This is ageism. Social media should be banned for everyone.
I don’t believe you read the article nor gave this any thought before you made your flippant comment. Also, you give no reasoning for your dogmatic statements.
Sounds like someone needs to take a little break from social media.
Why is that?
Internet anonymity in general is a terrible thing and I would do away with it if I could. I’m impossible to say who’s a real person, who’s a bot, who’s an alternate account. It’s allowed every evil and terrible person to find others like them and embolden each other without the oversight of social pressure from the rest of society which I think is an essentially needed social cue of healthy human communities.
Yes I realize the irony of posting this on Lemmy.
Fuuuuck that. The option of anonymity is essential to freedom of expression especially where authoritarianism takes root. Especially important now.
I agree with you but it does cut both ways. Anonymity empowers assholes, too.
OK, legal name, Id
Give
It’s complicated. The current state of the internet is dominated by corporate interests towards maximal profit, and that’s driving the way websites and services are structured towards very toxic and addictive patterns. This is bigger than just “social media.”
However, as a queer person, I will say that if I didn’t have the ability to access the Internet and talk to other queer people without my parents knowing, I would be dead. There are lots of abused kids who lack any other outlets to seek help, talk to people and realize their problems, or otherwise find relief for the crushing weight of familial abuse.
Navigating this issue will require grace, awareness and a willingness to actually address core problems and not just symptoms. It doesn’t help that there is an increasing uptick of purity culture and “for the children” legislation that will curtail people’s privacy, ability to use the internet and be used to push queer people and their art or narratives off of the stage.
Requiring age verification reduces anonymity and makes it certain that some people will be unable to use the internet safely. Yes, it’s important in some cases, but it’s also a cost to that.
There’s also the fact that western society has systemically ruined all third spaces and other places for children to exist in that isn’t their home or school. It used to be that it was possible for kids and teens to spend time at malls, or just wandering around a neighborhood. There were lots of places where they were implicitly allowed to be- but those are overwhelmingly being closed, commericalized or subject to the rising tide of moral panic and paranoia that drives people to call the cops on any group of unknown children they see on their street.
Police violence and severity of response has also heightened, so things that used to be minor, almost expected misdemeanors for children wandering around now carry the literal risk of death.
So children are increasingly isolated, locked down in a context where they cannot explore the world or their own sense of self outside the hovering presence of authority- so they turn to the internet. Cutting that off will have repercussions. Social media wouldn’t be so addictive for kids if they had other venues to engage with other people their age that weren’t subject to the constant scrutiny of adults.
Without those spaces, they have to turn to the only remaining outlet. This article is woefully inadequate to answer the fundamental, core problems that produce the symptoms we are seeing; and, it’s implementation will not rectify the actual problem. It will only add additional stress to the system and produce a greater need to seek out even less safe locations for the people it ostensibly wishes to protect.
So teens who don’t fit in well in the IRL spaces that are available to them should have 0 ways to have social interactions?
If teen me hadn’t had the internet, I would have 0 joyful memories whatsoever of my teen years. Anyone sympathizing with the ideas in the OP is in my mind purely evil and oppressive, I have no other words to describe this.
They only want to ban social media and even then only the big ones with an exception for youtube.
OK, what’s the definition of “social media” for that purpose then?
This is the newest ‘think of the children’ panic.
Yes, social media is harmful because companies are making it harmful. It’s not social media that’s the root cause, and wherever kids go next those companies will follow and pollute unless stopped. Social Isolation is not “safety”, it’s damaging as well, and social media is one of the last, freely-accessible social spaces kids have.
We didn’t solve smoking adverts for kids by banning kids from going places where the adverts were, we banned the adverts and penalized the companies doing them.
I disagree, as you said it yourself: companies ARE making it harmful, so it IS harmful. That, and there are various other reasons why its harmful
Its not an empty panic if you actually have real reasons why its harmful.
First you’d need laws in place that determine how the social media algorithms should work, then we can talk.
Its not an empty panic if you actually have real reasons why its harmful.
Every panic has ‘reasons’ why something is harmful. Whether they are valid reasons, proportional reasons, or reasons that matter, is up for interpretation.
First you’d need laws in place that determine how the social media algorithms should work, then we can talk.
Yes, then we can talk about banning systems that remain harmful despite corporate influence being removed. You’re still just arguing (by analogy) to ban kids from places where smoking adverts are until we fix the adverts.
companies ARE making it harmful, so it IS harmful
No, companies didn’t make social media harmful, they made specific aspects of social media harmful. You need to actually approach this with nuance and precision if you want to fix the root cause.
That, and there are various other reasons why its harmful
Every reason that’s been cited in studies for social media being harmful to kids (algorithmic steering towards harmful content, influencer impact on self-image in kids, etc) is a result of companies seeking profits by targeting kids. There are other harms as well, such as astroturfing campaigns, but those are non-unique to social media, and can’t be protected against by banning it.
Let me ask you upfront, do you believe that children ideally should not have access to the internet apart from school purposes (even if you would not mandate a ban)?
Haidt … is campaigning internationally to end the “phone-based childhood”. He says… Videogaming, porn and gambling gave boys such dopamine hits that anything else they did felt boring.
This is pseudo-science.
I remember reading a Haidt article for an ethics class in grad school. The analysis felt… underwhelming? It’s been too long to remember the article, but I think it was something about the “morality” of conservatives being not worse but different than liberals (limited to the US, iirc). I just remember reading it and going… yeah conservative morality functions differently. It’s also just demonstrably worse, though, even based on what the article was focusing on?
That class was weird though. Mostly just a bunch of folks going,“yeah well this is what I care about” and disagreeing with each other with seemingly no intention whatsoever to try and evaluate or engage with one another.
I was expecting a much stronger argument based on the headline.
Personally I’d prefer regulation on how social media is structured and how algorithms operate. First thing I’d do is ban infinite scroll, which corporations like because it increases ‘engagement’ whilst harming the quality of the experience for their users.
The argument they make seems to boil down to, there’s various reasons to believe that social media can be a negative influence on teenagers, social media companies are intentionally manipulative and amoral, the idea of this type of social media ban is popular with the public in polls, and the Trump administration opposes social media regulation. So yeah, not all that comprehensive. Notably lacking is a case that a youth ban is actually the right solution and wouldn’t cause its own harms, an explanation of why teenagers and adults are so different here and what that implies, or an acknowledgement of the cases against such a ban (for instance they make an uncritically positive reference to last year’s ban by Australia which is extremely controversial and has a lot of good arguments against it, like the privacy disaster of making everyone prove their identity to post online). To be fair the whole thing seems like mostly a really brief summary of The Anxious Generation, maybe that book makes a stronger point.
It has to be acknowledged that much of what makes up human culture and society is online now, and will continue to be going forward. The real question should be, what do we want that society to look like, and how do we move in that direction? Probably there is a lot more to it than passing laws that ban things. Calling social media digital crack and demanding teenagers to go live in a past that doesn’t exist anymore seems like a very head-in-sand attitude to me.
There should really be a different term for Instagram/TikTok/FB/etc style social media sites (I call them “push-style” social media, though “algorithmic” is probably a better term) and websites like public forums, chatting platforms, etc. The former is what I think this article is talking about. The latter seems both fine and necessary these days, even in some cases among children.
Yes. Those are good points.
There are better terms but capitalist media doesn’t attack its daddy.
As a thought experiment, it’s somewhat fascinating to ask what “social media” has done. I don’t really consider anything past MySpace truly social. The term now means “let’s keep you addicted to posts from people you’ll never meet” – essentially, the modern form of checkstand tabloids.
it’s somewhat fascinating to ask what “social media” has done… The term now means “let’s keep you addicted to posts from people you’ll never meet”
Sure, if you assume the worst possible definition of “social media”, then it probably hasn’t done anything worthwhile.
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Ah, yes. Truly, I cannot argue against this impeccable logic. I am swayed.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/2yvgd
Also, see if you can install Bypass Paywalls Clean.
Thanks. Just installed a new OS and I’m still working out the kinks. I had that extension installed previously but because it just works in the background I didn’t even think to re-install it.
I’ll cop to not having read the article and I’ll say I might, but I can think of some pretty good ones. It’s so children and teenagers can tell people when something bad is happening to them. Like being in a child marriage. Or being abused. Or being shot at in school. Or when their community is being preyed upon. Or when they’re in a cult. Or when they’re kidnapped and they have a phone. Or when they need to advocate for themselves against policy that chiefly affects them. Or when they’re afraid something is happening to their friends. Or when they’re suicidal. Or when they’re lost. I could probably come up with a hundred of these. The thing is that children and teens are half-finished people and we afford people certain rights. So we need to decide if we’d rather treat kids as human or as another group of pawns to control. I loathe this debate.
The few beneficiaries of social media include criminals. Drug dealers “reach teens on Snapchat they would never encounter in real life”
lol what? no they meet at school or on the block. how are they going to pick up the drugs?
Initial meetings and other communications like where to meet in person, etc.
It’s wild how easy it is to get in contact with small scale drug sellers on Snapchat. It’s easier and more convenient to buy LSD off of Snapchat than buying alcohol at the alcohol store in many medium and large cities, even as an adult. There’s lots of sellers to chose from, no verification of anything, open 24/7, convenient location, some even do home delivery. And they usually have lots of other stuff you probably want as well.
I vehemently dislike “inarguably” claims as it’s a similar strategy as “protect the children, you would want to leave a child unprotected, now would you?” and this is a double whammy as it is about protect children so, yeah.
Having said that.
I think there are definitely issues to be resolved.
The way social media keeps kids reeled in is one thing. In the past I saw teenagers doing stuff together, laughing, getting themselves into trouble (as a part of growing up), endless endless chattering together… Now I continuously see groups of teenagers quietly on their phones in a group, only interrupted by every now and then one teen showing something to others.
Just in general, I think little kids should have a bit less media to begin with. Again, I walk over the street and see mother’s with tiny kids and they’re already glued to the screen instead of looking around. I feel like that generation misses the beauty of the world outside in lieu of constant screen time. I getting, it’s nice and quiet for the parents who also want a life, but it seems a lot. It sort of feels like these kids are losing humanity and instead get this new world of only tech, and soon, only AI.
I think there are loads of other issues to be resolved as well. I’m a staunch advocate for banning mobile phones on schools (exceptions where needed) for example.
Having said all that, I don’t think that outright banning social media for kids is a good idea either, it doesn’t have to be a nothing or everything decision.
One thing could be that social media companies could be forced to publish their selection algorithms, and requiring said algorithms to adhere to a set of laws that ensure kids can interact healthily with their products.
There are loads of other solutions out there. I don’t think a full ban is right but leaving it at how it currently is also is not a solution
