> 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.
