We occasionally "grounded" our teenaged daughters from their devices for various reasons. This primarily cut them off from social media. After a week away from it, even they acknowledged how much healthier and happier they were (mentally/emotionally). A few days after device usage resumed, those things tanked. We pointed it out a few times. They saw it, too, even brought it up themselves. But of course they continued using the stuff. It reminds me of the vast hordes of young people vaping who wouldn't be caught dead hitting a cigarette, apparently aware that this is idiotic but doing it anyway.
"One wants to do everything and one can do nothing, one is always thinking that from to-morrow one will begin a new life, that from to-morrow one will set to work as one ought, that from to-morrow one will put oneself on a diet; but not a bit of it, on the evening of that very day one will over-eat oneself, so that one can only blink one’s eyes and can’t say a word—yes really; and it’s always like that.” -- "Hlobuev", Gogol, N. Dead Souls (1854)
Obesity has not just been normalized, it’s being actively promoted. I walked by a Victoria Secret store in the mall today, and one of the models displayed on the advertising wall was not just “plus sized” or obese, but morbidly obese. Advertised and promoted by a major brand as if it was healthy and sexy. I don’t get out much so it was shocking.
Should morbidly obese women not be allowed to buy underwear? Is Victoria’s Secret not allowed to market to them? Should the entire world tremble for the approval of your gaze?
I think the idea is that no matter if they want it or not, Victoria's Secret inspire and influence people, especially young people.
If you show anorectic models, they will inspire to anorexia. We all recognize that would be immoral. Now the inspire obesity, but because the pendulum is still swinging away from underweight, we don't recognize it for how sick it is.
People who are obese should not be misled that they are healthy. They should be encouraged to lose weight. "Healthy at every size" is a horrifyingly wicked slogan that will contribute to people being very ill and racking up hospital bills.
But they do tremble! Even the stairs tremble in fear and anticipationk(of structural failure)! Indeed I am "trembled", being on the parallel staircase in an adjacent apartment on an adjoining wall. I pause as the elephants pass.
Have a friend, non-obese and diabetic, who has learned precisely how much insulin to shoot up after various and sundry of his candy bars and caffeinated-sweet drinks. Impressive in a way.
Obesity uncommon back then, on average people where younger, and there where only ~1.2 billion people alive in 1854 vs 8 billion today. I would be surprised if obesity related deaths topped 100,000 / year back then.
Your comment better illustrates my thought than me.
The thought being, while human nature may not change much across centuries, some vices like food and tech are now more refined in their distribution and effects than ever before.
The idea that things are similar but not the same.
Social media is basically internet era alcohol. Except alcohol has been around for a heck of a long time and the internet has been a culturally important thing for maybe a quarter century.
Just like in previous times when we discovered alcohol, various cultures also found ways over time to deal with the fallout. Some cultures don't do so well with it.
The same happened with various other chemicals like opium, tobacco, and crack, which all have had societal reactions over time. The contraceptive pill is another one, and I'd argue so are processed foods.
I've always used sugar and high fructose corn syrup as my analogy.
In the early days of the internet we didn't have what we now call social media, but we had things like blogs and message boards that allowed for some connection with other people. Those things had some of the elements that make modern social media toxic, but they were mixed in with other good things and we consumed them much slower.
Over the past few decades, we've slowly refined social media to what it is today. In an attempt to retain customers we've boiled it down to its most addictive and unhealthy parts and pushed customers to consume more of that quicker than ever before.
The analogy I think of is the introduction of sugar to Inuit culture. Before the Europeans brought it, the Inuit apparently had no need to be concerned about dental hygiene and controlling intake of certain foods. For decades, there was the stereotype of Eskimos with most of their teeth rotted out. I don't know how many generations it took for Inuit culture to adapt.
I think the analogy flows through the idea that, like drinking in bars, posting on (some kinds of) social media can be used to make friends and/or deepen existing relationships; and that people often excuse a pattern of abuse of {alcohol, social media} as actually having this goal.
Something this analogy through-line makes me notice, is that we have clear cultural images of what a healthy use of alcohol looks like — going out for cocktails with friends; having wine with dinner; etc; vs. what alcohol abuse looks like — day-drinking, drinking alone, drinking until you pass out, etc. But we don't (yet) have similar cultural images for what healthy vs. unhealthy/abusive social-media participation looks like.
The rewards of smoking were social but not in making you cool. It was that smoking made it easy to find somebody to chat with and start contact. Smokers met outside, borrowed each other fire or gave cigarettes and became acquitances and friends. It was quick and easy.
Not smokers took longer to get to know each other and it was harder. But it was nit about cool factor all that much.
I’m 40 so I grew up with the “cool kids” narrative. But the only time I ever experienced it was when my brother pressured me once. I started smoking because I was bored out of my mind one day and the opportunity was available. Smokers were never the “cool kids” in my experience, at least not any more than football players or drama club.
Everything else you say is spot on, although the “reward” is a very nuanced minimal for me… it’s something I can go do privately by myself for a few minutes without needing to explain that. It’s probably the biggest conscious tie I still have to the habit.
> “When we do things that are addictive like use cocaine or use smartphones, our brains release a lot of dopamine at once. It tells our brains to keep using that,” she said. “For teenagers in particular, this part of their brain is actually hyperactive compared to adults. They can’t get motivated to do anything else.”
/me checks how much time I spent on hn this week-end and decides it's maaaybe time to "log out"
You're getting downvoted, but this raises a good point; how does HN avoid becoming a toxic cesspool?
It shares many attributes/features with other social media. Does it just come down to excellent moderation on the part of u/dang? Is it the lack of instant reply notifications? Is it that thread depth is capped? Only allowing downvotes for power users? Some combination of all those?
I think HN does become a cesspool for some specific subject matters that are controversial or anti-vc. Other than those subjects high moderation tools and extensive limiting of identified toxic contributors helps imo.
I believe so, it's hard to have flamewars as well since most users are limited from responding too fast. All of the above are good ways to increase the quality of discourse here.
In a way, based on the alcohol analogy, HN is kind of like an evening beer with friends at a biergarten, you drink socially, not too much to even get very inebriated, and if you try to, mechanisms exist to stop you, such as the biergarten owners kicking you out. You're not getting (or are supposed to get) drunk at a biergarten, generally speaking.
On the other hand, many other social media are more like clubs. Sure, you can drink less, but the entire environment is designed to get you to drink more. This is analogous to places like Twitter or Instagram which are specifically designed for you to use them as much as possible, like through only allowing short replies (thus stripping nuance and incentivizing short angry replies) or gamifying like counters and incentivizing heavily cherry picked and edited photos.
> It shares many attributes/features with other social media.
It doesn’t have any concept (much less a public one) of “following”, it doesn’t have public likes, it doesn’t have a DM facility, it doesn’t have a personalized algorithm, it isn’t ad supported (and thus isn’t incentivized to tweal its algorithms for maximizing engagement and ad delivery), it has negative (but equally not-public) voting and signals (flagging) that don’t require filling out a form and human review, and it has dang.
I've found a clear split between sites which are topic-focused and sites which are person-focused. Also smaller communities tend to be better. That said, Hacker News is unusually good even for a topic-focused site.
Aside: Has anyone analyzed social media in terms of it's inputs and outputs and distinguished what factors are most critical/useful to achieve a particular goal? That is, an analysis/compendium of social media sites from NNTP to Parler and the pros/cons of various methods? A book? A report?
From small scale (e.g., "How to create a social media site", etc.) to "How to best use Facebook to sell XXX, to influence political campaigns, to overthrow governments, to confuse your competition, etc.".
Doesn't social media have the same benefit when used in moderation? It makes it easier to get in touch with friends and make new ones based on shared interests.
I think the analogy is we're still in the equivalent of the early days of the Temperance movement for social media, where it's somewhat dysfunctional (like not drinking alcohol in the early 19th century US) to not have at least some account somewhere.
We may well be speed-running this. I won't be surprised by an attempt to ban "hard liquor" like FB and Twitter, nor if they decide to ban everything including "beer" places like here.
I'd say the fact that the internet is clearly useful in certain ways is a thing that allows some of the downsides to travel along.
With something like recreational drugs, the upsides are just pure hedonism, you do them because they make you feel a certain way and the downsides aren't inextricably connected. Plus the downsides are pretty awful, whereas with internet stuff it's awful but in a way that doesn't require an ambulance. Basically social media addiction is a flu that millions of people catch and mostly live with, whereas drug addiction is a thing fewer people catch but some of them die from it, like Ebola.
Hmm? To me organized religion seems to be the most toxic of all - megachurches and Internet-only pastors are the ones whipping up their followers into believing people that are not like them are existential threats worthy of being killed. The healthier forms of religion are the ones that explicitly un-organized: Unitarian Universalists, Quakers, your local community church that serves as a gathering place for like-minded folks but isn't interested in imposing their beliefs on others.
Maybe the lesson there is that organization is the evil, given that it seems to pop up in so many contexts (megacorps < small businesses, megachurches < community organizations, public schooling < small private/parochial/charter schools, big government < grassroots organizations). Would make sense, since an organization, by definition, is about subsuming what individually makes you happy so you can be a part of something bigger. The bigger the organization grows, the less it can fit the authentic selves of the people who support it.
* As a group grows it gets worse at serving each individual's needs.
* Large groups outcompete and disrupt small ones.
I think the trick is for small groups to be illegible to the outside world.
Fish school, birds flock and animals herd partly to avoid predators. I wonder if multiple schools/flocks/herds are always superior to a single one, as long as each of them is above some critical threshold.
Organization from the bottom up works fine. The problem comes with hierarchies that exist to reinforce power. If you naturally construct a hierarchy to coordinate, great. Let the hierarchy die when the need to coordinate is over. When someone co-opts that hierarchy to increase their own power and reduce that of others, you've got a problem.
It happens all the time in bottom-up disaster relief. Don't assume something doesn't exist just because you don't participate in areas where it's common.
> Have to point out, though, it seems the one place where everything isn't toxic seems to be (certain forms of) orgnanised religion.
Perhaps what we are seeing is a generalization of religion in which certain aspects of social concern have effectively become religious exercise. This might be a challenging thesis to sustain, but where parallels can be found it might give some broader insight into the present moment.
Props for the link, but the full text seems to be pay walled?
And the important bit seems to be
>nicotine concentration between 0.001 mM and 4.0mM.
And they found an effect starting at 1.0mW. But, this is what I hate about pretty much all scientific papers that clearly set out with a purpose in mind (good or bad) is the abstract doesn't mention what the hell 1.0mW. Is that even a feasible amount? Is that one puff? Is that 100% nicotine being directly vaped? What on earth is it? None of this is mentioned, for free anyways.
It's molar concentration, the study doesn't really mention it directly of course. 1mM is probably high since they're looking at what concentration of tobacco causes DNA damage in e.g., a cavity, but the study doesn't think it's unreasonable. Other studies in animals used up to 4mM.
The full study mentions that other studies found nasal snuff produced the highest plasma nicotine concentration at 0.8 uM, with speculation that a large (emphasis mine) pinch would produce mM concentrations in the nasal cavity, right on target for observed DNA damage, yet incidents of nasal cancer among western nasal snuff users are practically unheard of. Similarly, rates of oral cancer among Swedish Snus users are so low that several studies now have failed to find any association with oral cancer.
This says nothing about rates of other non-site specific cancers of course (pancreatic being a big one), or the other health risks that are still associated with smokeless tobacco (stroke, cardiovascular disease, impotency), but it's somewhat telling that even anti-nicotine advocacy groups rarely mention the risk of cancer for smokeless tobacco products in their publications.
I would love to see sources on this. All research I've seen about nicotine and cancer is that it can help a tumor grow faster but it cannot induce damage to DNA.
Nobody is making that argument. They're making the argument that the danger of vaping isn't at the same scales as the danger of cigarettes. Or rather, they're pointing it out, because that fact is not particularly controversial.
My remark was about young people doing something that is idiotic (vaping to the degree they do it) who would not take a puff on a cigarette. Arguments that vaping is "less dangerous than smoking" are precisely "At least I'm not shooting heroin in my eyeballs", because at no point did I assert that they were equivalent.
I recall hearing a lecture from Dr Leonard Sax where during part of it he discussed the dangers of social media on teens. He also mentioned that girls were especially disproportionately affected than boys.
> But of course they continued using the stuff
Sorry to be blunt, but why don't you do your duty as a parent and continue the prohibition of those devices except for necessary things?
That was my exact experience with a teenage daughter. She was depressed and rude with social media. She’s get it taken away for a month. Happy and energetic. Complete reversal in a couple days after getting it back.
Repeat for several years.
This is no different from me and my mobile phone usage. It directly correlates with the quality of my sleep, and I know I should sleep more, but it’s just too hard to give up.
why doesn't it really work and why do people come back and do it anyway? It's because cutting off is the most basic non-solution, that doesn't actually try to tackle the problem or fix anything. (Perhaps less so for 'managing use and having time limits', but definitely that for just 'cutting completely off, down to zero' approaches.) In a digital and online world, cutting people off is inhibiting people's communication. It's just plainly unfair. People need the ability to communicate, and venues to socialize in, at any age. And, it is not given that just because someone's 'technically of adult age', that they're gonna have some kind of understanding about digital spaces and how social life can play out within them. Just being in a space, or even having some experience within it, isn't necessarily gonna give explanations, answers and solutions. It is just a thing that's worth explaining and giving guidance on, whomever they may be.
Perhaps one useful and applicable distinction that can be made, is between 'interpersonal communication' (in apps like messengers, directly talking to people you know) and 'posting something on a platform' (in apps that are more like "social media", where posts are available to a broader public). Another distinction could be made for 'private platforms/spaces' (like discord) or 'limited/like-minded/focused spaces' (that aren't just the most general platforms, but something bit more specialized for some kind of content or audience), and the bigger platforms/spaces (that are basically just 'you're out there with everyone'. it also could be pointed out that 'having a semi-private group on a big platform might not be too bad - but that it might be still out there and accessible, so there's things to mind'. or, hell, explain what comes with posting on a big platform and what precautions should one take). Explaining the differences and outlining where and what someone would be doing, could help, in a practical way that won't be just 'you can't do anything now'.
Cutting off messaging isn't something that should be done, in my opinion - it's too drastic. it's basically saying, 'don't talk to people/you don't get to talk to people', and those people are probably gonna be the most familiar/important people to them. Cutting off social media, could be done, but it's really worth talking through and explaining the difference between 'publishing something for the whole internet and hanging out in that broad of a space' or 'posting something for your friends group to see, and hanging in a private, familiar space' (and perhaps, enticing them to grow and enrich their own social circle and seek something there, not just from random people on big platforms). At the end of the day though, cutting off and prohibiting something can be just circumvented, as people might just do something anyway, and if they don't have the 'why' explained to them, it might be even easier to ignore the limits without much concern. With guidance, that stands on its own, maybe it could be less so.
Social media for teens are effectively casinos. They're designed to do that.
Those who vape would also smoke, vaping is far healthier to do, it's cheaper, and it tastes better. You also can't government regulate liquid like you can cigarettes.
You certainly can, my city just passed a ban of all flavored tobacco products which will include vaping.
I disagree with the ban, but that's beside the point here.
I'm actually curious to see how things play out. The first thing that occurred to me was that vape shops might start selling unflavored liquid and also sell flavoring which you would have to mix in yourself. Not sure that would be passable under the legal regime or not.
Interestingly, statehouse Republicans attempted to pass a law which would have negated my city's ban. This was vetoed by the state governor though.
And now the city has created a black market of unregulated vaping liquid. Sounds like it's perfectly legal to buy the base liquid itself, then you just add the flavoring. Much cheaper and fun!
To be fair, I'm not sure that's the case re: unflavored liquid, I was just speculating. That said, as with any prohibition, yes, there will obviously be people selling vapes / liquid illegally now.
It's quite frustrating that as we slowly step towards an end to the senseless and wildly net negative prohibition of marijuana, we are determined to repeat the mistake with nicotine.
Lots of the motivation behind this seems to be the popularity of vaping among teens. "Think of the children" and all that goes along with it.
Growing up in early 90s we had a computer lab where we would go as part of kindergarten and first grade to play logo draw and Oregon trail. That feels way different to the type of tech exposure kids are getting these days with social media.
There is something fundamentally different about making things “social” than just doing something harmless offline, like playing a game with the family, writing a story, using MS paint, math blaster.
When things became social, it’s like we were all given sledgehammers and told to go smash the candy store and raid it for whatever we wanted.
Maybe I’m being nostalgic for the early / mid 90s when we didn’t have these devices glued to us and little red notification icons hijacking our dopaminergic circuitry.
+1 to offline computer labs. Our primary school had one in the '90s, but they only let us in for an hour or two each week.
The teachers didn't know how to use the computers, and the parents mostly felt that it was a waste of time which would rot our child brains. Still, the school had paid a bunch of money for it as part of an initiative to get rid of the library's card catalog system, so it had to be used.
The teachers tried to convince everyone to play math and typing games, but most kids played with a sort of photoshop-lite program, stuck magnets onto the CRT screens, or played Oregon Trail.
It wasn't an efficient process, but just about everybody in our district was a proficient typist by middle school. When I got to college, I was surprised by how many people typed on their laptops like they type on their phones, with rapid index finger pecks.
We figured out pretty quick how to use Windows' internal network messenger, and that was pretty cool (in terms of being able to chat with peers without the teachers knowing).
It still blows my mind that kids are using Chromebooks and Ipads daily on an elementary level.
Good question - I'm even typing this with thumbs now!
Thinking back, it was during a time when most phones were small enough to fit comfortably in one small hand. People would hold it with one hand, and use the other to tap.
Modern phones are too heavy and bulky for that, so I think we use both hands to hold and use them. Or maybe the finger-pecking was unrelated to phone use, who knows.
Fundamental difference is there is click/like/upvote/view/follower count next to everything. These counts never existed on the old Internet. Kids were never getting judged with the whole planet scoring their thoughts like today. And people werent programmed to think collecting Likes and Followers is the point of the whole story.
> Fundamental difference is there is click/like/upvote/view/follower count next to everything. These counts never existed on the old Internet.
Public view counts on individual pages were extremely common on the “old internet”, if by that you mean the WWW pre the rise of the terms “social media” and “social network”.
The problem with social media isn’t the social part. It’s the media part.
Media comes from the root of mediate. Social media is a huge system sitting between people and mediating their communication. The main goal function for most of it is to maximize engagement, which means amplifying and prioritizing the most toxic interactions.
It’s like having someone sitting between you and your friends steering the conversation toward whatever is the most negative, hateful, or ridiculous.
This is the game that taught me maths when I was 4-5 years old, and part of why I was excellent at maths for the rest of my schooling. Gosh it was fun!
That plus exploring Encarta 95 for hours on end.
But I also sunk a lot of time into SimCity 2000 and MechWarrior 2, to be fair.
I grew up in the mid to late 90's, so probably about 5 years later than you.
My first real exposure to the internet was through my year 7 English class. My English teacher was I guess you'd call an early adopter he was one of those people convinced technology was going to be revolutionary he somehow signed our class up to be a part of an email pen pal program with a school in Japan. One lesson a week we would go to the school library (where there was a computer with dial up internet) we would tell the teacher what we wanted to say and he would type 2 or 3 sentences from each student in our class and then send it using a program called "Eudora" (pretty sure we were using the teacher's personal address) and maybe a week later the teacher would show up to class with a stack of printouts. He would hand each of us the printout from our respective pen pal full of broken English. We did this for maybe a semester.
That was my first exposure to online "social" use of computers. A few years Later people started to get internet at home ICQ (a chat program became pretty popular) this was around the time of Napster so there was a lot of downloading songs sharing them with people on ICQ etc. A little after that Online gaming was starting to be possible, I remember playing Quake, Starcraft and Diablo 2 with my friends online. I think around year 11/12 Counterstrike came out, it was a mod for the game Half Life and was very popular. The latency was normally pretty bad but it slowly got better.
In the early days bandwidth was so limited it really restricted what kinds of social activities you could do on line.
Oh how I miss the computer labs with Kidpix, Oregon trail, Mavis Beacon, and maybe later Marathon LAN parties (when the instructor left the room for an hour)...
> “If parents can band together and say you know, as a group, we’re not going to allow our kids to use social media until 16 or 17 or 18 or whatever age they choose, that’s a much more effective strategy in making sure your kids don’t get exposed to harm early,"
I'm surprised by this statement considering he's a parent.
You can't really prevent a teenager from doing something if they set their mind on it. All we can really do is educate.
My take is that every social media outlet starts a death spiral once its first generation of users starts being parents of teenagers.
My experience is that it's much more effective to advocate for the alternative activities that would be done instead of using social media.
I also think focusing all our attention to the broadest instance ("social media" as a whole) is just as lazy as focusing on the broadest audience ("teenagers" as a whole).
One of the most frustrating social behaviors teenagers experience from adults is "infantilization": when an adult refuses to accommodate or even recognize a teenager's own autonomy, discipline, and maturation; instead placing them at the same social level as an infant. Teenagers are not babies, and they know it. They are not likely be fully mature, and they are definitely not fully immature.
To broadly declare that teenagers are endangered by social media is no more helpful than broadly declaring children are endangered by water. In either context, simple avoidance is not a practical solution, nor is it intrinsically desirable.
In America, there is a broad infantilization push that started from the 90s till now. I remember not being able to walk outside of my neighborhood, while my fiance who is not american walked to school as a preteen. While social media is toxic for teens and adults really, so there is clearly some value in the observation somewhere, this is stemming from the infantalizing culture of America today.
“You can’t really prevent a teenager from doing something if they set their mind on it.”
While true about any human, this mindset is wrong when the conclusion is “I won’t even try to change the problem.”
Education is the wrong answer because education only delivers information. What we need is leadership and wisdom in application.
Properly-applied leadership CAN prevent teenagers from engaging in self-destructive behaviors. Education is not the answer, it is half of the strategy, but perfect education by itself will not solve this issue or any other public health crisis facing our youth.
Maybe not "give them access," but I think we tend to underestimate adolescents' abilities to select out of behavior. From personal experience: I was able to access alcohol at a pretty early age, and thus avoided a lot of the "typical" American young adult experience with it (not drinking until college, at which point you black out at your first party.)
Tobacco is a step further in terms of addictive potential, but I think the US could generally learn from Europe's approach to adolescent drinking.
Associated, yes, but the causation is not clear: it could be the case that early drinking predisposes adolescents to alcoholism, or that adolescents who would be predisposed to alcoholism as adults are reflected in early drinking statistics.
These surveys are also done on American adolescents, who are more likely to obtain and consume alcohol illicitly than their European counterparts. It would be interesting to see comparative statistics on the two.
Finally: this bulletin mixes up different demographics: you have (1) COAs who are more likely to become alcoholics themselves, (2) adolescents who engage in binge drinking, which is generally correlated with alcoholism in adulthood, and (3) an unmeasured population of drinking-but-not-binging adolescents.
Yes, why not? The drinking age is 16 where I grew up and my parents said, if you want to smoke or drink, don't hide it, and if you ever want to experiment with anything do it here in the home where people you can trust are around. And that's what I did, never lied to my parents once. The first time I smoked pot they knew about it, I never got blackout drunk anywhere, never did any hard stuff or used anything irresponsibly, still don't.
What I do vividly remember is having US exchange students in uni age 21+ who binge drank themselves into oblivion everywhere, catching up on everything at once without anyone around.
The argument wasn’t about a specific age limit (it’s 16 for alcohol where I live as well, and TFA actually mentions 16 as a possible age limit for social media), it’s that the parent commenter was implying that restricting access would make no difference.
No argument that education is important, and that some would seek and find a way around the restriction, like they do with alcohol. But I’m sure that restricting access to social media under a certain age like it is the case for alcohol would significantly reduce the use of social media in the affected age group.
It didn't do that with alcohol and tobacco in my corner of the world and it was partly because some parents didn't really give a shit.
And that's the thing: as a teenager if you don't have access to <disallowed thing>, there's surely at least one kid in your class, whose parents are either largely absent or particularly lenient, and who will provide you with whatever you need.
In the case of social media I'd imagine a secret separate phone without parental restrictions and SIM card swapped out for the time being. Maybe even a separate SIM card, should the first one be restricted on the provider level. Or just rooting the device and rendering any control moot. There's always this one guy who'll help you out if your parents are too strict in your view.
Of course there's going to be some reduction, but you have to ask yourself: what's the plan when the kid turns eighteen and you can't legally control their internet usage - not when they have a SIM card on their name? You just let go of any restrictions on that day?
even if it did which I don't genuinely believe given how ubiquitous and easy access is, it's a bad idea for the same reason I gave for alcohol. The world is full of social media, just like it's full of drugs, and teenagers need to learn how to navigate that world because in adulthood they will be surrounded by them.
kids need to take to learn control of things that are harmful and how to engage them rather than be kept away from them. This avoidance behavior to me seems to be a consequence of now endemic helicopter parenting. If you hide things from kids, they don't gain the confidence of dealing with them or coming to you on their own terms.
The goal shouldn't be to reduce social media usage, it should be to equip teenagers with tools to be resilient and take control of the way they use social media. It's in a sense like bullying. Yes, you can shield your kids from exposure to it, or you can teach them to confront it. What's better long term?
Depends where you live, but in some EU countries, teens start drinking and smoking and already give up on cigs and beer before American teens even start.
It's pretty common to see 14 year olds smoking and drinking beer outside in public despite these being officially allowed when you're 18.
Teens will always try to do what adults tell them is forbidden and bad for them, because doing forbidden things is enticing and makes you look cool and rebellious.
I think every year that a teenager doesn't start drinking alcohol is a net benefit. They black out at college parties at 20 so what? By that time their brain is more developed. I think Europeans have a very unhealthy attitude towards alcohol and their kids pay the price of it. And they do not give up alcohol at all. On the contrary, they don't know how to party without alcohol for the rest of their life.
I'm Australian, the legal age is 18 here we have a pretty big binge drinking culture here but I think there are some differences.
There is a pub culture here, for example my university had pubs and bars on campus there was a lot of activities like Trivia nights etc. with heavy drinking involved. Pool tables at pubs were pretty common. During Uni I'd often hang out with my friends for a few hours drink beer shoot pool, grab a kebab on the way home, that was a pretty typical night out. Sports involved a lot of drinking as well, I played cricket while I was in university. I'd go to the pub with my cricket team after every game.
I think the American experience, especially around University is more focused around house parties and drinking games (unless the keg party, ping pong ball, cup flipping you see on TV shows is just a Stereotype).
The argument that you shouldn't ban something because people will do it anyway is very unconvincing. If it's the difference between 5% of people doing something harmful vs 95% of people, of course I'll take the 5%.
Furthermore, you won't have parents afraid of banning social media or phones for kids because it's a practical requirement for a social life in current age or something like that
Typically they only have limited access. I’m sure they would stop having access if they’d start binging it like social media, under most circumstances.
We prohibit children from drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco, and while it doesn't work perfectly, it sure has made them use these substances less. I'm a bit disappointed how timid his opinion is. He should be calling for laws against children's device use instead of calling for parents to do it.
I don't think parents will ever do it, not in such quantity that it would matter. Also, if it's primarily the parents' responsibility to do this, it will be the more well-off, more educated and more intelligent parents who will have the resources to do this. The children who need the most help with this problem will again be left to deal with it themselves.
> You can't really prevent a teenager from doing something if they set their mind on it.
By the time they hit their teenage years, it's basically too late. You have to start earlier instilling authority and respect and trust in their parents. Not a popular opinion here, but religion plays a role in guidance as well.
Are parents going to deny their kids access to social media? Among the parents I know, none of them do this even if they admit it's probably bad for their kids. The social pressure from the kids' peers is the number one reason they give: their kids will be left out, and social alienation is viewed as worse than social media. Perhaps a coordinated effort would make a difference, I don't know. I'm skeptical.
Despite saying lawmakers are "paying attention", there's no talk of regulation in this article, so presumably a voluntary effort on the part of parents is the only actionable plan they are ready to discuss. As the article notes, social products are not de facto designed to keep kids out, and have not done a good job of it so far, so I am also skeptical they will improve in the future without any legal pressure.
I think so. We don’t buy our kids smartphones. We tell them that they can have one when they can buy it themselves. That tends to happen around 16-17. At home we block social media at the router level. They have Chromebooks from school, but social media is blocked on those by the school district. We’ve never had any of the kids complain about social alienation.
Ditto. My old got cellphone in 9th grade, and all usual ones are blocked via pihole at home.
Now in 12th, he does use Discord to communicate with a limited set of friends. But that’s it.
I’ve said it before, the difference is that we don’t use any of the social media ourselves, so kids are OK. If parents use them but ask kids to refrain, obviously it’s not going to work.
I want to thank you for your socket guides etc. I learnt TCP/IP programming from those way back in the 90's! Presuming I am talking to the correct Beej here of course.
But, I'm pretty sure the Surgeon General did not have HN in mind while making that comment. :)
HN is a social media, but it lacks certain capabilities that make it OK. First and foremost, there is no DM, then it's heavily moderated both by users as well as by DanG, and then it is text based. Also, based on my observation, the karma/like acquisition is not what drives people's comments here.
So, while you're correct that it's a social media, it's not the cesspool of poison that the usual ones, that come to mind when we use the term social media, are.
I wouldn’t. It’s not social without a social network. A social network implies that we are not all anonymous strangers. It implies we know people’s real names and other personal information about them. To the best of my knowledge, I have never interacted with the same person twice on HN (or Reddit). That’s basically the opposite of social or a network. When everyone is anonymous, and might even be a bot, it isn’t social media. Mostly because it is not social.
Yes, he can, and maybe he did (I can’t say with 100% certainty that that is not the case) but I believe that is where parents not using these social media comes into play. And, remember, Discord is allowed which I believe meets some of the needs.
Also, any excessive data usage would show up in the family plan, which gives me confidence.
I have always vocally expressed my hate for FB so maybe that helped.
But all kids are different, and maybe what worked here won’t work for everyone.
Thanks, was just wondering. I have a 3 year old and the prospect of raising him in today's tech environment is daunting. I can't imagine I'll have to deal with him having a smartphone, etc. It's terrible.
I have a younger kid and we have set expectations that no cell phone before high school,
I’m sure there’d be push back in middle school but we’ll be able to refer to the older kid. Fingers crossed..
Also, I had used the family thing with the older kid, so app installations required patent approval. So that at least forces usage of web apps if the kid is trying to bypass some restrictions, which in itself reduces the damage caused by these social networks.
I actually think Discord is even lower on the social media pole in terms of potential harm than HN. The things that seem to be the source of negative effects of social media seem to boil down to 1. dopamine-inducing like/point systems, 2. endless content feeds, and 3. the number of people interacting.
HN has elements of all 3, but to a lesser degree than Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit.
Discord has the potential to have some of those to an extent, but especially if the user is simply using a server for them and their friends, practically none of those apply. It’s much closer to a simple group chat.
Well, it's not like group chat cannot have issues of its own (toxic admins, bullying... maybe not so much among friends, though as a teenager there's quite more risk to be paired with """friends"""), but you are right, I should perhaps (?) have left my concerns with Discord being a platform (closed, privately owned, for profit motive) that is US-based at the door in this specific discussion.
I put my own work around in for that. Wireguard VPN on the phone, that connects back to home. Tasker profiles to enable the Wireguard VPN connection anytime the wifi is not connect to the home network. Pihole blocking still active via that method.
Ah thank you. Yes, I have never used Discord and don’t know its capacities. I definitely should educate myself :)
But the kid is now in senior year of high school so in worst case I did protect them for as long as I could. I won’t have much control from next year anyway..
Fair, I use it all the time, there's probably millions of different communities on it, think of reddit but with the capacity to share files, images, voice chat, video call, screenshare and so on. Now remember how insane reddit can get without all of that.
Just wanted to post this in case someone else has no idea and they let their kids on that platform. Chances are high most people on Discord are fine, but bad can be found anywhere online.
Are you worried about the social lives they might be missing out on? About the friendships they might have had if they had a phone with Snapchat on it? A lot of social life for kids happens online.
That’s the point. you want them to miss out. Missing out means they don’t have to be depressed and have their attention spans attacked. This online social life is unhealthy and bad for them and they will grow up retarded socially if you don’t protect them from it.
Saving them from TikTok crack is hardly helicopter child abuse. It's responsible parenting. But it's also more than that. Simply not giving them a smartphone when they're 10 isn't enough. Parents have to also embody what they preach.
There is a range here, I'm not talking about 10 year olds or 5 year olds. The article discusses young teenagers, and by that point many of their friends will be on social media, and keeping them off it will stunt their social growth and make them outcasts.
I would strongly contest the idea that depriving a child of social media is “socially stunting” them. It isn’t as if children today are more socially adept after social media than children were for all of the millennia prior to social media, and if anything, there is evidence to the contrary. All of the options for socialization from pre-social media still widely available and applicable.
Then nothing. I am not worried about these things at all. We have a 25 year old, a 23 year old, and a 21 year old and their social lives were never impacted. And the 25 year old has thanked us for keeping her off of social media until she was older and more mature.
This is hard to believe to the point of me thinking your kids were in a plato's cave. It was not possible to have a normal social life without social media as a teenager over the last 10 years. Full stop. You will miss out on events because you can not be invited the normal way. Whether that's a big deal or not is certainly debatable, but claiming that it doesn't exist is ostrich behavior.
> About the friendships they might have had if they had a phone with Snapchat on it? A lot of social life for kids happens online.
A lot of things are said (and done) - often in haste - online, which one would simply never experience in a face-to-face interaction.
We support our kids participating in lots of team sports, not because they're amazingly talented (although they're all better than I was when I was that age!), but because we believe it's good for them, physically and socially.
> We support our kids participating in lots of team sports, not because they're amazingly talented (although they're all better than I was when I was that age!), but because we believe it's good for them, physically and socially.
This is the way to do it. People forget that while some teenage social life occurs online, not all of it does, and the part that can be done in-person is a lot healthier than what's online. In real life, are people going to be comparing themselves to Instagram posts? Unlikely, but even then, there will be a lot more nuance of something like, say, going on an international trip, where a friend can tell you the good and bad rather than showing only the good on an IG photo and making the viewer feel bad because they didn't go on such a trip.
Real life interaction simply has less ability to lack nuance, which I think is a good thing.
It depends really whether you as a kid can have a social life at all without being on social media. If your school is one of those no-digital-devices places where tech workers send their kids to, then you'll manage. But most schools aren't like that. Instead, there, children heavily rely on online services to communicate. I'm a late millenial, so I didn't have 100% the same experience as a kid growing up now has, but even for me, I felt it on my own skin. A lot of social interaction was inaccessible to me due to me not being on Facebook by choice. When some event was planned, I didn't immediately know about it.
Also there is the practicality point. In the old days, kids could reach each other from their own volition, back when kids walking on the sidewalk alone wasn't a reason to call CPS. Back when said side walks existed in the first place.
I was exaggerating a little, but the issue still exists. There has been a change in general societal mindset around deeming the outsides as dangerous for children, even during the day. This mindset might not exist everywhere, but where it is prevailing, it is forced onto parents who let their kids out in the sense that they are looked negatively upon.
I've lived in several places and never had this problem. My instinct is that this is just another moral panic - not any different than fearing of child abduction when letting your kid walk to school.
I think that's a big part of the problem. I want to encourage more of that social life to happen in person. I would feel bad if I was causing them to miss out on IRL events.
I'm curious how your kids collaborate with other students for schoolwork if social media is disallowed. When I was in elementary and high school I regularly used MSN/Facebook/etc. for group projects and study sessions, and from what I know today's students mostly use Discord. Having a student's Facebook group for the class/school was also very common and people would discuss assignments and events. Obviously the kids do fool around on those services but they also use it for legitimate purposes like how corps today use MS Teams.
If a student did not have access to those services I would not want to work with them on say a group assignment because it would be very difficult to keep things organized. I would not want to go out of my way to go to their house/make phone calls to keep them in the loop.
Kids don't use facebook. There is still imessage and school email, schoology, gsuite etc. No one is doing schoolwork over the twitter or instatok that we know of.
We had an official school LMS/email back in the day too, but students didn't like using that for obvious reasons. Today (at least with the kids I know) they typically use Discord for assignments and the like. It's not as bad as Twitter and co. but I would still call it a social media platform.
they are going to be very inadapted when they end up in college or later. this is also restricting them from career opportunities, e.g. community & socials management etc. I know people who flat-out say that they wouldn't trust someone with no social media presence.
> I know people who flat-out say that they wouldn't trust someone with no social media presence.
I've known people who say this. Trust me: They're not worth associating with. Most/all have unhealthy social problems. And none have worthwhile positives that you'd miss out on by not being part of their circle.
I am forever grateful that my parents raised me with no TV in the house.
It's true, we were sometimes out-of-the-loop with regards to pop culture, which is a somewhat isolating factor. I imagine it could be even more so with social media, since it's not just common discussion material but the actual means of communication.
From time to time, I'll look at TV these days (in a hotel, or so), and it's ... so off-putting. All the ads screaming at you, the pacing of things. I'm sure plenty of people don't even know another reality, but I'm so glad that I do.
I don't see it changing without a grassroots upwelling on a cultural level, where people want it to change. Maybe as quality of those experiences continues to degrade there will be an increased desire for it. A person can hope. Things generally need to get worse before they get better, it seems.
I will not deny it to them. Plus, it was their primary communication with peers during lockdowns, I am not going to put toothpaste back to tube. Social media are part of current world whether I like it or not. Teens are at the stage where you need to be releasing them gradually and they should become independent, get jobs or go to college soon.
I find the impulse to deny it all fascinating in combination with outrages over pre-teens and tees walking themselves or using public transport, expectation of without constant supervision till age of 18 and so on. There is knee jerk streak of "control everything as tightly as possible". Except that, they should be growing independent. And also fascinating contrast against how toxic online communities gets treated - I have yet to see the call to prevent boys from playing online games as strategy despite some of those peer groups being fairly toxic both in ideology and behavior.
We need more granular language to talk about these issues. Anyone with moderate proficiency in online communities know that there are major differences between eg instagram and a private discord chat to play Minecraft with your friends.
Perhaps we should look at online media as games, with different rules and incentives, and find out which rules are good for us and which ones aren’t.
Public people oriented social media (instagram & Twitter being canonical examples) clearly stand out to me as the most problematic. Worse, the content promotion algorithms are opaque and not customizable, which makes it very difficult to research their influence. Upstream, >99% of these companies’ revenue come from advertisers, it’s likely that they constitute the largest stakeholder in our children’s online experiences (and our own, of course).
"teenagers aged 13 to 16-18" is way too broad a category. What developmental characteristics are shared among that entire group? Which of those characteristics make an individual "too vulnerable" to benefit "safely" from "social media"? Are those traits really unique to children, and not adults? Is the use of "social media" itself entirely separate from learning how to "safely" interact with "social media" later?
The same goes for "social media" itself. Are we talking about public forums, direct messaging, group chats, content creation, media consumption, or something else? What moderation techniques and goals are involved? What subjects do the spaces in question focus on? If we can't get specific here, our only choice is to ban everything from 4chan, to Tinder, to Snapchat, to SMS, to IRC, to landlines, to physical letters, all the way down to chatting unsupervised in a public park!
And what is the "risk" posed? That a child will feel disproportionately leveraged judgement from their peers, and fall into depression? That a child will view traumatic content and get PTSD? That a child will start an unhealthy or dangerous relationship with an adult? That a child will build political or religious beliefs that contradict their parents' ideology? That a child will build an addictive relationship to the media itself, and avoid healthier activity? That a child will learn how to use technical computing skills to circumvent parental, school, or government censorship? Every one of these concerns is considered valid by a significant group of adults, and considered invalid by another.
We all know that leaving people alone to leverage something as powerful as computer networks is dangerous. That leverage goes both ways, and the metaphorical fulcrum is most often positioned nearest to the individual user, and farthest from the network itself. Even though this subject is vitality important, we must recognize that the only way to interact with it at all is through context.
The more context we have, the more control we have over the leverage that these tools provide, and the better equipped we become to maximize safety and utility.
In my case "50s is 'too early to join social media'". So right there with you. :) (Though to be honest, joined back in the 00's then left in the early 2010s.)
I think the "you must claim to be at least 13 to be able to participate in an online discussion site" law makes sense as it functions as an IQ test of sorts to keep under-13s who are not ready to be on the internet off the internet. But I'm not in favor of increasing the age as I think its reasonable for teens to be able to openly admit that they're teens.
The problem with most of the social media platforms is their hostility to anonymity. A teen with a Twitter account or a Reddit account should absolutely be an anon so that their posts while they're still figuring life out aren't tied to their real name and it would be good if social media companies and search engines would help people destroy the evidence of any embarrassing stuff they posted under their real identity as a teen for the same reason that we as a society typically expunge the criminal records of teenagers who commit crimes.
But social media companies have been making it harder and harder to be anonymous. For example, Twitter started locking new accounts and forcing them to provide a phone number a few years ago ostensibly as an "anti-bot" measure. This is actively harmful and should be discontinued. Likewise, Google needs to allow users who wish to remain anonymous to turn off all of their account security measures other than a password. Security measures such as tying accounts to phones are helpful for adults who have their identity and their finances tied to these accounts but it makes these services unsafe for minors as it allows the platform to know the identities of their underage users which is a possible security risk.
Minors should also be educated in terms of basic measures to protect their anonymous accounts from deanonymization attacks and on the dangers of meeting their "internet friends" in real life. All of this used to be standard advice for "heavily online" youth in the 90s and 00s. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be in the 20s other than the preference of some social media outlets that users use their real identity for ad targeting purposes and the insistence of certain powerful people who can't handle criticism that anonymity is bad because they get criticized by anons who otherwise wouldn't feel safe challenging them (i.e. online anonymity is also good because it allows adults who'd otherwise feel unsafe speaking truth to power to feel safe enough to do so).
An as empty-nester who gave their child a phone at 10 years old, I would say make the minimum age for social media 16, just like driving. We gave our child a phone to give her a competitive technology edge and to keep track of her movements for safety. However, social media is like crack cocaine for kids. We found out when we would take her phone away as punishment, and she became a monster. She constantly had FOMO. It's also nearly impossible to limit their screen time while in the possession of the phone. There should definitely be some sort of age restriction, whatever it is.
To be fair, adults are isolating themselves. Loneliness epidemic and all, adults dont have all that many relationships that would matter to them that exist outside of institutions they are in - work.
Adults dont use social media to keep communication with friends - they dont have friends. Adults use social medias as newspaper.
Any tips from parents of pre teens / teenagers on how to manage this? My son is turning 11 soon and his peers already have their own mobile phones, YouTube accounts etc. I want to protect him and only have this when he is old enough. I expect the next few years to be challenging times :(
We simply said "no" to social media and also led by example by not using social media[1]. Also talked about social media perils occasionally and shared articles from HN regarding.
1: I don't consider HN social media for the purpose of this discussion. I do use Facebook very occasionally for marketplace and groups that only exist in FB (utility only).
You can give them phones without giving them full permissions to any app/website. Apple and Google have pretty good parental controls, where you can decide which apps/websites are allowed, screen time for specific apps etc.
I know, but peer pressure I expect will persist. My youngest son is already frustrated he can’t watch YouTube because all his friends can, and he’s 7. I guess it’s more about tips on how to talk to them about it.
Give him an absolutely crap phone (maybe like a Light Phone II). If he wants a better one he can get a job and buy it himself, which will take some amount of time and at minimum he'll learn something.
Given how the office of the surgeon general has been so obviously politicized and their recommendations based on political considerations, I am reluctant to take their advice in and of itself as evidence of anything health related. It's likelier based on the administration's desire to put pressure on their political opponents at social media companies than any actual health considerations.
Maybe you can restrict social media in terms of connecting to everyone, but I don't think you can or should stop 13 year olds from being able to talk to their friends with the various group messangers.
Talking to peers in the cafeteria or playground is not subject to a corporation boosting attention to the kids that it finds most profitable.
More generally, taking your "no true scotsman" approach to kids safety would suggest that it's fine to let kids play in a lead-dust sandpit because you can't eliminate 100% of environmental lead.
My kids nag me constantly for Facebook/WhatsApp/TikTok etc.
Main argument is that peers are using those media and they feel excluded.
The thing is that all parties involved is way below required 13yo. I do have arguments which are heard but it is not like reality stops being it especially when there is no alternative outside of school-owned Teams account that has most social activities disabled.
It feels like there’s no win in this fight, except for maybe suing FB for not checking carefully enough and allowing young minors to use their platform.
I don't have children, but I think if I did, I'd ease them into social media by paying them run a social media profile for a cat -- from the perspective of the cat, with no humans or PII visible, solely the cat. This would accomplish a few goals: familiarity with the tools, exposure to the annoyances of the process in a relatively safe environment, and probably dislike of the whole thing due to it being "a job" before it's a hobby or personal interest.
Uh oh! I had ICQ but it was at a time I didn't know a single other "normal" person on the internet besides colleagues at aerospace jobs. Late 90s? Probably folks at universities too.
Significant number of pre-teens? Unlikely. Also ICQ didn't use dark addictive patterns to my memory, it was just fun.
Isn't the surgeon general in a position where they can amplify the best scientific information on social media / technology addiction and help parents / kids understand the risk of engaging?
Perhaps that type of voice could help create the next D.A.R.E. program, but for this issue given the efficacy of prevention programs.
I hear what you're saying and agree, but D.A.R.E. probably isn't the best example since a lot of studies have found that it was ineffective in preventing drug use.
Sure that's fair. I don't know the modern equivalent. I guess it is called "Keepin' it REAL". Which is what I was thinking in terms of efficacy from previous literature by the surgeon general.
> Well-supported scientific evidence demonstrates that a variety of prevention programs and alcohol policies that address these predictors prevent substance initiation, harmful use, and substance use related problems, and many have been found to be cost-effective. These programs and policies are effective at different stages of the lifespan, from infancy to adulthood, suggesting that it is never too
early and never too late to prevent substance misuse and related problems
But should the surgeon general also make comments about how code reviews need to be empathetic? I mean. If the surgeon general is gonna make statements about what is "healthy" for other social issues, where does he stop?
Honestly, yes. I grew up using the Internet from about the age of 5... but that was back then. This is now, where apps like Snapchat and TikTok exist. The internet is no longer safe to explore in that way.
Be careful my friends: it would be terrible for us embrace medical advice that agrees with our prejudices but ignore similar advice on subjects we don't like like sex ed and sleep and stress and bullying...
All you parents posting here how your kids are regulated, ha no there is always a friend with a workaround, you have no idea what they are doing elsewhere.
I remember when small cellphone came out (not smartphones, original cellphones) and wealthier parents started giving them to kids, people were freaking out how inappropriate. Then smartphones for kids.
I cannot even fathom what kids are exposed to these days before they are even in high school.
It depends on the country you live. In some countries it's used (almost) only for animals, because the health conditions of humans is so good that you don't need dewormers. In other countries there are national plans to give most of the population dewormers because it's an endemic problem.
Many of the papers claiming that ivermectin was good against covid-19 were produced by hospitals running these national programs. You are already giving ivermectin to a lot of people, so you it's almost free to count the deads in the people getting ivermectin and compare it to the death of the general population. (In my opinion they use bad statistics to get the results, there are a lot of bias that they can't fix. Double blind randomized controlled trial or it didn't happen.)
That clip doesn't want to play for me, but ivermectin's great if you or your pets (or livestock, I guess) have nematode trouble. Doesn't do a whole lot for the famous virus tho.
Nope. The Surgeon General should have corrected her by saying that Ivermectin was a drug approved for human use but he went along with the horse dewormer bullshit.
I guess you could say all the Africans who used Ivermectin were consumers of horse-dewormer.
The issue is his integrity and honesty as a state medical official. If he can't be relied upon to speak the truth in one area, how can he in another?
It's fun times to be a human.