“ 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.
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.
I wouldn't mind having verified accounts _as an alternative_. Not enforced over existing SM.
I'd like to know that when I'm reading a comment, it's written (or at least endorsed) by a human being. Currently that's.. debatable, and it's only going to be more so. Entities with cash and resources can focus on the topics relevant to them and drown the conversation. I'd like to at least know that the idiotic replies I'm getting are real human idiots, and not astroturfing in one shape or another.
"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.
I think personal responsibility does play into these situations to some extent, but even so, that doesn't imply there should be zero regulation.
Both for crack addicts and teens using social media, they not only hurt themselves, but also hurt those around them.
The studies on teen mental health largely suggest that mostly it's not about using a lot of social media yourself, but living in an area where social media is the coin of the realm. It's the toxic culture SM generates rather than direct use that's hurting teen mental health.
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.
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.
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?
"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."
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.
It’s easy to say, but do you want a teenage mind to compete against an army of thousands of marketers and engineers, with billions of dollars on the line, to see who wins that battle? It’s not a level playing field.
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!
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.
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?
“ 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.
“It failed now please don’t try anymore, see it can’t be done, trust the kidz.”
Someone’s nervous.
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.
That's just a means of banning social media for everyone, which is even better than banning it for teens.
No, it's a means of removing anonymity so promoters of ideologically unsound sentiment can be identified.
I wouldn't mind having verified accounts _as an alternative_. Not enforced over existing SM.
I'd like to know that when I'm reading a comment, it's written (or at least endorsed) by a human being. Currently that's.. debatable, and it's only going to be more so. Entities with cash and resources can focus on the topics relevant to them and drown the conversation. I'd like to at least know that the idiotic replies I'm getting are real human idiots, and not astroturfing in one shape or another.
"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.
Yup. All this talk of personal responsibility in these types of situations is nothing but a perfidious form of victim blaming.
"The crack addict should've known better, it's not the dealer's fault they came back for more!"
I think personal responsibility does play into these situations to some extent, but even so, that doesn't imply there should be zero regulation.
Both for crack addicts and teens using social media, they not only hurt themselves, but also hurt those around them.
The studies on teen mental health largely suggest that mostly it's not about using a lot of social media yourself, but living in an area where social media is the coin of the realm. It's the toxic culture SM generates rather than direct use that's hurting teen mental health.
Exactly, it's like talking about the symptoms and missing the point of the diagnostic.
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.
It's already banned for everyone who doesn't want to send their ID documents to Persona.
Persona already has the ability to access your ID, or they would otherwise not be able to determine if the ID you sent was genuine.
HN itself will get banned under this criteria.
I don't think so. Everyone sees the same feed. It's more like the New York Times homepage than it is Facebook.
I’d celebrate the revival of the ca 2000‘s blogosphere.
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.
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?
"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."
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.
It’s easy to say, but do you want a teenage mind to compete against an army of thousands of marketers and engineers, with billions of dollars on the line, to see who wins that battle? It’s not a level playing field.
Facebook measured "sentiment" and then shown weight loss influencers bullshit ads to teenagers deemed "more insecure about their looks".
Yes it feeds directly into anorexia. And yes, it had that effect.
Education wont counteract these effects, not when the company can put staggering amount of money into A/B testing for maximal impact.
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!
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.
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.
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?
Speaking of missing the point, what is the point of a built in TTS reader if it can only be played at a crawling pace?
I could read this article five times over before the TTT would have time to finish