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Comment by ElProlactin

6 hours ago

> They will also limit the usage of Facebook and Instagram to 90 hours per month.

When you consider that the average person is awake for somewhere between 450 and 500 hours per month, 90 hours still represents ~20% of waking time.

For comparison, a K-12 student spends 110-140 hours per month at school. So this is still a ridiculous amount of time for anyone to be spending on social media, teen or adult.

6 comments

ElProlactin

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judge2020  5 hours ago

The problem is, what if one of these apps is being used as a messaging app? Hardly social media if most of your usage is just using it to DM friends/family, a la texting.

Parental controls and occasionally sitting down with kids to review social media content together will still always be the correct approach, but it's hard, and the government can't mandate parents take the correct approach when it's so high-friction.

  • ElProlactin  2 hours ago

    > Parental controls and occasionally sitting down with kids to review social media content together will still always be the correct approach...

    In theory, this sounds reasonable. The problem is that these platforms are inherently toxic. They have been intentionally designed to be addictive and there are so many examples proving that they have operated with no duty of care to protect children.

    We wouldn't put free crack vending machines in school cafeterias and tell parents "talk to your kids about their crack use", would we?

    We also should acknowledge how insidious the harm of these platforms is. You could keep your kid off of them and he or she could still be the victim of social media bullying.

    All efforts to make social media use "safe" will fail unless and until we accept that these platforms are irredeemably flawed and detrimental to human health, mental and physical. They're no different than cigarettes, and probably worse.

  • skeledrew  5 hours ago

    Lots of messaging apps out there. No need to use one that's connected to a toxic platform.

  • troupo  3 hours ago

    > The problem is, what if one of these apps is being used as a messaging app?

    How is this a problem? We've had messaging apps 24/7 for 15 years. For many millenia we didn't have them, and it was hardly ever a problem.