>Critics have said the bill violates the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment protections for free speech and that parents, not the government, should make decisions about the online presence of their children of all ages.
It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children, especially early teens from using social media. This law should make it easier and it would put the work on Meta, Snap, Tiktok, Pinterest, Twitter to help parents.
I'm personally glad that I grew up without social media but I worry about the kids growing up now. The amount of random junk young kids are exposed to on social media is worrying.
Not speaking from personal experience. My kid is only 4.
Your argument seems like exactly what my parents would have said about me spending so much time on TV, computers and electronics instead of studying, playing outside, sports etc.
Almost exactly like your last paragraph..
“I’m personally glad that I grew up without infinite channels on TV, computers and its games, cell phones and your SMSes. I’m worried about your generation. You guys are exposed to a lot of junk and things that waste your attention.” - Dad.
Yet, here we are….
May be kids of now will just need to be educated about the real impact and not be treated as if they are in glass houses?
I understand what you are getting at, but to inject some nuance:
TV, print, radio, music and to a lesser extent games are all subject to some level of industry or statutory content regulation.
For example, in America, you're very unlikely to have a kids TV channel suddenly switch to videos of people being killed in industrial accidents. new media, not so much.
Watershed, age constraints and company ending fines existed (and in some cases still do) for violating those rules.
Large new media companies, such as facebook, youtube and tiktok can literally serve porn to kids and not have any legal ramifications. If a cable broadcaster knowingly broadcast frontal nudity before watershed, it would be fined. (yes, cable TV has less restrictions) but thats the point, regulation has not kept up with the pace of change. that has been a deliberate decision.
My kids are >5 < 12. They aren't allowed on insta/tiktok. They can have youtube, but its only when supervised. even then its 1/3 chance that they land on something toxic as shit.
The world has changed, and the guard rails that we had as kids have been removed. There is an argument about freedom of expression, I get that. But we need to think about whether its right to allow large corporations to profit from showing horrific content to minors. (adults, I don't give a shit, do what you want) The problem is, I'm not sure of the best mechanism, with the least bad outcome.
25 years ago us kids were watching viral content on the internet that wasn’t even acceptable to go on youtube then or now. Still today, we are now your young doctors and lawyers and young business executives, despite all the quite disturbing viral content that characterized the early 2000s internet. I think we did fine and I think the kids will be alright too.
There’s some survivorship bias here. Not everyone who was exposed to disturbing content is unaffected or can move past it so easily. And in 2024, it’s far more likely to encounter something you had no intention of seeing.
It’s worth thinking about the social climate right now as the long tail of the last 25-30 years of technology advancement. Mass shootings are so common now they often don’t even register on people’s radar.
These effects are so complex that we’re still trying to figure out how to measure them, but we should take seriously the power and danger of the instant wide distribution of the worst elements of humanity.
I grew up on the old Internet, and made some of my most important friendships using it. It shaped who I am today, mostly for the better. But I don’t think we can let nostalgia or even the many benefits blind us to what the Internet has become or the real harms that come along with those benefits.
> And in 2024, it’s far more likely to encounter something you had no intention of seeing.
Strongly disagree. I haven't stumbled on "goatse" level shock imagery in years. Sure you might encounter stuff you had no intention of seeing, but that's only because you're being funnelled into link farms or other for-profit crapware flooding the internet. It's very rare to stumble on something disturbing.
In the last year I have seen (on facebook no less):
various levels of war crime
the killing of people at close quarters (with the last sound that they made, which still haunts me)
A sniper killing someone taking a poo.
These were nestled in amongst memes, which were fun and engaging. None of them had content warnings.
goatse wasn't all that shocking to me, because he is very much alive. 2 girls one cup is at least a ramp into skat, rather than straight in.
Now, if a 16 year old saw that, I'd probably not worry too much, I wouldn't be happy. But if my 10 year old, or 6 year old saw that, I'd have a whole load of emotional clean up to do.
25 years ago most people didn't even have a broadband connection in their home much less any kind of mobile data plan.
25 years ago kids didn't walk around with challenging to audit handheld computers. The computer, if your family had one, was that one big thing shared with the whole family that an adult could pop their head in and see what the child was up to.
That some kids (an incredibly tiny fraction) did have unrestricted access to the internet and turned out fine isn't indicative of the general population of kids having this kind of exposure and being fine. If in 1999 you had internet fast enough to really download many many hours of videos without being audited by a parent you were probably the 1% of 1% of 1% of child populations. A high percentage of households didn't even have internet at all. In 2000 only 1% of US households even had broadband internet.
I did too, but I would gently point out that you had to actively look for it. something rotten was a known site for that kinda stuff. You only went there if you were doing "illicit browsing" shall we say.
It was pretty difficult to stumble over a video of something visceral. Moreover, the internet wasn't real when we grew up.
The internet is real and omnipresent, filled with the mountains of clickbated bullshit, and only ever three videos away from some sort of porn(if you're lucky).
While a lot of this can definitely sound like an old man yelling at the sky, tv compared to scrolling tiktok, is like caffeine compared to crack cocaine.
And 40 years ago kids were watching bootleg copies of Faces of Death. Yes, kids get to that stuff. The problem is FoD doesn't even hold a candle to the manipulative shit that social media does to kids.
It was not all that easy to get a copy of Faces of Death back then, so it was something you might have saw once maybe twice but that violent real death before your eyes was not something that you ever became de-sensitized to because those visuals were exceedingly rare by the scarcity of the content at the time(at least in the US). So that morbid curiosity itch was scratched and then you moved on. Short of the few weird kids that watched that shit over and over, you probably never watched the whole thing. I know I think I watched 10 mins back in the day before it was turned off and we went out to find some beer instead. Now, real violence and death is a search term away and available every minute, hour, and day.
But agree…even that exposure to violence now pales in comparison to the amplification of the negative peer pressures that kids today experience due to social media. At least back in the day when you were away from your peers you could escape it and gain respite. Now its constant.
imo there's a difference between goatse type momentary shock sites that we grew up with and social media that pervades every waking minute of a kid's life. Yea, the former is gross, but the latter seems like it has real lasting psychological ramifications with regard to popularity contests, body image, etc. all the things that kids already struggle with, social media turns up to 11.
You really can't speak for everyone. You can maybe say this particular cohort is fine despite seeing some of this content while young, but certainly not because of it.
I've seen the First Amendment used as an argument against the US government determining what should and shouldn't be moderated by private companies operating on private infrastructure serving private citizens. Unless we're talking about unprotected speech?
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that was your argument. That's not how I meant for you to interpret it.
I meant to get your opinion on whether the First Amendment would create a barrier for what you're proposing: government mandated moderation of protected speech on private platforms. You're talking about legislation and where to place barriers, so I thought you'd be interested in discussion. Sorry.
I think that private companies shouldn't own the public square. So long as we allow corporations to encapsulate social interaction, we will continue to fail at moderation.
I don't think that law is a really meaningful avenue to fix this problem. I do think that aggressive anti-trust action could help a lot, though. If we do want to use law, then I think the focus should be on punishment for facilitation of harm. We should be able to prosecute Facebook for hosting fraudsters and failing to moderate harmful content.
As it is, a tiny number of companies hosting the social activity of billions of people, and those companies have utterly failed to accommodate that reality with proportional moderation. The failure of Facebook to adequately moderate has already lead to genocide.
My greater dream is to replace centralized social networks and content moderation with a decentralized network of curated attestations.
I think the empirical evidence is fairly clear, actually.[1][2]
Having struggled with various forms of screen addiction myself, I find it sort of odd that a lot of people are so laissez faire about giving children the most addictive device ever created.[3] Whether or not this law is a good idea, I think it's incumbent on parents to monitor and limit screen time and access to social media. Which is difficult! When my wife and I are tired, setting my daughter down in front of an ipad is the easiest way to get a break.
It's risky to describe the claims of social studies profs as clear empirical evidence, given the history of the field.
Twenge makes some unscientific arguments in her blog post, like constantly conflating correlation with causation despite her evidence not being able to show that. She also seems to think that if she knocks down a series of counter-arguments, then that means that her own argument must be correct. Given that Haidt's identical claims already turned out to be based on very poor quality evidence [1], their argumentation must be examined carefully before rushing to action.
Still, assume for a moment that it's a correct causal inference despite the major flaws in their evidence base. There's another tricky aspect to this. The Twenge/Haidt argument is really only about teenage girls. Although Haidt is basically honest about this (see [2]), Twenge is not. The opening of her article you cite talks about teenagers in general, but the first figure only shows data for girls and women. Then the second figure is even captioned "Figure 2: tech adoption, teen depression" but the legend actually says "Depression, girls". A few paragraphs later she's making claims about "individuals" whilst providing evidence that's once again specific to teenage girls. Her article is full of sloppy conflations like this.
Anyway, needless to say, neither politicians nor academics are willing to only ban social media for girls. This would upset the left so the argument morphs seamlessly into "social media should be banned for all teenagers" which isn't a story found in their data. This punishes boys for the mental health problems of girls, but is that just?
There's also a more subtle logical problem with this argument. It assumes that teenagers are a fixed group, and thus any change in their behavior must be due to some immediate alteration to their environment. But it's not: "teenage" is a sliding window that people constantly pass through. In other words it's possible that these depressed teens have always been somehow messed up, and simply aged into the categorization they're looking at. By implication the true answer could be found in earlier periods, even as far as back as changes to childrearing practices in the late 80s/early 90s rather than something that changed specifically in 2012. One theory posits that it's something to do with the rise of extremely early daycare for infants (e.g. for children less than one or two years old), and they also have a variety of correlations to bolster their case.
It may be that social studies academics simply cannot answer such questions.
[1] https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide..."Haidt's compendium of research does point to one important finding: Because these studies have failed to produce a single strong effect, social media likely isn't a major cause of teen depression. A strong result might explain at least 10 percent or 20 percent of the variation in depression rates by difference in social media use, but the cited studies typically claim to explain 1 percent or 2 percent or less. These levels of correlations can always be found even among totally unrelated variables in observational social science studies. Moreover the studies do not find the same or similar correlations, their conclusions are all over the map."
It definitely appears much worse for girls, but afaict, depression has risen in boys as well, just by not as much. See graphs here: [1]
So if social medial is harmful in general, I don't view prohibiting it a "punishment" for boys; perhaps like less of a benefit? Regarding your second point, I imagine the data would provide some clues. If the kids that are now teens were always more depressed, I'd imagine that we'd see more pre-teen depression ~3-8 years ago. I haven't looked into it closely.
And I grant that social science statistics are often problematic -- I imagine it'll take a while to really know what's going on.
But the rise in depression is only amongst some people, not everyone uniformly. Yet nearly ~all teenagers use the internet and something that can be described as social media. So it'd be punishing the majority who can use something responsibly and even get enjoyment and benefit from it, for the lack of self control of a minority (who could easily just log off but won't).
All that assumes the link actually holds, indeed. The two articles in Reason are persuasive that it doesn't hold though. The social media discussion in that case is just a distraction that stops people figuring out the real causes.
What if it was the responsibility of parents to make sure their kids didn't smoke cigarettes, but it was legal for stores to sell cigarettes to kids? Responsible parents could tell their children they are forbidden from buying them, explain all the reasons why it's bad, and then kids could just walk into a store and buy them anyway. Putting it all on parents doesn't work, parents aren't capable of supervising 24/7 and it isn't reasonable to act like they are or should be.
That's a fair point. The more I think about it, I can see the argument for protecting someone against a known bad thing at a point when they cannot comprehend how bad it really is. The magnitude is different from watching TV, porn magazines, or video games. However, I do worry that the earlier list can be gated because of their physical nature. However, Kids are going to end up being exposed to Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and whatever else unless one cuts off Internet access altogether, at which point the losses pile up more than the wins.. There is no easy solution than to admit this problem will exist, and we talk often to the teenager and give doses of reality however possible.
Lol at the infinite channels on TV part really highlighting.
As an adult, I don't have cable, I use an antenna. Yes, I have streaming some streaming services.
As adults and/or parents we can make decisions that help our kids (and they might help us too)
I also use Adblock.
The TV argument is the same as devices too; We had one family TV growing up; I still refuse to have a TV in my bedroom.
In conclusion, seems like we've hit the generation where our parents used TV to parent and so now we don't know how to parents -- or, for many people, be.
I think there are magnitudes and cliffs for this stuff.
TV --> has quality control, professionally done, goes through a team of editors/creators before making it onto the screen
Early internet --> Mostly harmless content, can find dark stuff if kids look for it but it's pretty hard to find. More dangerous than TV but not too bad.
SMS --> just chatting with people you know. Not afraid.
TikTok, IG Reels, Youtube Shorts, Snapchat, Twitter: Good luck to you. Your kid is going to see a ton of deep fakes, edited images of unrealistic body proportions that the influencer won't disclose, heaps of radical and extremist views, undisclosed sponsorships masquerading as advice, targeted ads that anyone can buy, etc.
The magnitude is much higher now - hence I think laws need to come in to make it easier for parents to get back some control.
Go ahead and try to teach your kid who is going to spend hours each day seeing hundreds of videos each day - probably tens of thousands in a year. What are you going to do? Watch 100 Instagram Reels per day with your kid and explain each and every single one? As an adult, even I'm easily influenced by this stuff.
You make a fair point. I think you have won me over philosophically. However, there is still the pragmatic and realistic approach to consider. Personally, I think moving to a world where internet content is gated behind ID checks is a terrible and horrible precedent to set that is going to have ramifications far beyond simply protecting teens who are under 16.
As a parent of teenagers who are falling into this trap right now, it is something I am gravely concerned about. I am no tech, lightweight, and blocking and even regulating. This stuff is pretty much impossible. Short of helicopter parenting your child at all times. Nor do I think that sort of heavy-handed regulation is necessarily healthy, although that depends very much on the age in my opinion.
But what does a world look like where every website and app has to, for liability reasons alone, assume that everyone is underage before proving that they are not?
> Early internet --> Mostly harmless content, can find dark stuff if kids look for it but it's pretty hard to find. More dangerous than TV but not too bad.
In the early 90's the dark stuff was mixed in with the porn. If you were looking for porn on the internet before it was available on web browsers, aka on usenet or anonymous FTP, you got exposed to the dark stuff.
And I'm fairly confident that a large percentage of teens using the Internet in the pre-WWW age were looking for porn.
Also TVs since 2000 in the US were all required to support v-chip which allowed parents to set restrictions on content. Getting around v-chip could often be somewhat complicated. Meanwhile it is usually pretty trivial to get around parental control software on computers.
My parents couldn't switch inputs on the TV, there's zero chance they could configure a v-chip without my help. Most of my friends' parents were the same way. I don't think this technology had the impact you think it had.
as a parent you have all the control. why does your kid need a tablet? why do they need a smart phone like at all? these devices did not just magically materialize in your home, the tooth fairy didn't put them there. you chose to plop your toddler in front of a screen because electronic vicodin was easier than parenting and then you chose not to lock down their devices with the abundant parental controls you are given and then you decided you couldn't be assed to teach them basic internet safety habits or how to develop healthy skepticism and that seeing isn't always believing. really the only thing your children have been '''exposed to''' is your own laziness and utter unwillingness to offer them direction. the world will continue to exist whether we like it or not, and some day our kids will have to live in it just like we do. we can either prepare them for what's really there, warts and all or we can hide them away only toss them to the wolves when they turn 18 with the delusion that this somehow preserved their innocence. i personally believe giving them the grace of a childhood to learn how to deal with the bumpy parts of life is a much kinder option.
Agree and disagree. Kids can't really understand the negative impact of the things made to alter their mind, and since their parents are responsible for them, it's their job not to just explain, but to do their best to limit or participate in their usage. This is only difficult if your children are not in your presence 24/7 (public school, hanging out at malls, etc).
> May be kids of now will just need to be educated about the real impact and not be treated as if they are in glass houses?
The problem with this argument is that TV had ads and while they are manipulative, they are absolutely no match for the shit that Meta, YouTube, etc pull. Kids (and quite obviously lots of adults) simply do not have the ability to deal with that.
tv, computer, radio, social media, and more broadly the internet, are mediums of communication and distribution. what tv content/substance did you grow up with? is that in and way comparable to the content/substance kids these days grow up with? the ban is on the medium but the import is on the content. too much junk on the internet these days. it doesn’t help that (1) they’re way cheaper to produce, and unfortunately (2) highly rewarded (by the platform owners) for their ability to keep users glued.
until it’s possible to have strong and reliable filters, the only way to protect tender minds is through controlled exposure.
Did you get exposed to far right propaganda, dehumanizing women, incitations of violence, practical suggestions of suicide, cartoons about rape followed by pregnancy and a miscarriage, or similar content on TV when you were a kid?
This is the kind of shit that’s everywhere on YT now, and your kids will stumble upon (father of one here). The “faces of death” stuff we had access to once in a blue moon is not even close.
As a parent, I’m concerned about social media, and it has been more or less impossible to stop my teens from using it. They were jailbreaking and using VPNs and bypassing my parental controls a lot earlier than I expected. I did notice that whenever my kids didn’t have access to phones and games for several days for whatever reason, they were less grouchy and more willing to engage with us and do family or social activities.
That said, one thing my teenagers clued me in to is that these efforts to require parental involvement by law have some underlying motivations that are not being said out loud. One of them is to out kids to their parents early and cut off online support for teens going through gender identity issues, especially gay and trans kids, perhaps under the assumption that gender identity is a choice and that online activities are somehow causal.
Considering the suicide rates among teens with gender issues, and the growing number of physiological indicators, I’m not sure cutting off all online support for them is a good idea. One of my kids does have gender identity issues and has considered suicide, and as a parent that breaks my heart and scares me more than anything. It was surprising to find out about the gender issues, and it started coming out around 14, so it’s easy to jump to conclusions that social media is a bad influence. But in retrospect, the signs had been there for a long time and we failed to see and acknowledge them. Our kid said that online support is what kept her from attempting suicide even earlier.
If there were anything else that harmed over 90% of kids while potentially helping a remainder we’d generally prohibit it.
I’ve known and worked with folks facing mental health issues over the decades and usually these kind of issues come from within. The idea that instagram is a cure-all for teen self-harm is not supported.
Anecdata—we knew a teen recently with very supportive parents and a smartphone and it didn’t stop a suicide attempt. Direct intervention did.
I did not even suggest that Instagram helps with teen self-harm at all. It’d be great if we could discuss this without straw men or sniping argumentation. My kid found support from friends online, at a time when she felt like she wasn’t getting the right amount from the people in her life, which to my chargrin, included me. Direct intervention has helped, and online activity alone wasn’t going to stop everything. Direct intervention alone wasn’t going to stop everything either, and it’s important to know that the wrong kinds of direct intervention can make the problem worse. (I’m worried the DeSantis law is the wrong kind of direct intervention, for example.) Since you work with people with mental health issues, then you know full well that neither my story nor yours is a one-and-done situation. A single intervention is never the start nor the end of the story, and preventing suicide for people with depression & dysphoria is a continuous effort with lots of different forces pulling and pushing.
I'm an exmormon who grew up in Utah. I have seen a very significant amount of positive engagement over social media with people who desperately need it.
My state's version of this law is to force ID-verification for porn sites. For that stated purpose, it isn't even remotely effective. But what about convincing a child to admit to their parents (or Mormon Bishop) that they watch pornography? That's where it gets truly concerning.
We did consider the idea that online activity might have contributed. That was before we recognized that the issues were present long before her online activity ever began, and before we understood how our child’s perspective, and before we knew more about the stats and indicators. Now that we’ve thought about it for a few more years, and been working through the issues with professionals, and talking a lot with our children, and listening to a lot of talking points from all sides (some educated and evidence based, and some not very educated at all), we feel a little embarrassed about our initial naïveté, regretful about the ways we failed to support our child even when we thought we were being supportive, sorry for all the kids going through this that don’t have any support system, and concerned about the damage that these culture wars are having on our society and democracy.
Social media might be contributing to gender issues and other kinds of social dysphoria in the sense that I am pretty sure the vast ocean of ignorance, prejudiced attitudes, and hate speech my kids find online have increased their fears about participating in society and reduced their confidence in being able to freely show who they are. Non-binary gender and sexuality is only a “problem” because some people say it is, and a lot of those people are online being mean. Personally I feel like the political tribalism going on in our country is a much worse problem than gender issues by many orders of magnitude. Anyway, I’m just glad my kids have some family and friends and adults near them, both online and IRL, who are accepting and loving and committed to civil rights for all…
Yeah, what a weird spooky coincidence that someone like DeSantis would make a move that’s cut off kids’ means to countermand their parents’ information lockout.
Send them to a private school, or even better, homeschool, control what kind of people they make friends with, keep them busy with church and Sunday school and bible study, burn the books and defund the public libraries, control what music they listen to and what shows and films they watch and the games they play… and, of course, control their means of communication.
Heaven forbid your child ever be exposed to anything that might make them question the reality of this little garden of Eden you’ve imprisoned them in.
I’m not in favor of the DeSantis law for the above reasons. You appear to be against this law as well, so I’m a little baffled why you’ve turned that on me and imagined a whole lot of stuff I didn’t say. Am I correct in deducing that you are not a parent yet? I’m not religious, but this law we’re commenting on is coming from a group of people that are pandering to religion, and this law is a direct part of that effort.
I didn’t try to control my kids “information” other than when they were young trying to make the really nasty stuff not come up first or by default or on accident. They weren’t security conscious, because they were kids, so white/black lists preventing malware, phishing, and viruses seemed prudent. They also didn’t have a ton of self control, and games are infinitely more tempting than school work, chores, and even self-care and sleep, so screen time limits are useful. For example, we had multiple pee in the pants and on the couch accidents because our kids were so focused on playing games they wouldn’t stop to go to the bathroom. Google used to have a bad habit, when “safe mode” was turned off, of taking an innocuous search about human bodies and returning very hard core porn. We had an accident with one of our kids who searched carefully and incrementally for “naked ladies on the beach” and got back a list of pictures and videos of anal sex gang bangs. This was with a kid younger than 10, and the very week this happened to us, Google announced in a press release that it would start returning results that were more closely aligned with the literal search query, and it was instantly obvious to us what they meant and why they needed that.
So anyway, this is all to ask, maybe cool your jets so you’re not attacking people who might otherwise agree with you? Parental controls have legitimate functions that are not about cutting kids off from the world, and if/when you have kids you will come to understand it and probably try to use some parental controls too. Parental controls are not on & off; the term represents a whole spectrum of goals and options. Even the most absolute and strict use of parental controls, which is rare among any parents I know, is automatically less of a totalitarian option than disallowing any screen time or mobile device use.
So you grew up without AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo accounts, web forums and MySpace? Or for the generation before that, Geocities and Usenet?
The current form of interactive online platforms may be flawed but banning teens from using them is not the solution and any effective method of enforcing such a law is likely to run afoul of the 1st Amendment. Besides obviously the Tinker v. Des Moines precedent about how teens have the right to engage in non-disruptive speech at school which is probably sufficient to overturn this if the Supreme Court recognizes the precedent.
Under COPPA, the "parental consent" requirement for under-13s to sign up for online accounts turned into a de-facto ban because no parent or web site wants to deal with mailed permission forms. The informal "don't ask don't tell" policy works pretty well though because it functions as an IQ test to keep the kids who are too dumb to figure out that you're supposed to lie about your age (as I did to be able to use Geocities when I was 10) off of the internet. A "parental consent" requirement is effectively a ban which is what it was in the original law that DeSantis vetoed. But it sounds like this was a major priority for the Speaker of the state House so it was going to happen in some form possibly over the governor's veto in a worse form if he completely opposed it.
I grew up in a time when social computing was when we geeks of ages 13-15 brought each others Computers to a house and challenged each other to write games on another device.
Back in the days when I had an Acorn Atom and friends would bring their Spectrum, Oric—1, TRS-80, Commodore 64 etc.
> It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children, especially early teens from using social media.
I'm trying to decide whether it's "extremely easy" or "extremely difficult" for parents to stop their children from having a cell phone. One the one hand, all you have to do is not spend money and not buy a phone, easy. And yet, almost every kid has a cell phone, so evidently it is hard for parents to say no.
This law will put social media in the same situation. It will be "extremely easy" for parents to simply not give permission, but, like cell phones, I think most kids will end up having social media accounts anyway.
From personal experience with a teenager - you can't stop it. They get a device from their friend, they are easy to find. They keep them hidden, and you only find them by being a total snoop and seeing new devices popup on your wifi network. Or, they only use them at friends houses on their wifi, etc.
I don't think half the people commenting in this thread have even one single clue about any of this, from real world experience. You can do everything right on your end, but they sit with their friends on their devices when not around your house.
Yes, but I still disagree somewhat. I’m reminded of flip phones in prison—one scene in Orange is the New Black is funny… kept behind tile in the toilet.
Seeing things at friends’ house is expected. We used to look at Playboy magazines for example. But that’s still scarce and better than knee-deep in porn 24/7 at home.
Phones are not that expensive anymore. Kids can buy used phones for $100, or get hand-me-downs from friends. They can use them on wifi, or if they are able to get a prepaid SIM they can use them on cellular also.
I had a conversation with a mom recently where she wanted my input on her media choices because she thought what I was doing was cool and admirable.
It all fell apart when she realized that she'd have to yank the XBox, the PS*, the Switch, etc.
Her kid, and all of the other entitled ones with endless access to everything on the internet, are utterly intolerable when they come over -- until they go outside with my kids for a few hours and come back in with their heads reset!
Why should companies be forced to help parents supervise their own children? It's ironic that DeSantis is all about parental freedom yet wants to turn the companies into a nanny.
This trope that kids are more vulnerable to the influence of social media is dangerous. Media literacy, social media literacy, and internet literacy are critical for all ages, as without it you could be 10 or 40 and be equally influenced by some "influencer" you watch daily videos from. There are plenty of adults who react just as equally as a child would. Age does not guarantee maturity or competency.
It doesn’t work though. Using instagram web bypasses the app limit. If you set a website limit, it only applies to Safari. If you block TikTok, they will find video compilations in Spotify, which shouldn’t have to be blocked. It’s a mess.
ST can work by time as well as app. Recommend revoking app install privileges. No one should have third-party corporate surveillance apps installed anyway.
Sorry, I don’t see how that comment answers mine? In my experience it’s impossible to properly block anything that is also available as a web app (which is most of social media apps).
You can sidestep the block by simply using Chrome or Firefox. Which you'll eventually have to install due to something not working on Safari (like school software). And I would like them to have (some) internet access, so at the very least they get 30 free minutes of Instagram/whatever.
The funny thing is Facebook already has restrictions on serving ads to and collecting data from kids under 13. They have a popup that asks, "Are you over 13?" at which point my then 11 year old daughter clicked yes.
This is feel-good legislation and is not realistically enforceable. People can argue about it all they want, it won't change anything because it's not enforceable.
>It requires them to use a third-party verification system to screen out those who are underage.
One thing I worry about, as a parent in Silicon Valley, is that my kid will somehow procure a phone and hide it from us. My kids don't have enough cash to go buy a new phone without us noticing, but used phones are pretty cheap. Also, a wealthy friend/boyfriend could buy a phone and pay for cellular (MVNOs are quite inexpensive these days), which would defeat router-based monitoring. My kids are currently too young to do any of this, but I foresee it as an issue in the future.
Yeah it is difficult being a parent. Welcome to parenting and adulthood. The solution isn't more big government and a massive police/surveillance state. It's no wonder Stumpy didn't get too far in the primaries, people could spot his deep state tendencies from a mile away.
> It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children, especially early teens from using social media.
What are you talking about? Parents can use on-device controls, you can lock a phone down in many ways. There will be whiz kids who can get around these, but those few whiz kids can also easily get around any controls via legislation with VPNs.
It doesn't require a whiz kid to get around the absolutely terrible implementation of parental controls on iOS. Based on the number of bugs in ScreenTime (TikTok restricted to 15 minutes, but on the same screen shows 2.5 hours of use that day) I'm half convinced the feature is just parental control theater.
These critics have no understanding of the law. We’ve been making exceptions for children for decades at least, probably since the beginning of the republic
I assure you I have an understanding of the law. This is such a a rude and preposterous assertion in bad faith.
This is a law mandating ID verification for all children and adults.
If you require controls for everyone below a certain age, you de facto require controls for everyone of every age who does not prove they are over the minimum age. In other words, even if you can legally discriminate against children, my rights to speak anonymously as an adult are being taken away because if I don't show my ID, I will be treated as a child who has fewer rights.
We can disagree on the merits, but please don't imply that everyone who disagrees with you is ipso facto an idiot.
Indeed. We've been round this when Facebook etc (most recently Glassdoor) instituted "real name" policies.
I'm rather confused about HN's response to this because normally when a media platform voluntarily tries to censor certain kinds of bad behavior there's a massive backlash here, and now there's seemingly overwhelming support for simply removing a whole category of people from being able to speak at all, along with whatever real ID policy gets put in place to make it work.
Well, yeah. I can go without the opinions of any underrepresented group. (A lot of theoretical computer science work in my field was done by pseudonymous children, but it's not like I need that to live.) Doesn't mean they can go without me hearing what they have to say.
I was thinking things like complexity theory. The Minecraft kids are generally more on the applied side of things: software engineering, usability work, that kind of stuff; and afaik they don't really publish in ways that are easy to cite in academia. (I'm only familiar with that sort of thing in passing.)
If you subscribe to cable, you need to prove your financial record, which excludes most people under 18. if you want to buy the special channels, you have to go through an extra set of hoops.
Buying actual real media porn in stores or mail order, require(d) some level of age verification. If it went to a minor, massive fine and or a criminal record.
You need to prove your age to drink(or buy) alcohol and drive a car, and vote. Minors are treated differently in most common law countries.
It's extremely difficult for parents to stop their children, especially early teens from using social media. This law should make it easier and it would put the work on Meta, Snap, Tiktok, Pinterest, Twitter to help parents.
I'm personally glad that I grew up without social media but I worry about the kids growing up now. The amount of random junk young kids are exposed to on social media is worrying.