Comment by sagacity
15 days ago
It's good to see that many countries are working on lesiglation to protect children and teens against this, since the companies clearly aren't trying.
15 days ago
It's good to see that many countries are working on lesiglation to protect children and teens against this, since the companies clearly aren't trying.
American tech corps act like cigarette companies but we're still at the point where banning them for kids is considered weird, fringe and even dangerous. Crazy.
The general problem is that nobody actually needs cigarettes but communication is fundamental to the human experience. How do you even propose to define "social media" in a way that can distinguish between it and any other public forum for discussion?
The actual problem is not that kids are using group communications technology, it's that the network effect in public interaction has been captured by private companies with a perverse incentive to maximize engagement.
That's just as much of a problem for adults as for teenagers and the solution doesn't look anything like "ban people from using this category of thing" and instead looks something like "require interoperability/federation" so there isn't a central middle man sitting on the chokepoint who makes more money the more time people waste using the service.
> but communication is fundamental to the human experience.
Humans survived well before the internet, the telephone, the telegraph, or even international post.
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At least they are not running commercials saying 9 out of 10 doctors agree social media is good for you. That's the best thing I can say about them.
Ha, true. But I wouldn't put it past them if it ever gets to the point where they genuinely feel threatened.
if social media trends * related data suggested it would work they'd totally do it
The problem is when government's solutions go through identifying everyone and collaterally tracking their actions.
In the same way parents can be blamed for not keeping their children safe around guns/alcohol/drugs, they should also be blamed for not keeping the children out of digital dangers, and keep mandatory age verifications out of here.
Problem is that social media doesn’t have negative connotations like guns/alcohol/drugs do. That makes it hard or impossible for individual parents to restrict it. They are perceived as crazy or paranoid or controlling. Plus if their child does opt out of social media, they become a social outcast from their peers who are still on it, which is a worse outcome for the child.
It almost sounds like multiple parents from a large number of households need to collectively act in unison to address the problem effectively. Hmm collective action, that sounds familiar. I wonder if there’s a way to enforce such a collective action?
To be clear, I do agree that putting the ban on the software/platform side is the wrong approach. The ban should be on the physical hardware, similar to how guns/alcohol/tobacco which are all physical objects. But I don’t have the luxury to let perfect be the enemy of close enough.
> Plus if their child does opt out of social media, they become a social outcast from their peers who are still on it, which is a worse outcome for the child.
I don't think that is the case any more since social media isn't social like it used to be?
This is like saying parents are at fault when a gun salesman sells a weapon to their 12 year old.
Not even “sell” but “give for free, constantly, every day, delivered directly to their house, disguised as a toy”
More like saying parents are at fault when a gun salesman enters their home every day, talks for hours with their children, and sells them weapons.
Have these parents tried to not let the salesman in?
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Very shocking that you're being downvoted on HackerNews of all places, where I'd expect people to be tech-literate and aware of the harms of internet age verification law etc.
I downvoted it because he invoked the analogy of alcohol and tobacco while simultaneously arguing that it should be totally on the parents. That's not how it's done for alcohol and tobacco! If that were true then any shop could sell booze and cigs to kids, and if that were the case then how could parents possibly hope to stop it?
The premise that parenting is wholly on the parents and society at large doesn't need to play any role in raising kids is a manifestation of the kind of libertarianism that appeals to techies on the spectrum who want to find the simplest possible ruleset for everything, but it just doesn't work that way in reality.
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Government will do a terrible job at it. Society lost the capability of creating good and simple laws that can be disputed on courts based on law intention. Instead, laws nowadays are full of details hard to understand that attack the symptom and not the cause.
For instance, a simple law like "Companies should take measure, even if it lowers revenue and growth, to reduce addictive behavior. They should to it more emphatically on under age users and even more on under 13 years old.". But no. Instead, they will write 40 pages of what companies should implement in their software, and than have the 40 pages be quickly outdated, partially impossible to implement and hell for developers who try to do the right thing to comply. Total crap of standards and regulation bodies that help nothing and slow down all innovation.
Solution will only come from social pressure, movements to delete the apps, parents actually educating their children to avoid adicitive features. It will take time. But Government will solve nothing.
That’s pretty much the whole purpose of government and if it isn’t doing that then it has abdicated its primary responsibility.
I think many people would disagree with you that the primary responsibility of government is to protect people from themselves.
I’m talking about protecting people from evil actors with immense power to do harm.
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