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.
Social media, as we have it today, is not healthy for anybody. It is bad, truly bad, and the companies responsible know it.
You can't lace beer with crack and sell it. Not to a 12yo, not to a 50yo. Regulate the proverbial crack, then we see if further regulations are required.
Earlier this year (0):
> “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,”
From 9 years ago (1):
> Facebook showed advertisers how it has the capacity to identify when teenagers feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”
Thank you, it's been infuriating reading these social media bans for children, as if when kids suddenly turn 16 or 18 or whatever magical nimber the courts come up with, they are suddenly immune to the psychological tricks from multi million dollar companies hiring the best psychologists with no morals money can buy.
Social media needs to be heavily regulated to the point where it's safe for everyone, or banned entirely. I don't understand why there's this belief it should have a right to exist when basically everyone agrees it's a net negative to society.
I don't think there is that agreement that it is in total a net negative to society.
That said, with bans upcoming or in force in a lot places, what measures should we monitor to see improvements in wellbeing etc. (screen time isn't one there, I'd say)? What do we do if those do not go up noticably?
I agree that the positive effects of Social Media is understated, and probably on purpose.
Social Media allowed ordinary people to challenge on a global scale the oficially-sanctioned narrative. A generation has already grown with full distrust on what they learn from traditional media.
With that picture, addressing the (undeniable) negative effects of Social Media is only the sales pitch for introducing new legislation. The true goal of the legislation however is not to "save the children", but rather to ensure that the next generations will be obedient and meek.
> Social Media allowed ordinary people to challenge on a global scale the oficially-sanctioned narrative.
Hasn't been true for a while. Now it grants people with money and state actors unprecedented control over what ordinary people are allowed to see and mold them to desired narratives.
For starters, what's "social media"? It's kind of a undefinable phrase. Obviously Facebook and Instagram are agreed to be "social media".But is Youtube social media? How about HN? Or any website with a comment section?
I'd argue that generally speaking, the problematic social media tend to be ad-supported websites that focus on user-generated content.
so Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit are all social-media, because all are ad-supported, and all are focused on user-generated content. HN is focused on user-generated content, but not ad-supported (okay, technically HN is 'advertising for YC', but in practice, the site isn't optimized to get you doom-scrolling so you click on more ads), and a website with a comment section, if it's like a blog or something where the majority of the content is generated by the website owner, isn't focused on user-generated content.
The combination of user-generated content + advertising, however, seems to create websites that will try to get their users addicted to the site, which can harm the lives of their users.
Some nitpicker will probably come with "and what about...??" because we are on HN but I think you basically nailed the definition.
And yes, they are toxic. And yes, just as other toxic products (i.e. cigarettes or alcohol) there should be an ongoing discussion on its regulation for both adults and teenagers. Even if it's not 100% enforceable.
They are fundamentally different because they are not centralized and, if they are going to be centralized at some point, they will need to find a revenue stream because giving access for free to the whole world, literally, is technically impossible.
But email is not centralized, and it grew when Internet was really different. Mastodon - which was born in this new Internet - is used by a very small fraction of Twitter/IG/TikTok/Facebook users. I mean, TikTok and Mastodon started both in 2016 and see the difference now...
> But email is not centralized, and it grew when Internet was really different. Mastodon - which was born in this new Internet - is used by a very small fraction of Twitter/IG/TikTok/Facebook users. I mean, TikTok and Mastodon started both in 2016 and see the difference now...
Email and mastodon and pixelfed and peertube are all federated. Everyone can run their own server, pay others, or join others.
Federated services can still work today.
And yes Tiktok started in 2016 along with Mastodon. Ok. Mastodon's success isnt bound up in venture capitalism or hockeystick growth or 100x returns. Its completely organic growth that doesnt have anything to do with money. People share and talk about stuff all the time, and there's no profit motive in nearly anything. No advertisements, no upsells.
And enshittification and extractive "growth" applies strongly to Tiktok, and that smell pervades everything about it. Advertisements, making usage worse, worse payouts to user/advertiser/influencer. Everyones there for the views and the quick dollars. But they attract more people BECAUSE of the predatory pirahna-dollar water, and the hopes of making it big.
Many things are harmful for everyone, yet we only ban them for children because banning them for everyone would create huge uproar. Make tobacco illegal and then we can talk about social media.
Tobacco is legal because of large numbers of addicts which would create a huge market for illegal supplies. The UK plans to phase out tobacco by raising the age at which it can be legally bought every year.
In any case, this is whataboutery. There are lots of harmful things that adults are allowed, but lots that are banned for everyone. There are lots of things that cannot be sold without meeting safety standards (cars, electricals), or that are only sold subject strict controls (prescription drugs, guns). We do not allow adults to have whatever they want.
> Thank you, it's been infuriating reading these social media bans for children, as if when kids suddenly turn 16 or 18 or whatever magical nimber the courts come up with, they are suddenly immune to the psychological tricks from multi million dollar companies hiring the best psychologists with no morals money can buy.
This is sort of true, but there is definitely a scale of development that means the most harm will be done the earlier you start. Same with access to pornography. People's brains don't suddenly become immune to it at 18, it's just that that's the age of legal responsibility that ties in with other things.
Men who turn 18 don't suddenly become disposable meat-based gun-holders in times of war, and yet we still treat them that way.
A concrete example is the annulation of the 2024 Romanian elections. It probably happened because a certain candidate was able to manipulate the TikTok algorithm using (undeclared) paid influencers and spam.
“ No evidence established direct connections between Georgescu's campaign and Russian state actors. There were only assertions that there must have been due to his rapid rise on social media”
And:
the "National Liberal Party paid for a campaign on TikTok that ended up favoring ... Georgescu" and not Russia as previously presented to the Constitutional Court.
Also:
On 28 April 2025, right-wing conservative Hungarian think-tank Mathias Corvinus Collegium filed a complaint with the European Ombudsman because the European Commission denied access to the documents containing information on the EU's DSA proceedings in the case.
That’s not something you would expect from a proper investigation. The whole thing is a mess and what we heard on the news at the time is essentially a made up story.
Not a good counterexample either. The link to Russian intelligence services may not be proven, but nobody seems to dispute that there were paid influencers? Also that this was not declared anywhere and the money was at best grey in origin?
In events like these it can be useful to operate on the systems thinking maxim and strictly look at who benefited, as this is interesting in itself without entertaining the suggestion that they engaged in anything illegal.
When it comes to social media in politics, I believe the burden of proof is on those who claim a net benfit. Centralization of traditional media is generally regarded as bad for open democracies, and the ultimate owners of almost all social media globally can be counted on one hand with fingers to spare.
> The link to Russian intelligence services may not be proven, but nobody seems to dispute that there were paid influencers?
As the quotes I included say, there was no evidence that Russia was behind the interference. They did track who paid for Tiktok "influencers" but it was ended up at "the National Liberal Party" - which means it was not foreign interference as pretty much all media in the world reported. If you wan to claim there was without anyone disputing it, you absolutely should provide evidence!
I think the only irregularity was that the Tiktok paid influencers were not disclosed properly. But the same has happened in so many other countries (even in Sweden where I am - the biggest party had to go through a huge scandal about doing just that) without ending up nullifying the result of elections. Of course, if they did not like the results enough, I'm sure similar shenanigans would've been utilized.
The problem with all these is that the mythos of democracy depends on pretending that individuals and the people at large are making intelligent decisions based on available true information - instead of what it really is.
Just saying "regulate" it is not an answer and won't give you the results you think.
What you'll get is restrictions on speech. UK arrests thousands every year for what essentially amounts to mean tweets. There have been people that comment publicly on horrendous crimes that get harsher sentences than those that commit the crimes.
At any point in time politicians could have enforced existing terms of service violations like kids must be 13 or older. But they choose to look the other way and target only things that's a threat to their political future.
Social media helps organization and political action. Maybe you don't like the outcome at this point in time but it's a powerful weapon against those in power. It's no wonder politicians will try to neuter it. But it will not help anyone but themselves.
Currently, the fact that these large platforms can block you and they block you randomly (which is the case of Reddit for me, because I dared to use privacy protecting extensions when I commented on a subreddit to which I wasn’t subscribed; Instagram permanently blocked me because I used VPN when I wanted to login) is way larger restriction on my speech than removing these harmful platforms completely. Currently, I’m not allowed to react to others at all on some of these platforms. Even TV is better, because there is contact information for all of them.
Sure there was basically a cartel in social media. You saw coordinated censorship campaigns to ban the former president of the United States for example. But I wouldn't discount the amount of political interference there as well. The last administration admitted to flagging individual posts for the social media companies.
But it's true there is a lot of coordinated censorship even without state interference. But this tends to resolve itself as there is a market opportunity to create a better product. This coordination and censorship campaign has led to the acquisition of Twitter, which lifted its restrictions and other companies more or less followed suit because an open platform is obviously better for most people. And you had offshoots like Bluesky that had the old centralized censorious pre twitter acquisition policies, and things work out in the long run
> this tends to resolve itself as there is a market opportunity to create a better product
If the market is fair and leveled. Which is not the case without intervention as we know for hundreds of years at this point. And governments clearly started to no intervene even when their own laws would require it.
> which lifted its restrictions
This is categorically not true. Twitter home page is massively censored and coordinated. And this was quite obvious around Charlie Kirk's death, when normalization of racism was heavily promoted, and without a doubt promoted. Not before that, and after that was so obvious that they touched the algorithm for that (I have a far right racist fake account there to monitor this specifically). Also from Musk's own words, when Grok didn't lie for them. And since controversial topics, like racism, alt-right, etc spreads better, "lifting restrictions" mean exactly to form public opinions towards these. The market is not fair even towards ideas for a long time (and probably it was never true).
It's censored and there is a ton of controversial opinions being spread?
Do you see how these two statements are in conflict?
What is being censored? You don't like some speech but that's proof that restrictions on speech have been lifted. Get your narrative consistent at least. There's either vile speech due to lifting speech restrictions or there are still restrictions so these opinions are suppressed.
The charlie kirk stuff wasn't censored. You can still find it there. I see daily conspiracy theories about his wife being involved. Before the acquisition you had a satirical newspaper banned for referring to someone by their biological sex. Do you see the difference?
I guess you could have the opinion that normie moderate speech is censored but thats just silly.
> It's censored and there is a ton of controversial opinions being spread?
> Do you see how these two statements are in conflict?
It's not in conflict. Both can be true at the same time. Also, there is nothing which is not "controversial".
> You don't like some speech but that's proof that restrictions on speech have been lifted.
Still, nothing in conflict. I can have problem with some speech, and I can support full blown free speech at the same time. Also, there is literally nobody who supports uncontrolled free speech. Not even, who lie to themselves that they support that.
> The charlie kirk stuff wasn't censored.
It wasn't "censored" in the sense, that you can find whatever you want. That was true on Twitter always in every single topic, even before Musk. It was censored how you can find it. Which is the case even by government censorship. You can find Mein Kampf even in countries where it's completely banned. You can find weed everywhere, the difference is only how.
I see crazy stuff relating to conspiracy theories about Kirk every day. It's not censored.
If you don't see the contradiction around censorship while seeing a ton of controversial opinions, I don't know how to convince you. It reminds of the quote "It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible."
Maybe this will help, but I know that your cognitive dissonance will find something else:
- There are 100 controversial opinions
- 50 is censored
- you can see 50 all the time
Also, you ignored all of the explanation which explained to you why your “censorship” and mine are different. And make your whole question nonsense. Because you predictably used “leftist”, and I anticipated that the problem is empathy.
??? no you don't, if you disagree with Musk on Twitter your account gets visibility-limited and if you want to use Reddit it's hard to even get an account that's allowed to post anywhere and not shadowbanned
I'm not familiar with what you're talking about. Can you share a real world example of a case like this? You're saying a social media comment about a crime is somehow punished harshly and much harsher than the crime itself?
Are you sure that link's the one you meant to share?
> The former childminder from Northampton, who is married to a Conservative councillor, had posted an abhorrent message on X, calling for people to "set fire" to hotels housing asylum seekers following the murder of three young girls at a dance class in Southport in July 2024.
> Yet the fact both men were able to address a huge crowd in London is perhaps evidence that there is rather more leeway for free speech in this country than those likening the UK to a "tin pot dictatorship" suggest.
The link is far broader than that, but even in this case: there was no threat. No more than a university lecturer tweeting that he wanted a white genocide.
It's a common (and somewhat right-wing) trope, but it's not really true. Thousands of people aren't arrested for "mean comments" or similar. That isn't to say the UK has no problem with the balance of freedom of expression and regulation, but it is nothing like the impression you'd get from some sources. There are some high-profile cases which are commonly misrepresented to support these claims.
It is definitely true. It's "right wing" because the soft power is with the left (or was until maybe very recently) and so only principled people of the left (e.g. Bill Maher) and all the people of the right (either principled on speech or saying things that are more likely to be censored) are going to be talking about it.
I think generally the argument is that these usually aren’t credible threats, they’re hyperbole, and the police are overstepping by arresting people for saying they’ll do something when they have no evidence that that person would actually do that. A free society doesn’t arrest someone for saying “I’m going to burn down so-and-so’s house.” It waits until you actually go to so-and-so’s house with a can of petrol, and then arrests you.
It’s the same problem as amber alerts - the stories you here about are the dramatic stranger danger ones, but the vast majority of the statistics are “boring” custody disputes.
The poster up thread said people were being arrested for "mean tweets" and now you've moved it to "but those death threats weren't serious!" No, the original claim was dishonest bullshit.
I said "regulate the proverbial crack" and gave two concrete examples of things going wrong. At no point did I hint at "stop people from conversing freely".
We regulate the platforms, not the users:
We ban (most? all?) targeted advertising.
If we still have to go further, we force tech giants to publish their recommendation algorithms and aggregated user data (e.g. statistics about time spent on what types of content on the platform by user cohort)
If we still have to go further, we can adapt policy restricting concrete addictive usage-patterns (e.g. the infinite scroll proposal recently discussed here[1])
On an unrelated note: yes, I also don't understand how this incident has to do much with social media bans…
> 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.
We ban targeted ads. Great but then what? My oldest is 17, no targeted ads to him so that means he gets a million political ads. To me, it is just as problematic. I would argue that under 18, there should be zero ads. Yeah I know it will never happen.
I don’t think political ads should be legal. Political information should be freely available to all, including children. But in no way should we be bombarded with the manipulation from whatever political entities have the most cash at hand.
That’s a different claim then, you’re against political ads as a whole, not based on age. The fact that your teenager is 17 doesn’t feel relevant for your position
That's contextual advertising, not targeted as such.
A targeted example for this case would be to switch the digital billboard to tampons because they read your number plates, visually identified the driver is a woman, and your recent texts with a friend mentioned needing some.
What it has to do with social media bans, is that the incident was propagated on social media. The author is arguing that the ability to shame others on the internet, should not be restricted to the old and powerful.
In answer to your first question, what do we do. We regulate the platforms, not the users.
There are loads of things that can be done to reduce online harm, that don't just say "OK, you're over this age, you can experience online harm now".
Platforms can become legally responsible for content, they can be compelled to be transparent about their feed algorithms, enable monitoring via public APIs. We can ban infinite scroll. There are so many policy levers that can be pulled, without getting the ban-hammer out for people of an arbitrary age, and without forcing the rest of us to hand over our IDs to platforms.
Well your ability and areas you can shame people might be limited until you're of age.
I'm not asking "what do we do" but that plenty of people write articles poking holes in current policy or suggested future policy, but lack providing a potential solution.
The author is highlighting an ugly contradiction in a policy that is being rolled out across the anglophone world as we speak. I see plenty less-substantive think pieces on this site, I don't feel it's necessary for every blog post to be accompanied by policy recommendations.
I pulled a few alternatives out there. What's your take?
I still don't see the ugly contradiction. The guy was caught and shunned by the general public regarding their actions, the guy could've used a video camera and it would be no different. Again, just because a group of adults have used a piece of technology incorrectly, doesn't mean the identified risks of those devices for young people people are any different. Just because there are drunks walking around committing offences doesn't mean we should allow underage people drinking.
From my perspective I think we do need to ask social media companies to reduce algorithmic feeds that create echo chambers or as you say provide transparent metrics on this. Social media companies should potentially ban infinite scroll/short form video content, however this is going to be difficult to do if its based on age as it will fall back to the ID/age verification issues.
Feeds should also not show content considered R18+ unless manually hidden, this shouldn't be able to be removed. There is some horrifying content that can pop up on these platforms that young people shouldn't see unsolicited.
Interesting framing in "we should ask" and "social media companies should ban". We have sovereign states that make laws, companies must comply with them if they wish to make money in our markets.
Otherwise, I think my perspective here is very similar. I'd personally emphasise legal publisher responsibility, a repeal of Section 230 in American.
By absolving social media platforms of legal responsibility for the content they publish, we've allowed some very unpleasant scenes to flourish in the most mainstream of places.
Well with you on the issues of addictive design. I'd throw in data harvesting, sketchy advertising, and increasingly platform- level political bias.
Age restrictions simply increase the age at which users are exposed to harms, rather than addressing those harms themselves.
These platforms have become staggeringly wealthy and powerful, it is them what needs to be controlled, not kids.
Section 230 is very important for all website operators. It doesn't just protect big companies. If you repeal it, now you're making every blog owner responsible for whatever some idiot says in the comments section.
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
seems less justifiable as an excuse for platforms that consist primarily of externally created content, have very large amounts of varied content, and select and target specific subsets of that content to present to specific users. It would seem more justifiable if it were random, or not individualized, or chronological.
Aye, it's the curation, innit. If the platform is making opaque decisions on what you see, then it should be accountable for what it's showing you.
I think scale is important here too. If you've got a user-base that's an appreciable proportion of a country's population, you're a utility. My energy supplier has a tiny fraction of the customers of say, Meta, and is subject to considerably stronger oversight.
My proposal for step 1 -- Allow people to "ban themselves" from certain social media for certain period. Every platform/app MUST support the ability to set limits on usage for all time periods (hour/day/week/month) and enforce those. Also allow the user to set blacklist times. Also allow the user to set a "cooldown" period on any blacklist changes.
This is the low-hanging-fruit, for those of us who KNOW it's an addiction and are actively trying to quit, but struggling to limit our usage. I use leechblock NG which is amazing for browser-based sites, but wouldn't really help a kid who's having the isuse on apps.
There are many further steps to take, but I think we should all align on the most obvious ones first and build up from there.
The problem to solve is addiction. When I was a kid I could spend the whole day and week in front of the play station… but my parents thought me that, well, that’s not normal (and ofc sent me to sleep every other night). Why social media or phones is different? Parents need to teach these kind of stuff to their kids. It’s the same for drugs, sex, money or any other thing
> 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.
Do we know this? As far as I can tell, the studies are ambivalent at best. Some kids are damaged, others benefit.
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.
> What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids
Regulate social media if that is the case.
Bans are ineffective anyway - if you doubt that, compare and contrast the outcomes of Prohibition and the War on Drugs, versus regulating Tobacco companies...
> What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids.
IMHO it's not healthy for anyone. From kids, to retired pensioners not knowing what to do with their time, to profesionalls doing linkedin "hacking" and "networking" on twitter, etc.
> I have no idea how an adult filming young girls on a train has anything to do with social media bans.
The article is, I think, making several points at once:
- some of the people involved in creating this new legislation are already responsible for the harms the legislation alleges to mitigate. We've already heard (here on HN at least) that Meta lobbies FOR age restrictions; now with this incident we have a civic leader abusing their position of power and targeting exactly the people this raft of legislation allegedly protect (although it might be stretch to assume this person is involved in bringing in said legislation; they might be quietly avoiding talking about it because they know they're part of the problem). We should be questioning who's responsible for the legislation and inspecting their motivations publicly. We should be questioning their motivations, and challenging the efficacy of the proposed solutions given the background of motivations of those proposing them. We should be challenging the decision-making: where's the evidence the mitigations will work? (and this is all in addition to the perceived harms to all adults from the increased breadth and accuracy of the dragnet surveillance the solutions create).
- we don't need this kind of legislation to help raise reasonably-minded children. We should be targeting the perpetrators of the harm, not targeting near-adults who are (potentially) being harmed. The current legislation is victim-blaming, not prosecuting the perpetrators. The situation described is somewhat allegorical, rather than "here, social media is good"
I think it's also saying this:
- how else are people, adults, near-adults, children, going to learn of, and discuss, situations like the one described, without social media? "The Kids" have been using social media for the last ten years, and many of them are, despite the harms, growing up sane, self-controlled, able to stand up for themselves.
The article is making me reflect on our household's ban on our teen using social media. We don't want them getting wrapped up in constant one-up-ing, gossiping, body-shaming, discrimination, and other social ills that go around, but we are also denying them some ability to discuss these issues, learn about them, find support from peers and experts. (I mean, they can... they can use the wider web and can talk with their parents, friends, and teachers, in person; but those media are slower or more awkward for being "in your face")
Kids need freedom to make their own decisions, without that they won't grow to be self realized adults.
For this specific issue, the solution is simple and straightforward: shaming. None confronted the pervert in the train, because no one knows what is acceptable today and what is not.
Until lately I thought messaging apps like WhatsApp is ok, but this summer my eleven year old niece has been depressed, crying at the summer lake house with extended family because she can see her friends hanging out on WhatsApp. Incredibly toxic. Basically she can't enjoy the adventures we have here because of it. Even a simple thing like group chats completely destroy their brains.
> No need to be a Luddite, but what do kids possibly get out of a phone?
In far more cases than is ideal, the phone gives them an element of freedom/safety from their living situation.
Imagine a kid whose own parents are abusing them, or an LGBT kid growing up in a deeply conservative family, and one day the government suddenly decides you don't deserve being able to connect with support resources...
it’s incredibly simple. put parental controls on the phone. when i was a kid i couldn’t download any apps without my dad’s approval, and none of the major social medias have a functioning web experience on mobile, they just redirect you to the app store page
Then first we need to fix the issues in the parents, especially those with only one kid, reading social media and low rent news sites, who believe their kid is constantly in immortal danger, thereby forcing the phone upon the kid, in an attempt to ease their insecurities
This aspect needs talking about way more especially when the parents don't admit to it and to being the instigator
The question isn't just "what do the kids get out of it", it's also what do the parents: they get surveillance and some kind of reassurance. But at what cost?
Question: aren't you allowed to photograph or film anyone you want in public? Or the target being underage somehow removes this right? I always thought you can film whoever you want, but you can't publish what you filmed in some cases.
It really matters which country you're talking about, because depending on that you'll get answers from "filming in public is effectively forbidden" to "film and publish whatever you want".
Lets say that was true legally, its certainly frowned upon and you will be shamed for being an adult blatantly filming underage girls on a train without their permission or reason.
Which is why others on the train were not happy with it.
There are various limits on this, likely country dependent. And being free from legal sanction doesn't mean being free from public condemnation and shaming.
So, legal limits - if your behaviour constitutes harassment especially if you're targeting certain individuals, then it's likely to be illegal. Or if your behaviour constitutes 'disturbing the peace' in some vague way the police might put a stop to it.
But beyond that you're talking about the law but not everything is about the limits of the law, and the law is only a loose guide on morality. You can behave in a legal manner and still be doing something most people would consider wrong.
If you take your camera and try to record someone's kids up close in the park, you should absolutely expect to be told to GTFO, possibly by a whole gang of people. "Oh but it's in public I'm not breaking any laws, you have no expectation of privacy here" doesn't mean squat. Nor is it OK to film a bunch of girls like a drunken old pervert and try to say "It's not illegal".
I got my first bug bounty at 16. Not having access to compute would've drastically changed the direction of my life. I wouldn't have been able to afford university & would likely be working on a farm right now like my cousins
As a kid I was using my PSP to browse the web at night. Will you also restrict a Nintendo DS, a Switch, and any other device that comes with a web briwser?
Don't your kids go anywhere by themselves? Or do they stay at home / only get ferried by the parents?
A bus-tracking app on my phone completely changed how I interact with public transit, and made it significantly better. I remember waiting for the bus when I was 14, and I would not wish this to anyone.
A maps app is great when you are going to less-familiar places - either into the big city, or into large parks (although not every kid is ready to be hiking in the parks before 16)
I spent all of my childhood with a (large and ugly) digital camera on my belt. Phone is much smaller, and for the kind of pictures I was taking, the lower quality does not matter that much.
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.
Seems wise to experience at least a little bit of “functioning as an adult in the world” independently of phone habits…
It seems like, in this situation, we watch primarily non-phone-enabled virtues save the day: a clear sense of right and wrong, assertiveness, courage, steadiness in a tense situation, an attentive social environment with bystanders who both noticed and backed each other up…
Even having practiced some of those skills in moving through the world, I worry that, if I were a phone-carrying person, I’d be tempted to “just record it and let the internet sort it out.” Which is orthogonal to fixing the wrong in the moment.
The severity depends on where you are, even within a country, but in many places you can't authentically "function as an adult in the world" without a phone, unless you want to roleplay an adult from the previous century.
In some places, payment requires a phone. Tracking unreliable public transit requires a phone. Getting rideshare requires a phone.
The issue probably isn't the phone but letting them outside in the first place.
This is obviously an overstatement. Sure, a phone is convenient, but we managed to function just fine without smartphones. I assure you, it's possible to do all those things without a phone.
We managed without smartphones before smartphones were a requirement for participating in society. That is, if you’re a millennial or older.
We can’t just pretend that it’s possible to live an adult life without one in 2026. In 2008, certainly, but that’s not the world these kids grew up in.
But we’re talking about kids, which is a whole different matter.
Without knowing where GP is posting from, you can't make that claim. We can want and wish it were true, but there exist places where it's no longer possible to do things without a phone because the service requires signing in online, or the form is only available via the website, there is no paper version anymore. Parts of the world are moving on from bits of paper, no matter how much you don't want that to be true. Parts of the world also aren't, we simply don't know where GP is so you can't make that claim.
Personally, I would rather see public resources used to teach parents how to use the existing controls (in iOS and Android) to restrict what their own kids can do on their own smartphone.
However, if a school district wants to restrict the use of smartphones during the school day for all students, I would be OK with that.
>> if a school district wants to restrict the use of smartphones during the school day for all students
Both of my kids went to public school. My sisters kids both went to a private school. The policy was the same at both places. Kids come in the classroom, turn off their phones, put in a pouch at the front of the class. At the end of the class, kids get their phones back.
Apparently since there is little or no time between classes, I guess with the lack of time to be on their phones, in person conversations have increased and more face-to-face interactions are the norm. Its faster and easier to meet someone down the hall then it is to go through the process of texting someone, which is the entire point.
The goal was to create enough friction (psychological or real) so kids simply revert back to just meeting up at a regular spot to catch up, as opposed to constantly being on their phones. The school admins I talked to said its really pushed kids back into communicating like humans. Many have forgone their phones in between classes, except a quick check for emergency purposes, that sort of thing.
He has a Lightphone which he hates. That's how I know it is working. He built a gaming PC last year, so I am aware that Pandora's box is open there. But look, it has been thirteen years of playing whackamole with YouTube. I can't keep him off it. They watch it at school. They give him chromebooks that I have no control over. And the stuff I do have control over the control is tenuous. I have largely given up. He is pretty much grown now. But man, has it felt like gaslighting when people are like, "Do parenting. Use the settings. Get a dumb phone. Problem solved."
> There’s some good stuff on there, just not in the “Shorts” tab.
Why do people get so weird about the shorts tab? There are perfectly good videos in there, they're just tilted weird. You can fit quality content into 3 minutes.
And remember Elsagate? That was entirely landscape videos.
Exactly. Drew Talbot's brilliant "Bistro Huddy" (which anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant whether as a server or in the kitchen can relate to) is done as Youtube shorts because that makes sense for comedy sketches. What exactly is wrong with a short vertical video? Just that it reminds people of Tiktok?
There are good Shorts. One problem is a flick of the thumb scrolls you down to the next, then the next, and many are crap. The uncertainty about whether you're going to see crap or gold is part of what makes recommendation-based infinite scrolling addictive.
And that uncertainty doesn't apply to watching normal videos? I dunno, if shorts gets unreliable because it ran out of the channels I regularly visit then I just leave.
Never done that, muscle memory is simply not there. But then again i dont watch youtube on phone, computer with ublock origin is vastly superior experience.
There is whole world to read and discover before switching to passive videos. Or even spend time here lol
I'm for very restrictive digital device and service use for children and I also think that 16 is roughly the age when most or all of those restrictions can be lifted.
> And of course they need a phone when they go out like these girls.
Do teens need phones? Sure, they need a phone. Arguably any child old enough to know how to make a phone call needs one. But do they need a miniature computer to scroll through AI slop 10+ hours a day?
These aren't the same question. Confusing these two is dangerous.
Kids don't want to call, and parents don't want to receive calls except for critical situations. Only elders and scammers are actually phoning.
> AI slop
Same deal as what the GP is pointing at: you need to train kids to deal with slop, and not have them face it on their own at once at some arbitrary adult age.
My kids call. Only they tend to call through Discord or Whatsapp instead of just using the actual phone, for some reason. But they call, and they pick up when I call them. They also call their friends for gaming.
> Kids don't want to call, and parents don't want to receive calls except for critical situations.
Curious where this idea comes from, most parents I know (including mine) would much rather call than text. Discord and your average x-stack in a game are also a good sign that voice chat isn't really something people of any age are averse to.
Maybe back in some earlier era when we all had so many children that 3 or 4 were basically disposable, stupid parenting methods like "letting them learn to deal with this ruinously dangerous vice on their own" would have worked (or maybe there's a reason no one did that then). But for those of you that have just the one or two, this is well beyond reckless. Nothing I could ever say will persuade you otherwise, and even observation of reality won't help since the aftermath will play out for 50 or more years. Good luck, you'll need it.
This metaphor, while it seems intended to challenge the OP, kinda reinforces it. Many countries and cultures give some limited access to alcohol at a younger age, and the result is generally that they end up having fewer instances of problematic binge drinking when they come of age. A little bit of exposure instead of complete abstention helps people learn to have a healthier relationship than letting them hit 21 and dropping them into the deep end unrestricted.
In Europe, I think it is more common tbh. Even in the UK my dad would let me try making cocktails etc. at the weekend when I was 17.
It meant when I got to university I knew how much I could drink (although as a student I was too poor to drink much anyway haha) whereas there were people drinking like half a bottle of vodka.
I don't drink any alcohol nowadays so it's not like it turned me into an alcoholic either.
Its usually in the UK in my experience to give teenagers wine, beer or cider with meals.
16 year olds can currently have them with a meal in a restaurant or pub. Until a few years ago it was 14.
> It meant when I got to university I knew how much I could drink (although as a student I was too poor to drink much anyway haha) whereas there were people drinking like half a bottle of vodka.
I gave my kids some alcoholic drinks for just that reason.
I think the evidence points the other way. Giving younger people a drink with their meal during adolescence leads to more drinking problems later in life.
As far as I know the evidence points to getting drunk younger leads to more drinking problems later in life. Drinking moderately younger leads to fewer.
It's interesting how many conclusions are being assumed here
In many countries cultures, strict parents/laws are seen as loving and protecting. Being told "don't drink untl you're at least 20" isn't seen as "forbidden fruit" you're being denied.
What countries do you have in mind? I find it hard to believe you can tell teenagers not to do some kind of fun activity based purely on age and cause no significant feelings of forbidden fruit.
16 used to be the minimum drinking age in Netherland, until they raised it to 18. It wouldn't surprise me if there were still countries where it's 16.
But it's not really a fair comparison, because alcohol has a very direct detrimental effect on brain development. Many things can have a detrimental effect, but alcohol always does. Which is probably why they raised the age to 18.
In parts of europe you can legally drink wine and beer at the age of 14-16. In many parts of europe you start drinking alcohol at around 14-15 illegally but socially acceptable to some extent. I started at that age, which is the same age adolescents start going out and dating.
It would be nice to ease people into alcohol over a greater amount of time, but with phones you're using them constantly and "avoid it" or "only have two" are not workable solutions like they are with alcohol.
I appreciate giving another perspective, but alcohol is not a good analogue of phone. There's no need to “learn” how to use alcohol --- one can do without it. Yet, practically speaking, a phone is a necessity.
my apologies for sounding more blunt than im meaning to, but, im not at all sure where i would fall on the idea of banning kids from having social media powered phones, but i know they’re not a “necessity”.
I could have been clearer. A phone is practically a necessity of modern life. Sooner or later people have to use it, unlike alcohol. Whether social media is a necessity is a different question. I bet everyone gets their own dose of it, whether they like it or not.
> A phone is practically a necessity of modern life.
It isn't yet.
> Sooner or later people have to use it, unlike alcohol.
So far I've avoided having a smart phone, I've not had a mobile phone since flip phones - I went off always being contactable about that time, having had bleeding edge sat phones for decades.
I have a land line, an answering machine, travel, purchase, am part of several overlapping businesses and deliver work for clients.
Would you care to elaborate how you don't think a phone is not “practically necessary”?
I have never personally met someone like you. I've never known someone who personally met someone like you either. Theoretically, nothing is a necessity. That's why I wrote “practically”. Practically nobody lives like you do.
I don't have a particular opinion about smartphone/social media ban for minors, but the argument made here is at best a strawman fallacy, there is no law that prevents minors from having a digital camera that can be used to collect evidence or document malicious actions, and they aren't more expensive than phones.
"The kids are alright" is evergreen. So much of the <insert current generation who are teenagers> are doomed rhetoric is pure nonsense, a lot of that rhetoric is on here.
Phones and social media are a completely new type of pacifying and attention stealing threat which we have only just begun to discover the effects of. This is not your standard 'kids are doomed' rhetoric.
No, they're not, and yes, it is. I sincerely hope we do not take phones and other computers from future generations. That would be a terrible thing to do to them.
I very much hope we continue to bring our children up outside of a digital world, encouraging them to interact and learn physically before introducing them to digital devices later in life when they can treat them sensibly as a small part of a healthy and full life.
Giving addictive and attention stealing tech to children from a young age is like giving drugs to rats, they will continue to hit the feeder bar until they effectively kill themselves.
Old style rat drug experiments with rats in a barren cage being administered morphine are barely a good behavioral model for rats, let alone people. This is the aforementioned moral panic language. If the point was that solid it wouldn't need to make this multi-step analogy.
We can agree to disagree, thats fine. You give your kids mobiles and tablets from toddler age and I will bring mine up in the physical world and introduce them to tech gently over time, finally giving them full smart devices later in life when they are responsible enough to manage their own time.
> If the point was that solid it wouldn't need to make this multi-step analogy.
Analogies are always useful to show logical similarities in somebodies thinking pattern. The fact you dismiss them shows you have no interest in thinking about anything other than your own point. Again thats fine, we can agree to disagree. I wonder if you will show me the same courtesy.
You fall back on agree to disagree, twice, here, when you're accusing me of thinking only of my own perspective. It's not courteous to agree with something for the sake of agreement, nor is misrepresenting what we can say from an experiment useful for "showing patterns". You can use analogies without making poorly constructed, sweepingly grandiose ones.
Beyond that, like any parent, you have a lot of latitude in how you choose to treat your children, but I'm not going to agree that isolating them from computers is helping just because you frame it as "gentle", and I'm not going to say that we should replicate that elsewhere.
Well that's the question isn't it, agency but to what extent. It makes sense to allow teenagers to have more agency over themselves than a 10 year old, but clearly there is an argument for limiting their agency on social media platforms.
Just because there are adults that abuse their agency of the use of alcohol (alcoholism) doesn't mean we should remove restrictions on young people.
Just because there are adults with full agency who drive recklessly doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds to drive cars.
The point is very clear to the rest of us. You inserted the word "full" where the author was not talking about full agency. It's hard to believe that you don't follow.
We are arguing over how much agency children should have. The article argues they should have more, the comment you originally responded to said practically definitionally we limit the agency of children. The obvious implied point is that it's not unreasonable to think their phone use may be part of the agency that they are denied, and that would not be a departure from how children are treated.
I know a few upper-crust families, including a hereditary title. They all care about their children, like the majority of human beings. But this blogger doesn't think we hate posh people enough, so necessarily they abuse their young.
It snacks of "jews will eat your baby". It's not the vitriol that offends me, it's the stupidity.
I've known plenty of very rich people and they're just normal people, every bit as capable of loving or abusing their children as anyone. So while I kinda agree with the first half, your comment smacks of knowing less extremely wealthy people and still being at the stage where you're just so happy you bumped into a few and feel the need to glaze them, lacking the outlook and the jadedness available to someone like me (not to mention someone who knows even more rich people, or even is a rich themselves).
I grew up in a listed house with twelve fireplaces and a stable block with coach houses (plural). There were three crown princes in my boarding house at school. My godfather's house is a tourist attraction and my godmother was on the board of ICI. My mother's garden is on the horticultural circuit. My sister got married in Westminster Abbey. One brother used to play polo and the other just made equity partner at deloitte. I can probably get twenty OBEs on the phone. One of my friends has a net worth of €500b, and this year i have declined three invitations from him just to avoid the air travel.
When i was young and everything was black-and-white, i hated all rich people. I chiselled my privilege out of my accent and worked manual jobs. Now i hate the system, and i take the people in the system as i find them. My circle includes people from all walks of life, and I get invited to opera and to warehouse parties alike.
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.
While I wish it wasn't framed in a 'lost revenue' sense, it isn't a bad idea. Would be funny if they were taxed based on how long people use it. At even $0.10 an hour of use, some of these companies would find the costs involved far too high to justify.
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.
I have said it for a long time. Look at the original iPhone release. It was a hyper focused device that was designed to consolidate devices, make using a phone easier so that you could get on with your day.
Once the app store and opened the gate for social media to wonder in, that is when these things got turned into potential addiction machines.
The "addictive" insisting by 2 new ones in short time? Getting bot vibes. "We need to classify social media as an addictive substance" more or less. Is that from someone's e-safety commissioner? Or someone wanting back-pay compo right back to MySpace addiction. An absurd idea.
"Some people can't control themselves around video games therefore video games bad", that's what social media has copped.
"Addictive" might mean a bloody well designed user interface that users like. Making buttons easy to access and responsive feedback and just the right amount of visual cues and spicy labels, all in harmony as designed and delivered via well engineered mechanisms. "Too addictive, you must now jump through regulatory hoops". No!
No, I don't think that it's about buttons and scrolling. It is simply about what the algorithm promotes. If you look at one thing, even if you decide that you don't like it, they show you more to provoke you. The algorithm should be limited to showing followed pages.
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.
Interesting reversal of the "think of the kids" argument, though: think of the kids who could have used their phones to document their mistreatment at the hands of alcoholic perverts.
Reminds me of the "good guys with guns" narrative tbh. Being able to document such transgressions is not enough of an argument to do a mass rollout of ad display technology IMHO.
The ability to film people on their phone is not the same as the ad display technology.
I think the argument upthread about "conflation" has a point, but .. it's social media itself that forces the conflation. You can't just have a social network that lets you communicate with your community, it has to get tied up with international politics and exploitative advertising.
the even more direct analogy is the Arab Spring, where social media and phones were widely advertised as a means to bring evil dictators down, as a democratic, youth empowering anti evil old pervert technology.
The tech industry obviously jumped onto it because it's a rhetorically powerful argument but it tells you very little what the systemic consequences are ten years down the road.
It's still funny how much it's celebrated because it brings down establishments, not realizing it'll also bring down their own. Reminds me of why no one should start biological warfare.
Age 16-17 is very different than Ages 5-10 for kids to carry a device.
The former is no issue. I just don't think the author's take is nuanced as they think.
Kids (Age 5-13) safety is of ultimate importance. Devices, independently are also a major issue in schools. Social media use of bullying also is a major issue. To the point they are banned.
The UK is not proposing disallowing 16-17 year olds (or any children) from carrying smart phones on public transit, though, which makes the entire article fall apart.
The author leaps from a proposed ban on 15 year olds using tiktok to wholesale bans on smartphones.
Removing a means of bullying that leaves a trail is not the same thing as removing bullying. It's just removing undeniable bullying.
If people truly agreed that children needed to be protected from the desires of others, teaching them that a particular religion is the true one would be restricted until they were of an age where they could provide informed consent.
For some, communication devices are the only way to escape that particular abuse.
Forgive me if I am misinterpreting or getting in the way of your primary point -- but I think it is relatively well recognized that, though cyberbullying might not be objectively worse than analog bullying (obviously direct physical abuse/altercations cant happen electronically....yet), the 24/7 pervasiveness, anonymity, lack of emotional feedback for the bully, reach, and permanence of cyberbullying has had a meaningful impact on the state of the bullying game and the impacts it has on children.
That doesn't mean I agree with the general thrust of taking technology away from kids and young adults....I don't. But I do think we should probably understand the bad that we are taking with the good.
I think a lot of people here just don't have kids of a relevant age yet. They assume either the bullying doesn't happen, or it isn't any different than bullying in person, or that it's easy to stop when it happens.
You can just not have phones, but it's socially isolating. You have to frequently audit what's on their phones because they often won't volunteer what's happening. You take them out of one group chat only to have the bullies reappear in another one.
Old fashioned bullying kept regular business hours. This gives them a portal into your home life 24/7, and that's the best case, when you put a ton of effort into managing it.
And if you're not having this problem somehow, you might want to double check and make sure your kid isn't the bully.
> You can just not have phones, but it's socially isolating.
I hear this plenty, but kids are literally forced to go be with their peers (hopefully including some friends) for 6+ hours a day (in my country). Don't they have enough time to arrange their social lives in person?
I seem to recall both of us being children once, although admittedly not at the same time. The research my daughter does as part of her charity work probably counts as well.
Learning about something doesn't invalidate it entirely on that basis alone, just like the experience of one parent doesn't speak for all parents, or those concerned about the impacts of phones on kids (who are future adults).
Removing phones doesn't remove a means of bullying, it removes a magnifier and multiplier of bullying.
There's lots of ways to capture bullying. But it might be hot water right? What if it was a watch with a camera? What if it was a camera alone? :)
Bullying is serious enough it can't be conflated with the desires of device manufacturers and social media platforms to manufacture young consumers of their feeds.
An issue here is the unfiltered internet is not capable of raising children, as much as they want to be exposed to everything, it doesn't work out the same for every child based on a whole host of independent factors than those who take the position above.
Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue. I’ve been bullied before social media was mainstream. A little later in life, when internet as a whole was majorly taking off, it helped me actually socialize. I met people some of whom I’m friends to this day, but more importantly - I could meet people to go out with, to talk to.
Should we ban schools then? Because school grounds are famously place where the most bullying, especially kids 5-13 (which you highlighted yourself), is happening. Or maybe ban real life interactions? Because you can meet someone who will bully you or be of bad influence?
We both know that’s not the right way, just like banning social media is not solving any problems. It’s just a convenient argument to introduce internet-wide surveillance, as well as to take away any autonomy or rights kids may have. Instead of investing in moderation, and actually scrutinizing big tech, which is the real cause of more bullying, shorter attention spans, and whatever else people say is wrong with the kids these days.
> Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue. I’ve been bullied before social media was mainstream.
The differences with bullying via social media are: the difficulty to escape it in space or time as well as its reach. I don't think we can argue that social media is not an issue on these fronts.
> A little later in life, when internet as a whole was majorly taking off, it helped me actually socialize.
I agree, but I also have to wonder if the nature of the Internet has changed to the point where the benefits are secondary to the costs. In the early days, it was far easier to access the positives and far easier to ignore the negatives since we made explicit decisions about where to go. While you can still do that today, by avoiding social media, it is far more difficult. The mainstream has consolidated to the point where you pretty much have to isolate yourself to avoid it. Much of what mainstream social media sites provide is pushed to the user in some for or another. On top of all of that, the online world had far less reach in the past. At least when I was younger, the bullies simply didn't go online and while exploitive people were online there seemed to be far fewer of them.
As for the Internet wide surveillance: I don't think that is the driving force behind the current regulations. We already have Internet wide surveillance. That is why your proposal is all the more important, the bit about moderation and scrutinizing big tech, because we let them get away with far too much.
> The differences with bullying via social media are: the difficulty to escape it in space or time as well as its reach.
Just log off of Instagram / TikTok / wherever. Or block the people bothering you. If anything I'd say digital bullying is easier to escape because unlike school kids aren't required to be on those sites six to eight hours a day, and blocking someone needs a lot less effort and cooperation from adults than reporting them to school authorities.
A large number of youth will do that, but there is also a reason why children and youth are considered a vulnerable population.
I cannot speak too much on youth since most of my experience is with children. While some of them are more than happy to navigate their social lives by choosing who their friends are and ignoring those who cause them grief, where possible (as you suggested, there is the physical proximity in schools to complicate things), a great many more want to belong. They want to belong even where they are unwelcome and the unwelcomeness is manifested as bullying. What little I've seen of teens suggests that much the same does happen, only the bullying is meaner.
And that only addresses bullying. It does not address content directed towards adults, much of which is perfectly fine for younger people to know but they should also learn about it under the guidance of an adult so they don't come to think it is acceptable or the norm. It also fails to address the manipulative nature of some sites, something that they probably haven't learned to recognize never mind how to handle.
Yes, in a sense, you can turn off the problems and a lot of the problems will just go away. I'm not going to say they will disappear completely. Remember, social media has a larger audience and the others in that audience may bring it back to real life. Also remember that the people we are discussing don't always have the wisdom or experience to turn it off. Heck, a lot of adults don't have that wisdom or experience (but, at least for adults, we can claim they ought to know better).
Technologies when not learned by the people to use in proper ways, too often can be used against people by people with vested financial interests.
Social Media worked out that way. So did device addiction.
It's great to find ways to socialize, and those ways existed before, and will also exist after.
The exclusion of current forms of social media and connectivity as default doesn't mean better solutions don't step up.
I'm not really sure of the tying of schools to phone bans in schools. Schools aren't perfect, but they have a legal liability to keep kids safe (or safer). Devices and social media don't.
A large part of this is life coming at parents faster than they can keep up, let alone stay one season ahead of their childs growth. This would probably be a way.
Societally, rules and laws, including public health are a social contract and agreement on how to live together in a tight place.
Inside the home, though, is the opportunity for parents to learn and expose as they wish.
Solving today's social media can solve a ton of problems, or at least provide an impetus for it to improve. Schools are supposed to be safe places for kids, right? And the entire unfiltered outside world was coming into it via device.
For example, one solution is parents getting literate in tech enough to know how to lead young people before this even becomes a conversation. One way to do this is to offer unlimited screen time for creating, and much less for passive consuming. The generation that wants to experience the real world through a little screen has it backwards, and that's coming form the people who built the little digital world too.
I'm not anti-technology for young people at all. I'm anti-addiction and anti-manipultion by unlimited people and parties interested in reaching eyeballs.
Parents, legally, are required to provide a safe and growing environment.
> A large part of this is life coming at parents faster than they can keep up, let alone stay one season ahead of their childs growth.
The amount of administrative tasks, bureaucracy and complexity an adult, let alone a parent, has to navigate on a daily basis has increased 100x since the 70’s. It is very convent for corporations but less convenient for parents. Just look at the amount of legal contract you have to sign relating to data, Eula, etc.
> Parents, legally, are required to provide a safe and growing environment.
True, but be carefull, people might solve the problem in ways you don’t expect.
For example if someone races near a kids playground on electric skateboard at 50 km/h, and authorities keep ignoring the issue, they might just hit an unexpected obstacle
> Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue
Are you sure about that? So far the negatives vastly outweigh the positives. Imagine a statement:
> as a concept there isn’t an issue with a social credit score / great firewall / reeducation camp as long as they are done by a competent well-meaning person
I'm reminded of the way that universally carried high resolution cameras made UFOs and crop circles disappear, but police suddenly became a lot less trustworthy.
The abuse question .. well, "social justice" is a term that starts fights, but there have been a lot of people who've been able to get some sort of justice only because they raised their cause on social media, having been ignored by the authorities. #MeToo is probably the big example, culminating in the Epstein revelations.
Not who you’re responding to, but I also don’t really think the article makes any kind of sensible argument that I can follow. Yes, it’s bad that a creepy drunk man used his phone to take pictures of teenage girls. Yes, it’s commendable that bystanders called him out. Yes, some countries are thinking of curtailing social media access for teenagers. I’m not sure what any of these things have to do with each other but the author presents them as somehow related, without drawing a coherent thread through them.
I don’t agree. Whether or not these girls had phones, or social media, was irrelevant in this case. And I’ve never heard anyone seriously argue that 16-year-olds shouldn’t have phones, or that 16-year-old girls are at fault when an old man secretly makes videos of them. Both these groups seem like imagined bogeymen that the article is railing against.
Perhaps there's stuff going on in the UK that I'm missing but:
- I have not heard of a general cell phone ban for children and youth. They may "ban" the use of phones in schools (in reality: phones must remain in a bag or locker) and parents may choose to forbid their children from having phones (which is difficult to enforce after a certain age), but nothing general.
One may argue that children and youth may use phones to document improper or abusive situations in schools, which certainly can happen, but that is not the dominant use of phones by children and youth in schools and there are other avenues to document such circumstances.
- Most of the regulations we are discussing today are related to access to adult content or sites that are run in an exploitive manner (e.g. "the algorithm"). I have heard of no prohibitions of children and youth accessing sites outside of that context, even though there is plenty of room to question where the boundaries should be.
So I will agree that the author is either misrepresenting or conflating the regulations, to the point where the article is nonsense.
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?
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.
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.
i feel like there's a time and a place to split hairs on whether or not legality clears moral wrong doing, and this is certainly not that time nor place. in what universe are these even remotely equivalent without broad abstractions?
* elite boomer filming underage girls for his own gratification
* bystanders filming a perpetrator mid-act
heather touches on those willing to get hung up on this stretch of an inconsistency and even links her other Darnella test post.
> (if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article)
that is literally the article. she's a tech policy writer critiquing the policy framework.
in general the weird undertones of your comment feel like you're asserting heather is like morally compromised or something and that the article is worth dismissing. if there was some discussion about the actual stuff she's talking about in this article i'd be singing a different tune right now, you know about whether or not under 16 bans punish young people for stinky perf perpetrator behavior... but since there isn't it feels even crazier that you're dotting this with your assessment that heather is somehow being the problematic one here. wat
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.
The political analysis there is completely wrong. How can she blame the "Tatler/Telegraph/Times set" for legislation passed by a Labour government? The opposition to this sort of legislation (e.g. the OSA) has largely come from the right.
> These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults.
Really? I would have said the opposite. Part of the problem is she lumps the affluent and the wealthy together. The affluent professional class go out of their way to encourage independence. They are the people who take gap years to travel, who are pushed to go away to university rather than a local one while living at home (a Scottish "policy wonk" should notice that the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews are full of affluent kids from the South of England).
The story is powerful and i agree with some of the conclusions, but forcing the conclusions to fit narrative that all bad things are the other sides fault is terrible.
I'm with the "This whole article is a non-sequitur" crowd.
The old pervert using his camera shouldn't be doing that. His behaviour was not OK.
Nobody is talking about keeping kids off social media because their behaviour is not OK. They're talking about keeping kids off social media because they believe it's harmful to them, and that the companies designing the products know it's harmful and addictive.
We can disagree about whether or not that's true, or what actions might be helpful (or not), but there is no common thread with the example given.
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
I joking argue that we should cap computer speed at 486 level's. You can still do office stuff, some graphics and audio but you are not running a doom scrolling setup with that kind of limited hardware. You are barely running Doom!
I think smart phones are really cool when they aren't in the attention economy. But high performance but low power draw chips and media accelerators unintentionally allowed for these kind of social media setups to be viable.
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.
Would it not be a better approach to remove any incentive to provide an addictive product. Companies don't do that just to be evil. Evil is just the byproduct of money.
Make it illegal to advertise to anyone under the age of 18. Make it illegal to trade data about anyone under the age of 18.
What incentive would then remain? I don't think they will do it for the long term gains of training behaviour for when they are old enough to exploit. Companies that engage in behaviour like this are notoriously immune to long term ideas.
> I don't think they will do it for the long term gains of training behaviour for when they are old enough to exploit.
They would definitely do that. It is a pretty basic idea to advertise to kids so there will be a customer base in later years. There was related emails leaked too
At the very least I think we should seriously consider taxing advertising.
It’d be almost impossible to pick and choose so just tax all of it. I think the knock on effects would be positive. It’s an almost unmitigated vice at this point and is the main engine behind this stuff.
I agree. Even the platonic ideal of something like Facebook isn't really a problem (assume a Facebook with a chronological feed which shows nothing but what your friends and liked pages have posted, and it'll be a lot less addicting than what we have today, and a lot more social!). It's possible to have a phone and not have any apps on it which are engineered to make you addicted. If the relevant companies behaved themselves, we wouldn't be in this rut (or at least not as deep into it).
> 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.
I say this is a click bait article. The guy is taking a contrarian view on smartphone use by young people, with weak and very subjective arguments.
> the impetus for the most authoritarian internet regulation in the UK, including the <16s ban, has come from the affluent/wealthy/1% elite on the political right wing
Very strong take with no justification at all. What we observe is that many developped countries with different political orientations are currently taking action against harm caused by social media and more generally by excessive screen time. This is not about political right wing.
>It’s easy to understand why: the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. They never have. And they never did themselves,
Really sounds like a frustrated person that projects his own problems on the rest of the world. And totally not relevant to the debate about the impact of social media on teenagers.
Here is something I am not seeing anyone else addressing. Some yonks ago I was going to work by train and I stopped partially as a result of an incident on that train that involved someone recording my rather candid political conversation with a colleague. It is not the social media; tech etiquette needs to be seriously adjusted and while I am willing to give grace as we are trying to figure out proper balance as a society, I am not willing to have my life examined on the interwebz for everyone's amusement.
The kids in that sense, are just a convenient vessel for an argument; the same way they function for the author of that article.
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.
While that is true, the friction to access has been made far too easy. Adding in some inconvenience may actually be a good thing. It also helped that in the print/radio/television period, you couldn't hyper focus content at a specific individual. What was broadcast was free for all to see and critique.
I'm not advocating for a return to that, but that was one of the highlights of the era.
Oh the power may remain, but at least finally the buses and subways will be free of the constant noise of someone blasting short form content or games who doesn't have headphones. I'll take that.
So it's not propagandists that are the problem, but rather the people they target? That's an odd take.
Maybe we should've shown a little more spine when they asked us to build a medium for the strong would use to prey on the weak. Maybe we're the problem.
TFA gives an example where kids are at risk and an old person is misusing a phone. It is clearly not advocating for this scenario to occur more often. Can you show anything else to indicate that the conclusion is "toughen them up"?
> 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.
What offences would those be? It isn’t an offence to record somebody on a train or else the person who recorded the video of the guy also committed an offence (and neither that person nor the guy did).
Didn’t read past that part. Mindless outrage culture is neither intellectually interesting nor healthy to be around.
> This runs against the grain of 2026 tech policy, which decrees that it’s young people who need their behavior censored and constrained, in ways that punish them for the actions of the perpetrator.
I mean social media is simply misanthropic. If humanity had any balls it'd burn these places down. Calling banishment from social media a punishment is a stretch. The point of these decrees has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with persecuting adults for behaving in ways the state doesn't like. The author's read is just weird
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
I agree with your sentiment completely. I think there's nuance that a lot of people don't bother with because of tribalism but your take is the one I most align with in this instance. Children do need protecting, I grew up with the Internet and it made me partly who I am today, but I also recognise it is completely different now. Gore/shock/NSFL websites being linked between friends as pranks are no longer a thing (thankfully), but we have replaced that with garden walls (Facebook, Reddit, YT, etc.) that are much more insidious and have mechanised the harm to children and young people to an unbelievable scale.
The problem is not the ability to communicate, but rather the addiction generated by those algorithms. They should absolutely be regulated, for all ages.
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.
If you're going to frame it that way, let's talk about the Muslim prosecutor that put them away and the Muslim home secretary trying to deport the ringleader.
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.
Social media, as we have it today, is not healthy for anybody. It is bad, truly bad, and the companies responsible know it.
You can't lace beer with crack and sell it. Not to a 12yo, not to a 50yo. Regulate the proverbial crack, then we see if further regulations are required.
Earlier this year (0):
> “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,”
From 9 years ago (1):
> Facebook showed advertisers how it has the capacity to identify when teenagers feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”
0 - https://www.biometricupdate.com/202602/meta-plans-launch-of-...
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/01/facebook-...
Thank you, it's been infuriating reading these social media bans for children, as if when kids suddenly turn 16 or 18 or whatever magical nimber the courts come up with, they are suddenly immune to the psychological tricks from multi million dollar companies hiring the best psychologists with no morals money can buy.
Social media needs to be heavily regulated to the point where it's safe for everyone, or banned entirely. I don't understand why there's this belief it should have a right to exist when basically everyone agrees it's a net negative to society.
I don't think there is that agreement that it is in total a net negative to society.
That said, with bans upcoming or in force in a lot places, what measures should we monitor to see improvements in wellbeing etc. (screen time isn't one there, I'd say)? What do we do if those do not go up noticably?
I agree that the positive effects of Social Media is understated, and probably on purpose.
Social Media allowed ordinary people to challenge on a global scale the oficially-sanctioned narrative. A generation has already grown with full distrust on what they learn from traditional media.
With that picture, addressing the (undeniable) negative effects of Social Media is only the sales pitch for introducing new legislation. The true goal of the legislation however is not to "save the children", but rather to ensure that the next generations will be obedient and meek.
> Social Media allowed ordinary people to challenge on a global scale the oficially-sanctioned narrative.
Hasn't been true for a while. Now it grants people with money and state actors unprecedented control over what ordinary people are allowed to see and mold them to desired narratives.
Yeah it allowed them to challenge traditional narratives like the earth is not flat and getting the measles vaccine is a good thing.
For starters, what's "social media"? It's kind of a undefinable phrase. Obviously Facebook and Instagram are agreed to be "social media".But is Youtube social media? How about HN? Or any website with a comment section?
Or WhatsApp? Or Matrix? Or SMS? Or the telephone network? Or email? Or Google Docs?
I’d start with “platform on which it’s possible to become an Influencer” and work backwards.
I'd argue that generally speaking, the problematic social media tend to be ad-supported websites that focus on user-generated content.
so Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit are all social-media, because all are ad-supported, and all are focused on user-generated content. HN is focused on user-generated content, but not ad-supported (okay, technically HN is 'advertising for YC', but in practice, the site isn't optimized to get you doom-scrolling so you click on more ads), and a website with a comment section, if it's like a blog or something where the majority of the content is generated by the website owner, isn't focused on user-generated content.
The combination of user-generated content + advertising, however, seems to create websites that will try to get their users addicted to the site, which can harm the lives of their users.
Some nitpicker will probably come with "and what about...??" because we are on HN but I think you basically nailed the definition.
And yes, they are toxic. And yes, just as other toxic products (i.e. cigarettes or alcohol) there should be an ongoing discussion on its regulation for both adults and teenagers. Even if it's not 100% enforceable.
The problem is capitalist companies using heavily gamified psychology to prey on people.
Mastodon doesn't have this problem.
Pixelfed doesn't have this problem.
Lemmy doesn't have this problem.
Peertube doesn't have this problem.
But "social media laws" would hit all of these as well.
They are fundamentally different because they are not centralized and, if they are going to be centralized at some point, they will need to find a revenue stream because giving access for free to the whole world, literally, is technically impossible.
You basically restated that its all about profit, and centralization.
> giving access for free to the whole world, literally, is technically impossible.
Again, this is what Mastodon is doing. This is also how email works.
And its not technically impossible. Its impossible when you have investors who demand 30x growth at all costs.
Its a capitalism issue, with game theory pushing worse and worse solutions to extract smaller percentages of profit.
But email is not centralized, and it grew when Internet was really different. Mastodon - which was born in this new Internet - is used by a very small fraction of Twitter/IG/TikTok/Facebook users. I mean, TikTok and Mastodon started both in 2016 and see the difference now...
> But email is not centralized, and it grew when Internet was really different. Mastodon - which was born in this new Internet - is used by a very small fraction of Twitter/IG/TikTok/Facebook users. I mean, TikTok and Mastodon started both in 2016 and see the difference now...
Email and mastodon and pixelfed and peertube are all federated. Everyone can run their own server, pay others, or join others.
Federated services can still work today.
And yes Tiktok started in 2016 along with Mastodon. Ok. Mastodon's success isnt bound up in venture capitalism or hockeystick growth or 100x returns. Its completely organic growth that doesnt have anything to do with money. People share and talk about stuff all the time, and there's no profit motive in nearly anything. No advertisements, no upsells.
And enshittification and extractive "growth" applies strongly to Tiktok, and that smell pervades everything about it. Advertisements, making usage worse, worse payouts to user/advertiser/influencer. Everyones there for the views and the quick dollars. But they attract more people BECAUSE of the predatory pirahna-dollar water, and the hopes of making it big.
irc doesn't have this problem
Ignoring the capitalism and the money, those still can have the bad effects of social media, just perhaps not amplified for money extraction.
When I had to fill up the ESTA form to enter the US, this is what was in the "social media" drop down list:
- ASKfm
- Facebook
- Flickr
- GitHub
- Google+
- Instagram
- JustPaste.it
- LinkedIn
- Tumblr
- Twitter
- Vine
- VKontakte (VK)
- YouTube
This is obviously outdated but it can give an idea.
Many things are harmful for everyone, yet we only ban them for children because banning them for everyone would create huge uproar. Make tobacco illegal and then we can talk about social media.
Case in point. There is no chance tobacco would be declared legal if it was invented today. Don't you agree?
How do you reconcile this idea with the fact that marijuana is being legalized all over the place?
1. Marijuana was not invented today. 2. Marijuana is not tobacco.
Marijuana is not a recent invention
Tobacco is legal because of large numbers of addicts which would create a huge market for illegal supplies. The UK plans to phase out tobacco by raising the age at which it can be legally bought every year.
In any case, this is whataboutery. There are lots of harmful things that adults are allowed, but lots that are banned for everyone. There are lots of things that cannot be sold without meeting safety standards (cars, electricals), or that are only sold subject strict controls (prescription drugs, guns). We do not allow adults to have whatever they want.
> Thank you, it's been infuriating reading these social media bans for children, as if when kids suddenly turn 16 or 18 or whatever magical nimber the courts come up with, they are suddenly immune to the psychological tricks from multi million dollar companies hiring the best psychologists with no morals money can buy.
This is sort of true, but there is definitely a scale of development that means the most harm will be done the earlier you start. Same with access to pornography. People's brains don't suddenly become immune to it at 18, it's just that that's the age of legal responsibility that ties in with other things.
Men who turn 18 don't suddenly become disposable meat-based gun-holders in times of war, and yet we still treat them that way.
A concrete example is the annulation of the 2024 Romanian elections. It probably happened because a certain candidate was able to manipulate the TikTok algorithm using (undeclared) paid influencers and spam.
Really bad example. From the Wikipedia article:
“ No evidence established direct connections between Georgescu's campaign and Russian state actors. There were only assertions that there must have been due to his rapid rise on social media”
And:
the "National Liberal Party paid for a campaign on TikTok that ended up favoring ... Georgescu" and not Russia as previously presented to the Constitutional Court.
Also:
On 28 April 2025, right-wing conservative Hungarian think-tank Mathias Corvinus Collegium filed a complaint with the European Ombudsman because the European Commission denied access to the documents containing information on the EU's DSA proceedings in the case.
That’s not something you would expect from a proper investigation. The whole thing is a mess and what we heard on the news at the time is essentially a made up story.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusations_of_Russian_interfe...
Not a good counterexample either. The link to Russian intelligence services may not be proven, but nobody seems to dispute that there were paid influencers? Also that this was not declared anywhere and the money was at best grey in origin?
In events like these it can be useful to operate on the systems thinking maxim and strictly look at who benefited, as this is interesting in itself without entertaining the suggestion that they engaged in anything illegal.
When it comes to social media in politics, I believe the burden of proof is on those who claim a net benfit. Centralization of traditional media is generally regarded as bad for open democracies, and the ultimate owners of almost all social media globally can be counted on one hand with fingers to spare.
> The link to Russian intelligence services may not be proven, but nobody seems to dispute that there were paid influencers?
As the quotes I included say, there was no evidence that Russia was behind the interference. They did track who paid for Tiktok "influencers" but it was ended up at "the National Liberal Party" - which means it was not foreign interference as pretty much all media in the world reported. If you wan to claim there was without anyone disputing it, you absolutely should provide evidence!
I think the only irregularity was that the Tiktok paid influencers were not disclosed properly. But the same has happened in so many other countries (even in Sweden where I am - the biggest party had to go through a huge scandal about doing just that) without ending up nullifying the result of elections. Of course, if they did not like the results enough, I'm sure similar shenanigans would've been utilized.
The problem with all these is that the mythos of democracy depends on pretending that individuals and the people at large are making intelligent decisions based on available true information - instead of what it really is.
Just saying "regulate" it is not an answer and won't give you the results you think.
What you'll get is restrictions on speech. UK arrests thousands every year for what essentially amounts to mean tweets. There have been people that comment publicly on horrendous crimes that get harsher sentences than those that commit the crimes.
At any point in time politicians could have enforced existing terms of service violations like kids must be 13 or older. But they choose to look the other way and target only things that's a threat to their political future.
Social media helps organization and political action. Maybe you don't like the outcome at this point in time but it's a powerful weapon against those in power. It's no wonder politicians will try to neuter it. But it will not help anyone but themselves.
Currently, the fact that these large platforms can block you and they block you randomly (which is the case of Reddit for me, because I dared to use privacy protecting extensions when I commented on a subreddit to which I wasn’t subscribed; Instagram permanently blocked me because I used VPN when I wanted to login) is way larger restriction on my speech than removing these harmful platforms completely. Currently, I’m not allowed to react to others at all on some of these platforms. Even TV is better, because there is contact information for all of them.
Sure there was basically a cartel in social media. You saw coordinated censorship campaigns to ban the former president of the United States for example. But I wouldn't discount the amount of political interference there as well. The last administration admitted to flagging individual posts for the social media companies.
But it's true there is a lot of coordinated censorship even without state interference. But this tends to resolve itself as there is a market opportunity to create a better product. This coordination and censorship campaign has led to the acquisition of Twitter, which lifted its restrictions and other companies more or less followed suit because an open platform is obviously better for most people. And you had offshoots like Bluesky that had the old centralized censorious pre twitter acquisition policies, and things work out in the long run
https://substack.com/@mleverything/p-41310456
> this tends to resolve itself as there is a market opportunity to create a better product
If the market is fair and leveled. Which is not the case without intervention as we know for hundreds of years at this point. And governments clearly started to no intervene even when their own laws would require it.
> which lifted its restrictions
This is categorically not true. Twitter home page is massively censored and coordinated. And this was quite obvious around Charlie Kirk's death, when normalization of racism was heavily promoted, and without a doubt promoted. Not before that, and after that was so obvious that they touched the algorithm for that (I have a far right racist fake account there to monitor this specifically). Also from Musk's own words, when Grok didn't lie for them. And since controversial topics, like racism, alt-right, etc spreads better, "lifting restrictions" mean exactly to form public opinions towards these. The market is not fair even towards ideas for a long time (and probably it was never true).
It's censored and there is a ton of controversial opinions being spread?
Do you see how these two statements are in conflict?
What is being censored? You don't like some speech but that's proof that restrictions on speech have been lifted. Get your narrative consistent at least. There's either vile speech due to lifting speech restrictions or there are still restrictions so these opinions are suppressed.
The charlie kirk stuff wasn't censored. You can still find it there. I see daily conspiracy theories about his wife being involved. Before the acquisition you had a satirical newspaper banned for referring to someone by their biological sex. Do you see the difference?
I guess you could have the opinion that normie moderate speech is censored but thats just silly.
> It's censored and there is a ton of controversial opinions being spread?
> Do you see how these two statements are in conflict?
It's not in conflict. Both can be true at the same time. Also, there is nothing which is not "controversial".
> You don't like some speech but that's proof that restrictions on speech have been lifted.
Still, nothing in conflict. I can have problem with some speech, and I can support full blown free speech at the same time. Also, there is literally nobody who supports uncontrolled free speech. Not even, who lie to themselves that they support that.
> The charlie kirk stuff wasn't censored.
It wasn't "censored" in the sense, that you can find whatever you want. That was true on Twitter always in every single topic, even before Musk. It was censored how you can find it. Which is the case even by government censorship. You can find Mein Kampf even in countries where it's completely banned. You can find weed everywhere, the difference is only how.
I see crazy stuff relating to conspiracy theories about Kirk every day. It's not censored.
If you don't see the contradiction around censorship while seeing a ton of controversial opinions, I don't know how to convince you. It reminds of the quote "It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible."
Maybe this will help, but I know that your cognitive dissonance will find something else:
- There are 100 controversial opinions - 50 is censored - you can see 50 all the time
Also, you ignored all of the explanation which explained to you why your “censorship” and mine are different. And make your whole question nonsense. Because you predictably used “leftist”, and I anticipated that the problem is empathy.
If it tends to resolve itself then why has it got worse not better? reality seems to contradict your position.
How has it gotten worse? You have a lot more freedom on all social media platforms than you did 4 years ago.
What's gotten worse in some countries is the government censorship which I'm against.
??? no you don't, if you disagree with Musk on Twitter your account gets visibility-limited and if you want to use Reddit it's hard to even get an account that's allowed to post anywhere and not shadowbanned
I get a ton of ppl on my feed that I do not follow that say awful things about Musk daily. What are you talking about?
I'm not familiar with what you're talking about. Can you share a real world example of a case like this? You're saying a social media comment about a crime is somehow punished harshly and much harsher than the crime itself?
Here's an example of Westmidlands police bragging about arresting a 12 year old for racist posts.
There are 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages. It's not heavily reported for some reason but it's very real.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
https://x.com/WMPolice/status/1282627004018364416
If you walk through a town shouting racist stuff you'll get arrested too, and rightly so.
The kid is 12 years old. If he ran around shouting racist stuff in town, that should be addressed by his parents, not by an arrest.
Here's an overview of the situation: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62ln7mzd5ro
Are you sure that link's the one you meant to share?
> The former childminder from Northampton, who is married to a Conservative councillor, had posted an abhorrent message on X, calling for people to "set fire" to hotels housing asylum seekers following the murder of three young girls at a dance class in Southport in July 2024.
> Yet the fact both men were able to address a huge crowd in London is perhaps evidence that there is rather more leeway for free speech in this country than those likening the UK to a "tin pot dictatorship" suggest.
Seems fine?
> Are you sure that link's the one you meant to share?
Sorry, I'm confused by the question.
The link seems to make the opposite point you intended.
Criminal threats with appropriate punishment, and regular old hateful speech is ongoing.
The link is far broader than that, but even in this case: there was no threat. No more than a university lecturer tweeting that he wanted a white genocide.
I'm sorry, but if you think public calls to burn down occupied buildings during unrest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_riots) aren't a threat, I'm not sure there's a discussion to be had here.
So people are getting arrested for tweeting they want to set fire to a hotel full of people?
Seems good to me
It's a common (and somewhat right-wing) trope, but it's not really true. Thousands of people aren't arrested for "mean comments" or similar. That isn't to say the UK has no problem with the balance of freedom of expression and regulation, but it is nothing like the impression you'd get from some sources. There are some high-profile cases which are commonly misrepresented to support these claims.
It is definitely true. It's "right wing" because the soft power is with the left (or was until maybe very recently) and so only principled people of the left (e.g. Bill Maher) and all the people of the right (either principled on speech or saying things that are more likely to be censored) are going to be talking about it.
> Thousands of people aren't arrested for "mean comments" or similar
What are they arrested for, or are you disputing the number?
Lucy Connolly was arrested for threatening to kill a thousand people, for example.
I think generally the argument is that these usually aren’t credible threats, they’re hyperbole, and the police are overstepping by arresting people for saying they’ll do something when they have no evidence that that person would actually do that. A free society doesn’t arrest someone for saying “I’m going to burn down so-and-so’s house.” It waits until you actually go to so-and-so’s house with a can of petrol, and then arrests you.
> A free society doesn’t arrest someone for saying “I’m going to burn down so-and-so’s house.”
I feel like it's a significantly freer society when others can't threaten to murder me without consequences.
Sending death threats has never been legal.
The statical lie with the UK numbers is the vast majority of cases are about the use of messaging services in domestic violence cases.
It’s the same problem as amber alerts - the stories you here about are the dramatic stranger danger ones, but the vast majority of the statistics are “boring” custody disputes.
The poster up thread said people were being arrested for "mean tweets" and now you've moved it to "but those death threats weren't serious!" No, the original claim was dishonest bullshit.
> UK arrests thousands every year for what essentially amounts to mean tweets.
Somebody is peddling lies in your direction. These claims don’t hold up to any sort of cursory examination.
Regulate the algorithmic feeds and similar non opinionated regulations rather than content itself.
I have no idea what you're on about.
I said "regulate the proverbial crack" and gave two concrete examples of things going wrong. At no point did I hint at "stop people from conversing freely".
Regulating access to speech platforms is a difference of degree, not a difference of kind, from regulating speech.
Requiring universal access is a form of regulation, and the OP asking for regulating the platform, not the access.
We imprisoned kids for making an offensive video of a burning cardboard xopy of grenfell tower
But we gave legal immunity to the corporate executives that forged fire testing certificates and caused the actual fire that killed over 100 people
And when I say we have Russia-style corruption no one believes me
> Social media, as we have it today, is not healthy for anybody.
Millions of employed might disagree.
I'm trying to work out what this means. The "millions" employed at Meta?
> Social media, as we have it today, is not healthy for anybody
Define social media, specifically name the sites you're talking about. And explicitly state the ill health that follows when you consume social media
We regulate the platforms, not the users: We ban (most? all?) targeted advertising. If we still have to go further, we force tech giants to publish their recommendation algorithms and aggregated user data (e.g. statistics about time spent on what types of content on the platform by user cohort) If we still have to go further, we can adapt policy restricting concrete addictive usage-patterns (e.g. the infinite scroll proposal recently discussed here[1])
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48897104
On an unrelated note: yes, I also don't understand how this incident has to do much with social media bans…
> 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.
also agree wholeheartedly.
We ban targeted ads. Great but then what? My oldest is 17, no targeted ads to him so that means he gets a million political ads. To me, it is just as problematic. I would argue that under 18, there should be zero ads. Yeah I know it will never happen.
Ban political ads? That one seems like an immediate win anyways.
You think a 17 years old should be protected from political content? They are pretty much an adult and are able to vote in some places…
I don’t think political ads should be legal. Political information should be freely available to all, including children. But in no way should we be bombarded with the manipulation from whatever political entities have the most cash at hand.
That’s a different claim then, you’re against political ads as a whole, not based on age. The fact that your teenager is 17 doesn’t feel relevant for your position
I suspect that political ands anre more about laundering money from campaigns to friends than about actually affecting the election.
I'm extremely against ads, so I sympathize greatly with your sentiment. But what does it mean to "ban targeted advertising"?
Will we ban posters along highways that advertise car wreck lawyers? Where do you draw that line?
That's contextual advertising, not targeted as such.
A targeted example for this case would be to switch the digital billboard to tampons because they read your number plates, visually identified the driver is a woman, and your recent texts with a friend mentioned needing some.
> Will we ban posters along highways
Quite a few places around the world have already done so, on the basis that they are an eyesore. Where there's a will there's a way.
That is called contextual advertising, not targeted
What it has to do with social media bans, is that the incident was propagated on social media. The author is arguing that the ability to shame others on the internet, should not be restricted to the old and powerful.
In answer to your first question, what do we do. We regulate the platforms, not the users.
There are loads of things that can be done to reduce online harm, that don't just say "OK, you're over this age, you can experience online harm now".
Platforms can become legally responsible for content, they can be compelled to be transparent about their feed algorithms, enable monitoring via public APIs. We can ban infinite scroll. There are so many policy levers that can be pulled, without getting the ban-hammer out for people of an arbitrary age, and without forcing the rest of us to hand over our IDs to platforms.
Well your ability and areas you can shame people might be limited until you're of age.
I'm not asking "what do we do" but that plenty of people write articles poking holes in current policy or suggested future policy, but lack providing a potential solution.
The author is highlighting an ugly contradiction in a policy that is being rolled out across the anglophone world as we speak. I see plenty less-substantive think pieces on this site, I don't feel it's necessary for every blog post to be accompanied by policy recommendations.
I pulled a few alternatives out there. What's your take?
I still don't see the ugly contradiction. The guy was caught and shunned by the general public regarding their actions, the guy could've used a video camera and it would be no different. Again, just because a group of adults have used a piece of technology incorrectly, doesn't mean the identified risks of those devices for young people people are any different. Just because there are drunks walking around committing offences doesn't mean we should allow underage people drinking.
From my perspective I think we do need to ask social media companies to reduce algorithmic feeds that create echo chambers or as you say provide transparent metrics on this. Social media companies should potentially ban infinite scroll/short form video content, however this is going to be difficult to do if its based on age as it will fall back to the ID/age verification issues.
Feeds should also not show content considered R18+ unless manually hidden, this shouldn't be able to be removed. There is some horrifying content that can pop up on these platforms that young people shouldn't see unsolicited.
Interesting framing in "we should ask" and "social media companies should ban". We have sovereign states that make laws, companies must comply with them if they wish to make money in our markets.
Otherwise, I think my perspective here is very similar. I'd personally emphasise legal publisher responsibility, a repeal of Section 230 in American.
By absolving social media platforms of legal responsibility for the content they publish, we've allowed some very unpleasant scenes to flourish in the most mainstream of places.
Well with you on the issues of addictive design. I'd throw in data harvesting, sketchy advertising, and increasingly platform- level political bias.
Age restrictions simply increase the age at which users are exposed to harms, rather than addressing those harms themselves.
These platforms have become staggeringly wealthy and powerful, it is them what needs to be controlled, not kids.
Section 230 is very important for all website operators. It doesn't just protect big companies. If you repeal it, now you're making every blog owner responsible for whatever some idiot says in the comments section.
As noted elsewhere in this thread, scale is important: I think it's entirely reasonable to have different rules for platforms with millions of users.
To me Section 230
seems less justifiable as an excuse for platforms that consist primarily of externally created content, have very large amounts of varied content, and select and target specific subsets of that content to present to specific users. It would seem more justifiable if it were random, or not individualized, or chronological.Aye, it's the curation, innit. If the platform is making opaque decisions on what you see, then it should be accountable for what it's showing you.
I think scale is important here too. If you've got a user-base that's an appreciable proportion of a country's population, you're a utility. My energy supplier has a tiny fraction of the customers of say, Meta, and is subject to considerably stronger oversight.
My proposal for step 1 -- Allow people to "ban themselves" from certain social media for certain period. Every platform/app MUST support the ability to set limits on usage for all time periods (hour/day/week/month) and enforce those. Also allow the user to set blacklist times. Also allow the user to set a "cooldown" period on any blacklist changes.
This is the low-hanging-fruit, for those of us who KNOW it's an addiction and are actively trying to quit, but struggling to limit our usage. I use leechblock NG which is amazing for browser-based sites, but wouldn't really help a kid who's having the isuse on apps.
There are many further steps to take, but I think we should all align on the most obvious ones first and build up from there.
The problem to solve is addiction. When I was a kid I could spend the whole day and week in front of the play station… but my parents thought me that, well, that’s not normal (and ofc sent me to sleep every other night). Why social media or phones is different? Parents need to teach these kind of stuff to their kids. It’s the same for drugs, sex, money or any other thing
> 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.
Do we know this? As far as I can tell, the studies are ambivalent at best. Some kids are damaged, others benefit.
The current consensus is that the effects of social media on mental health are in between minimally detrimental to non-existent.
Probably the same way we know most things. We know it affects us and we extrapolate.
Stop calling it social media.
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.
> What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids
Regulate social media if that is the case.
Bans are ineffective anyway - if you doubt that, compare and contrast the outcomes of Prohibition and the War on Drugs, versus regulating Tobacco companies...
> What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids.
IMHO it's not healthy for anyone. From kids, to retired pensioners not knowing what to do with their time, to profesionalls doing linkedin "hacking" and "networking" on twitter, etc.
> I have no idea how an adult filming young girls on a train has anything to do with social media bans.
The article is, I think, making several points at once:
- some of the people involved in creating this new legislation are already responsible for the harms the legislation alleges to mitigate. We've already heard (here on HN at least) that Meta lobbies FOR age restrictions; now with this incident we have a civic leader abusing their position of power and targeting exactly the people this raft of legislation allegedly protect (although it might be stretch to assume this person is involved in bringing in said legislation; they might be quietly avoiding talking about it because they know they're part of the problem). We should be questioning who's responsible for the legislation and inspecting their motivations publicly. We should be questioning their motivations, and challenging the efficacy of the proposed solutions given the background of motivations of those proposing them. We should be challenging the decision-making: where's the evidence the mitigations will work? (and this is all in addition to the perceived harms to all adults from the increased breadth and accuracy of the dragnet surveillance the solutions create).
- we don't need this kind of legislation to help raise reasonably-minded children. We should be targeting the perpetrators of the harm, not targeting near-adults who are (potentially) being harmed. The current legislation is victim-blaming, not prosecuting the perpetrators. The situation described is somewhat allegorical, rather than "here, social media is good"
I think it's also saying this:
- how else are people, adults, near-adults, children, going to learn of, and discuss, situations like the one described, without social media? "The Kids" have been using social media for the last ten years, and many of them are, despite the harms, growing up sane, self-controlled, able to stand up for themselves.
The article is making me reflect on our household's ban on our teen using social media. We don't want them getting wrapped up in constant one-up-ing, gossiping, body-shaming, discrimination, and other social ills that go around, but we are also denying them some ability to discuss these issues, learn about them, find support from peers and experts. (I mean, they can... they can use the wider web and can talk with their parents, friends, and teachers, in person; but those media are slower or more awkward for being "in your face")
> What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids Who said we know?
Kids need freedom to make their own decisions, without that they won't grow to be self realized adults.
For this specific issue, the solution is simple and straightforward: shaming. None confronted the pervert in the train, because no one knows what is acceptable today and what is not.
Start by putting the people making money off it in prison.
These are capital crimes against humanity. The notion that we just have to accept it is absurdity.
Kids shouldn't have smartphones until much later, like late teenage years.
A flip phone for kids who are out of the house regularly with some contacts is fine.
No need to be a Luddite, but what do kids possibly get out of a phone? If I didn't have work and to chauffeur people around, id toss mine too.
Until lately I thought messaging apps like WhatsApp is ok, but this summer my eleven year old niece has been depressed, crying at the summer lake house with extended family because she can see her friends hanging out on WhatsApp. Incredibly toxic. Basically she can't enjoy the adventures we have here because of it. Even a simple thing like group chats completely destroy their brains.
You don't need to convince me, my point was that they can have them but with limited capabilities, like only being able to SMS and call.
> No need to be a Luddite, but what do kids possibly get out of a phone?
In far more cases than is ideal, the phone gives them an element of freedom/safety from their living situation.
Imagine a kid whose own parents are abusing them, or an LGBT kid growing up in a deeply conservative family, and one day the government suddenly decides you don't deserve being able to connect with support resources...
Based on what? Your personal feelings? You think kids don’t get anything from online content and interactions with other kids via their phone?
I'm not 100% sure yet but I think an iPhone can be configured such that toxic social media apps cannot be used.
it’s incredibly simple. put parental controls on the phone. when i was a kid i couldn’t download any apps without my dad’s approval, and none of the major social medias have a functioning web experience on mobile, they just redirect you to the app store page
Then first we need to fix the issues in the parents, especially those with only one kid, reading social media and low rent news sites, who believe their kid is constantly in immortal danger, thereby forcing the phone upon the kid, in an attempt to ease their insecurities
This aspect needs talking about way more especially when the parents don't admit to it and to being the instigator
The question isn't just "what do the kids get out of it", it's also what do the parents: they get surveillance and some kind of reassurance. But at what cost?
> Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones
I am.
Question: aren't you allowed to photograph or film anyone you want in public? Or the target being underage somehow removes this right? I always thought you can film whoever you want, but you can't publish what you filmed in some cases.
It really matters which country you're talking about, because depending on that you'll get answers from "filming in public is effectively forbidden" to "film and publish whatever you want".
There's a difference between legal and ethical.
Lets say that was true legally, its certainly frowned upon and you will be shamed for being an adult blatantly filming underage girls on a train without their permission or reason.
Which is why others on the train were not happy with it.
There are various limits on this, likely country dependent. And being free from legal sanction doesn't mean being free from public condemnation and shaming.
So, legal limits - if your behaviour constitutes harassment especially if you're targeting certain individuals, then it's likely to be illegal. Or if your behaviour constitutes 'disturbing the peace' in some vague way the police might put a stop to it.
But beyond that you're talking about the law but not everything is about the limits of the law, and the law is only a loose guide on morality. You can behave in a legal manner and still be doing something most people would consider wrong.
If you take your camera and try to record someone's kids up close in the park, you should absolutely expect to be told to GTFO, possibly by a whole gang of people. "Oh but it's in public I'm not breaking any laws, you have no expectation of privacy here" doesn't mean squat. Nor is it OK to film a bunch of girls like a drunken old pervert and try to say "It's not illegal".
> Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones
I'll say it. Kids shouldn't have phones until the age of 16.
I got my first bug bounty at 16. Not having access to compute would've drastically changed the direction of my life. I wouldn't have been able to afford university & would likely be working on a farm right now like my cousins
Well they didn’t say 16 years olds should not having access to compute so your point is irrelevant.
Pretty sure that to get a bug bounty one needs to study things first, and this takes quite a bit of time.
Access to a desktop computer vs a smartphone that they bring to bed with TikTok on it are different though. What was your bug bounty for?
As a kid I was using my PSP to browse the web at night. Will you also restrict a Nintendo DS, a Switch, and any other device that comes with a web briwser?
AFAIK a nontrivial (5-10%?) fraction of population own a smartphone without any bigger computing device.
I would doubt many of them are using those smartphones to collect bug bounties.
The smartphone free childhood movement is explicitly saying children shouldn't have phones (until 14). I'm broadly with them although with nuance.
Don't your kids go anywhere by themselves? Or do they stay at home / only get ferried by the parents?
A bus-tracking app on my phone completely changed how I interact with public transit, and made it significantly better. I remember waiting for the bus when I was 14, and I would not wish this to anyone.
A maps app is great when you are going to less-familiar places - either into the big city, or into large parks (although not every kid is ready to be hiking in the parks before 16)
I spent all of my childhood with a (large and ugly) digital camera on my belt. Phone is much smaller, and for the kind of pictures I was taking, the lower quality does not matter that much.
Not unconditionally, but some truly benefit from them, if the parents teach them not to use social media in a harmful way.
Limited, locked-down smart watches is what most kids need.
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.
Attention economy is a red herring. HN shows that you don't need to do much to be more addictive than TikTok. It's human nature.
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
You just need easy access to an unpredictable reward. Humans or other animals will pull the lever as much as possible to try to catch a high reward.
FTA: "essentially punishing them for the sins of Big Tech"
> Attention economy of social media is not
Because of chungus memes? I think you might be over reacting there bro
All popular systems with negative impacts will always have a claim to virtue.
An extreme example, all genocides are done by people who want to set the world right. It just how they see right is warped.
> all genocides are done by people who want to set the world right
heh. no.
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.
Seems wise to experience at least a little bit of “functioning as an adult in the world” independently of phone habits…
It seems like, in this situation, we watch primarily non-phone-enabled virtues save the day: a clear sense of right and wrong, assertiveness, courage, steadiness in a tense situation, an attentive social environment with bystanders who both noticed and backed each other up…
Even having practiced some of those skills in moving through the world, I worry that, if I were a phone-carrying person, I’d be tempted to “just record it and let the internet sort it out.” Which is orthogonal to fixing the wrong in the moment.
The severity depends on where you are, even within a country, but in many places you can't authentically "function as an adult in the world" without a phone, unless you want to roleplay an adult from the previous century.
In some places, payment requires a phone. Tracking unreliable public transit requires a phone. Getting rideshare requires a phone.
The issue probably isn't the phone but letting them outside in the first place.
This is obviously an overstatement. Sure, a phone is convenient, but we managed to function just fine without smartphones. I assure you, it's possible to do all those things without a phone.
We managed without smartphones before smartphones were a requirement for participating in society. That is, if you’re a millennial or older.
We can’t just pretend that it’s possible to live an adult life without one in 2026. In 2008, certainly, but that’s not the world these kids grew up in.
But we’re talking about kids, which is a whole different matter.
Without knowing where GP is posting from, you can't make that claim. We can want and wish it were true, but there exist places where it's no longer possible to do things without a phone because the service requires signing in online, or the form is only available via the website, there is no paper version anymore. Parts of the world are moving on from bits of paper, no matter how much you don't want that to be true. Parts of the world also aren't, we simply don't know where GP is so you can't make that claim.
OP is from Palo Alto, so, obviously, the closest thing to a hellscape you can possibly get. /s
> if I were a phone-carrying person, I’d be tempted to “just record it and let the internet sort it out.”
Desperate reaching. People who carry phones are bad people, I mean FFS, get real
Personally, I would rather see public resources used to teach parents how to use the existing controls (in iOS and Android) to restrict what their own kids can do on their own smartphone.
However, if a school district wants to restrict the use of smartphones during the school day for all students, I would be OK with that.
>> if a school district wants to restrict the use of smartphones during the school day for all students
Both of my kids went to public school. My sisters kids both went to a private school. The policy was the same at both places. Kids come in the classroom, turn off their phones, put in a pouch at the front of the class. At the end of the class, kids get their phones back.
Apparently since there is little or no time between classes, I guess with the lack of time to be on their phones, in person conversations have increased and more face-to-face interactions are the norm. Its faster and easier to meet someone down the hall then it is to go through the process of texting someone, which is the entire point.
The goal was to create enough friction (psychological or real) so kids simply revert back to just meeting up at a regular spot to catch up, as opposed to constantly being on their phones. The school admins I talked to said its really pushed kids back into communicating like humans. Many have forgone their phones in between classes, except a quick check for emergency purposes, that sort of thing.
Kind of fascinating to hear to be honest.
Where's the setting to make YouTube not display shorts?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-short...
Settings -> time management -> short feed limits -> 0 minutes
It took some digging but I found that setting on browser. Thank you. I'd love a big toggle for "brain fucking" that you could just set to off.
And of course these settings do nothing if he just opens any browser and watches YouTube logged off.
New Commodore flip phone - has google maps and whatsapp for calls and video, otherwise a dumb phone.
Hard to argue below 18 actually needs more. Wants, sure, but then whole cancerous can of worms is opened and good luck there.
He has a Lightphone which he hates. That's how I know it is working. He built a gaming PC last year, so I am aware that Pandora's box is open there. But look, it has been thirteen years of playing whackamole with YouTube. I can't keep him off it. They watch it at school. They give him chromebooks that I have no control over. And the stuff I do have control over the control is tenuous. I have largely given up. He is pretty much grown now. But man, has it felt like gaslighting when people are like, "Do parenting. Use the settings. Get a dumb phone. Problem solved."
And have you ever tried to find or access parental settings on a school Chromebook?
Is this mobile app only? I don't see "time management" on the website.
This works for me:
echo "0.0.0.0 youtube.com www.youtube.com m.youtube.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
One really does that on phones?
That’s all of YouTube. There’s some good stuff on there, just not in the “Shorts” tab.
> There’s some good stuff on there, just not in the “Shorts” tab.
Why do people get so weird about the shorts tab? There are perfectly good videos in there, they're just tilted weird. You can fit quality content into 3 minutes.
And remember Elsagate? That was entirely landscape videos.
Exactly. Drew Talbot's brilliant "Bistro Huddy" (which anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant whether as a server or in the kitchen can relate to) is done as Youtube shorts because that makes sense for comedy sketches. What exactly is wrong with a short vertical video? Just that it reminds people of Tiktok?
Because the incentives are very different which leads to different content being available.
Notice how Shorts recently removed the dislike button?
There are good Shorts. One problem is a flick of the thumb scrolls you down to the next, then the next, and many are crap. The uncertainty about whether you're going to see crap or gold is part of what makes recommendation-based infinite scrolling addictive.
And that uncertainty doesn't apply to watching normal videos? I dunno, if shorts gets unreliable because it ran out of the channels I regularly visit then I just leave.
It doesn't because in the normal video interface you select what to watch next.
Never done that, muscle memory is simply not there. But then again i dont watch youtube on phone, computer with ublock origin is vastly superior experience.
There is whole world to read and discover before switching to passive videos. Or even spend time here lol
I'm for very restrictive digital device and service use for children and I also think that 16 is roughly the age when most or all of those restrictions can be lifted.
> but 16 is nearly adult
On paper yes, biologically not really
Give them a bottle of scotch and pack of cigarettes as well.
yeah i’m not sure where people are coming from when they imply the best way to fight off an extremely addictive thing is to use it.
we warn kids about the impacts of heroin, we don’t shoot them up with it.
Feels like the seventies. Remember the time when tobacco CEO-s sweared, that they didn’t know cigarettes are unhealthy?
> And of course they need a phone when they go out like these girls.
Do teens need phones? Sure, they need a phone. Arguably any child old enough to know how to make a phone call needs one. But do they need a miniature computer to scroll through AI slop 10+ hours a day?
These aren't the same question. Confusing these two is dangerous.
> make a phone call
Kids don't want to call, and parents don't want to receive calls except for critical situations. Only elders and scammers are actually phoning.
> AI slop
Same deal as what the GP is pointing at: you need to train kids to deal with slop, and not have them face it on their own at once at some arbitrary adult age.
I'm a parent in my 30's. Call me up anytime, for whatever. Always down to chat!
My kids call. Only they tend to call through Discord or Whatsapp instead of just using the actual phone, for some reason. But they call, and they pick up when I call them. They also call their friends for gaming.
> Kids don't want to call, and parents don't want to receive calls except for critical situations. Curious where this idea comes from, most parents I know (including mine) would much rather call than text. Discord and your average x-stack in a game are also a good sign that voice chat isn't really something people of any age are averse to.
>Same deal as what the GP is pointing at: you need to train kids to deal with slop,
Sure. That's why I have mine mainlining China White. How will they learn to deal with addictive substances unless they're waist-deep in it?
If you're waist deep in China White, you may as well teach your kids about it, get them as much knowledge as possible, and how to stay clear of it.
Letting choose a different path than you is IMHO the minimum you should be doing.
Maybe back in some earlier era when we all had so many children that 3 or 4 were basically disposable, stupid parenting methods like "letting them learn to deal with this ruinously dangerous vice on their own" would have worked (or maybe there's a reason no one did that then). But for those of you that have just the one or two, this is well beyond reckless. Nothing I could ever say will persuade you otherwise, and even observation of reality won't help since the aftermath will play out for 50 or more years. Good luck, you'll need it.
Do people really want to restrict 16 year olds with alcohol? 16 is nearly adult, they need to learn responsibility
This metaphor, while it seems intended to challenge the OP, kinda reinforces it. Many countries and cultures give some limited access to alcohol at a younger age, and the result is generally that they end up having fewer instances of problematic binge drinking when they come of age. A little bit of exposure instead of complete abstention helps people learn to have a healthier relationship than letting them hit 21 and dropping them into the deep end unrestricted.
Teenagers learning how to have a couple of beers with a meal would be an improvement on them turning 18/20/21 and going and getting hammered on shots
In Europe, I think it is more common tbh. Even in the UK my dad would let me try making cocktails etc. at the weekend when I was 17.
It meant when I got to university I knew how much I could drink (although as a student I was too poor to drink much anyway haha) whereas there were people drinking like half a bottle of vodka.
I don't drink any alcohol nowadays so it's not like it turned me into an alcoholic either.
Its usually in the UK in my experience to give teenagers wine, beer or cider with meals.
16 year olds can currently have them with a meal in a restaurant or pub. Until a few years ago it was 14.
> It meant when I got to university I knew how much I could drink (although as a student I was too poor to drink much anyway haha) whereas there were people drinking like half a bottle of vodka.
I gave my kids some alcoholic drinks for just that reason.
I think the evidence points the other way. Giving younger people a drink with their meal during adolescence leads to more drinking problems later in life.
As far as I know the evidence points to getting drunk younger leads to more drinking problems later in life. Drinking moderately younger leads to fewer.
I don't think so although I can't find the report I read right now.
It's interesting how many conclusions are being assumed here
In many countries cultures, strict parents/laws are seen as loving and protecting. Being told "don't drink untl you're at least 20" isn't seen as "forbidden fruit" you're being denied.
What countries do you have in mind? I find it hard to believe you can tell teenagers not to do some kind of fun activity based purely on age and cause no significant feelings of forbidden fruit.
16 used to be the minimum drinking age in Netherland, until they raised it to 18. It wouldn't surprise me if there were still countries where it's 16.
But it's not really a fair comparison, because alcohol has a very direct detrimental effect on brain development. Many things can have a detrimental effect, but alcohol always does. Which is probably why they raised the age to 18.
In parts of europe you can legally drink wine and beer at the age of 14-16. In many parts of europe you start drinking alcohol at around 14-15 illegally but socially acceptable to some extent. I started at that age, which is the same age adolescents start going out and dating.
It would be nice to ease people into alcohol over a greater amount of time, but with phones you're using them constantly and "avoid it" or "only have two" are not workable solutions like they are with alcohol.
I appreciate giving another perspective, but alcohol is not a good analogue of phone. There's no need to “learn” how to use alcohol --- one can do without it. Yet, practically speaking, a phone is a necessity.
> practically speaking, a phone is a necessity.
no. it isn’t.
my apologies for sounding more blunt than im meaning to, but, im not at all sure where i would fall on the idea of banning kids from having social media powered phones, but i know they’re not a “necessity”.
I could have been clearer. A phone is practically a necessity of modern life. Sooner or later people have to use it, unlike alcohol. Whether social media is a necessity is a different question. I bet everyone gets their own dose of it, whether they like it or not.
> A phone is practically a necessity of modern life.
It isn't yet.
> Sooner or later people have to use it, unlike alcohol.
So far I've avoided having a smart phone, I've not had a mobile phone since flip phones - I went off always being contactable about that time, having had bleeding edge sat phones for decades.
I have a land line, an answering machine, travel, purchase, am part of several overlapping businesses and deliver work for clients.
eMail, cash, debit cards still get me by <shrug>
> It isn't yet.
Would you care to elaborate how you don't think a phone is not “practically necessary”?
I have never personally met someone like you. I've never known someone who personally met someone like you either. Theoretically, nothing is a necessity. That's why I wrote “practically”. Practically nobody lives like you do.
I don't have a particular opinion about smartphone/social media ban for minors, but the argument made here is at best a strawman fallacy, there is no law that prevents minors from having a digital camera that can be used to collect evidence or document malicious actions, and they aren't more expensive than phones.
"The kids are alright" is evergreen. So much of the <insert current generation who are teenagers> are doomed rhetoric is pure nonsense, a lot of that rhetoric is on here.
Phones and social media are a completely new type of pacifying and attention stealing threat which we have only just begun to discover the effects of. This is not your standard 'kids are doomed' rhetoric.
No, they're not, and yes, it is. I sincerely hope we do not take phones and other computers from future generations. That would be a terrible thing to do to them.
I very much hope we continue to bring our children up outside of a digital world, encouraging them to interact and learn physically before introducing them to digital devices later in life when they can treat them sensibly as a small part of a healthy and full life.
Giving addictive and attention stealing tech to children from a young age is like giving drugs to rats, they will continue to hit the feeder bar until they effectively kill themselves.
Old style rat drug experiments with rats in a barren cage being administered morphine are barely a good behavioral model for rats, let alone people. This is the aforementioned moral panic language. If the point was that solid it wouldn't need to make this multi-step analogy.
We can agree to disagree, thats fine. You give your kids mobiles and tablets from toddler age and I will bring mine up in the physical world and introduce them to tech gently over time, finally giving them full smart devices later in life when they are responsible enough to manage their own time.
> If the point was that solid it wouldn't need to make this multi-step analogy.
Analogies are always useful to show logical similarities in somebodies thinking pattern. The fact you dismiss them shows you have no interest in thinking about anything other than your own point. Again thats fine, we can agree to disagree. I wonder if you will show me the same courtesy.
You fall back on agree to disagree, twice, here, when you're accusing me of thinking only of my own perspective. It's not courteous to agree with something for the sake of agreement, nor is misrepresenting what we can say from an experiment useful for "showing patterns". You can use analogies without making poorly constructed, sweepingly grandiose ones.
Beyond that, like any parent, you have a lot of latitude in how you choose to treat your children, but I'm not going to agree that isolating them from computers is helping just because you frame it as "gentle", and I'm not going to say that we should replicate that elsewhere.
Even if the kids ARE illiterate, society will adjust to cater to them. Everything will be fine.
They will be dominated by smarter kids, maybe from other countries.
> These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives,
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?
In TFA, the author says "agency" not "full agency." I also can't find all these other issues (jobs, etc) in TFA. Where are you getting this?
Well that's the question isn't it, agency but to what extent. It makes sense to allow teenagers to have more agency over themselves than a 10 year old, but clearly there is an argument for limiting their agency on social media platforms.
Just because there are adults that abuse their agency of the use of alcohol (alcoholism) doesn't mean we should remove restrictions on young people.
Just because there are adults with full agency who drive recklessly doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds to drive cars.
Is there a point you’re trying to make?
The point is very clear to the rest of us. You inserted the word "full" where the author was not talking about full agency. It's hard to believe that you don't follow.
We are arguing over how much agency children should have. The article argues they should have more, the comment you originally responded to said practically definitionally we limit the agency of children. The obvious implied point is that it's not unreasonable to think their phone use may be part of the agency that they are denied, and that would not be a departure from how children are treated.
"These are groups that i invented".
I know a few upper-crust families, including a hereditary title. They all care about their children, like the majority of human beings. But this blogger doesn't think we hate posh people enough, so necessarily they abuse their young.
It snacks of "jews will eat your baby". It's not the vitriol that offends me, it's the stupidity.
I've known plenty of very rich people and they're just normal people, every bit as capable of loving or abusing their children as anyone. So while I kinda agree with the first half, your comment smacks of knowing less extremely wealthy people and still being at the stage where you're just so happy you bumped into a few and feel the need to glaze them, lacking the outlook and the jadedness available to someone like me (not to mention someone who knows even more rich people, or even is a rich themselves).
Triangulate this:
I grew up in a listed house with twelve fireplaces and a stable block with coach houses (plural). There were three crown princes in my boarding house at school. My godfather's house is a tourist attraction and my godmother was on the board of ICI. My mother's garden is on the horticultural circuit. My sister got married in Westminster Abbey. One brother used to play polo and the other just made equity partner at deloitte. I can probably get twenty OBEs on the phone. One of my friends has a net worth of €500b, and this year i have declined three invitations from him just to avoid the air travel.
When i was young and everything was black-and-white, i hated all rich people. I chiselled my privilege out of my accent and worked manual jobs. Now i hate the system, and i take the people in the system as i find them. My circle includes people from all walks of life, and I get invited to opera and to warehouse parties alike.
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.
Same for AI.
While I wish it wasn't framed in a 'lost revenue' sense, it isn't a bad idea. Would be funny if they were taxed based on how long people use it. At even $0.10 an hour of use, some of these companies would find the costs involved far too high to justify.
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.
The harm mainly comes from the addictive, manipulative algorithm designed to provoke the user, and not from the ability to communicate.
This is a great example of a thing that's 99% harmful being 1% very useful.
So which should we choose as society, removing the 99% harm or keep the 1% usefulness?
Also we should note that the children in this example were 16 and 17 years old, so above the age of many of the suggested restrictions.
The focus on children needing their phones controlled is the correct instinct, incorrectly applied to a too-narrow group.
Smartphones are fomes peccati.
> Smartphones are fomes peccati.
Smartphones aren't, some apps on them are.
(besides being unneeded or a nuisance in some situations)
I have said it for a long time. Look at the original iPhone release. It was a hyper focused device that was designed to consolidate devices, make using a phone easier so that you could get on with your day.
Once the app store and opened the gate for social media to wonder in, that is when these things got turned into potential addiction machines.
It already had a browser. You don't need an app when you have a browser. The addiction is built-in as a latent capability.
The browser itself is not the problem, but the way the platforms design themselves to be very addictive.
> very addictive
The "addictive" insisting by 2 new ones in short time? Getting bot vibes. "We need to classify social media as an addictive substance" more or less. Is that from someone's e-safety commissioner? Or someone wanting back-pay compo right back to MySpace addiction. An absurd idea.
"Some people can't control themselves around video games therefore video games bad", that's what social media has copped.
"Addictive" might mean a bloody well designed user interface that users like. Making buttons easy to access and responsive feedback and just the right amount of visual cues and spicy labels, all in harmony as designed and delivered via well engineered mechanisms. "Too addictive, you must now jump through regulatory hoops". No!
No, I don't think that it's about buttons and scrolling. It is simply about what the algorithm promotes. If you look at one thing, even if you decide that you don't like it, they show you more to provoke you. The algorithm should be limited to showing followed pages.
> the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions.
This is insane.
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.
Edit: now fixed, thanks mods
Conflates a whole load of othogonal issues that really have nothing to do with each other
Interesting reversal of the "think of the kids" argument, though: think of the kids who could have used their phones to document their mistreatment at the hands of alcoholic perverts.
Reminds me of the "good guys with guns" narrative tbh. Being able to document such transgressions is not enough of an argument to do a mass rollout of ad display technology IMHO.
The ability to film people on their phone is not the same as the ad display technology.
I think the argument upthread about "conflation" has a point, but .. it's social media itself that forces the conflation. You can't just have a social network that lets you communicate with your community, it has to get tied up with international politics and exploitative advertising.
What do you think about legalizing drugs?
In general it reduces underage usage as the sellers don't want to lose their sales license.
no one in the know cares about legal status of drugs as substances for personal enjoyment. see Shulgin.
the even more direct analogy is the Arab Spring, where social media and phones were widely advertised as a means to bring evil dictators down, as a democratic, youth empowering anti evil old pervert technology.
The tech industry obviously jumped onto it because it's a rhetorically powerful argument but it tells you very little what the systemic consequences are ten years down the road.
It's still funny how much it's celebrated because it brings down establishments, not realizing it'll also bring down their own. Reminds me of why no one should start biological warfare.
at the hands of alcoholic perverts who push this legislation onto them
Why are we conflating having a camera with social media that is addictive?
Age 16-17 is very different than Ages 5-10 for kids to carry a device.
The former is no issue. I just don't think the author's take is nuanced as they think.
Kids (Age 5-13) safety is of ultimate importance. Devices, independently are also a major issue in schools. Social media use of bullying also is a major issue. To the point they are banned.
The UK is not proposing disallowing 16-17 year olds (or any children) from carrying smart phones on public transit, though, which makes the entire article fall apart.
The author leaps from a proposed ban on 15 year olds using tiktok to wholesale bans on smartphones.
Removing a means of bullying that leaves a trail is not the same thing as removing bullying. It's just removing undeniable bullying.
If people truly agreed that children needed to be protected from the desires of others, teaching them that a particular religion is the true one would be restricted until they were of an age where they could provide informed consent.
For some, communication devices are the only way to escape that particular abuse.
Forgive me if I am misinterpreting or getting in the way of your primary point -- but I think it is relatively well recognized that, though cyberbullying might not be objectively worse than analog bullying (obviously direct physical abuse/altercations cant happen electronically....yet), the 24/7 pervasiveness, anonymity, lack of emotional feedback for the bully, reach, and permanence of cyberbullying has had a meaningful impact on the state of the bullying game and the impacts it has on children.
That doesn't mean I agree with the general thrust of taking technology away from kids and young adults....I don't. But I do think we should probably understand the bad that we are taking with the good.
I think a lot of people here just don't have kids of a relevant age yet. They assume either the bullying doesn't happen, or it isn't any different than bullying in person, or that it's easy to stop when it happens.
You can just not have phones, but it's socially isolating. You have to frequently audit what's on their phones because they often won't volunteer what's happening. You take them out of one group chat only to have the bullies reappear in another one.
Old fashioned bullying kept regular business hours. This gives them a portal into your home life 24/7, and that's the best case, when you put a ton of effort into managing it.
And if you're not having this problem somehow, you might want to double check and make sure your kid isn't the bully.
> You can just not have phones, but it's socially isolating.
I hear this plenty, but kids are literally forced to go be with their peers (hopefully including some friends) for 6+ hours a day (in my country). Don't they have enough time to arrange their social lives in person?
It’s not as bad as phone apologists say.
Agreed, students in schools seem to be regularly reporting an improved environment as unmanaged phone use went away.
Well I guess it is true that I don't have children of that age. My daughter is on the board of a charity that deals with youth issues though.
So neither you, nor your daughter, have any experience with the issue?
I seem to recall both of us being children once, although admittedly not at the same time. The research my daughter does as part of her charity work probably counts as well.
Learning about something doesn't invalidate it entirely on that basis alone, just like the experience of one parent doesn't speak for all parents, or those concerned about the impacts of phones on kids (who are future adults).
I certainly wouldn’t speak about kids and bullying without knowing about both.
What works needs to be found.
Removing phones doesn't remove a means of bullying, it removes a magnifier and multiplier of bullying.
There's lots of ways to capture bullying. But it might be hot water right? What if it was a watch with a camera? What if it was a camera alone? :)
Bullying is serious enough it can't be conflated with the desires of device manufacturers and social media platforms to manufacture young consumers of their feeds.
An issue here is the unfiltered internet is not capable of raising children, as much as they want to be exposed to everything, it doesn't work out the same for every child based on a whole host of independent factors than those who take the position above.
Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue. I’ve been bullied before social media was mainstream. A little later in life, when internet as a whole was majorly taking off, it helped me actually socialize. I met people some of whom I’m friends to this day, but more importantly - I could meet people to go out with, to talk to.
Should we ban schools then? Because school grounds are famously place where the most bullying, especially kids 5-13 (which you highlighted yourself), is happening. Or maybe ban real life interactions? Because you can meet someone who will bully you or be of bad influence?
We both know that’s not the right way, just like banning social media is not solving any problems. It’s just a convenient argument to introduce internet-wide surveillance, as well as to take away any autonomy or rights kids may have. Instead of investing in moderation, and actually scrutinizing big tech, which is the real cause of more bullying, shorter attention spans, and whatever else people say is wrong with the kids these days.
> Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue. I’ve been bullied before social media was mainstream.
The differences with bullying via social media are: the difficulty to escape it in space or time as well as its reach. I don't think we can argue that social media is not an issue on these fronts.
> A little later in life, when internet as a whole was majorly taking off, it helped me actually socialize.
I agree, but I also have to wonder if the nature of the Internet has changed to the point where the benefits are secondary to the costs. In the early days, it was far easier to access the positives and far easier to ignore the negatives since we made explicit decisions about where to go. While you can still do that today, by avoiding social media, it is far more difficult. The mainstream has consolidated to the point where you pretty much have to isolate yourself to avoid it. Much of what mainstream social media sites provide is pushed to the user in some for or another. On top of all of that, the online world had far less reach in the past. At least when I was younger, the bullies simply didn't go online and while exploitive people were online there seemed to be far fewer of them.
As for the Internet wide surveillance: I don't think that is the driving force behind the current regulations. We already have Internet wide surveillance. That is why your proposal is all the more important, the bit about moderation and scrutinizing big tech, because we let them get away with far too much.
> The differences with bullying via social media are: the difficulty to escape it in space or time as well as its reach.
Just log off of Instagram / TikTok / wherever. Or block the people bothering you. If anything I'd say digital bullying is easier to escape because unlike school kids aren't required to be on those sites six to eight hours a day, and blocking someone needs a lot less effort and cooperation from adults than reporting them to school authorities.
> Just log off of Instagram / TikTok / wherever.
A large number of youth will do that, but there is also a reason why children and youth are considered a vulnerable population.
I cannot speak too much on youth since most of my experience is with children. While some of them are more than happy to navigate their social lives by choosing who their friends are and ignoring those who cause them grief, where possible (as you suggested, there is the physical proximity in schools to complicate things), a great many more want to belong. They want to belong even where they are unwelcome and the unwelcomeness is manifested as bullying. What little I've seen of teens suggests that much the same does happen, only the bullying is meaner.
And that only addresses bullying. It does not address content directed towards adults, much of which is perfectly fine for younger people to know but they should also learn about it under the guidance of an adult so they don't come to think it is acceptable or the norm. It also fails to address the manipulative nature of some sites, something that they probably haven't learned to recognize never mind how to handle.
Yes, in a sense, you can turn off the problems and a lot of the problems will just go away. I'm not going to say they will disappear completely. Remember, social media has a larger audience and the others in that audience may bring it back to real life. Also remember that the people we are discussing don't always have the wisdom or experience to turn it off. Heck, a lot of adults don't have that wisdom or experience (but, at least for adults, we can claim they ought to know better).
Technologies when not learned by the people to use in proper ways, too often can be used against people by people with vested financial interests.
Social Media worked out that way. So did device addiction.
It's great to find ways to socialize, and those ways existed before, and will also exist after.
The exclusion of current forms of social media and connectivity as default doesn't mean better solutions don't step up.
I'm not really sure of the tying of schools to phone bans in schools. Schools aren't perfect, but they have a legal liability to keep kids safe (or safer). Devices and social media don't.
A large part of this is life coming at parents faster than they can keep up, let alone stay one season ahead of their childs growth. This would probably be a way.
Societally, rules and laws, including public health are a social contract and agreement on how to live together in a tight place.
Inside the home, though, is the opportunity for parents to learn and expose as they wish.
Solving today's social media can solve a ton of problems, or at least provide an impetus for it to improve. Schools are supposed to be safe places for kids, right? And the entire unfiltered outside world was coming into it via device.
For example, one solution is parents getting literate in tech enough to know how to lead young people before this even becomes a conversation. One way to do this is to offer unlimited screen time for creating, and much less for passive consuming. The generation that wants to experience the real world through a little screen has it backwards, and that's coming form the people who built the little digital world too.
I'm not anti-technology for young people at all. I'm anti-addiction and anti-manipultion by unlimited people and parties interested in reaching eyeballs.
Parents, legally, are required to provide a safe and growing environment.
> A large part of this is life coming at parents faster than they can keep up, let alone stay one season ahead of their childs growth.
The amount of administrative tasks, bureaucracy and complexity an adult, let alone a parent, has to navigate on a daily basis has increased 100x since the 70’s. It is very convent for corporations but less convenient for parents. Just look at the amount of legal contract you have to sign relating to data, Eula, etc.
> Parents, legally, are required to provide a safe and growing environment.
True, but be carefull, people might solve the problem in ways you don’t expect.
For example if someone races near a kids playground on electric skateboard at 50 km/h, and authorities keep ignoring the issue, they might just hit an unexpected obstacle
> Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue
Are you sure about that? So far the negatives vastly outweigh the positives. Imagine a statement:
> as a concept there isn’t an issue with a social credit score / great firewall / reeducation camp as long as they are done by a competent well-meaning person
I'm reminded of the way that universally carried high resolution cameras made UFOs and crop circles disappear, but police suddenly became a lot less trustworthy.
The abuse question .. well, "social justice" is a term that starts fights, but there have been a lot of people who've been able to get some sort of justice only because they raised their cause on social media, having been ignored by the authorities. #MeToo is probably the big example, culminating in the Epstein revelations.
I agree that there are several different issues at work. Can you show an example of how TFA conflates some of them?
You may disagree with the author's conclusions, but that doesn't make the article nonsense.
Not who you’re responding to, but I also don’t really think the article makes any kind of sensible argument that I can follow. Yes, it’s bad that a creepy drunk man used his phone to take pictures of teenage girls. Yes, it’s commendable that bystanders called him out. Yes, some countries are thinking of curtailing social media access for teenagers. I’m not sure what any of these things have to do with each other but the author presents them as somehow related, without drawing a coherent thread through them.
The article explains very clearly what these issues have to do with each other in this particular case.
I don’t agree. Whether or not these girls had phones, or social media, was irrelevant in this case. And I’ve never heard anyone seriously argue that 16-year-olds shouldn’t have phones, or that 16-year-old girls are at fault when an old man secretly makes videos of them. Both these groups seem like imagined bogeymen that the article is railing against.
>Whether or not these girls had phones, or social media, was irrelevant
The article explains why that was not irrelevant.
Who is saying 16yos shouldn't have phones though?
Maybe if you have a certain frame of reference? I found it impenetrable.
Perhaps there's stuff going on in the UK that I'm missing but:
- I have not heard of a general cell phone ban for children and youth. They may "ban" the use of phones in schools (in reality: phones must remain in a bag or locker) and parents may choose to forbid their children from having phones (which is difficult to enforce after a certain age), but nothing general.
One may argue that children and youth may use phones to document improper or abusive situations in schools, which certainly can happen, but that is not the dominant use of phones by children and youth in schools and there are other avenues to document such circumstances.
- Most of the regulations we are discussing today are related to access to adult content or sites that are run in an exploitive manner (e.g. "the algorithm"). I have heard of no prohibitions of children and youth accessing sites outside of that context, even though there is plenty of room to question where the boundaries should be.
So I will agree that the author is either misrepresenting or conflating the regulations, to the point where the article is nonsense.
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?
That is a glaring false dichotomy.
The irony of this is the phone is an easy button for parenting. For that reason, I don’t think we should try to optimize around easy.
Let’s do both.
The latter.
Wait until they are 26?
Sadly, this happens all the time.
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.
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.
> was apparently following the law
i feel like there's a time and a place to split hairs on whether or not legality clears moral wrong doing, and this is certainly not that time nor place. in what universe are these even remotely equivalent without broad abstractions?
* elite boomer filming underage girls for his own gratification
* bystanders filming a perpetrator mid-act
heather touches on those willing to get hung up on this stretch of an inconsistency and even links her other Darnella test post.
> (if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article)
that is literally the article. she's a tech policy writer critiquing the policy framework.
in general the weird undertones of your comment feel like you're asserting heather is like morally compromised or something and that the article is worth dismissing. if there was some discussion about the actual stuff she's talking about in this article i'd be singing a different tune right now, you know about whether or not under 16 bans punish young people for stinky perf perpetrator behavior... but since there isn't it feels even crazier that you're dotting this with your assessment that heather is somehow being the problematic one here. wat
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.
And this is why we need to continue to shame "glassholes" whenever we encounter them.
The political analysis there is completely wrong. How can she blame the "Tatler/Telegraph/Times set" for legislation passed by a Labour government? The opposition to this sort of legislation (e.g. the OSA) has largely come from the right.
> These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults.
Really? I would have said the opposite. Part of the problem is she lumps the affluent and the wealthy together. The affluent professional class go out of their way to encourage independence. They are the people who take gap years to travel, who are pushed to go away to university rather than a local one while living at home (a Scottish "policy wonk" should notice that the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews are full of affluent kids from the South of England).
The story is powerful and i agree with some of the conclusions, but forcing the conclusions to fit narrative that all bad things are the other sides fault is terrible.
Indeed. More than enough reason to flag the submission, in my view.
(It's remarkable how many of the top-level comments are pointing out this sort of problem with the article content.)
I'm with the "This whole article is a non-sequitur" crowd.
The old pervert using his camera shouldn't be doing that. His behaviour was not OK.
Nobody is talking about keeping kids off social media because their behaviour is not OK. They're talking about keeping kids off social media because they believe it's harmful to them, and that the companies designing the products know it's harmful and addictive.
We can disagree about whether or not that's true, or what actions might be helpful (or not), but there is no common thread with the example given.
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
I joking argue that we should cap computer speed at 486 level's. You can still do office stuff, some graphics and audio but you are not running a doom scrolling setup with that kind of limited hardware. You are barely running Doom!
I think smart phones are really cool when they aren't in the attention economy. But high performance but low power draw chips and media accelerators unintentionally allowed for these kind of social media setups to be viable.
You don't need much client-side power to implement addictive UX.
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.
Would it not be a better approach to remove any incentive to provide an addictive product. Companies don't do that just to be evil. Evil is just the byproduct of money.
Make it illegal to advertise to anyone under the age of 18. Make it illegal to trade data about anyone under the age of 18.
What incentive would then remain? I don't think they will do it for the long term gains of training behaviour for when they are old enough to exploit. Companies that engage in behaviour like this are notoriously immune to long term ideas.
> I don't think they will do it for the long term gains of training behaviour for when they are old enough to exploit.
They would definitely do that. It is a pretty basic idea to advertise to kids so there will be a customer base in later years. There was related emails leaked too
At the very least I think we should seriously consider taxing advertising.
It’d be almost impossible to pick and choose so just tax all of it. I think the knock on effects would be positive. It’s an almost unmitigated vice at this point and is the main engine behind this stuff.
I agree. Even the platonic ideal of something like Facebook isn't really a problem (assume a Facebook with a chronological feed which shows nothing but what your friends and liked pages have posted, and it'll be a lot less addicting than what we have today, and a lot more social!). It's possible to have a phone and not have any apps on it which are engineered to make you addicted. If the relevant companies behaved themselves, we wouldn't be in this rut (or at least not as deep into it).
Facebook was on balance good until the algorithmic timeline.
> 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.
The problem isn’t guns.
The problem is bullets, which guns just happen to make go very fast.
Guns have only one main function. Phones have thousands.
Also, you cannot block one harmful one without blocking a thousand legitimate ones.
I say this is a click bait article. The guy is taking a contrarian view on smartphone use by young people, with weak and very subjective arguments.
> the impetus for the most authoritarian internet regulation in the UK, including the <16s ban, has come from the affluent/wealthy/1% elite on the political right wing
Very strong take with no justification at all. What we observe is that many developped countries with different political orientations are currently taking action against harm caused by social media and more generally by excessive screen time. This is not about political right wing.
>It’s easy to understand why: the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. They never have. And they never did themselves,
Really sounds like a frustrated person that projects his own problems on the rest of the world. And totally not relevant to the debate about the impact of social media on teenagers.
he's just mad he can't groom kids on his dicord as easily anymore
Who is recording? Who is watching? Who controls the data? All compounded issues when data is hardly ephemeral and is long-lived.
Here is something I am not seeing anyone else addressing. Some yonks ago I was going to work by train and I stopped partially as a result of an incident on that train that involved someone recording my rather candid political conversation with a colleague. It is not the social media; tech etiquette needs to be seriously adjusted and while I am willing to give grace as we are trying to figure out proper balance as a society, I am not willing to have my life examined on the interwebz for everyone's amusement.
The kids in that sense, are just a convenient vessel for an argument; the same way they function for the author of that article.
Personally, I don’t even think adults with phones are alright.
Yeah, age and maturity are two different things entirely. One of the bigger issues / trends right now is immature adults with power.
Maybe the problem is power
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.
I am not even sure kids are more susceptible. Plenty of addicted adults.
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.
Remove the phones and the problem will remain, which is people’s desire to consume detrimental content, or content in detrimental amounts.
Before phones/computers/internet, it was garbage on television channels. Propaganda on 24/7 “news” channels, “reality” tv shows, etc.
While that is true, the friction to access has been made far too easy. Adding in some inconvenience may actually be a good thing. It also helped that in the print/radio/television period, you couldn't hyper focus content at a specific individual. What was broadcast was free for all to see and critique.
I'm not advocating for a return to that, but that was one of the highlights of the era.
Oh the power may remain, but at least finally the buses and subways will be free of the constant noise of someone blasting short form content or games who doesn't have headphones. I'll take that.
So it's not propagandists that are the problem, but rather the people they target? That's an odd take.
Maybe we should've shown a little more spine when they asked us to build a medium for the strong would use to prey on the weak. Maybe we're the problem.
It's not that odd of a take to recognize that the people abusing their power and those eating it up are both part of the problem in their own ways.
https://archive.is/poWGm
Why do you need an archive link for this?
The site reported an error at the time of viewing citing consumption
Why don't you? Everything should be archived.
> a four-minute long documentary masterclass in bystander action, documenting offenses
I read the whole article to find these offences.
Found none.
So this woman is angry at a man with mental illness / alcoholism who happens to look like her ex husband? Am I missing something?
So this is the new hot take? That kids need unfettered access to smart phones and the internet to toughen them up? Absolutely cringe.
TFA gives an example where kids are at risk and an old person is misusing a phone. It is clearly not advocating for this scenario to occur more often. Can you show anything else to indicate that the conclusion is "toughen them up"?
> 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.
Ok fair.
We don't allow kids to smoke, presumably that's also something to do with limiting their agency?
Fine, let em have little video recorders then
Documenting offences?
What offences would those be? It isn’t an offence to record somebody on a train or else the person who recorded the video of the guy also committed an offence (and neither that person nor the guy did).
Didn’t read past that part. Mindless outrage culture is neither intellectually interesting nor healthy to be around.
> This runs against the grain of 2026 tech policy, which decrees that it’s young people who need their behavior censored and constrained, in ways that punish them for the actions of the perpetrator.
I mean social media is simply misanthropic. If humanity had any balls it'd burn these places down. Calling banishment from social media a punishment is a stretch. The point of these decrees has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with persecuting adults for behaving in ways the state doesn't like. The author's read is just weird
> 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?
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.
It's important to define kids.
The 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.
So force parents to give them devices running an even more nonfree, even more crippled OS. At least on a smartphone you can run GNU/Linux.
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.
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.
I agree with your sentiment completely. I think there's nuance that a lot of people don't bother with because of tribalism but your take is the one I most align with in this instance. Children do need protecting, I grew up with the Internet and it made me partly who I am today, but I also recognise it is completely different now. Gore/shock/NSFL websites being linked between friends as pranks are no longer a thing (thankfully), but we have replaced that with garden walls (Facebook, Reddit, YT, etc.) that are much more insidious and have mechanised the harm to children and young people to an unbelievable scale.
The problem is not the ability to communicate, but rather the addiction generated by those algorithms. They should absolutely be regulated, for all ages.
I disagree, but thanks for making a coherent argument. It's a ray of sunshine.
Yes, I don't know why it's being downvoted so much.
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.
If you're going to frame it that way, let's talk about the Muslim prosecutor that put them away and the Muslim home secretary trying to deport the ringleader.
Trillion-dollar private businesses shouldn't exist in the first place. What did you expect from that??