"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims." -- I am sorry, but how is this not true, when companies like Meta are in full control of their algorithms, tuning them to maximum addiction.

One can indeed argue what is the best way to deal with the problem of kids and social media, but I think the article is misrepresenting the situation.

Are people seriously routinely experiencing serious harm from social media use, comparable with alcohol or gambling addiction? The discussion may have suffered from much unnecessarily hyperbole in comparing YouTube to heroin, in how a single use guarantees unavoidable long term consequences with little redeeming qualities.

I'm a college age gen Z, and don't really think you can fix much with a social media ban alone, even ignoring all the implications if it's enforcement.

People don't get dysmorphia because some computer program told them so. The "influencers" are just other victims of a fundamentally toxic culture, or leaches on that insecurity.

You could say it used to be better before the internet, and maybe you'd be right. But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. As long as there are humans communicating through any medium, there will be a culture that can harbor these destructive tendencies, and the bigger more sparse that culture is, the more extreme its ideas can get.

Chronological feeds or more civic accountability for any algorithmic feeds (like forcing companies to share data with researchers to study their effects) could be a generally great initiative, but simply banning social media for anyone won't do as much as you'd hope.

Looksmaxing, the latest of these strange internet-induced mental illnesses, literally began on a phpBB forum.

Maybe it’s because tech people are prone to binary thinking, but there seems to be the idea that if you can’t prevent a bad thing entirely, then you shouldn’t try to prevent it at all. Or maybe the other way around: if you can’t achieve a good thing completely, then why even bother trying?

There is nothing wrong with social media; if anything, we need more social media.

What we need less of are the attention-maximizing, eldritch-horror things that have stolen social media and now walk around wearing the skins of the entity that summoned it.

Facebook is not social media — if you don't believe me, go on Facebook and count how many posts are from people you had mutual interactions with and actively choosen to follow and how many are everything else (not including native ads, I understand the platforms have to make moeny).

It's the same issue, if not worse, on X/Twitter.

I wouldn't know the status of TikTok for the same reason I don't know what the current status of street drugs, but as I understand it you can't even meaningfully follow people on TikTok — it's just mindless consumption from people you don't know.

How can it be social media if there's no social component?

Email is social media; chatting with your guild members in World of Warcraft is social media. Until at least a few months ago, commenting on a pull request on GitHub was more social media than Twitter was.

The first step in dealing with the world is to look at things as they actually are, not as they were twenty years ago.

“ But less than a year in, it suggests the ban is failing: A state-sponsored survey of parents indicated that seven in 10 teens are still using social media, while academic research has reported even lower rates of compliance.”

Failure? Or 30% improvement.

“While social media can be weaponized for bullying or hate, over half of all teens turn to social media as a source of social and emotional support.”

Teens also turn to drugs as a source of of social and emotional support.

“ Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults.”

Ironically the thesis of this article. In fact I would say by banning teens from social media, we may be implicitly increasing their agency, since they’ll have to figure out how to interface with a set of technolgies that are not optimized for them.

There’s something really dystopian to me about “designing for teens in mind” and I think maybe the unintended consequence of this kind of thinking is just - the continued marketable capture of segments.

What this person is basically advocating for is a new way for tech companies to extract more value from our youth.

The whole point of being a teenager is to generate your own ways to rebel against the fact that the adult world isn’t quite built for you.

This “facebook but for teenagers” is just another opiate for the masses.

Teen welfare is just the excuse. The teens are collateral damage along the path to mandating identification and de-anonymizing the Internet. The teens aren't enfranchised, so they can't meaningfully complain, and once they can vote, their problem is over, so why would they fight?

> Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces

The article is missing the point entirely. The conversation is not about “regulated spaces”, but removing them from spaces created entirely to drive advertisement, mindless engagement and consumption. If they find other spaces to join without that, perfect - it worked!

They don't care about social media bans, they care about linking users to their government ID.

It's baffling to me that anyone has still not realized that.

For the record, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has fostered world-class research and development in fields such as A.I., X Windows (Athena Widgets, Kerberos security (adopted by Microsoft in SMB and Windows Server, etc. GNU (Richard M. Stallman))) Emacs and elisp, as well as glibc and gcc compiler tool suite.

Why not “Teen Cigarette Bans Miss the Point”?

Just because compliance isn’t 100% doesn’t mean there’s no benefit. Also these things can take time to work, but we do have evidence that bans reduce usage to an extent.

The reason social media bans miss yhe point is because they will be replaced by other addictive/predatory technology, such as gaming. It's wack-a-mole - ban one thing and another pops up. Parental involvement and school education about addiction in all its forms is the best (not perfect) solution. The goal is to allow adolescents to grow into knowledge and responsible adults. Infantilizing them and delaying their exposure to the world only delays that development. And most age verification tech just undermines privacy.

"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims."

"In scary headlines like these, the adult man in the white van is the subject, and the child is the passive victim. The child can obviously be trained to identify that adult mans talking to them in white vans may require distance even if not every person doing so is a killer."

Don’t ban it for kids. Ban the doomscrolling algorithmic feeds for everyone. Make them only show people posts from accounts they opt-in to following, and nothing else.

On the contrary, I think social media bans are poised to accomplish exactly what they're intended to: provide a convenient justification for forced identity verification across all websites.

It is the operating systems vendors who created this scenario by creating single-user walled-garden platforms which abrogate a parents rights and agency over their children’s lives.

I should be able to give my 8 year old a mobile phone for their uses, pair it with my phone, and at any time of day be able to observe their activity on that phone - just as if I were watching what they were up to at the park, or while experimenting with matches in the garden, or riding their bikes on the street for the first time.

But there is a distinct desire by the operating system vendors to serve their true masters - ad agencies - and abrogate responsibilities of the users. “Filesystem, what filesystem?”

The idea of having a parent/child relationship encoded in the functions of the operating system is not in alignment with the idea that the true operators of the platform are faceless corporations, hell bent on harvesting every bit of data from every human being using their platforms.

With one simple trick, operating systems can change this equation entirely: give parents their rights and duties and responsibilities back. Let me see what my 8-year old is doing, in a fair and open and equitable fashion, so that I can - as a parent - fulfill my responsibilities to keep my children safe.

A phone is no less dangerous than a sharp kitchen knife. I’m perfectly fine with my 8 year old learning to use a kitchen knife properly - to gain their own agency over it as a tool - as long as I am able to observe their use of it.

And before anyone tries to make the argument “parents don’t do that, oh my god, you’re violating your child’s right to privacy” - no, that is not what I mean. A child should have privacy and they should learn to have agency over that privacy - but a parent is not absolved of the issue if that child falls of a cliff because of their negligence. Let the OS provide privacy - but let it also provide a means of review by the parents - who are the ones ultimately responsible for the child in the first place.

This needs to be an OS feature. Parents and children should, through the OS, be able to establish a strong, positive relationship with each other over this issue, with agency returned to the family unit.

Otherwise, we are creating totalitarian systems of control and putting them in the hands of people we simply cannot trust. The degradation of agency within the family unit is a function of commercial desire to exploit that lack of agency.

Operating systems, instead of serving ad agency masters, can go a long, long way to provide parents and children the right tools to solve this problem. They do, however, need to stop suckling at the teat of the nameless corporations who see the family unit as a nut that has to be cracked in order to extract the juice.

“It failed now please don’t try anymore, see it can’t be done, trust the kidz.”

Someone’s nervous.

Personal anecdote, and not about social media per se but the infinite-wall aspect of today's web, made my brain behave in very scary ways. I had a few times where I didn't order my hand to swipe (because I was expected to do something else right away) but my hand swiped. It was sufficiently against a part of my mind that it felt 'not me' and it happened a few times, sometimes even more complex movements.

To me it's an evidence that the brain is that sensitive to neurological reward to the point of being bent into automatic aimless actions just for the sake of keeping the cycle going.

It's not as deep and harmful as alcoholism but still too large not to ignore.

Having lived many years prior to social media, it feels very clear that social media fundamentally warps people in a way they weren’t before.

If you have only lived within it, it makes sense to underestimate the impact.

“ But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. ”

Isn’t one of the big complaints about social media that only like 1% or .1% of users get promoted?

I think the problem is your last paragraph buries the lede. - the social media companies want to make this about content, because algorithmic feeds are what make meta a trillion dollar company instead of a 50 billion dollar company.

I do think there would be a fair bit of agreement with your thesis if your minor caveat at the end wasn’t the big huge problem.

I think most of these bans are because no one has figured out how to ban the algorithmic feed and SV isn’t self-regulating.

There would still be plenty of moral panics about the content, but I think the bans are picking up speed because of the form.

I don’t care that my kid wants to join a satanic death cult I care that Meta has figured out how to monetize satanic death cult membership in the algorithm.

Well we live in a global informational network. Instagram actually did try to not fully attentionmaxx their reels algos back in 2014 when TikTok came up, and this led to them losing 60% of the market to this.

You can't regulate the whole world, if you won't make something addictive, someone in China will and you will lose the market to them.

Next best thing is ban because regulations in software are stale the day they get released due to legal processes being slower than technological ones.

The profit motive turns social media into an opium machine gun, the maintenance of a global scale consumer social media without a profit motive impossible, and the existence of a consumer global scale social media makes both smaller scale and protocol-based forms obsolete

I can agree with this. And I’m not sure how these bans are scoped but maybe they should be scoped specifically around algorithmic feeds.

The biggest problem to me isn’t the content or posting on a friends timeline. It’s that choices are pushed to the user rather than pulled. Change that one dynamic and I may not care as much that YouTube has content I consider toxic. Add a little friction my teen has to go actively discover content he’s curious about, not pushed an algorithmic feed.

I think the problem is though - the tech companies are incentivized to make this about _content_ “ I can’t ban Andrew Tate because it’s not my job to tell people what they can and can’t watch, first amendment, blah blah blah.

And Zuckerberg isn’t wrong here exactly, but per above the real argument I think is less about content and more about form.

But the reality is these companies don’t actually make their money from the content they make it from the form.

So Zuckerberg can’t concede “oh you’re right, making the newsfeed less adddictive doesn’t violate first amendment rights, at least we’re not banning Trump, because he doesn’t care about banning Trump except for the heat he gets from republicans, he cares about you messing with the money printer.

The thing we may all be able to agree they should do is the thing they’ll push back much harder against doing.

Or how about you adults all grow up and gain some healthy personal accountability instead of blaming your devices and society for your lack of self control.

For certain technology there should be bans but it is not social media and algorithmic feeds. There may be speedbumps, more user controls and auto classifiying of user type with optional alteration of the feed and type of content, but full bans for things like infinite scroll are disproptional.

Should sexual content be banned on social media? Maybe? Should violent footage be banned? It depends? Should bullying or predatory behavior be banned? I guess so? Or maybe it should it only be discouraged? What kind of social media does there exist? Is it binary or is it a spectrum, and should different rules or guidelines be applied?

Way too many variables. But what is clear is that age (ID) checks for the wide spread internet are completely out of the question. Governments should not have that much control over our social lives.

Face it, technology changes the world. The smartphone with camera did. If you could, would you put that genie back in the bottle? Should all content produced on smartphones be checked and watermarked and pulled through a selection of governments fingerprints to be publishable? Be very careful what you wish for since every new technology comes with hard to imagine second order effects and threats.

Yep I'm also in favour of legally requiring the default feed on any "social" app to be a chronological feed from people you follow. It's both better for society longer-term and a better experience for the users, just not the shareholders.

> Ban the doomscrolling algorithmic feeds for everyone.

HN itself will get banned under this criteria.

It's already banned for everyone who doesn't want to send their ID documents to Persona.

Android allows parents to monitor and control what apps children use, and for how long, on their devices.

So I block chrome, and require my permission to install any app. They get thirty minutes a day on devices that lack a browser or social media apps. Not even any YouTube.

They can browse the web on PCs that are visible to the whole living room.

Please contact me or share your contact information, I am working on something exactly like this.