> We know parents want to feel confident that their teens can use social media to connect with their friends and explore their interests, without having to worry about unsafe or inappropriate experiences.
Or how to ignore the fact that the problem with social media is not harmful content, it's the social media itself. The addiction, the loss of time, and the constant comparison with others. Go design a social media without those.
I'm not really sure that's possible. Cohost tried and well, they died.
The nature of social media just leads to it's very unhealthy problems. By taking away the ability for social media to make viral posts, you take away a lot of the reason people use it. To see popular posts and memes. Then nobody uses it, so nobody sees the ads, so advertisers leave, etc etc.
Personally, I'd be happy if we all went back to interest forums that aren't reddit. But I'm not going to pretend that age is going to come back without deeply overreaching legislation.
My goodness I wish I could go down to just friends and family on Facebook. Maybe 6 months ago they started aggressively showing other groups I don't care about. Right now, it showed:
3 posts from pages or friends I follow
17 from pages I have never cared about or followed
1 from a page I follow
23 from pages I have never followed
It feels more like reddit than what I care about most - my friends and family.
The closest thing I believe we have as a neutral social media platform is Telegram. You can follow people, talk to friends with a performant interface without having a company who's main goal financially is making you see ads.
There is very little parasocial relationship on the platform although this could definetly grow as channels become a medium for influencers.
We should really just raise the age of COPPA from 13. It’s a robust legal framework and we can amend one line in it to regulate this industry without excessive bloat or bickering.
It’s crazy that Americans can be on Instagram 8 years before having a sip of alcohol.
We should raise the COPPA consent age at least 16, but probably 18.
I see it now: "Please submit a photo ID or driving license in order to access this service. All IDs will be logged and tied permanently to your account."
Because the social media companies are? I wonder if there would be a noticeable increase in VPN adoption if there were strictly enforced age restrictions targeting the US only. There certainly has been an uptick in VPN literacy among people I know after PornHub blocked my state...
We have some fairly strict rules on devices - it’s not a lack of will.
Same for the school; they don’t want kids YouTubing in class, but “a laptop for everyone” is the standard now, the teachers do a lot on Teams, etc. Kids are smart and motivated, and they share techniques. They find ways.
The key stakeholders here are the services themselves. If they placed “keep children off the network” anywhere near “keep growing DAU” on their list of priorities, all those highly paid engineers (likewise smart and motivated) would find ways too.
I’m a deeply technical well-motivated person who works with stuff like DNS and VPNs for a job and I find it quite challenging, despite physical access to the devices and the users.
Having to download a VPN and do some evasion would probably be a substantial enough deterrent for… [checks notes]… 14 year olds… that it’d be worth doing.
And realistically, if Meta et al wanted to stop harming entire generations of developing minds, they could obviously use their immense data infrastructure to separate actual Russian from allegedly-Russian children.
So all you really need is corporate buy-in (and toothsome regulations is a perfectly fine way to produce buy-in where markets fail to do so)
Edit: realized you’re talking about the case of Russian services being marketed to American children. That too seems straightforward to produce meaningful obstacles, with sufficient appetite from regulators.
My 10 year old kid is smart enough to bypass the various blocking mechanisms in place at school. A VPN is nothing. All they’d need to do is buy a pre paid credit card at the local Walgreens.
My 10 year old kid is smart enough to bypass the ignition key on a car therefore licensure requirements and car keys are stupid.
In reality, your smart 10 year old isn’t powering the toxic social dynamics of social media. It’s the armies of average intelligence kids seeking engineered dopamine hits.
Network effects work for network dissolution just the same as they work for network growth, which is of course why Meta would never voluntarily do anything that could kick off the popular kids, even if your prodigy could bypass it with no problem.
Note: “All those kids are already addicted and so they’ll be highly motivated too!” is a call to action, not to inaction.
Yeah with a "default yes" approach it'll be easily bypassed. With a "default no" it would work, ie you simply don't get an account at all until you prove your age.
I disagree. Defaults matter. “It’s illegal” is a firm line parents can hold. And, you don’t need to deter 100% - just taking a chunk out will reverse network effects and cause population collapse.
Plus, expect more services to verify IDs in an effort to combat AI spam.
I struggle to think of time on Instagram being well spent. Perhaps less badly spent?
Also I wonder how they'll do age verification and "parent" verification, might end up being very trivial for most teens to work around the restrictions using secondary accounts. Thinking about it, the policy might be more for show than anything else.
In my opinion the addiction cost likely outweighs the benefit in this particular example, especially since there are so many other less addictive ways to get inspiration for art.
A good start. Should also include the ability for the parent to approve any new follows by the teen, not just new followers.
Still not letting my kids have social media accounts (FB, IG, TT, X) until their later teens (messaging groups with friends they already have -- Messenger Kids, despite being a FB app, is pretty good for that).
My younger ones use Messenger Kids and it gives me some confidence that Meta has thought about the problem and have solutions that actually work for all parties.
It remains to be seen whether these controls will have an impact on the second-order / emergent effects of rampant social media. Would prohibited words or time-limitations stop the algorithm from making an embarrassing moment viral?
What happens when these strict restrictions cut someone off from their support systems?
Messenger Kids was a pragmatic effort by Meta to improve safety on the Messenger platform. It works well, and it looks to me like Instagram Teen accounts is a similar effort. You can bemoan the effects of social media or whether teens should be there but the teens are there, so credit to Meta for making a serious investment.
Always lacking in these conversations is a proper definition of "social media". Kids want to talk to their friends, many want to be social, so if we're going to talk about the dangers of social media we need to be specific. E.g. the problems with algorythmic content are entirely different to the issues of bullying and inappropriate direct messaging. Conflating them under a "social media is bad" banner doesn't help us build healthier, safer systems.
> Teens will get notifications telling them to leave the app after 60 minutes each day.
It is insane that someone thinks that an impressionable child/young adult wasting ~ 1/16 of their waking time every day on this drivel is OK! But, I guess profit motive gotta win over sanity.
I could justify "5 minutes", maybe "10 minutes". But I am not the one making money from selling their attention and selling them pointless shit.
In my household the policy is and remains: kids can have instagram/facebook/tiktok/$latestMindRottingShit when they buy their own phone and their own cell plan.
Very surprised that you or anyone thinks 60 minutes each day is "a long time!"
I agree that anything past 15 minutes undeniably unhealthy. But large masses of people are very commonly online for hours upon hours. And all along and alongside there's TV.
I'm speaking toward empathy perhaps. I agree that values shouldn't be relative to some lowest common denominator.
> It is insane that someone thinks…
This is overly critical. Social media is an addiction. We're an a new epidemic and we have to assess how to respond. We should be discussing treatments in a similar vein of drug rehabilitation.
So I think shooting for your kids to only get 15 minutes is the right value, but very tricky and risky in how one gets there.
> We should be discussing treatments in a similar vein of drug rehabilitation.
Have you been through a drug addiction? I have. I wouldn't compare having an account on a social media platform to being addicted to hardcore drugs. It doesn't make you sound very smart.
Depending on the type of content one consumes, those activities are a net positive, or at least neutral. Meanwhile social media is a net negative for nearly everyone except "influencers" who get paid to shill for products and services.
As an adult I agree on principle, but how old are your kids? The social pressure to be present in these things must be tough to deal with as a teenager. Can they still access it on a computer?
I was an uncool outcast in school. Now, the "cool kids" from my high school bag my groceries when I go shopping. Social pressure is what got them to where they are. Not succumbing to it is what got me to where I am. I am OK with my kids hating me for now. They'll thank me when they can afford things they want while the former "cool kids" waste their lives bagging cabbage.
I urge you to take your kids' complaints seriously, your comment reads quite dismissive with some strange generalizations of how "cool kids" and "outcasts" will do later in life.
Pressure can turn some people into diamonds (you, apparently), but it can also crush them psychologically.
> In my household the policy is and remains: kids can have instagram/facebook/tiktok/$latestMindRottingShit when they buy their own phone and their own cell plan.
Or how to ignore the fact that the problem with social media is not harmful content, it's the social media itself. The addiction, the loss of time, and the constant comparison with others. Go design a social media without those.