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- Hacker News
- “ 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.
- What a surprise! Researchers who have a good grift going studying how young people use social media don't want it banned outright. Instead, they want some unspecified conversation in which they have a role deciding how technology can be "better shaped", which coincidentally allows their grift to keep going.
> The companion narrative to technological determinism is something I’d call adult saviorism. Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults. In this narrative, teens lack the media literacy or judgment to save themselves. The conclusion to this line of thinking, when it comes to regulation, is that teens need not be involved, since they themselves are compromised.
This totally devalues the long-accepted wisdom that adults are responsible for raising children and sometimes have to make decisions that children don't like but that are necessary and beneficial for their well-being.
In the author's narrative, teens who have no meaningful context in which to understand how their brains are being manipulated by multi-billion dollar companies for profit are somehow supposed to participate in proposing regulations that protect them from said companies.
> While adult saviorism is, in many ways, well-intentioned, often coming from a place of concern about child safety, it fails to recognize teens’ expertise and creativity in using technology. Most teens are skeptical that their parents and policymakers know better than they do about the good and bad of the online world, and for good reason. Consider the U.S. congressional hearing held in 2021, in which Facebook’s then global head of safety was asked by Senator Richard Blumenthal, “Will you commit to ending Finsta?” Needless to say, such embarrassing lines of questioning — which neither began nor ended with Blumenthal — should inspire very little confidence.
Teens think they know more than their elders?!? What an astonishing revelation!
This is such a straw man argument. Arguing that some geezer in Congress saying "Finsta" is evidence that adults are incapable of making sensible decisions about protections for children is a bad look for anyone associated with an institution of higher learning.
by ElProlactin - A disingenuous article. The 30% reduction of teen use is touted as a failure. If this was applied to cigarettes and alcohol, the solution would be stronger enforcement, but this is then labelled as doubling down.
It is not. The sources provided shows that the remaining 70% of teenagers that remain on the platforms are due to lack of enforcement from the platforms, not purposeful skirting of restrictions by the teenagers (VPN etc.).
The article further labels the teenage bans as a fight between adults and teenagers, as if the laws will breed resentment from children towards their parents. As far as I'm aware, that's not how teenagers view the issue of tobacco and alcohol bans around the world.
30% reduction is a successful start in the first year. I foresee further reduction in the coming years when less teenagers slip through the lack of enforcement and more of them pass the 16 year old threshold.
by fyredge - What is everyone so worked up about? All parents have to do to stop the harm Meta is inflicting on children is to have their “high school students get together to hash out a national AI policy for schools.”by lapestenoire
- 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?by jl6
- 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.
by pona-a - "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.
by sega_sai