an accident for 30 years). 16 is ok if you withstand peer pressure.
Insurance and actuarial science is some of the most data-drivenwork we have. It is incredibly hard to withstand peer pressure and there is not much wrong in admitting what the data has already proven.
It's not that hard to drive a car! Unfortunately, physics motivates us to have unreasonable expectations of our drivers, like "doesn't drive off the road at 100km/h ever", and "avoids all obstacles all of the time". That's the hard part.
I did close to the same with my kids.. their PCs were in a common room, they got their first phone at 14 and it stayed at the downstairs charging station at night until 17. IMO it worked great and both our kids have a healthy relationship with their phones and tech in general.
I'm not sure how I feel about making it illegal, but it does benefit from some sort of collective action.
If none of your child's friends and classmates have cell phones yet, I'd strongly encourage establishing a smartphone pact with the other parents. Our community used http://waituntil8th.org pledges but even a shared spreadsheet would work.
> the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards
True, but that's why you don't do it alone. You need to talk with other parents and encourage them to talk to others until the majority of parents understand the risks and let the administration, school board, and teachers know that they have your support.
All that local level stuff doesn’t work. As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone, the online world becomes vastly more interesting than the day to day.
I can't speak to anyone else, but it seems to be working well enough in our town. The overwhelming majority of kids don't have cell phones until high school. That doesn't mean your kids won't beg you for a smartphone, it just means you can say "no" without socially isolating them.
> As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone
The point is to engage in collective action early enough that you can prevent these situations in the first place. Once a critical mass of kids have smartphones and their socialization and coordination moves to online spaces it becomes intensely isolating to be the only kid in a friend group without a smartphone.
Collective action that is effective is hard to pull off in a million homes a million times around the country. Most people without extra time and resources are just not going to do it which at this point is a large part of the country. It’s like advocating for town level collective action on alcohol or age of consent. It’s way more sensible to just make it law.
I fully agree. There should be a complete ban on social media and similar addictive platforms for those under 16, and a nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.) for users aged 16 to 18.
It is absurd to suggest that children should not be allowed to socialize online. Have we completely forgotten the internet we grew up on? I would be dead if I hadn't been able to make friends online.
Why not vice tax the operators? Easier than using age verification schemes and giving them even more data, chat control etc. I'm thinking tiktok, meta and x. Want to operate in Denmark? The license will cost $N/person/month where the amount of people equals the country's population. It's basically a viewer tax.
Or parents could just take responsibility for their own children and not buy them a phone instead of outsourcing their parental responsibilities to the government.
It’s not 1995 any more. My 13 year old gets social contact doing things like playing Minecraft with people from school, organised via WhatsApp with group chats and then yelling about diamond swords and lava chickens or whatever.
There’s then the simple reality that most schools require smartphones for things like homework. It’s set on devices you can only access via an app. Ok maybe you could run some form of android emulator and maybe that works and maybe they can’t do the homework on the bus on the way home and instead can just stare out of the window, but then the teachers tell them to do something in class.
Then once they leave home at 18 and get introduced to something which has been banned yet is completely normal, they go overboard anyway.
Those very responsible would likely do that. But then you have a spectrum from "fully responsible but on occasions slip" to "not responsible at all". You can help some make the "good" decision and prevent others from making "bad" decisions. Hopefully those who grew up with healthier environments will have higher chances for becoming "fully responsible".
My wife and I have this discussion on a regular basis. We want kids, but we've both had to navigate technology usage without any guide, and I've personally experienced how ruinous a smartphone can be.
We want to teach our children how to _responsibly_ use technology. We're still not sure what that looks like in detail, but the general agreement we've come to is something like 'no screens before age X'.
I would be pretty happy about social media being banned for everyone if not the immense possibilty for the government to abuse this law to disrupt undesired communication altogether.
Technically true but I've found it to be less addictive than other text forums (like the R-site and Lemmy), let alone the algo-powered video-based abominations that normies are all hooked on.
I'm thinking that it comes down to one thing in particular: the absence of response notifications. There's only so much addiction you can get out of a page of text without so much as a bell icon.
I know what you mean, but I think the issue is not social media, but rather big corporations being shitty. PepsiCo makes addictive beverages that cause people develop to diabetes and heart disease, but that doesn't mean beverages should be illegal. I think it would be better to regulate or ban the specifically harmful things, rather than a blanket ban on something that is actually useful. And like you alluded to, banning social media could easily lead to a general crackdown on freedom of expression, journalism, etc, now that it is the primary way people communicate with one another.
I'll also add that I'm not specifically opposed to banning minors from using social media. It would probably also be better if it was illegal for children to buy their own soda tbh.
> Dorothy, who runs an Ariana Grande fan account, was suffering through a typical teenage nightmare: Her mom took away her phone. But the resourceful teen didn't let that stop her from communicating with her followers. First, she started using Twitter on her Nintendo DS, a handheld video game device.
> Sometime after finding her DS, it was taken again, so Dorothy started tweeting from yet another connected device: her fridge. "My mom uses it to google recipes for baking so I just googled Twitter," she told CBS News.
And I'm pretty sure she did it just for laughs. I also built a listening device to hear what my mom was saying when I wasn't there. But it was too boring to me to actually listen to the conversations, I don't think I ever actually did it. But I did enjoy immensely setting it up.
Let's do away with the laws requiring shops to check ID before selling cigarettes. After all, a parent can simply tell their child not to smoke cigarettes and that's clearly good enough, right? All in the name of less government, which is clearly the most important priority here.
That system has massive holes. Using convenience store employees many recent immigrants to be the gatekeeper to cigarettes for your kids seems foolish. Who trusts that last line of defense? If a kid fails at once location another location will succeed and there are no punishment for attempting to purchase underage.
You make a persuasive case, but nicotine is genuinely addictive. Something to do with releasing stored glucose and substituting for food, and causing irritability on what I take to be a physiological level on withdrawal. Otherwise I'd agree.
But in this context, is it so important to distinguish between whether something is physiologically addictive vs. just seriously habit-forming? Except for substances where withdrawal is genuinely life-threatening, the practical difference seems to be in degree, not kind. Nicotine withdrawal causes irritability, but (I know having experienced both) so can breaking a bad social media habit.
(And it seems like there's a physiological basis to both cases, it's just that one involves endogenous chemicals and the other doesn't)
If all the other kids are on social media all the time, it makes it much harder to keep your kids off it. Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online? Would you want that for your kids?
Bans like this make much more sense at a community level. Not an individual level.
The idea that it's "hard" therefore we need government to save us is exactly why the program itself will never work. The problem is much deeper than law or government can fix.
You don’t need the government. Just some form of collective action.
I know of plenty of alternative communities & schools in which all the parents agreed to keep their kids away from phones until they were 15 or something. Great! If you try to roll something like this out to state schools, it looks like “the government”. But it’s the same idea.
I don’t understand the hatred and mistrust of government in this thread. The government protects us from lead in our food, from underage drug use, unsafe roads and lots of other stuff. Why not social media too?
> Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online?
I mean, who cares what the kid wants? It's your job as a parent to be a parent. Sometimes that means telling your kid no, even if that means they're not your best friend for a day or two.
> Would you want that for your kids?
Unequivocally, yes. Social media is cancer. I'd prefer my daughter not be pathologically depressed and my son not turn into a little hateball because of Meta's shitty algorithms. I have no idea why this is even a question, aside from the pure cowardice of Millennial parents.
None of this to comment on GP's suggestion that we don't need laws, or the idea that we shouldn't do this societally anyways.
Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level. This is terrible "we'll make it up on volume" logic.
It's also the justification used for some of the dumbest laws in history.
Think about what level of enforcement is going to be required for this (National IDs tied to online activity), and then think about the fact that Denmark is one of the main governments pushing chat control. Now start to think about how, once this tracking/enforcement scheme is created, that it might be expanded to things outside the scope of this law.
Like communism, this idea sounds good in theory, but is going to turn into an authoritarian nightmare in practice.
> Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level.
Social media itself doesn’t make sense at an individual level. If you’re the only one on a discord server, it’s not much of a party.
Personally I’m happy for some countries trying this. Let’s run the experiment and see how it goes. I too worry about the age verification system. Let’s see if the mental health of young people actually improves and by how much.
Rest assured, if the US couldn’t take collective action in the face of a global pandemic, there’s no way a law like this will come for America.
oh yeah, children famously do what their parents are told. especially when it comes to interacting with their friends. and they never are more adept at understanding technology and circumventing parental controls.
Then give parents the tools they need! I can reliably black hole all social media on my home network, and can configure DNS on their phones to do similar. A lot of that knowledge I picked up working in tech, but no tech company is going to offer such robust solutions to parents.
For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids. More importantly the constant appeal to the responsibility of parents misses that this is a collective action problem.
The reason most parents give up to regulate their children's online activity is because the children end up isolated if an individual household prevents their kid from socializing online. All the other kids are online, therefore switching individually ends in isolation. What might be beneficial for each household is unworkable as long as there is no collective mechanism. (which is the case for virtually every problem caused by social networks)
> For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids
This one hit me recently. My 4th grader has a friend who is on tik-toc and has a phone. Me, living in a bubble, where other parents I've met are terrified of social media and phones for their kids, was shocked when I met the mom and she wasn't aware of all the negative impact of social media. But, like with smokers, you can tell them it's bad for you but it's up to them to quit.
Denmark's government has authoritarian aims and are one of the primary groups pushing chat control in the EU. I think you are falling for the "think of the children..." fallacy here.
This is a stepping stone towards further control elsewhere, especially once a framework for enforcement is in place (which nobody actually thinks about when emotionally reacting to feel-good ideas like this). How easy would it be to expand ID based age enforcement to tracking ALL online activity and cracking down on "non-approved" speech? No thanks. I'll handle parenting myself.
Also, if you don't care about the age number, and think social media is just objectively bad...why are you on this social media site? Isn't posting here the definition of hypocrisy...given you're supporting what you believe to be worse than cigarettes?
I don't think HN is a social media site. The goals of a social media site is to keep you engaged for as long as possible with the assistance of various algorithms, dark patterns while your data is sold to businesses so they can have a slice of your attention pie via ads and supported content.
I dont feel as if any of that applies here. In fact HN has gotten further from a social media site by not displaying comment points.
You can argue this, but if you hand over this authority to government, it will not be up to you.
Fundamentally this is an upvote driven social media platform no different from Reddit, which everyone agrees is social media.
If you live in Denmark, get ready to tie your State ID to your HN profile to login and hope that you don't say anything that would make the wrong official (or your employer) upset with you.
As we know from history, well-intentioned government laws have zero unintended consequences, always work perfectly every time, and are very easy to remove once they've been created...
"Old media" was (and is) quite heavily regulated. Not everywhere turned into an East German surveillance state.
The idea that governments are incapable of acting in the interests of their citizens is just a narrative designed to weaken public democratic institutions and hand power to the real authoritarians.
Old media the three networks censored so much and the rise of cable allowed a more open playing field where someone could swear or show an HBO gritty cop show that mirrored reality.
How about you parent your kid instead of trying to get the government to parent everyone else's? What the hell is you and everyone else's problem who want to get into other families' business.
It’s just easier to do some things if they’re prohibited by law. If you don’t want children to smoke, not selling them ciggarettes is a great first step.
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
you can take a teen’s phone off them and they can just walk into a store and buy an inexpensive second hand handset and use the WiFi from a local cafe.
The idea of treating under 18s like they are human is extremely undesirable in the USA because it among other things opens up a lot of doctors to be held accountable for their participation in the mass mutilation of baby boys. It also holds a whole lot of physically abusive parents to a standard where their children could call CPS and get their parents in legal trouble for corporal punishment.
Of course, these are indeed good things in worlds that don't endorse physical violence as the primary method to enforce control. This is why Finland his tail docking, ear cropping, animal crating, corporal punishment, circumcision, etc bans and why the US South is so ruthless.
To be fair, the "War on Tobacco" has actually been a huge success[1]. I've been saying for years that we should end the War on Drugs in its current form and extend tobacco policy to other drugs. If you're old enough to drink, smoke, and get shipped off to a warzone, who is anyone else to tell you that you don't deserve the freedom to buy a bottle of pharmaceutical-grade heroin at CVS and shoot it up in the privacy of your own home?
But because we collectively insist on infantilizing ourselves, hundreds of billions of dollars per year are redirected from the pharma industry to black market criminal syndicates. Instead of funding medical research and stock buybacks, we're actively choosing to fund global chaos and mass atrocities. We could stop tomorrow, and it would cost us nothing. In fact, it would save the US billions of dollars in annual losses at all levels of government and generate billions of dollars in annual tax revenue, all of which could be used to fund things like addiction treatment services, law enforcement, and border security.
As a parent, you should be able to parent your child, rather than having the government arbitrarily and capriciously do so on your behalf, and for everyone else's kids, too.
As someone who got my first BlackBerry at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or led to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone.
(Funny anecdote, but I didn't even figure out how to sign up for Facebook until I was 11-12, because I wouldn't lie about my age and it would tell me I was too young. Heh.)
First, if some parents let their kids use social media and some don't, all kids will eventually use it. You can't cut kids off from social spaces their peers are using and expect them to obey.
Second, this move by Denmark reflects a failure to regulate what social media companies have been doing to all their users.
e.g. What has Meta done to address their failures in Myanmar?[1] As little as was legally possible, and that was as close to nothing as makes no difference. More recently, Meta's own projections indicate 10% of their ad revenue comes from fraud[2]. The real proportion is almost certainly higher, but Meta refuses to take action.
Any attempts to tax or regulate American social media companies has invited swift and merciless response from the U.S. government. To make matters worse, U.S. law makes it impossible for American companies to respect the privacy of consumers in non-U.S. markets[3].
Put it all together, and American social media is something that children need to be protected from, but the only way to protect them is to cut them off from it entirely. This is the direct result of companies like Meta refusing to respond to concerns in any way other than lobbying the U.S. government to bully other nations into accepting their products as is.
Good on Denmark. I hope my own country follows suit.
Cultures around the world have barred children from certain social places until they go through a rite of passage that the whole society, not just the parents, recognize.
Yes, cultures around the world have done this through parents parenting their child successfully, and not through arbitrary government overreach telling you how to parent.
Not really. The ideal you are describing, where there is no role for the community in regulating public spaces outside the household and determining when young people can enter them, strikes me as highly unusual historically and geographically. It’s an example of that streak of libertarianism that took off from early American internet culture and hardly exists outside internet pontificating.
You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry—appropriate timing for a government to make a law to save kids from the evils of it.
> You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry
You're either operating with an anachronistic notion of what constitutes social media, or you're very out of touch with the public. Not sure which one.
The "myspaces" and "facebooks" are trending down, but other forms of social media like tiktok, discord, reddit, youtube, etc are alive and well, still hooking kids young as they always have.
i think the ban on youtube accounts will just be mildly inconvenient, like not being able to subscribe to channels, or chat in a livestream. they can't ban just watching youtube without an account.
The issue is rather the algorithmic feed optimized for grabbing our attention. It's definitely addictive and should be regulated like other drugs.
Give people technology, but let's have an honest conversation about it finally. As a adult it's already hard to muster enough self control to not keep scrolling.
Okay, so explain this to your child, just like you tell them they shouldn't do drugs. Are there not people who are sober by choice? The only thing preventing you from going and smoking crack right now is most certainly not because it's illegal, but because you make a choice not to do so, knowing the negative effects it has on you.
I don't scroll social media. When I was 14-17, sure. But then I lost interest, much like most of my peers did.
(I do probably refresh HN more than I should though, but I think that's probably the least evil thing I could do compulsively...)
The part you’re missing is that the decision to be online isn’t like choosing to do drugs. It’s closer to deciding to go to parties and socialise at all.
Social media for teens is ubiquitous and where your peers connect. It’s being included in your social group, not opt-in thrill seeking.
Most teens will have multiple accounts for various networks - private accounts for their friends, and then again for closer friends. Or they use apps like Discord that parents have no visibility into at all. There is a lot that most parents never see.
I don't think it will ever disappear, but it certainly plays a less outsized role now than it used to, and it's not exactly an industry I see huge growth in.
What we define as "social media" I think is important. I don't really consider things like TikTok to be "social media" even if there is both a social component and a media component, since the social part is much smaller in comparison to the media part. People aren't communicating on TikTok (I think), which is what people concerned about "being left out by their peers" would be referring to. This type of "social" media probably is not dying, but I think is likely stagnant or will become stagnant in growth, while traditional "social media" continues to regress over the next decade.
Parents are doing what they can, but it inevitably comes down to “but my friend x has it so why can’t I have it” - so all and any help from government / schools is a good thing.
This is so, so, so obviously a nasty, dangerous technology - young brains should absolutely not be exposed to it. In all honesty, neither should older ones, but that’s not what we’re considering here.
I think you are massively overstating how important it is to the kids that they have a social media account. How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?
Connecting online is the primary social space for many kids nowadays, not in person.
Some parents (or those without kids) have a bit of a naive view and think ‘social media’ and just imagine Facebook, instagram etc - things they understand and that don’t provide much connection.
The kids connect using private accounts, completely different apps, or even just inside the chat of other apps like games, if that is where your specific group hangs out.
I agree with what you're saying (including saying that arcfour is out of touch and doesn't really know what they're talking about), but... I do agree with them to an extent. And I have a kid (with another along the way). Kids adapt. They want to be on social media, or games, or Discord, or whatever because their friends are. If they have enough friends in real life doing something fun, that becomes where their specific group hangs out. The number of people you need in that group before it crosses that threshold is really low... 4, 5 people? That's all you need to have a tight knit friend group.
I've seen things like after school D&D club at the elementary school down the street where my son now goes to preschool. I'm optimistic that by the time he's older, there will be even more groups like this and more opportunities for him to have friends where they're doing activities that aren't mediated by screens.
To be clear, I'm not weighing on in on whether or not I think a ban is a good idea. I tend to think it is. But I do think the idea that there's nothing parents can do from the ground up without the help of government (which I'm not opposed to!) is also a bit misguided.
That's rather rude of you, especially since I was actually a kid and grew up during the mass proliferation and ubiquity of social media, to suggest that I am "out-of-touch" compared to... you? (who are likely much older than me, or at best the same age) is pretty ridiculous. I was on Twitter and Facebook at like 12 years old, I've experienced this. And to dismissively suggest I don't know what I'm talking about, on what basis do you say that? The basis that you just disagree with me...saying that a law for this is stupid and an example of paternalistic government overreach? Many people who decidedly do know what they are talking about agree, just as there are many who disagree and know what they are talking about; simply because you are on the other side doesn't mean I must be clueless.
I don't, but I do have friends, and did have friends when I was a kid growing up during the rise and proliferation of social media and the beginnings of algorithmic content distribution, so I am familiar with it.
> How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?
Easy. If half the conversation happens online, and your kid wasn’t part of that, they’d constantly need to be “filled in” when they got to school.
Imagine if your company used slack but you weren’t on it. You could still go to all the meetings, but there would have been conversations held and decisions made that you wouldn’t even know about. You would feel like you were on the out. Banning an individual kid from social media would be just the same.
If social media is as bad for them as you seem to think it is, then why wouldn’t it be best for them?
I’m old enough to remember the same trash arguments over video games, rap music, even (for some unknown reason) the Disney Channel. This is just another moral panic.
This is an overly simplistic, idealistic view of the world that leads to people thinking things like the OP are good and necessary. By recognizing that the world doesn't actually work this way at all—things aren't black and white, they're gray—you come to the conclusion that legislation is the worst way to solve these issues and is totally unnecessary.
> you come to the conclusion that legislation is the worst way to solve these issues and is totally unnecessary.
If you want to argue for that point of view, do so. Put forward actual arguments. Your comment reads as “if you were smart like me, you’d know I’m right”. Which is unfalsifiable and unconvincing.
That's an overly nonspecific criticism. It's more of a compliment of your own cognitive abilities rather than something tangible I can map onto my comment.
Name-calling now? I’ll give you the fourth option that you neglected to include:
- Kids continue to use social media despite the ban, with some using sketchy circumvention services or older friends to gain access, and with others driven to totally unsupervised social media in foreign countries and/or the dark web, with predictable results. The majority of kids rightly see the restrictions placed upon them as unreasonable and grow up with less respect for government and the law, broadly harming social trust as they enter adulthood.
It's a question of magnitudes. There will be at least one kid who does what you're saying, but how many? My strong intuition is that it'll be a small number, too small to cancel out the benefits. The appeal will be largely gone when the network effects are gone. So I say run the experiment in one country and observe the outcome and adjust accordingly. That is the least idealistic position.
As long as it’s not my country and you don’t try to apply your rules extraterritorially, fine. (And feel free to block US-hosted services if you don’t like the way we run things.)
Parent of a 21 and 18 year old so I’m somewhat familiar about how to do parenting, thanks.
Yes, “no” is a tool that more parents can and should reach for. But if you’ve got any experience at all of kids you’ll know it’s really not as straight forward as this. The more responsibility you can push off to others, such as government or schools, the easier this is.
We brought ours up with pretty strong guidelines and lots of “no” but we’re fortunate in having some time and some money and some knowledge about how to block stuff on the network and so on - lots of parents aren’t as lucky. They need all the help they can get.
Describe three hypotheticals to me of what you think will happen in the following circumstances:
* Kid who is told "no" by his parents
* Kid who is told "yes" by his parents
* Kid who "can't" sign up for social media because it's illegal to do so at their age, who then signs up for it when it becomes legal.
I would really like to see what you believe the outcomes of these three scenarios would be, because I doubt any of them are truly catastrophic, considering we are, at best, merely delaying the onset of social media use by the kid by just 2-3 years.
Read literally anything about brain elasticity and then come back and tell me those “just” 2—3 years are unimportant. These are key, critical years for development. Pretty much all the studies are saying it’s fucking us, and particularly our kids.
Personally I want to do something about this, and IMO every move in the direction that helps even in a small way is a good one.
Not necessarily a law, but it requires some form of collective action.
I highly recommend discussing a smartphone pact such as http://waituntil8th.org with fellow parents before anyone in their friend group gets a cell phone.
Lol you can order a cigar or pipe tobacco on the internet completely legally without any ID check. Most people don't know this. You can do it with wine, too, for the vast majority of the US. It's not really a problem.
I suspect you need a credit card though? Can kids sign credit card contracts without parent consent in the US?
Moreover just because that laws and regulations are applied inconsistently in the US (and we are talking about Denmark here), does not mean we should completely do away with them.
Not sure if it's changed but I had a debit card and bank account from age 15 when I started working as a kid. I got it without even involving my parents, not sure if you can still do that now, it was before the KYC stuff ramped up to the nines.
Comparing the internet we grew up with and the modern internet where a army of psychologists have been unleashed with the express intent to massively increase addiction to everything they touch is very foolish
This is not about telling kids no. This is about companies (and foreign hostile governments!) worth billions of dollars openly studying how best to prey on children's minds. There are things that are just poisonous to society as a concept.
The same people demanding the anti-smart phone laws will rat your ass out the second your kid is spotted walking alone, playing independently, etc. They want to put you in a catch-22 situation.
The real problem here is way less people are parents or people that have no idea what parenting is like, so they don't understand the practicalities of raising children so they come up with the dumbest laws possible and then lord it over you with the full weigh of the state so they can pretend to be parents but with none of the responsibility and all of the smug moral superiority.
Jonathan Haidt, the most prominent psychologist pushing for restrictions on social media use for children, is also the most prominent proponent of letting kids play and roam more freely. So no, those are not the same people.
As someone who sold their first joint at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or let to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone.
/s
Absolute statements like yours rarely work, because the discussion is hardly ever about absolutes and more about where to draw the line.
