- Let's limit children's use of social media and screens.
- Great! Let's do it.
- We need to identify who is 18+, so here's your digital ID for everything. And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.
- WTF!
- That "WTF" just cost you 100 social credits.
UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and next USA. It's amazing how coordinated it is. They are using dog-whistles like CSAM, immigration, crime, and now children's wellbeing.
It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state. Check out what teachers have to say about the attention span of the current generation pupils. But no, your access to whatever it is you're addicted to is more important.
Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.
> It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.
Agree. A simple solution would be to regulate social media by forcing a maximum time per user per day or banning it altogether. But that's clearly not the agenda. (same with all the other dog-whistles).
> Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.
But currently they can't match anonymous social media profiles to IDs or bank accounts. This is why they want a mandatory "Digital ID" for social media.
The fact that this discussion seems to revolving around a single axis of limiting social media time and mandatory identification is such a farce.
When I was growing up, I had very limited access to real life social spaces that I actually enjoyed participating in. Online communities were my respite, the light in the darkness that honestly kept me alive until I managed to make it to college. If there was an overbearing nanny state preventing me from knowing that there was a better life waiting for me after grade school, I'm not sure I would've bothered to stick around until then.
That said, most of modern social media isn't the same as the online communities I and many others grew up on. It's a free for all with very thin walls between social spaces, almost no human oversight, and run by the most despicable and immoral people on God's green earth. So I am inclined to agree with the people who say that kind of social media is a bad influence and should be curtailed.
But even today, that isn't everything that's on the internet these days. Discord especially has quietly become the socialization hub of most of the younger folks I know of, and a large part of that is because it allows the creation of private, invite-only groups moderated by actual people. As far as I'm concerned, the Internet needs more Discords and fewer Twitters and Instagrams. There shouldn't be an arbitrary limit on socialization, but socializing should be...social, not some weird performance art done in front of the entire internet.
Frankly, the law should be "you can sue social media if you can link their service to a problem with you'r child's mental health"
then let the courts decide. they'll clean up their act pretty quick when lawsuits come pouring in, and it removes the central govt's role in USER ID's and other 1984 schemes.
> Frankly, the law should be "you can sue social media if you can link their service to a problem with you'r child's mental health"
So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents? That's totally something that I could picture happening under such a regime. And that's ultimately indicative of a larger conundrum we face as a society.
The fact that as a society we seem to favor giving parents the ability to make their children in their own image, over giving their children the leeway to figure out who they truly are outside of their parent's guidance. And that's a truly difficult line to tack. Sometimes the parents are 100% right and the children would self-destruct under their own supervision. Other times, the children are being abused and tortured for not following the whims of their selfish parents.
I was lucky, all things considered. My parents were well meaning, just extremely overbearing and micro-managing. Some of the outright abuse that some of my acquaintances describe undergoing would make y'all sick if repeated here. I don't know if there's any solution, but I'm not sure giving helicopter parents more leverage against social spaces is the right play.
> So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents?
Why not. In a court of law, and facts, such lawsuits would only serve to highlight that religion is not a real thing. That would be a good thing for the world.
It's much easier to say to a child "you can't have a social media account, it's the law because experts have determined it's not healthy at your age" than "your mother and I think that social media is bad for you".
I've read that after elementary school parents have an incredibly small impact on their children's development, peers and their environment (which includes virtual one), has virtually all of the impact on your children's development.
My parents gave me really shitty smartphones that were barely powerful enough to do important things but was an awful experience for Instagram/games/etc until I bought a better one with my own money (similar specs to Pinephone Pro)
How so? Parents and schools can collectively decide to take away the smartphones of preschoolers if keeping them safe and focused was the main priority. Like how else is a preschooler gonna get a smartphone without adult money and support? Last time I checked preschoolers can't open a checking account and a credit card.
This bs of government forcing everyone in the country to have to doxx themselves just so preschoolers can't access social media(which they will anyway since rebellious children are very resourceful on cheating the system made by tech illiterate adults), is like if prehistoric humanity were to stop using fire just because the village idiot burned his house down.
Let's suppose the cause really is as simple as "parents can't be bothered to parent". By default, this will continue to be the case. And realistically we're not going to fix it by telling bad parents to please start being good parents. So what do you actually want to do? I'm not saying it's this or nothing, but if you don't have an alternative policy that might actually help, I don't take much comfort in the idea that the kids who are damaged will have _parents_ who totally deserved it.
There are some alternative policies, for example, banning smartphones in schools. This doesn't completely solve the problem, of course, but at least it limits social media use while the children are under direct supervision of the government.
A more extreme policy would be to treat smartphones themselves the same way we treat alcohol and cigarettes, enforcing an age minimum at the point of purchase. Of course the giant tech corporations would fly into rage over this suggestion and lobby heavily against it.
It's why we see so many infants getting caught for DUIs. Seriously? You seem to be implying that there's no justification/efficacy for any law/ban prohibiting children from engaging in adult activities. That's... something.
>It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.
It's not though. That's just the popular meme among easily influenced and excitable social groups (like parents). It's not reflective of reality. The idea that mobile devices are somehow damaging to mental state is not supported by scientific studies. Nor is the idea that online discussion forums and markets are.
What is dangerous is mis-using medical terms like "addiction" in apparently an intended medical context. When you start throwing around words like addiction governments get really excited about their ability to use force and start hurting and imprisoning people. Even murdering them. Multi-media screens are not addictive. There is no evidence supporting such assertions in reputable scientific journals.
By link you mean correlate, which doesn't mean anything.
Social studies are useless anyway. Academic social studies are so biased that anything they say on the matter should be discarded. They will always produce "evidence" on demand for whatever the left want to do.
Social media should be left alone. Parents who want to can block it on their children's devices. There's nothing more that needs to be done.
yes thank you Facebook shareholder for your clearly unbiased opinion, totally not a transparent attempt to insist there's no problem at all the big bad left boogyman is making it all up
> It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.
Is it? Or is it "bloody obvious" to morons who mindlessly accept whatever they are told? The world is always collapsing right?
> Check out what teachers have to say about the attention span of the current generation pupils.
Before smartphones, it was TV. TV was rotting kids' brains. But the world didn't end. Did it? Besides, aren't teachers really complaining about smartphones usage DURING class?
It's dumb chicken littles like you that are the bane of freedom and civilization.
> And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.
We could have a real conversation about tradeoffs (and maybe this one isn't worth it!) but not if you just assume/pretend the worst-case scenario is real. I'm Australian and I'll happily bet that N years from now I'll still be able to criticize the government without being debanked or sacked.
If we do ever fall to authoritarianism, I doubt this will have been a crucial step; it's already easy for the government to deanonymize most posters if it wants to, and an evil future government that wanted to go further could probably just... do it, regardless of precedent.
> but not if you just assume/pretend the worst-case scenario is real
Just want to point out that Canada weaponised war time powers to debank truckers protesting during COVID. The rubicon has already been crossed. While I didn't support their cause, the writing is on the wall about what governments want to be able to do to people it finds inconvenient.
Governments never give up power. They will only take more. So considerations on what power should be given over should be done carefully instead of having knee jerk reactions based on "think of the children".
It's my impression that the shift from 'basically normal government' to 'authoritarian nightmare', when it happens, tends to happen quite abruptly rather than via the ratchet effect/frog-boiling.
And there seem to be plenty of examples of democracies that have remained basically normal despite decades' worth of policies that libertarian-leaning observers would decry as the thin end of the wedge. I'm open to being convinced that the risk of a policy like this clearly outweighs its benefits, but I think I need a specific causal pathway and/or historical precedent rather than general arguments.
The US is kind of an obvious example of this ratchet effect. The powers that have been given to the executive over the course of decades and consistent moving to the right for decades has led us to where we are now. Similar cases in Russia and China where more power is handed over to a centralized leadership role over time.
I'm not a libertarian or follow the thin end of the wedge belief system. It's a simple observation that governments operate under the idea of growth of power. That is not to say an absence of government or reduction of government is good or better. But to recognize our role in maintain the social contract with the government. Abdicating that role entirely does not improve your life.
The only benefit of this legislation is that VPN's will get a bump in revenue, the web becomes more unusable and critical information gets stored at third parties who become high value targets for hacking. Not to mention these data brokers can easily turn around and begin to monetize this data. I'm not a privacy nut by any measure, but this seems like the most obvious major hit to personal data privacy. Instead of addressing the problem that is being claimed to be resolved, it's just lining another corporations pockets who will sell your data. We've seen this story play out many many times already. but you think this time will be different? I don't think so.
I don't have the solution. But it seems like a problem which needs to be addressed and regulation isn't a crazy place to look. As a parent, it feels like I'm constantly battling with Meta, Tiktok and Google over my childrens' development and we have very different goals.
Lack of something like SSO and centrally-managed permissions for families is a huge pain in the ass.
Minecraft is notably insane due to this. I don’t know how normies get their kids playing online with it (ours is locked down to just-with-friends, and we gatekeep the friend list), I thought it was hard as a techie. Cross-platform play (outside of X-Box, I suppose) requires creating and carefully-massaging permissions on two overlapping but unrelated systems, both the account on the console itself and a Microsoft account (and their UI for managing this is, in modern Microsoft fashion, entirely nutty). Then, if anything goes wrong, the error messages are careful never to tell you which account’s settings blocked an action, so you get to guess. Fun!
(Getting “classic” Java Minecraft working, just with a local server, was even harder)
Your options are to go all-in on one or two ecosystems; to take on just a fuckload of work getting it all set up nicely and maintaining that with a half-dozen accounts per kid or whatever; or to give up.
Then schools send chromebooks home with less-restrictive settings than I’d use if I were managing it and no way for me to tighten those, and a kid stays up all night playing shovelware free Web games before we realize we need to account for those devices before bed time. Thanks for the extra work, assholes.
iPhones have excellent parental controls (by the abysmal standards of consumer software more broadly). You can just not allow insta and such, or set time limits on them per-day (30 minutes, say). I assume Android has something similar. You can set the Web to allowlist-only. Kids can send requests to bypass limits, sends the request right to your own Apple devices, easy to yay or nay it. It’s damn good.
If those work, sure, although kids tend to be pretty clever about getting around parental controls and are sometimes quite a bit more technically sophisticated than their parents.
It ain’t the ‘90s and this ain’t Windows 95 with bypassable-by-accident OS account logins and half-assed website blocking made by the lowest bidder. Getting past app installation restrictions and time limits on iOS would be… challenging.
It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.
(And on some platforms it is, for practical purposes, impossible—looking at you, Linux, not just because it’s a powerful open platform but because its permissions and capabilities system is decades behind the state-of-the-art and tools for sensibly managing any of that on a scale smaller than “fleet of servers” and in the context of user-session applications are nonexistent)
To that extent can't kids just pop in a live USB and get a totally ephemeral and open os?
I'd push the implementation to the router and force root certs on devices and have all clients run through your proxy or drop the packets. That way even live usbs will not get network access. Have some separate, hugely locked down network for kids' friends.
Maybe put a separate honeypot network up with some iot devices on it with wifi and a weak password, and let the kids have some freedom once they figure out how to deauth and grab the bash upon reconnections.
Idk. I'm some years away from this problem myself,but someone recommended this in another thread recently.
> It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.
I didn't claim that it's impossible, merely that it's difficult sometimes, as you also implied ("putting in tons of work"). The advantage of physically consfiscating phones is that it's a low tech, brute force method available even to the least technically sophisticated parents.
I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives.
My son's cross country team communicates via GroupMe and it's very difficult for him to stay up-to-date with the web version from a laptop. My daughter's friend group communicates via snapchat.
This doesn't mean parents have to allow everything. My daughter doesn't have Snapchat, for example. But there are definite tradeoffs like her being left out of many conversations and slowly getting excluded from friend groups as a result.
It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.
> I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives.
It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban. A kid could be limited to an hour a day or phone use or something like that.
> It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.
The inevitable result would seem to be that all adults, parents or not, would be forced to present their identification online to use the internet. I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice, regardless of how noble the goal.
Limits help, for sure. But it's like setting limits for addictive products like "one cigarette a day". It's better than a pack a day but the impact addictive products have on kids don't stop once their limit is up.
> I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice
That's why I started by saying I don't have the solution. Regulation and fines for companies that target kids feels plausible. While not exactly the same, we curbed teen cigarette use by imposing marketing restrictions and issuing fines to tobacco companies (and drastically reduced adult smoking too for that matter).
An an Australian, the social media ban legislation specifically requires than non-ID methods be available (it specifically says that also included digital ID).
If your making the slippery slope argument sure I can agree there is a risk.
However its saying digital validation for federal benefits - I mean given the amount of fraud in the US social security system of recent years it seems like having some kind of protection is important to not waste our tax payers benefit. And if you cross the border you are immediately in a digital system in the US.
That said this isn't saying digital identity for websites similar to what AUS is proposing.
It's not really "amazing" at all, when you consider that the working class in those countries has finally woken up to the fact that their biggest present day issues, like housing unaffordability and low purchasing power, have been caused by the intentional fiscal policies of their governments over the last 30+ years, instead of the usual boogeymen (Xi Jinping, Putin, Covid, immigrants, etc).
And now after 20+ years of constantly vote hopping between left and right, hoping "this time it will be better than last time" but in practice it always ended up worse, the people are trying to hold them accountable for it, so the elite are switching tactics now that the ye olde reliable tactic of gaslighting the people doesn't work anymore.
If the carrot doesn't work anymore, time to move over to using the stick to keep the peasants in line.
When you put all the points on a graph and they form a line, what more "evidence" do you need?
Your request for evidence reminds me when the 3 telco operators in my country raised their prices simultaneously on the same day, and the nation's anti cartel watchdog said they found no evidence of price fixing lol
Just because the system is corrupt, incompetent or ineffective at finding evidence, doesn't mean there isn't collusion going on.
I lucked out in when I was born, I developed before social media existed and my college was a later addition to Facebook. I think it just doesn’t affect me in the same way… like someone who has never won a dollar gambling looks at a gambling addict. I’ve got tremendous empathy for the people that are addicted to it and I can’t imagine how corrosive it would have been to my teen years, so much as I revile the politics behind Rahm who believes nothing and will stick his finger in the wind every few minutes and go where it takes him, I’m glad this is the way the winds are blowing. Social Media should be regulated like alcohol and cigarettes and drugs. All addictive, all tuned to hit dopamine centers, all bad for our health in different ways.
How would we effectively regulate social media? Being the regulator could be a very powerful political tool and used to capture or maintain political power.
I think playing a ton of games as a kid has helped me.
I walk through a casino and see all the flashing lights and sounds and like the casino screen is half as busy as an RTS. It's just not the same level of engagement; it's not overwhelming, it's just slow.
I feel the same way. In a sense, our parents had it easier in terms of the damage external world could do emotionally, because there was typically a simple way to prevent most of it. Now, it is not nearly as simple. Not to search very far, our kid has a media diet that some consider strict ( 30 minutes a day of pre-selected items if kid meets some criteria, which I still consider too high ). But then some kids already have cellphones, ipads ( some completely unlocked too ! ). I only recently gave my kid lappy with gcompris installed ( locked down lappy; no net access ). Point I am trying to make in my rambly way is that each parent is hodge podge of various choices. And it does not work in aggregate.
I get that it is all about balance, but it is hard to disagree with Rahm here. Top down ban is the only real way to go.
> Point I am trying to make in my rambly way is that each parent is hodge podge of various choices. And it does not work in aggregate.
On top of that, you have some of the biggest, most moneyed companies in the country spending billions of dollars to get kids and adults hooked. Even for parents with good intentions, it's not a fair fight.
Maybe I'm going off the deep end, but I sometimes think people that work at Facebook should be considered social pariahs. The amount of damage that company has done to our country and society is truly incalculable. It's really hard for me to forgive anyone who had any part in it.
Social media is not the same product as social networks. It had value when you were in control of what content you wanted to see (your friends' posts).
Now social media, controlled by algorithms, is just like a permanent informercial. You have direct ads and first level indirect adds (sponsored content), but it goes deeper than that, when they manage set up a "viral trend" you have a lot of people acting as speaker person for brands without even realizing.
Attention shapes who you will become in the future, because it focus on what matters to you. When you outsource that to others, they can mold you into what is more profitable to them. Specially kids, who are at the prime time for being influenced.
This is a good point. I completely relate to the statement that "social media is a plague on society." But you have a good point -- it's not so much the digitization of a social network as the algorithms that are hyper-optimized to steal attention and sell advertising. Maybe it's not the age that should be regulated, but the algorithm. Whether algorithm regulation should be age dependent is another question. Personally I don't think it should be age dependent. Or... Dear Social Media Companies, F your attention hijacking, skinnerbox advertising and engagement crack regardless of how old your victim is.
On the question of whether to legislate the ban, I'm a no. On the question of whether parents should implement it, I'm a yes. My niece and her husband have a one year old that is allowed zero screen time. They are willing and able to forego the high tech baby sitting, and are talking about continuing until at least the pre-teens. I think that if they could go even further, say live for the next decade with the Amish, it would be even better.
If a kid was raised with his family in a dome where no technology later than 1900 were permitted (perhaps with an emergency medicine exception) and the kid wasn't released into the world until 13, I think on average they'd be mentally healthier and have a happier life.
Your niece and her husband are one in a thousand parents. Very few have the fortitude to do it. Not a good outlook for the future if we depend on the virtue of parents.
That is extremely short-sighted to assume that because a few anecdotes on “how to parent” will fix the problem. I recommend you go out in public and observe the reality in various states and in various demographics and you’ll quickly see that the parents are just as addicted as the kids. They won’t know how to parent this away without legislation.
Just go into the classroom and witness children and their six-seveeen.
This is 100% like smoking except worse, because entire population of children are being deprived of their attention span. They just learn how to peddle useless products onto their peers without brain development to understand the consequence.
I feel the same way about a smoking. I'm opposed to both smoking and a ban on smoking. It's not because I don't think an effective ban would be healthful, but because I believe that the concentrated power needed for it is a greater danger. It's the same argument that I believe supports the first amendment: people saying evil shitty false things is a lesser evil than the power needed to stop them from saying them.
And suppose no one banned smoking, and smoking was still allowed on airplanes and most restaurants had smoking sections would we be better off? I’m sure all the people who died of throat cancer would tell you otherwise.
I concur with this. I’d even be okay with government-sponsored PSAs about social media use as long as it’s based on sound research. But a ban is a hard no due to the First Amendment.
This is the exact policing we don't want government to do regardless of the age. In my opinion it's the responsibility of the parents to decide how to raise their children and teach them how to live and adapt in the age of social media and maintain a balance.
In the same sense one could argue that social media like Facebook or WhatsApp should be banned among older population because that's one of the major ways mis/fake information being spread among elderly people and now with AI videos they actually believe those fake stories to be 100% true as well. I think that's more risk to modern day democracy and well being of the society in general.
Cigarettes (nicotine products) are easy to identify. What is social media? Why would I want to acquire and provide an ID just to comment on HN? In the case of social media, there is not a well enough defined product to ban.
That's the whole point then right? It's whole another policing and maintenance burden created to be funded by tax payers money without actually achieving anything useful at all.
Almost no laws are enacted with this in mind. The people doing it are neither scientists nor engineers and never suffer any consequences for failure of what most people will see as well meaning lawmaking. The idea that a law should be subject to quality control is not merely absent but also anathema.
I don't see advertisements often, but I had to fly for work recently and of course saw advertisements in the airport. One of the ads was for "Teen Instagram" with "automatic protections." Kind of depressing. It's a bit like someone selling teen cigarettes, they're a bit more mild and you can graduate to "adult cigarettes" when you're ready. I'm not sure government banning is solution, but there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media. It's a strange problem, and ultimately the issue is that people just cannot regulate their behavior in this area.
When you start to think about that statement, and why it was written there, why a company chooses to pay $ to tell you this, you know that inherently something went REALLY wrong in the past.
And because it's a company, they're doing the bare minimum to fix it, as to minimize the impact on their bottom line.
It reminds me of the ads against a certain prop in CA, the one that would make app workers (?) employees.
Advertisements taken out by Lyft, Uber, etc, all to sway people.
When companies want you to do something it's not in your best interest. It's in theirs.
> there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media.
If this were true, I’m sure that you wouldn’t have any trouble advocating that we ban it. Many of us remember social media before the algorithmic feed took over, and it was a good way to stay connected to friends and family. Some us also were lucky enough to experience a protracted period of socializing on the internet in the pre-social media days: MUDs, web forums, chat rooms, etc. I enjoyed all of those, in my teen and college years, and like you I count myself fortunate that I was not exposed to social media during a formative time of my life. I think that’s why I hesitate to say that we should outright ban it: I know that the internet _can_ coexist (and even augment) a healthy social life. That said, I don’t use social media at all anymore (unless you count HN), so I’ve definitely voted with my eyeballs.
- What we did on the Internet in the early 90s was not broadcast to our (real world) peers. If some big drama blew up online, we could escape it with the flip of a switch.
- Similarly, we could escape real world drama by shifting to our online relationships.
- Normal people were not online yet, so you didn't have all the normal real world structures of authority and popularity/hostility. Or, you had substitutes instead, because this is human nature, but they were not so universal and entrenched. It was an Internet of niches, and we could all find or create our own.
- There was no pervasive profitability goal in keeping our eyeballs on a particular platform, so today's dark pattern manipulation just didn't exist.
- It was separate. Not only did the Internet not bleed into real life (and v-v), but it wasn't always-available like today with smartphone ubiquity.
The Internet, back then, was a safe third space.
Today it's often a toxic hellscape, with some exceptional corners.
Very well put. The internet used to be an island of sanity from the real world. Now, most of it, is far worse than the real world. Pockets of excellence exist, but you're always just one impulse control failure away from stumbling into outrageous or addicting content.
> there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media
Citation needed.
Look, I am greatly opposed to how US social media giants handle and monetize data, and I don’t like them having the level of control that they do. Antitrust is a great lever to use here, because concentration is the source of many problems. But banning what is in effect public social communications is a giant step over the First Amendment.
People can and do use social media to their benefit, whether it’s for political organizing, whistleblowing, mutual aid, OSINT, or gathering on the ground media and first hand accounts from active events (such as conflicts, protests, or police actions) that may never show up in the news. The professional media cannot be everywhere, and sometimes they will not cover certain events. That’s what social media is good for, despite its flaws.
Yes. My parents happily drench themselves in a neverending barrage of unhinged political commentary on YouTube and watch clips on Facebook without knowing they are AI generated. It is really horrifying.
Ban social media and go a step further and ban mobile devices for children while we're at it. The generation of iPad babies is completely broken. I kept my kids away from that stuff religiously, but now these brain addled goblins are their peers.
So let me this straight. I will need an ID to go on internet but not to vote. He even talked about how requiring ID makes thar certain people are trapped in vicious cycle.
This is the exact policing we don't want government to do - but it is to protect children. So I guess we will go with it.
The driving, smoking, and drinking laws are enforced outside the home. Everyone has to prove their age at the DMV to get a license and at commercial establishments to buy cigarettes and alcohol.
The only way to enforce the social media law age minimum is to force everyone to show their ID just to use the internet, even from their own home. That seems more Orwellian to me.
The effects are there for everyone to see. GenZ is depressed and can't hold a thought for more than a few seconds. No, it's not because of the housing or job market, it's the phones. Check e.g. Jonathan Haidt: https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/
And free speech: you don't need a mobile phone or tiktok to exercise that right.
Culturally, this is the pivotal question of our generation. Both options are admittedly terrible, and as appealing as the parental rights argument may be... it hasn't been going well.
Does the Democratic party actually have a platform capable of beating the incumbent Trump Republicans? Or is it just this kind of stuff? Ban kids from YouTube?
It's interesting, because quite a lot of the pornography ID laws are passed by Republicans and popular among Republicans. I don't mean this as a "both sides" sort of argument, but rather that modern tech seems to be unpopular among all constituents, even if different groups have their preferred villain.
I feel like those laws are different because they specifically target pornography, which is seen as an evangelical moral sin. They would prefer to ban it completely, but that most likely runs afoul of the Constitution. So their next best bet is just to try to limit it to over-18s.
Obviously the end result is the same, but I think the motivation is different.
Maybe. Most of the debate that I hear feels similar to social media commentary -- teen boys getting their brains fried by constant access to stimulus. I don't hear anything about onanism or sinning.
Mind you, I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but just that most of the arguments I hear are saying "we think this is an identifiable and secular harm."
> They would prefer to ban it completely, but that most likely runs afoul of the Constitution. So their next best bet is just to try to limit it to over-18s.
They dont care about constitution. And they are in position to reinterpret it however they want to, regardless of its text and meaning.
If that was actually true then states would have banned or blocked already. This is not a new issue and it has been challenged unsuccessfully many times.
depends on how or who you poll. I dont think it is popular. It's just that there's a lot of stigma when you try to argue against "saving the children" type policy - which is why this gets used to pass laws that otherwise would be difficult to pass if the true intentions were revealed.
The pitch of the centrist/“3rd way” wing that’s still, incredibly, ascendant even after the massive party shift on the other side that was teed up in the late ‘00s and realized in 2016, is basically “we’re just like Reagan but we like the gays and abortion a little more, and like guns a lot less”.
It’s a shit message, but they’re apparently permanently damaged by the 1980 landslide re-election loss to Reagan and incapable of moving on. IDK if liberal democracy will survive here long enough for us to see if another wing of the party can ever get those folks to let them try something else.
[edit] not for nothing, Obama lightly hinted at a move away from that in his campaigning (if not his governing) and it seemed to work pretty damn well. Why they didn’t double down on that is anyone’s guess, but I’d suppose it rhymes with “bobbying”.
1984, not 1980, FWIW, and the Democratic Party old guard had been pretty badly beaten up by the 1968 and 1972 conventions. Tip O'Neill was one of the last of that group to really hold power.
1980 was the famous almost-every-state-is-red presidential election map that scared democrats shitless and convinced (enough of) them the way forward was shifting much closer to Reagan on many issues (including, notably, joining the Republican neoliberal movement). But yeah it took an election cycle or two to stabilize after that.
[edit] I mean yes 1984's map was even worse, but 1980's was reeeeeal bad. Six states won in 1980, versus one in 1984. And we have a guy who won a pretty ordinary split of states and less than a majority of votes-cast calling his win in 2024 a "landslide", lol. No, Reagan's elections are what a landslide looks like.
[edit edit] I mean I don't really want to quibble over the details, it probably was the one-two punch of those that really set the direction and we seem to agree on the basics that it was Reagan's crushing electoral success that set the tone for Democrats for up until... well, still today, largely.
Trump won during a time where incumbents lost by ~10 points. He narrowly beat a candidate that lost their only primary run by <2 point.
Trump's very vocal minority is very good at making people think there is a silent majority.
However, the democrats have been elected quite a lot this millennium and they've fully shown they're incapable of making necessary reforms so there's going to keep being populist candidates until there's new blue blood.
That would require making positive, pragmatic suggestions that could improve the lives of the average person, rather than moralizing and kowtowing to the special interest groups and wealthy donors who have captured the party. Good luck with that.
As it is we now have two parties obsessed with “regulating” the morality of citizens while bleeding them out financially.
No, it would require overcoming a shameless demagogue and enablers who have no problem blatantly lying about everything to everyone.
Democracy has been known since its invention to be extremely vulnerable to such actors. It's vulnerable to it because it's nearly impossible to counter.
Your critique is valid to some degree, but Trump won simply because he had the shamelessness to lie over and over and over again that he'd bring prices down. That's it.
No "positive, pragmatic suggestions" are electorally stronger than simple untruths stated with confidence ad infinitum.
Good luck with that. This was the message of the consultant class in 2016 and 2024 and it’s why Dems lost both of those elections. Biden, for all his flaws, actually did attempt to articulate and focus on a positive message and actively reached out to struggling workers. And he won.
No, the message was that winning was about “overcoming a shameless demagogue and enablers who have no problem blatantly lying about everything to everyone,” plus shallow pandering to diversity, rather than delivering tangible benefits to Americans. In both 2016 and 2024 the Dem message to voters was that everything was fine, no radical economic change was needed, vote against orange man and all would be well. This was a losing position against a populist. Biden called on his long record of support for labor and proposed investing in American manufacturing, which was a winner in swing states especially since the economy was hurting due to the pandemic.
I said that there's no "pragmatic, positive message" that overcomes simply lying and having an entire media and political apparatus that supports it.
Biden's primary advantage was running against a guy who was demonstrably a complete shit show as an actual incumbent. That was memory-holed by the same shameless lying (e.g. ask Republicans who they think "locked people down" during COVID).
Biden (and Harris) then had a similar disadvantage going into 2024.
It's extremely, extremely silly to act like voters were looking for pragmatic messages lol. Simply no evidence for that.
They were primarily looking to get rid of the incumbent, as was the trend across all democracies during a period of extreme inflation.
That’s a common refrain, especially among the media (ironically, as they are blaming themselves) and the professional-managerial class, who seem to have a blind spot for labor needs. Voters facing hardship have agency and vote for who they believe is aligned with their needs. In 2020 Biden’s union support was key to his victory in the rust belt states, which carried him to victory. Harris didn’t have the same background and didn’t make a serious effort to reach those people, and lost a percentage of union votes at a time when the number of union voters actually increased. So she lost. But it’s true that inflation didn’t help.
One reason that incumbents are doing so poorly is that they promise nothing, and deliver it. Nations are in decline across the West, and all that candidates are allowed to offer is more of the same neoliberal pablum. Anyone who attempts to offer something different faces a coordinated attack from the media and incumbent political class, and the only ones seemingly able to break through the resistance are dishonest right-populists. The left has to come up with a solution other than dismantling (excuse me, “fortifying”) democracy, which appears to be the EU solution.
Can you tell me which Trump policies were pro-labor, pro-union, pragmatic, positive visions of the future?
There was none.
It turns out that actually you don't need pragmatic, positive visions of the future to win. In fact, we have plenty of evidence that pragmatic policies at all are a massive electoral liability when facing someone who is, again, willing to simply lie about everything.
In Trump, you have clear evidence that people do not need pragmatic solutions to anything. Somehow you are pulling from that the conclusion that Democrats are not pragmatic enough.
What makes you believe there is public appetite for pragmatic solutions? Enough to win a national election?
Trump does not offer real solutions, except as a sound bite in passing (to be later ignored). But in the absence of pragmatic policies that voters can get behind, the winner will always be the candidate who offers to tear down the system that has failed the people. Mark my words.
The reality is that sound bites have an intrinsic advantage over real solutions. Real solutions to complex problems are by their nature complex and uncertain (else the problem would've been solved already).
"Immigrants are the problem" or "I will bring prices down on day one" have a fundamental memetic advantage that, in a lazy and unengaged populace, will win in 100% of scenarios.
The real issue here is the GOP not holding themselves accountable to something better than suicidal demagoguery. The opposing party cannot prevent this from being successful. That's why it's a known, fundamental flaw of democracy.
Almost impossible to do, but I agree and have been saying that for decades.
Until recently I agreed with the age of 16, now I am starting to think they should be banned until they get an High School Diploma or equivalent, if no "diploma", then at the age of 21, they are allowed. Same as Drinking Age in the US.
The diploma requirement might decrease the dropout rate the the US.
Remember this guy was chased out of chicago for trying to cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald by the CPD. Then, previously was famous for being Clinton's fixer in the Gennifer Flowers case. The fact that this man has any political career at all is an incredible indictment of our system.
Social media is the smoking of our age, and it will come to be seen the same way we see smoking now.
Just like the tobacco companies, social media companies have known about the ills of their platforms for a long time and actively hidden it and/or publicly downplayed it.
No: It's more like leaded gasoline. People of the future will be like, "why would you let a big corporation control the feed algorithm?" Social media is fine. It's the algorithm that seeks addiction/engagement that's the problem. Not social media in general.
"Social media" is far too ambiguous anyway. For example, under most definitions, Steam is a social media platform. Yet no one is addicted to sharing things via Steam. But you can! You absolutely can share and browse people's posts, screenshots, videos, and even chat (text and voice)!
The reason why no one complains about Steam's social media features is that they're not designed to be addicting. That's not the point of the platform (it's to sell more games).
I don't believe this is done for the benefit of children/teens. What's much more likely is that politicians don't like people having news/information sources not beholden to them.
(repost)
UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and next USA. It's amazing how coordinated it is. They are using dog-whistles like CSAM, immigration, crime, and now children's wellbeing.It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state. Check out what teachers have to say about the attention span of the current generation pupils. But no, your access to whatever it is you're addicted to is more important.
Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.
> It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.
Agree. A simple solution would be to regulate social media by forcing a maximum time per user per day or banning it altogether. But that's clearly not the agenda. (same with all the other dog-whistles).
> Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.
But currently they can't match anonymous social media profiles to IDs or bank accounts. This is why they want a mandatory "Digital ID" for social media.
The fact that this discussion seems to revolving around a single axis of limiting social media time and mandatory identification is such a farce.
When I was growing up, I had very limited access to real life social spaces that I actually enjoyed participating in. Online communities were my respite, the light in the darkness that honestly kept me alive until I managed to make it to college. If there was an overbearing nanny state preventing me from knowing that there was a better life waiting for me after grade school, I'm not sure I would've bothered to stick around until then.
That said, most of modern social media isn't the same as the online communities I and many others grew up on. It's a free for all with very thin walls between social spaces, almost no human oversight, and run by the most despicable and immoral people on God's green earth. So I am inclined to agree with the people who say that kind of social media is a bad influence and should be curtailed.
But even today, that isn't everything that's on the internet these days. Discord especially has quietly become the socialization hub of most of the younger folks I know of, and a large part of that is because it allows the creation of private, invite-only groups moderated by actual people. As far as I'm concerned, the Internet needs more Discords and fewer Twitters and Instagrams. There shouldn't be an arbitrary limit on socialization, but socializing should be...social, not some weird performance art done in front of the entire internet.
Frankly, the law should be "you can sue social media if you can link their service to a problem with you'r child's mental health"
then let the courts decide. they'll clean up their act pretty quick when lawsuits come pouring in, and it removes the central govt's role in USER ID's and other 1984 schemes.
> Frankly, the law should be "you can sue social media if you can link their service to a problem with you'r child's mental health"
So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents? That's totally something that I could picture happening under such a regime. And that's ultimately indicative of a larger conundrum we face as a society.
The fact that as a society we seem to favor giving parents the ability to make their children in their own image, over giving their children the leeway to figure out who they truly are outside of their parent's guidance. And that's a truly difficult line to tack. Sometimes the parents are 100% right and the children would self-destruct under their own supervision. Other times, the children are being abused and tortured for not following the whims of their selfish parents.
I was lucky, all things considered. My parents were well meaning, just extremely overbearing and micro-managing. Some of the outright abuse that some of my acquaintances describe undergoing would make y'all sick if repeated here. I don't know if there's any solution, but I'm not sure giving helicopter parents more leverage against social spaces is the right play.
> So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents?
Why not. In a court of law, and facts, such lawsuits would only serve to highlight that religion is not a real thing. That would be a good thing for the world.
Why are we focusing on pupils? Attention span in general has degraded, I see it on myself and my family too and we're all between 32 and 60.
The only person that hasn't degraded is my grandma as the only internet feature she uses are video calls.
Why shouldn’t parents mind their own children? Why limit everyone’s speech?
Do you have kids?
It's much easier to say to a child "you can't have a social media account, it's the law because experts have determined it's not healthy at your age" than "your mother and I think that social media is bad for you".
Yes let's take away everyone's privacy because parents can't be bothered to parent.
I doubt that parenting can do much here.
I've read that after elementary school parents have an incredibly small impact on their children's development, peers and their environment (which includes virtual one), has virtually all of the impact on your children's development.
Do children buy devices and pay for internet service?
Good luck denying your 12 year olds a smartphone when every single of their friends has one and they are cut off from everything.
My parents gave me really shitty smartphones that were barely powerful enough to do important things but was an awful experience for Instagram/games/etc until I bought a better one with my own money (similar specs to Pinephone Pro)
How so? Parents and schools can collectively decide to take away the smartphones of preschoolers if keeping them safe and focused was the main priority. Like how else is a preschooler gonna get a smartphone without adult money and support? Last time I checked preschoolers can't open a checking account and a credit card.
This bs of government forcing everyone in the country to have to doxx themselves just so preschoolers can't access social media(which they will anyway since rebellious children are very resourceful on cheating the system made by tech illiterate adults), is like if prehistoric humanity were to stop using fire just because the village idiot burned his house down.
> Parents and schools can collectively decide to take away the smartphones of preschoolers if keeping them safe and focused was the main priority
Collective action? Like some sort of communist? No THANK you!
Let's suppose the cause really is as simple as "parents can't be bothered to parent". By default, this will continue to be the case. And realistically we're not going to fix it by telling bad parents to please start being good parents. So what do you actually want to do? I'm not saying it's this or nothing, but if you don't have an alternative policy that might actually help, I don't take much comfort in the idea that the kids who are damaged will have _parents_ who totally deserved it.
There are some alternative policies, for example, banning smartphones in schools. This doesn't completely solve the problem, of course, but at least it limits social media use while the children are under direct supervision of the government.
A more extreme policy would be to treat smartphones themselves the same way we treat alcohol and cigarettes, enforcing an age minimum at the point of purchase. Of course the giant tech corporations would fly into rage over this suggestion and lobby heavily against it.
They can, but digital passports and ID makes it far easier. Notice that even though government can do it now they are still pushing for these.
“It’s for the children” is the siren song of tyranny.
Yes, but damaging adults is OK. It's only children that must not be damaged.
Adults are expected to think for themselves. Kids need help because they don’t have the experience yet.
If society and parents ban you from something and they do it themselves then the ban has virtually no effect.
That’s right and important to keep in mind.
It's why we see so many infants getting caught for DUIs. Seriously? You seem to be implying that there's no justification/efficacy for any law/ban prohibiting children from engaging in adult activities. That's... something.
>It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.
It's not though. That's just the popular meme among easily influenced and excitable social groups (like parents). It's not reflective of reality. The idea that mobile devices are somehow damaging to mental state is not supported by scientific studies. Nor is the idea that online discussion forums and markets are.
What is dangerous is mis-using medical terms like "addiction" in apparently an intended medical context. When you start throwing around words like addiction governments get really excited about their ability to use force and start hurting and imprisoning people. Even murdering them. Multi-media screens are not addictive. There is no evidence supporting such assertions in reputable scientific journals.
What are you talking about there's an overabundance of studies that links social media consumption with degrading mental health. Especially for youth.
Here's a review (a paper that collects results of many other papers) from 2022:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9052033
By link you mean correlate, which doesn't mean anything.
Social studies are useless anyway. Academic social studies are so biased that anything they say on the matter should be discarded. They will always produce "evidence" on demand for whatever the left want to do.
Social media should be left alone. Parents who want to can block it on their children's devices. There's nothing more that needs to be done.
yes thank you Facebook shareholder for your clearly unbiased opinion, totally not a transparent attempt to insist there's no problem at all the big bad left boogyman is making it all up
vile
> It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.
Is it? Or is it "bloody obvious" to morons who mindlessly accept whatever they are told? The world is always collapsing right?
> Check out what teachers have to say about the attention span of the current generation pupils.
Before smartphones, it was TV. TV was rotting kids' brains. But the world didn't end. Did it? Besides, aren't teachers really complaining about smartphones usage DURING class?
It's dumb chicken littles like you that are the bane of freedom and civilization.
Your insults weaken your argument and detract from the overall conversation. Aim higher.
The don't tread on me angle is just as overplayed as the one you're complaining about.
What insults? Truth is never offensive.
> Aim higher.
Touch grass.
> The don't tread on me angle is just as overplayed as the one you're complaining about.
Not as overplayed as the passive aggressive social engineering sneaks like you. Aim higher.
Thank you for pushing back against this sort of nonsense.
HN is full of manipulative tone policing by people who can't argue, and it's refreshing to see someone put their foot down.
> And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.
We could have a real conversation about tradeoffs (and maybe this one isn't worth it!) but not if you just assume/pretend the worst-case scenario is real. I'm Australian and I'll happily bet that N years from now I'll still be able to criticize the government without being debanked or sacked.
If we do ever fall to authoritarianism, I doubt this will have been a crucial step; it's already easy for the government to deanonymize most posters if it wants to, and an evil future government that wanted to go further could probably just... do it, regardless of precedent.
> but not if you just assume/pretend the worst-case scenario is real
Just want to point out that Canada weaponised war time powers to debank truckers protesting during COVID. The rubicon has already been crossed. While I didn't support their cause, the writing is on the wall about what governments want to be able to do to people it finds inconvenient.
Governments never give up power. They will only take more. So considerations on what power should be given over should be done carefully instead of having knee jerk reactions based on "think of the children".
It's my impression that the shift from 'basically normal government' to 'authoritarian nightmare', when it happens, tends to happen quite abruptly rather than via the ratchet effect/frog-boiling. And there seem to be plenty of examples of democracies that have remained basically normal despite decades' worth of policies that libertarian-leaning observers would decry as the thin end of the wedge. I'm open to being convinced that the risk of a policy like this clearly outweighs its benefits, but I think I need a specific causal pathway and/or historical precedent rather than general arguments.
The US is kind of an obvious example of this ratchet effect. The powers that have been given to the executive over the course of decades and consistent moving to the right for decades has led us to where we are now. Similar cases in Russia and China where more power is handed over to a centralized leadership role over time.
I'm not a libertarian or follow the thin end of the wedge belief system. It's a simple observation that governments operate under the idea of growth of power. That is not to say an absence of government or reduction of government is good or better. But to recognize our role in maintain the social contract with the government. Abdicating that role entirely does not improve your life.
The only benefit of this legislation is that VPN's will get a bump in revenue, the web becomes more unusable and critical information gets stored at third parties who become high value targets for hacking. Not to mention these data brokers can easily turn around and begin to monetize this data. I'm not a privacy nut by any measure, but this seems like the most obvious major hit to personal data privacy. Instead of addressing the problem that is being claimed to be resolved, it's just lining another corporations pockets who will sell your data. We've seen this story play out many many times already. but you think this time will be different? I don't think so.
I don't have the solution. But it seems like a problem which needs to be addressed and regulation isn't a crazy place to look. As a parent, it feels like I'm constantly battling with Meta, Tiktok and Google over my childrens' development and we have very different goals.
Lack of something like SSO and centrally-managed permissions for families is a huge pain in the ass.
Minecraft is notably insane due to this. I don’t know how normies get their kids playing online with it (ours is locked down to just-with-friends, and we gatekeep the friend list), I thought it was hard as a techie. Cross-platform play (outside of X-Box, I suppose) requires creating and carefully-massaging permissions on two overlapping but unrelated systems, both the account on the console itself and a Microsoft account (and their UI for managing this is, in modern Microsoft fashion, entirely nutty). Then, if anything goes wrong, the error messages are careful never to tell you which account’s settings blocked an action, so you get to guess. Fun!
(Getting “classic” Java Minecraft working, just with a local server, was even harder)
Your options are to go all-in on one or two ecosystems; to take on just a fuckload of work getting it all set up nicely and maintaining that with a half-dozen accounts per kid or whatever; or to give up.
Then schools send chromebooks home with less-restrictive settings than I’d use if I were managing it and no way for me to tighten those, and a kid stays up all night playing shovelware free Web games before we realize we need to account for those devices before bed time. Thanks for the extra work, assholes.
Why not just take away their phone?
iPhones have excellent parental controls (by the abysmal standards of consumer software more broadly). You can just not allow insta and such, or set time limits on them per-day (30 minutes, say). I assume Android has something similar. You can set the Web to allowlist-only. Kids can send requests to bypass limits, sends the request right to your own Apple devices, easy to yay or nay it. It’s damn good.
Phones are among the easiest devices to manage.
Found out last year that simply deleting an app and reinstalling it will reset time limits.
App deletion and installation were among the first things I disabled :-)
> iPhones have excellent parental controls
If those work, sure, although kids tend to be pretty clever about getting around parental controls and are sometimes quite a bit more technically sophisticated than their parents.
It ain’t the ‘90s and this ain’t Windows 95 with bypassable-by-accident OS account logins and half-assed website blocking made by the lowest bidder. Getting past app installation restrictions and time limits on iOS would be… challenging.
It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.
(And on some platforms it is, for practical purposes, impossible—looking at you, Linux, not just because it’s a powerful open platform but because its permissions and capabilities system is decades behind the state-of-the-art and tools for sensibly managing any of that on a scale smaller than “fleet of servers” and in the context of user-session applications are nonexistent)
To that extent can't kids just pop in a live USB and get a totally ephemeral and open os?
I'd push the implementation to the router and force root certs on devices and have all clients run through your proxy or drop the packets. That way even live usbs will not get network access. Have some separate, hugely locked down network for kids' friends.
Maybe put a separate honeypot network up with some iot devices on it with wifi and a weak password, and let the kids have some freedom once they figure out how to deauth and grab the bash upon reconnections.
Idk. I'm some years away from this problem myself,but someone recommended this in another thread recently.
https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump
> It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.
I didn't claim that it's impossible, merely that it's difficult sometimes, as you also implied ("putting in tons of work"). The advantage of physically consfiscating phones is that it's a low tech, brute force method available even to the least technically sophisticated parents.
heh...see my comment above about bypassing screen time limits on ios by simply deleting and reinstalling the app.
I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives.
My son's cross country team communicates via GroupMe and it's very difficult for him to stay up-to-date with the web version from a laptop. My daughter's friend group communicates via snapchat.
This doesn't mean parents have to allow everything. My daughter doesn't have Snapchat, for example. But there are definite tradeoffs like her being left out of many conversations and slowly getting excluded from friend groups as a result.
It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.
> I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives.
It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban. A kid could be limited to an hour a day or phone use or something like that.
> It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.
The inevitable result would seem to be that all adults, parents or not, would be forced to present their identification online to use the internet. I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice, regardless of how noble the goal.
> It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban.
Limits help, for sure. But it's like setting limits for addictive products like "one cigarette a day". It's better than a pack a day but the impact addictive products have on kids don't stop once their limit is up.
> I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice
That's why I started by saying I don't have the solution. Regulation and fines for companies that target kids feels plausible. While not exactly the same, we curbed teen cigarette use by imposing marketing restrictions and issuing fines to tobacco companies (and drastically reduced adult smoking too for that matter).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_Un...
Can't zero knowledge proof solve this problem?
Submit a zkp that you are over 18 to the website that requires it. The proof need not be tied to the identity of the user.
I personally don't think self-regulation works. It's harmful so the next best option is the government regulating it.
Problem? That's the intended result.
Doesn't matter if they can, because that's not how any of the shot callers want it done.
Also in the meantime kids find their way to other sites / work around and they claim to be adults so now ... NO PROTECTIONS for the kids ...
Completely the opposite of what you would hope.
> And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.
When has this happened in the countries you listed?
An an Australian, the social media ban legislation specifically requires than non-ID methods be available (it specifically says that also included digital ID).
Why are you lumping Canada into that group? Only UK and AUS are doing the digital ID.
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202508/canada-adopts-nationa...
https://www.todayville.com/canada-moves-forward-with-digital...
https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/FINA/Brief/B... "Oct 7, 2022 — Recommendation 1: That the government drive economic growth by prioritizing and investing in the government's digital identity mandate."
If your making the slippery slope argument sure I can agree there is a risk.
However its saying digital validation for federal benefits - I mean given the amount of fraud in the US social security system of recent years it seems like having some kind of protection is important to not waste our tax payers benefit. And if you cross the border you are immediately in a digital system in the US.
That said this isn't saying digital identity for websites similar to what AUS is proposing.
Children’s welbeeing being a dog whistle? You should go out and talk to real parents and teachers in the real world.
This is a speculative, intuitive reflex meant to derail an argument.
Also Rahm Emanuel: "Let's take Second Amendment rights away from everybody on the no-fly list." [1,2]
1: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/rahm-emanuel-hey-lets...
2: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/816qf/rahm_eman...
Sorry what do you think is happening in New Zealand?
Meh, the gov can do this already. The effect of social media on our kids is a bigger evil at this point.
> It's amazing how coordinated it is.
It's not really "amazing" at all, when you consider that the working class in those countries has finally woken up to the fact that their biggest present day issues, like housing unaffordability and low purchasing power, have been caused by the intentional fiscal policies of their governments over the last 30+ years, instead of the usual boogeymen (Xi Jinping, Putin, Covid, immigrants, etc).
And now after 20+ years of constantly vote hopping between left and right, hoping "this time it will be better than last time" but in practice it always ended up worse, the people are trying to hold them accountable for it, so the elite are switching tactics now that the ye olde reliable tactic of gaslighting the people doesn't work anymore.
If the carrot doesn't work anymore, time to move over to using the stick to keep the peasants in line.
There’s no evidence about this being coordinated is there?
What?
Coordinated
When you put all the points on a graph and they form a line, what more "evidence" do you need?
Your request for evidence reminds me when the 3 telco operators in my country raised their prices simultaneously on the same day, and the nation's anti cartel watchdog said they found no evidence of price fixing lol
Just because the system is corrupt, incompetent or ineffective at finding evidence, doesn't mean there isn't collusion going on.
This is probably controversial, but this reason I would much rather things like social media and pornography be outright banned rather than age-gated.
I lucked out in when I was born, I developed before social media existed and my college was a later addition to Facebook. I think it just doesn’t affect me in the same way… like someone who has never won a dollar gambling looks at a gambling addict. I’ve got tremendous empathy for the people that are addicted to it and I can’t imagine how corrosive it would have been to my teen years, so much as I revile the politics behind Rahm who believes nothing and will stick his finger in the wind every few minutes and go where it takes him, I’m glad this is the way the winds are blowing. Social Media should be regulated like alcohol and cigarettes and drugs. All addictive, all tuned to hit dopamine centers, all bad for our health in different ways.
How would we effectively regulate social media? Being the regulator could be a very powerful political tool and used to capture or maintain political power.
I think playing a ton of games as a kid has helped me.
I walk through a casino and see all the flashing lights and sounds and like the casino screen is half as busy as an RTS. It's just not the same level of engagement; it's not overwhelming, it's just slow.
I feel the same way. In a sense, our parents had it easier in terms of the damage external world could do emotionally, because there was typically a simple way to prevent most of it. Now, it is not nearly as simple. Not to search very far, our kid has a media diet that some consider strict ( 30 minutes a day of pre-selected items if kid meets some criteria, which I still consider too high ). But then some kids already have cellphones, ipads ( some completely unlocked too ! ). I only recently gave my kid lappy with gcompris installed ( locked down lappy; no net access ). Point I am trying to make in my rambly way is that each parent is hodge podge of various choices. And it does not work in aggregate.
I get that it is all about balance, but it is hard to disagree with Rahm here. Top down ban is the only real way to go.
> Point I am trying to make in my rambly way is that each parent is hodge podge of various choices. And it does not work in aggregate.
On top of that, you have some of the biggest, most moneyed companies in the country spending billions of dollars to get kids and adults hooked. Even for parents with good intentions, it's not a fair fight.
Maybe I'm going off the deep end, but I sometimes think people that work at Facebook should be considered social pariahs. The amount of damage that company has done to our country and society is truly incalculable. It's really hard for me to forgive anyone who had any part in it.
Social media is not the same product as social networks. It had value when you were in control of what content you wanted to see (your friends' posts).
Now social media, controlled by algorithms, is just like a permanent informercial. You have direct ads and first level indirect adds (sponsored content), but it goes deeper than that, when they manage set up a "viral trend" you have a lot of people acting as speaker person for brands without even realizing.
Attention shapes who you will become in the future, because it focus on what matters to you. When you outsource that to others, they can mold you into what is more profitable to them. Specially kids, who are at the prime time for being influenced.
This is a good point. I completely relate to the statement that "social media is a plague on society." But you have a good point -- it's not so much the digitization of a social network as the algorithms that are hyper-optimized to steal attention and sell advertising. Maybe it's not the age that should be regulated, but the algorithm. Whether algorithm regulation should be age dependent is another question. Personally I don't think it should be age dependent. Or... Dear Social Media Companies, F your attention hijacking, skinnerbox advertising and engagement crack regardless of how old your victim is.
On the question of whether to legislate the ban, I'm a no. On the question of whether parents should implement it, I'm a yes. My niece and her husband have a one year old that is allowed zero screen time. They are willing and able to forego the high tech baby sitting, and are talking about continuing until at least the pre-teens. I think that if they could go even further, say live for the next decade with the Amish, it would be even better.
If a kid was raised with his family in a dome where no technology later than 1900 were permitted (perhaps with an emergency medicine exception) and the kid wasn't released into the world until 13, I think on average they'd be mentally healthier and have a happier life.
Your niece and her husband are one in a thousand parents. Very few have the fortitude to do it. Not a good outlook for the future if we depend on the virtue of parents.
That is extremely short-sighted to assume that because a few anecdotes on “how to parent” will fix the problem. I recommend you go out in public and observe the reality in various states and in various demographics and you’ll quickly see that the parents are just as addicted as the kids. They won’t know how to parent this away without legislation.
Just go into the classroom and witness children and their six-seveeen.
This is 100% like smoking except worse, because entire population of children are being deprived of their attention span. They just learn how to peddle useless products onto their peers without brain development to understand the consequence.
I feel the same way about a smoking. I'm opposed to both smoking and a ban on smoking. It's not because I don't think an effective ban would be healthful, but because I believe that the concentrated power needed for it is a greater danger. It's the same argument that I believe supports the first amendment: people saying evil shitty false things is a lesser evil than the power needed to stop them from saying them.
And suppose no one banned smoking, and smoking was still allowed on airplanes and most restaurants had smoking sections would we be better off? I’m sure all the people who died of throat cancer would tell you otherwise.
Would you also prefer to repeal the first amendment? (If you are subject to it.)
I concur with this. I’d even be okay with government-sponsored PSAs about social media use as long as it’s based on sound research. But a ban is a hard no due to the First Amendment.
This is the exact policing we don't want government to do regardless of the age. In my opinion it's the responsibility of the parents to decide how to raise their children and teach them how to live and adapt in the age of social media and maintain a balance.
In the same sense one could argue that social media like Facebook or WhatsApp should be banned among older population because that's one of the major ways mis/fake information being spread among elderly people and now with AI videos they actually believe those fake stories to be 100% true as well. I think that's more risk to modern day democracy and well being of the society in general.
Stores are banned from selling cigarettes to those under 18. Sure, kids can still get them, but it does present a barrier.
I don't see this as being any different, and as a parent, I'd support a ban like that.
Cigarettes (nicotine products) are easy to identify. What is social media? Why would I want to acquire and provide an ID just to comment on HN? In the case of social media, there is not a well enough defined product to ban.
That's the whole point then right? It's whole another policing and maintenance burden created to be funded by tax payers money without actually achieving anything useful at all.
Do you have kids? I'm glad mine can't just walk into a store and buy cigarettes. It's a pretty strong deterrent.
These platforms exist for one reason: data collection, used to sell ads.
Once you realize their perverse nature where they walk the line of barely useful vs maximizing income, using the application starts to feel icky.
But sadly that knowledge only comes with age and experience.
He’s saying this because he’s Jewish and zoomers/alphas are seeing a lot of anti-Israel content on TikTok, etc.
What are the metrics this Australian law should hit? How do we know its achieving its intended result?
Almost no laws are enacted with this in mind. The people doing it are neither scientists nor engineers and never suffer any consequences for failure of what most people will see as well meaning lawmaking. The idea that a law should be subject to quality control is not merely absent but also anathema.
I don't see advertisements often, but I had to fly for work recently and of course saw advertisements in the airport. One of the ads was for "Teen Instagram" with "automatic protections." Kind of depressing. It's a bit like someone selling teen cigarettes, they're a bit more mild and you can graduate to "adult cigarettes" when you're ready. I'm not sure government banning is solution, but there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media. It's a strange problem, and ultimately the issue is that people just cannot regulate their behavior in this area.
Yea I've seen those too. Made my heart sink.
When you start to think about that statement, and why it was written there, why a company chooses to pay $ to tell you this, you know that inherently something went REALLY wrong in the past.
And because it's a company, they're doing the bare minimum to fix it, as to minimize the impact on their bottom line.
It reminds me of the ads against a certain prop in CA, the one that would make app workers (?) employees.
Advertisements taken out by Lyft, Uber, etc, all to sway people.
When companies want you to do something it's not in your best interest. It's in theirs.
> there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media.
If this were true, I’m sure that you wouldn’t have any trouble advocating that we ban it. Many of us remember social media before the algorithmic feed took over, and it was a good way to stay connected to friends and family. Some us also were lucky enough to experience a protracted period of socializing on the internet in the pre-social media days: MUDs, web forums, chat rooms, etc. I enjoyed all of those, in my teen and college years, and like you I count myself fortunate that I was not exposed to social media during a formative time of my life. I think that’s why I hesitate to say that we should outright ban it: I know that the internet _can_ coexist (and even augment) a healthy social life. That said, I don’t use social media at all anymore (unless you count HN), so I’ve definitely voted with my eyeballs.
Some critical differences, I think, are:
- What we did on the Internet in the early 90s was not broadcast to our (real world) peers. If some big drama blew up online, we could escape it with the flip of a switch.
- Similarly, we could escape real world drama by shifting to our online relationships.
- Normal people were not online yet, so you didn't have all the normal real world structures of authority and popularity/hostility. Or, you had substitutes instead, because this is human nature, but they were not so universal and entrenched. It was an Internet of niches, and we could all find or create our own.
- There was no pervasive profitability goal in keeping our eyeballs on a particular platform, so today's dark pattern manipulation just didn't exist.
- It was separate. Not only did the Internet not bleed into real life (and v-v), but it wasn't always-available like today with smartphone ubiquity.
The Internet, back then, was a safe third space.
Today it's often a toxic hellscape, with some exceptional corners.
Very well put. The internet used to be an island of sanity from the real world. Now, most of it, is far worse than the real world. Pockets of excellence exist, but you're always just one impulse control failure away from stumbling into outrageous or addicting content.
> there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media
Citation needed.
Look, I am greatly opposed to how US social media giants handle and monetize data, and I don’t like them having the level of control that they do. Antitrust is a great lever to use here, because concentration is the source of many problems. But banning what is in effect public social communications is a giant step over the First Amendment.
People can and do use social media to their benefit, whether it’s for political organizing, whistleblowing, mutual aid, OSINT, or gathering on the ground media and first hand accounts from active events (such as conflicts, protests, or police actions) that may never show up in the news. The professional media cannot be everywhere, and sometimes they will not cover certain events. That’s what social media is good for, despite its flaws.
Your mention of cigarettes is apt.
We will come to see social media in its current form the same way we view smoking.
I see social media ( x AI fakes) doing just as much or more harm to seniors.
Yes. My parents happily drench themselves in a neverending barrage of unhinged political commentary on YouTube and watch clips on Facebook without knowing they are AI generated. It is really horrifying.
Yes but they won’t let you take it away from them because they are hooked
they also vote
Coming from Rahm Emanuel of all people, I don't get the sense that this is just a good faith effort to help kids at school
Ban social media and go a step further and ban mobile devices for children while we're at it. The generation of iPad babies is completely broken. I kept my kids away from that stuff religiously, but now these brain addled goblins are their peers.
- 1990s, blogs, months long
- 2000s, facebook, weeks long
- 2010s, twitter, days long
- 2020s, tiktok, minutes long
- 2030s, ???, seconds long
and our attention span, intelligence and socialising are compromised.
So let me this straight. I will need an ID to go on internet but not to vote. He even talked about how requiring ID makes thar certain people are trapped in vicious cycle.
This is the exact policing we don't want government to do - but it is to protect children. So I guess we will go with it.
> And he suggested lawmakers should start with targeting three of the most popular apps among U.S. teens — TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.
The linked Pew Research article also lists YouTube up there. Why not restrict its use by teens as well? It is because it also has wholesome material?
We should ban voting aged people from using them.
Makes sense.
Our kids didn't get social media until they were 16 and life continued.
We don't let kids drive until 16 and smoke or drink until 18.
This just seems down right reasonable.
What is the case for allowing them to have it before 16?
The question is how the laws are enforced.
The driving, smoking, and drinking laws are enforced outside the home. Everyone has to prove their age at the DMV to get a license and at commercial establishments to buy cigarettes and alcohol.
The only way to enforce the social media law age minimum is to force everyone to show their ID just to use the internet, even from their own home. That seems more Orwellian to me.
Surely any other country should wait a while to see what the effects are. It's already being challenged in Australia on free speech grounds.
The effects are there for everyone to see. GenZ is depressed and can't hold a thought for more than a few seconds. No, it's not because of the housing or job market, it's the phones. Check e.g. Jonathan Haidt: https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/
And free speech: you don't need a mobile phone or tiktok to exercise that right.
I was referring to the effects of the law.
That's def and "ok, boomer" mentality. Apparently, Rahm has never heard of a "VPN."
Jokes aside, this should be the responsibility of parents, not the government. Also, this is about censorship, not protecting kids.
Culturally, this is the pivotal question of our generation. Both options are admittedly terrible, and as appealing as the parental rights argument may be... it hasn't been going well.
Does the Democratic party actually have a platform capable of beating the incumbent Trump Republicans? Or is it just this kind of stuff? Ban kids from YouTube?
It's interesting, because quite a lot of the pornography ID laws are passed by Republicans and popular among Republicans. I don't mean this as a "both sides" sort of argument, but rather that modern tech seems to be unpopular among all constituents, even if different groups have their preferred villain.
I feel like those laws are different because they specifically target pornography, which is seen as an evangelical moral sin. They would prefer to ban it completely, but that most likely runs afoul of the Constitution. So their next best bet is just to try to limit it to over-18s.
Obviously the end result is the same, but I think the motivation is different.
>which is seen as an evangelical moral sin
Maybe. Most of the debate that I hear feels similar to social media commentary -- teen boys getting their brains fried by constant access to stimulus. I don't hear anything about onanism or sinning.
Mind you, I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but just that most of the arguments I hear are saying "we think this is an identifiable and secular harm."
> They would prefer to ban it completely, but that most likely runs afoul of the Constitution. So their next best bet is just to try to limit it to over-18s.
They dont care about constitution. And they are in position to reinterpret it however they want to, regardless of its text and meaning.
If that was actually true then states would have banned or blocked already. This is not a new issue and it has been challenged unsuccessfully many times.
That was before conservatives stopped caring about pretending they care about constitution.
They dont really care about porn now tho.
The good news is Emmanuel, although a media gadfly, isn't well liked by Democratic voters so he won't make it out of a Democratic primary.
It's popular in Australia according to polling even though you'd never guess that based on sampling opinions about it from social media.
Credibly fixing both social media and cost of living would be an effective platform across the West.
> It's popular in Australia according to polling
depends on how or who you poll. I dont think it is popular. It's just that there's a lot of stigma when you try to argue against "saving the children" type policy - which is why this gets used to pass laws that otherwise would be difficult to pass if the true intentions were revealed.
> Credibly fixing
"credibly" is carrying a lot of weight here.
> On March 12, 2025, Politico reported that Emanuel was interested in running for president in the 2028 U.S. presidential election.
They are going to find out soon enough.
The pitch of the centrist/“3rd way” wing that’s still, incredibly, ascendant even after the massive party shift on the other side that was teed up in the late ‘00s and realized in 2016, is basically “we’re just like Reagan but we like the gays and abortion a little more, and like guns a lot less”.
It’s a shit message, but they’re apparently permanently damaged by the 1980 landslide re-election loss to Reagan and incapable of moving on. IDK if liberal democracy will survive here long enough for us to see if another wing of the party can ever get those folks to let them try something else.
[edit] not for nothing, Obama lightly hinted at a move away from that in his campaigning (if not his governing) and it seemed to work pretty damn well. Why they didn’t double down on that is anyone’s guess, but I’d suppose it rhymes with “bobbying”.
1984, not 1980, FWIW, and the Democratic Party old guard had been pretty badly beaten up by the 1968 and 1972 conventions. Tip O'Neill was one of the last of that group to really hold power.
1980 was the famous almost-every-state-is-red presidential election map that scared democrats shitless and convinced (enough of) them the way forward was shifting much closer to Reagan on many issues (including, notably, joining the Republican neoliberal movement). But yeah it took an election cycle or two to stabilize after that.
[edit] I mean yes 1984's map was even worse, but 1980's was reeeeeal bad. Six states won in 1980, versus one in 1984. And we have a guy who won a pretty ordinary split of states and less than a majority of votes-cast calling his win in 2024 a "landslide", lol. No, Reagan's elections are what a landslide looks like.
[edit edit] I mean I don't really want to quibble over the details, it probably was the one-two punch of those that really set the direction and we seem to agree on the basics that it was Reagan's crushing electoral success that set the tone for Democrats for up until... well, still today, largely.
Is this not a bipartisan issue?
Unfortunately yes.
Trump won during a time where incumbents lost by ~10 points. He narrowly beat a candidate that lost their only primary run by <2 point.
Trump's very vocal minority is very good at making people think there is a silent majority.
However, the democrats have been elected quite a lot this millennium and they've fully shown they're incapable of making necessary reforms so there's going to keep being populist candidates until there's new blue blood.
That would require making positive, pragmatic suggestions that could improve the lives of the average person, rather than moralizing and kowtowing to the special interest groups and wealthy donors who have captured the party. Good luck with that.
As it is we now have two parties obsessed with “regulating” the morality of citizens while bleeding them out financially.
No, it would require overcoming a shameless demagogue and enablers who have no problem blatantly lying about everything to everyone.
Democracy has been known since its invention to be extremely vulnerable to such actors. It's vulnerable to it because it's nearly impossible to counter.
Your critique is valid to some degree, but Trump won simply because he had the shamelessness to lie over and over and over again that he'd bring prices down. That's it.
No "positive, pragmatic suggestions" are electorally stronger than simple untruths stated with confidence ad infinitum.
Good luck with that. This was the message of the consultant class in 2016 and 2024 and it’s why Dems lost both of those elections. Biden, for all his flaws, actually did attempt to articulate and focus on a positive message and actively reached out to struggling workers. And he won.
The message of the consultant class is that demagogues can win by just lying to people?
Which consultants said that?
Biden won because he came hot on the heels of Trump's complete inability to actually govern.
Which specific pragmatic, positive visions did Biden put forth that are so distinct from Harris's that they won in one case and lost in another?
No, the message was that winning was about “overcoming a shameless demagogue and enablers who have no problem blatantly lying about everything to everyone,” plus shallow pandering to diversity, rather than delivering tangible benefits to Americans. In both 2016 and 2024 the Dem message to voters was that everything was fine, no radical economic change was needed, vote against orange man and all would be well. This was a losing position against a populist. Biden called on his long record of support for labor and proposed investing in American manufacturing, which was a winner in swing states especially since the economy was hurting due to the pandemic.
I didn't say that should be the message.
I said that there's no "pragmatic, positive message" that overcomes simply lying and having an entire media and political apparatus that supports it.
Biden's primary advantage was running against a guy who was demonstrably a complete shit show as an actual incumbent. That was memory-holed by the same shameless lying (e.g. ask Republicans who they think "locked people down" during COVID).
Biden (and Harris) then had a similar disadvantage going into 2024.
It's extremely, extremely silly to act like voters were looking for pragmatic messages lol. Simply no evidence for that.
They were primarily looking to get rid of the incumbent, as was the trend across all democracies during a period of extreme inflation.
That’s a common refrain, especially among the media (ironically, as they are blaming themselves) and the professional-managerial class, who seem to have a blind spot for labor needs. Voters facing hardship have agency and vote for who they believe is aligned with their needs. In 2020 Biden’s union support was key to his victory in the rust belt states, which carried him to victory. Harris didn’t have the same background and didn’t make a serious effort to reach those people, and lost a percentage of union votes at a time when the number of union voters actually increased. So she lost. But it’s true that inflation didn’t help.
One reason that incumbents are doing so poorly is that they promise nothing, and deliver it. Nations are in decline across the West, and all that candidates are allowed to offer is more of the same neoliberal pablum. Anyone who attempts to offer something different faces a coordinated attack from the media and incumbent political class, and the only ones seemingly able to break through the resistance are dishonest right-populists. The left has to come up with a solution other than dismantling (excuse me, “fortifying”) democracy, which appears to be the EU solution.
Can you tell me which Trump policies were pro-labor, pro-union, pragmatic, positive visions of the future?
There was none.
It turns out that actually you don't need pragmatic, positive visions of the future to win. In fact, we have plenty of evidence that pragmatic policies at all are a massive electoral liability when facing someone who is, again, willing to simply lie about everything.
In Trump, you have clear evidence that people do not need pragmatic solutions to anything. Somehow you are pulling from that the conclusion that Democrats are not pragmatic enough.
What makes you believe there is public appetite for pragmatic solutions? Enough to win a national election?
Trump does not offer real solutions, except as a sound bite in passing (to be later ignored). But in the absence of pragmatic policies that voters can get behind, the winner will always be the candidate who offers to tear down the system that has failed the people. Mark my words.
The reality is that sound bites have an intrinsic advantage over real solutions. Real solutions to complex problems are by their nature complex and uncertain (else the problem would've been solved already).
"Immigrants are the problem" or "I will bring prices down on day one" have a fundamental memetic advantage that, in a lazy and unengaged populace, will win in 100% of scenarios.
The real issue here is the GOP not holding themselves accountable to something better than suicidal demagoguery. The opposing party cannot prevent this from being successful. That's why it's a known, fundamental flaw of democracy.
It sounds like you’re in a real spot of trouble then. If there are no solutions available. Maybe you can double down on the 2016/2024 strategy again.
banning kids from youtube seems pretty reasonable
Almost impossible to do, but I agree and have been saying that for decades.
Until recently I agreed with the age of 16, now I am starting to think they should be banned until they get an High School Diploma or equivalent, if no "diploma", then at the age of 21, they are allowed. Same as Drinking Age in the US.
The diploma requirement might decrease the dropout rate the the US.
I can't believe we're still talking about him. All he's done is fail.
Remember this guy was chased out of chicago for trying to cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald by the CPD. Then, previously was famous for being Clinton's fixer in the Gennifer Flowers case. The fact that this man has any political career at all is an incredible indictment of our system.
Social media is the smoking of our age, and it will come to be seen the same way we see smoking now.
Just like the tobacco companies, social media companies have known about the ills of their platforms for a long time and actively hidden it and/or publicly downplayed it.
No: It's more like leaded gasoline. People of the future will be like, "why would you let a big corporation control the feed algorithm?" Social media is fine. It's the algorithm that seeks addiction/engagement that's the problem. Not social media in general.
"Social media" is far too ambiguous anyway. For example, under most definitions, Steam is a social media platform. Yet no one is addicted to sharing things via Steam. But you can! You absolutely can share and browse people's posts, screenshots, videos, and even chat (text and voice)!
The reason why no one complains about Steam's social media features is that they're not designed to be addicting. That's not the point of the platform (it's to sell more games).
I don't believe this is done for the benefit of children/teens. What's much more likely is that politicians don't like people having news/information sources not beholden to them.