>I have lost patience with articles about kids and teens and "social media" that make no attempt to define what social media is. It is no wonder parents won't seriously - particularly when the follow up advice is "don't give your kids phones" as though it's all or nothing.

This article is about social media, and doesn't suggest an all-or-nothing approach of not giving kids phones. Hell, a ctrl+f for "phone" brings up 0 results.

>Could we please get a list of social media kids are using and their relative levels of harm? If it's mostly Instagram then say Instagram and parents can uninstall that app. Is it Facebook? (I didn't think kids were using Facebook) Is it TikTok? (I'm not sure I'd classify TikTok as social media) Twitter? Reddit? Roblox? Shared google docs? Group texts? Hacker news?

If you go to the NYT article and follow the link to the 19-page report in the first article, you can find this[1] in the second citation. This appears to suggest that, at a minimum, social media includes YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitch, WhatsApp, Reddit, and Tumblr. These are, to my mind, obvious choices, but maybe it's not so obvious to others?

Your comment is the first time I've ever heard anyone mention group texts and shared Google docs being considered "social media", and it's often mentioned and acknowledged on this very forum that HN can be considered social media.

>Do I have to point out that phones have more uses than social media?

No, because contrary to you saying that "saying 'no phones' is throwing the baby out with the bathwater", nobody has actually said that here. A ctrl+f for "phone" in this thread currently brings up 12 results, 9 (well, 10 now that I've edited this sentence in) of which are in my comment and yours, and the other three aren't about banning phones outright, in fact two of them are about taking the more nuanced approach you've suggested.

>It shouldn't be hard to have intelligent, thoughtful discussions on kids and the internet. For some reason, no one ever does.

It's not hard if we're not being so reactionary.

[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social...

You have some fair points. Some of my criticism is not about the linked article but about the inevitable follow up discussions that usually have a heavy dose of "why are these lousy parents giving kids phones anyway?".

Am I in the minority of not thinking of TikTok and YouTube as social media? Perhaps it's only in my head. I mention shared google docs because I've actually seen bullying behavior in shared google docs - it's an easy way for kids to talk to each other with their school laptops outside of any other supervision.

> Am I in the minority of not thinking of TikTok and YouTube as social media?

I'd say they are "social media", but they aren't the most problematic sort. By default there is little or no interaction with their circle of "real life" friends, so the issues that tend to arise around social media are largely mitigated.

All that's really left is the safety concern, and we mitigate that by requiring that they not expose their real name, their face, or their geographic location at anything more specific than a regional level ("I'm in northern Arkansas").

> why are these lousy parents giving kids phones anyway?

They're lousy parents who give their kids phones, not lousy parents because they give their kids phones.

> This appears to suggest that, at a minimum, social media includes YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitch, WhatsApp, Reddit, and Tumblr. These are, to my mind, obvious choices, but maybe it's not so obvious to others?

Like everything "parenting", I feel like it's a bit more subtle/situational than a simple list.

We have two daughters, the oldest of which is 14. We recently bought her a cheap pay-as-you-go Android phone to take with her when she's out at events and such. She's been great about taking it, but at the moment it's sitting on a shelf in her room with a dead battery and no service plan. She just isn't interested in "having" a phone.

On the other hand, she has an 11" 5G/LTE iPad Pro. Both her mother and grew up with unfettered Internet access from a relatively early age (~13, in 1997) and agree that it was a huge net benefit to us. That's the overall approach we've taken, with one modification: unlike _our_ parents, we're savvy to both the tech and social aspects.

They aren't allowed to have social media accounts tied to their names without them first coming to us and talking about it. They both have YouTube accounts (and post very frequently, with more followers than their parents), but they're under aliases and they don't show their faces. If they really wanted a Facebook account or something - they won't, because that's "for old people", but for the sake of argument - we'd figure out a way to satisfy both of us.

I require that they keep all of their passwords in Bitwarden, and I have access to the vault where they're stored. This serves multiple purposes: security, ease of access across devices, and access for us in an emergency. We let them know that we wouldn't access their accounts without them present except in an emergency, and they trust us to follow through with that.

Instead, "social monitoring" is done when we sit down, about once a week, and let them talk about what's going on in their digital lives.

Finally, we have fairly comprehensive logging set up on all of our devices and access points. I have a list of the top 5k or so "problematic" sites - including, obviously, porn - and a cron job that scans our logs for those hostnames. If something comes up that concerns me, I let my wife know and speak to our kids directly and privately. The theory here is if they're old enough to sit down and talk to their parents about a given piece of content, they're old enough to consume it if they choose to.

We've only felt the need to have those conversations a handful of times, and while sometimes awkward, it has had the effect we intended: they're spending their (prodigious) time online reading, watching mostly instructional YouTube videos, and creating content.

... and yes, before HN points this out, I'm well aware that there is no such thing as a system that cannot be compromised or bypassed. I'm not even trying that hard: the logs are written to a USB drive connected to our home router, and the router's admin password is written right there on a label. If they figure out how to SSH into the router, modify the logs, and cover their tracks... well, I don't think there is much that would make me happier to be honest. I'll take "hacker mentality" over "has never seen a porn video" every day of the week.

Interesting that you wouldn't classify TikTok as social media. How would you characterize it?

I suppose I'd call it a video sharing platform. "Social media", to me, has an implication of media that is shared within a social circle. Facebook is social media because the intention is to share information with friends and family. No one is posting on FB hoping to have it go viral and make a pile of cash off it.

TikToc is content creators sharing their videos with the whole world.

> TikToc is content creators sharing their videos with the whole world.

Seems like a "social"ly focused way of producing/consuming a particular kind of "media".

In all seriousness, I think the defining characteristics of social media for me include:

- a social graph, I can follow other entities, and they can follow me - bottomless, user produced content and feeds - interactive commentary and messaging between users - promotion algorithms, where the endless content is filtered and promoted, potentially leading to something going "viral", including by those who aren't in my immediate social network - a focus on sharing content between users - some form of voting, liking, or reacting

I don't think something needs all of the above to be considered social media. Some things ride the line quite a bit: a Discord server, if small between friends, probably doesn't qualify and is closer to a group chat. A large Discord server with lots of users who don't know each other? Probably counts. HackerNews, and other message boards? You could make an argument either way, but in HN's case, I'd say it is social media.

I think you're underestimating the draw of para-social relationships. That's what powers the "social media" part of TikTok. I think it would be disingenous to suggest that TikTok is anything other than social media.

I will agree if I'm in the minority on this one, but it confirms my larger point - "social media" isn't a useful term. If some apps are putting our youth at risk, tell us what those apps are. Give a top three. Help everyone out.

The reason they don't say is because they don't know.

It's true. This meta-analysis was posted a while back on HN with this key quote:

"In social media research, we focus on “how much social media did a person consume?” and we plan our experiments accordingly... Most don’t even distinguish between platforms, as if Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok are just different kinds of liquor. "

Like I wrote in a comment back then, it's like blaming "computers" or "the internet". Vague to the point of useless.

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/why-some-researchers-th...

How can they claim that this is all backed up by research if they don't know what social media is? What is the link they are finding?

It doesn't feel like science. It feels like hand-waving, correlation, and anecdote.

Well imagine this experiment. You take 100 kids and put them into the animal enclosures at a local zoo. Some are put with sheep, some with birds, some with sharks, and lions and others with elephants. You notice that more of these kids these die than the control group that went to the zoo but outside the animal enclosures. Conclusion: wildlife dangerous. What you cannot conclude certainly is which wildlife is dangerous, there simple weren't enough participating kids. Maybe the reason the kid put with the lion lived is because lions are safe, or maybe it was because the lion was just fed. That would take a follow-up study to find. And what about kangaroos? The zoo didn't even have so we would have to try to extrapolate.

If I'm doing the zoo study with 100 kids, I might turn it in for my 6th grade science project and enjoy my A.

If I'm the Surgeon General of the United States, I'm doing the follow up study. As far as I can tell, that follow up study hasn't been done with kids and social media.

Obviously people are abusing non-free software and centralized web services both to spread propaganda and to separate parents from their kids. People not involved in the industry have an extremely difficult time articulating what they experience there though.

I think it's wrong to be upset at them.

>Saying "no phones" is throwing the baby out with the bath water

I completely disagree. Outside of the top maybe tenth percentile of focused/competent people smartphones are a net negative. They're practically designed to be. I don't own one for that reason.