Controversial opinion:

In the future we are going to look back on seeing children use iPads that directly connect them to the most sophisticated engagement and manipulation algorithms ever as something as horrid as a child smoking a cigarette, or doing any other drug

Now obviously this is an issue, but many of the suggested solutions are lacking.

Remember: the phones in our pocket are turing complete, any software solution can be undone by another software solution

Hardware flaws baked into chipsets will be inevitably exploited by the worst of humanity

What we need is a LEGAL framework to this issue

We need to see that allowing a full 5g 2.5ghZ portal to the unknown is simply absolutely harmful for a child to get there hands on without parental or educational supervision

I suspect it really should work like regulating a drug, allow more and more unsupervised compute and networking as the child ages

That way kids can still have dumb phones for basic safety and comms.

I suspect laws will be applied like alcohol within the home, to allow for family owned game systems and such

But lapses that lead to actual demonstrated harm such as mental illness leading to bodily harm or violence due to radicalization need to be treated as if a parent just fed their child alcohol without care. Or at least enabled them to it if it’s evident that they didn’t even try

Straight up it’s also a cultural shift 13-16 yr olds gaming at home under parental guidance, but not being bought significant personal compute since it would not be sold to them or for the purpose of giving to them

Usage in school where they get education on information technology and the harms and good it can do all fine and good , but seeing babies with iPads at the mall seen as badly as letting them smoke (and the secondhand smoke from all the brainrot leading to brainrotted adult)

Absolutely not. Anything you put in is likely going to have privacy issues for both adults and children, and you forget how smart children are. I know we had firewalls and all kinds of shit when I was in school, and I was the person who taught everybody else how to bypass them in like five minutes. There is not a filter in the world you can put up that are going to keep children from the content that they actually want to look at.

I don’t think a ban is coming at the issue from the right angle. Social media misuse is fundamentally a problem of addiction, and we have a checkered past of causing harm when banning things. For a historical analogue, look at the Prohibition era of the United States.

Ultimately, bans for these things don’t work because people will get around it anyway. And that’s exactly when dangerous things happen. Using the Prohibition example again, people poisoned themselves trying to make illegal hooch because they were determined to drink anyway.

I think education is the answer. And I mean honestly, isn’t education always the answer? But you’ve got to educate your kids about the content they’re using. We’ve got to educate the parents about the dangerousness of unlimited access to screens. If people don’t understand the danger, then they don’t recognize the danger, and suddenly they’ve stumbled on danger.

I’m sure everyone has heard a story about a straight-laced kid who grew up with strict parents, and then at the first opportunity to party in college goes on a bender to destroy their life. Those kids’ parents really did them a disservice by not preparing them for reality. If their only education on drugs and alcohol is “don’t do them,” then the child isn’t really aware of the risks. They just see that everyone else is doing them and having fun, and then they go off the deep end before they realize how bad things are getting.

Social media’s the same thing. The day your kid turns seventeen they’ll have every chance to succumb to brainrot on their own volition. Without being informed of how or why that happens, there’s nothing stopping someone from falling into any internet rabbithole.

There is no real need to regulate kids on devices … leave that up to the parents to figure out.

What we need is to regulate every major corporately owned social media company. Regulate and control them like they do for newspapers, magazines or television. Put them under complete regulatory control across the board so that we can regain some normalcy in public perception of reality and politics everywhere.

It’s a pipe dream I know … but in the meantime, no matter what anyone says or does … if social media companies are not regulated, everything and everyone is going to hell in a hand basket.

Yes. I hope the rest of the world will begin addressing the issue.

There’s a wealth of information linking negative mental health to social media use (hell, read stories about QAnon), and I look at regulating social media among kids the same way we regulate cigarette smoking. Will it be perfect? No. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

I don’t think kids should be barred from social media, since at its core, social media is just people talking and sharing things with each other.

The problem is not with the medium or generally who is using it, it’s with the rate of consumption, poor parenting and poor moderation.

I also think it is an even larger problem to enforce in the first place, since it will destroy one of the good things about the Internet: anonymity. Seeing as the only way to truly enforce an age restriction is to require ID to be given to verify a user’s identity. I’m not as super hardcore about my privacy like some parts of Lemmy are, but this is one thing I absolutely do not want to see happen.

I don’t think the government should be banning kids from using certain parts of the internet because of perceived harm. Kids need to explore the internet for themselves in order to learn first-hand about the dangers. I mean, the same argument for social media can be applied for everything on the internet. Search engine results are full of scams, are be banning search engines too? News sites are full of misleading information, lets ban news sites? So the only source of information is now from schools who can also be biased and in some places are just regurgitating government propaganda. In red states, schools are constantly telling LGBT+ kids that they are commiting “sins” and they are “mentally ill”, and they might have very conservative parents with no sympathy. Are we really gonna stop kids from going online and seek support? If kids can’t even be allowed to explore the digital world, how are we also allowing them to explore the physical world, where there are physical dangers?

In an ideal scenario, kids should be allowed to freely explore the internet, but should have parents that they trust to talk to in case they face any danger or harassment, so the parents can help them deal with it.

Eventually, kids are gonna grow up, and a kid with zero online experience their entire life suddenly gaining free access to all of the internet is a recipe for disaster.

Its like not teaching kids sex ed, then when they get old enough, they’ll end up having unprotected sex.

Edit: Not to mention, social media ban is not very enforcible. Even in China, an authoritarian regime, is unable to stop kids from gaming, they just steal their grandparents IDs and play anyways. Do y’all really want a democratic country to suspend civil rights and start privacy intrusions?

I can’t remember which article I was reading, probably one on Lemmy, but it said that we know social media algorithms are bad for people and their mental and physical health, that they are divisive, drive extremism, and just in general are not safe for society.

Drugs are regulated to ensure they are safe, so why aren’t social media algorithms regulated the same way? Politicians not understanding the technical details of algorithms is not an excuse - politicians also don’t understand the technical details of drugs, so they have a process involving experts that ensures they are safe.

I think I’m on the side of that article. Social media algorithms are demonstrably unsafe in a range of ways, and it’s not just for under 16s. So I think we should be regulating the algorithms, requiring companies wishing to use them to prove they are safe before they do so. You could pre-approve certain basic ones (rank by date, rank by upvotes minus downvotes with time decay like lemmy, etc). You could issue patents to them like we do with drugs. But all in all, I think I am on the side of fixing the problem rather than pretending to care in the name of saving the kids.

I don’t think that kids should be banned from social media. Instead they should be taught how to handle it in an individually and socially healthy way. Namely:

• how to spot misinformation
• how to spot manipulation
• how to protect yourself online
• how to engage constructively with other people
• etc.

This could be taught by parents, school, or even their own peers. But I think that all three should play a role.

How? Make it a crime for every manager of the social media companies to let a child in.

fewest possible side effects?

No. That is not a goal when it is about child protection.

Why only kids? We all need to be protected from social media.

I don’t know to suggest good national policy, but I think social media has these:

• controls on how far you can doom scroll
• being able to opt out of algorithms by seeing things in time order and from optionally only white listed sources and allowing block lists in a variety of ways, etc, etc
• heavy moderation of blatantly illegal content.
• heavily curated advertising (or none at all, users can pay)
• separation of political content (maybe a system of tagging so topics that are not of interested can be hidden…maybe this could be crowd sourced)
• Strict control of data collection
• The ability to delete/be forgotten

I don’t know how propaganda or corporate interests can be excluded, but that would be ideal.

We can’t regulate half a dozen corporations, prohibiting algorithmic feed and targeted ads, so we will ban millions from using the apps with these features.

I agree with the under-16 social media ban, but figuring out how and who implements is definitely going to be the hard part. Ideally it would be parents first, but that’s been the status quo up to now and it hasn’t worked. And as someone who has been “18+” online since I was 10… raising the age limit on the services themselves is only going to work to a certain extent. I’m very curious to see how this plays out.

I mean, you can’t really do it without parents.

But there could be a law that any phone tied to a number a minor possesses is locked down so it can’t install the apps. It wouldn’t stop web based, but apps seem to be a worse problem for various reasons.

It’s not even so much the content that’s the problem, it’s the delivery mechanism, how it effects dopamine release, and how damaging those changes can be to a developing brain.

Its similar to the lootbox system that was regulated in various countries. Human brains will keep trying the next item in their feed because there’s a chance something good shows up. If every post was good it would actually cause less addiction.

But a child has shit tier impulse control. They’ll going to keep pulling the proverbial level forever, wading thru shit for the slightest dopamine hit. All the meanwhile still being influenced by what they scroll past.