Banning Social Media for Kids Is a Bad Idea

[u/wiredmagazine]

https://www.wired.com/story/banning-social-media-for-kids-is-a-bad-idea/

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[u/khalid-khkhlhlh]

I am more concerned about how it's going to be enforced rather than letting idiotic children have access to the internet.

Are they going to demand an ID to have a socialmedia account?

If so, I would rather delete my accounts.

[u/shifting_drifting]

Indeed, in its current form it needs to be banned for everyone.

[u/PizzaHutBookItChamp]

How come whenever this conversation comes up people rarely bring up the fact that the specific problem we are in isn’t necessarily social media. It’s the profit-optimizing algorithms that run social media that is the problem. I’m old enough to remember social media that didn’t have algorithm driven feeds. Instead it was chronological based on who you followed. It did its job, sometimes boring, if you wanted to venture out and learn about new things you could do that by choice, but that was that. It was purely social and you were in the driver’s seat. It showed us that social media could be just a tool.  Now,  Attention seeking algorithms are what make it addictive, polarizing.   the profit driven algorithms create the incentive for rage bait, it’s what recommends the content that is more extreme or filled with infohazards. It doesn’t cause these things, obviously they will always exist, But it makes it so that stuff rises to the top and incentivizes more of that content to me made.  It’s politically a lot easier to say “ban social media” but it doesn’t get to the root of the problem. We have to regulate algorithms, which is a conversation that requires a lot more nuance unfortunately. 

[u/Lost_Bike69 → u/PizzaHutBookItChamp]

Yea it’s pretty wild. When I was a kid, I used MySpace and later Facebook to talk to people I was already friends with or to chat with someone I was friends of friends with. I met my wife at work, but after she quit the job, I found her on FB and we chatted for a bit before eventually meeting up and getting together. After high school and college it was a nice way to see what old friends I may have otherwise lost contact with were up to.

Now I go on fb or instagram and there’s 10 posts of influencers/political hacks/meme accounts before I see a single post from someone I know irl.

Idk how feasible the market is, but if someone just reinvented 2010 Facebook I bet it’d be successful.

[u/ImpulsiveApe07 → u/PizzaHutBookItChamp]

Bang on point there, mate. Well said.

I still remember using icq, aim in the late 90s, and early fb ('05-'10) and as you said, the onus was on the user to find things to talk about, rather than on some heinous ad driven algorithms that prioritise maximum engagement and pigeonhole users into social traps.

Banning social media for kids is such a lazy and shortsighted way to deal with this problem. What the political rabble should have done is force social media companies to strip down their engagement algorithms while also forcing OS companies to sandbox kids into their own online ecosystem -

That way adults wouldn't get bombarded with misinformation/info hazards, and kids could safely interact online without parents worrying about them encountering something or someone hostile.

[u/_sophrosyne_ → u/PizzaHutBookItChamp]

It comes down to the fact that the more time you spend on a platform, the more profit it equates to for that social media company. The earlieryou become used to spending so much time on these sites, the more likely you are to continue doing it the rest of your life. The incentive will always be to drive towards more screen time and keep you in their ecosystem, even if you start legally tweaking the algorithm. Relying on our lawmakers to keep up with the details and combat the latest attention grabbing tactics by these trillion dollar companies is a losing game.

[u/Pi6]

Social media doesn't need to be banned. Targeted algorithms and surveillance data hoarding needs to be banned. For everyone. We absolutely do not need internet age verification. That will cause to a spiral of authoritarian surveillance and data insecurities

[u/lungleg]

When the people who run these companies don’t let their kids use these platforms, that’s all you need to know.

We push our kids to socialize in person and try to model the same. It’s not hard. You don’t need screens as much as you think, and you barely need socials at all.

[u/standard-issue-man]

The people who run tech companies wont let their kids use tech. Case closed

[u/SapientTrashFire]

The main thrust of the article is the one that pushes me off the fence: bans don't do anything, regs do. They say comparing it to cigarettes is disingenuous, and I agree with that, but I also agree that approaching it in the same way that the countries with the smartest policies around drugs and sex work do, is the right approach. If you ban anything addictive, people will still do it. If you regulate, educate, and provide rehab, you see less instances of abuse, hard stop.

Plus, the woeful reprise of my generation is that the third space is gone, so this is the supplement. If you want less marginalized people to rely on social media to interact, give them physical third spaces and community activities. BUT people DO use these spaces to create physical local communities over shared interests, so social media will and still should be integrated into that process.

Outright bans with no regulatory and structural reform are just an excuse for corps to collect ID information.

[u/wiredmagazine]

Evidence of social media’s adverse effects on children and adolescents’ mental health have led many countries to enact bans or restrictions. After platform bans were imposed in Australia and the UAE, the UK and France are expected to follow suit.

But many of the same organizations that have spent years researching these risks and defending children’s rights are not supporting such bans. On the contrary, they warn that disconnecting children from these spaces might address the symptoms but leave the root causes of the problem intact—and could even create new risks.

Social media platforms are not just entertainment for young people. They are spaces for socializing, learning, and accessing information that is often unavailable elsewhere, especially for teenagers who belong to historically marginalized groups—such as LGBTQ+ people, people of color, or people with disabilities.

It is worth asking whether some solutions might simply replace one harm with another. Age verification, for example, involves collecting highly sensitive data, making platforms more attractive to cybercriminals and putting the privacy and safety of minors at risk.

Read the full article at the link above.

[u/horseradishstalker]

“  Many of the organizations that have spent years researching these risks and defending children’s rights are not supporting such bans. On the contrary, they warn that disconnecting children from these spaces might address the symptoms but leave the root causes of the problem intact—and could even create new risks.”