I don't know why this is hard. At least in the classroom if not during the entire school day.
You get a cabinet with a bunch of cubbie holes, kids put their phone in at the beginning of class, they take it out at the end of class. They can even lock and each kid takes a key with them if theft is a concern. It doesn't seem that complicated. They have these things outside every SCIF. I know they exist.
I'm young enough that smartphones were just hitting the market when I was in high school, but old enough that using your phone in class was still totally verboten. (We all tried to skirt the rules[1], of course, but we knew the rules were unambiguously a thing, and knew there'd be consequences if we got caught.[2]) And for the most part, teachers didn't have to implement any special solutions; we kept them on us at all times, and if a teacher heard/saw your phone, they were liable to take it for the class or for the day.
So the current situation with out-of-control phone use in schools is interesting/puzzling to me, because clearly something's changed since then—but I don't think "better smartphones" are the differentiating factor here. Something's shifted with how schools enforce (or don't enforce) these policies, or with kids' relationship to their phones (and believe me, I was plenty hooked on mine back then too :P), or something else entirely.
It's also puzzling when people argue that smartphones have opened a Pandora's box that makes it impossible to control student behavior—because I know firsthand that that's not true!
[1] I think the threat of punishment also forced us to be relatively discreet about it. If you're texting in class, you have your phone on silent, brightness all the way down, barely sticking out of your bag...
[2] Some teachers admittedly gave more of a shit than others, but I rarely saw students taking advantage of that in a disruptive way—the most blatant thing you'd see is a kid listening to music on headphones during art class or something. I might've been the biggest offender in that regard, because I would occasionally bust out a Wiimote and N64 emulator to play Mario 64 on my phone, but I knew when I could get away with that and when I couldn't.
> I'm young enough that smartphones were just hitting the market when I was in high school, but old enough that using your phone in class was still totally verboten.
When you were in high school, none of your teachers had grown up with smartphones. Today, many have, maybe even a majority depending on the teacher demographics at a particular school.
Not saying this is the entire explanation, or exactly what it might explain, but it seems likely to at least be related somehow.
Punishment is effectively not allowed at many schools because parents suck.
Kids complain to parents.
Parents complain to teacher. Teacher tells parent to pound sand. Parent complains to administration about unfair teacher. Administration takes a “customer is _always_ right” mindset for various reasons, and teacher told to not enforce. Or the rule is changed.
Some parents refuse to allow their child to do anything wrong (by moving the goalposts of “wrong”, assuming their child is always right, etc), some have anxiety if they can’t reach their child instantly via text, some parents refuse to enforce rules they don’t understand or agree with.
Have you ever gotten into that situation, as a kid, where you argued with an adult about how stupid their kid was? That's the summum of the situation you just described. Good times.
Prohibit phones in AP classes, allow phones in the GA or remedial classes. If a parent complains about their kid having to put away their phone, then they can switch classes to be with the rest of the distracted kids. Normally you'd be wary about creating this kind of segregation, but with the loss of effective intelligence from being tethered to a surveillance industry terminal, this arrangement would likely end up expanding access to AP classes.
My own experience with nieces nephews and niblings agrees that it's pretty much this. It's more about the parents' wishes than the children's demands.
Phones are powerful tools. Ideally kids would learn how to use them properly while respecting their sharp edges. Ya know, more work for teachers on budgets that are already under attack and such.
I'm sorry but no. There is no emergency I can think of that either can't wait till lunch (or end of class, whenever the kids are allowed to check), or else calling the school office directly (remember those?), or even just showing up to the school to pickup their kid in person.
By the way, most parents I speak to would love to have their kids off their phones and focusing on school during the day. This whole "parents, emergency" argument seems highly suspicious to me.
> There is no emergency I can think of that either can't wait till lunch
Respectfully, most parents I've met do not agree with you. And I don't think that the random events like school shootings and bomb threats have helped them relax into the same environment we had in the 90's.
I guess we’ll see if that’s representative, there’s a clear backlash, so at least a significant proportion don’t agree, and don’t appreciate the disruption and peer pressure dynamics this creates.
I’m certainly in the camp of personal devices having no place outside of a backpack. We shouldn’t let our anxiety run things.
If there is an emergency, a parent can deal with it the same way they would have 20 years ago: call the school, and they will send someone to grab your kid from the classroom. This was not a particularly rare occurrence when I was in school.
The parent has to talk to the school on the phone to release their kid from class anyway.
> In talking to teachers across the country, the reasons phone policies don't work or are not implemented center on three main issues: safety (parents want their children to be reachable, especially during our era of heightened school violence), liability (phones are expensive, and in some districts, teachers have been held liable when they confiscated a phone the student later claimed was damaged), and lack of clear, consistent policy support (it can be difficult to rally an entire staff around a policy, maintain energy for its consistent enforcement, and make sure the work of its enforcement is upheld equitably).
You don't have to search the students. Or even put the phones in a locker. You just make the rules about them known, and if students are found using a phone during class, they can just be punished with detention/suspension.
I don't understand why this is hard to enforce, or requires special laws. We had rules about not using (feature) phones back when I was in middle school (~2002), and you just kept your phone in your backpack/pocket until the class was over. It worked.
That's weird. I've mostly heard about the opposite at schools, like someone getting reamed for bringing cake and a plastic knife to cut it. But I guess that was probably over a decade ago. Has 'zero tolerance' so thoroughly reversed?
If they say they don’t have a phone, fine. If they later have a phone out in class, you tell them to put it in a cubby. If they have it and don’t take it out in class it’s not a problem.
That’s exactly what they use at some of the schools that tried it (and there’s an arms race where some kids figured out how to hack these devices and unlock them). Locking up thousands and thousands of dollars worth of phones for the day is way too much liability for a school otherwise.
I imagine it is not difficult to make a phone detector. A phone is sending almost constantly. If a phone has to be in flight mode the whole lesson then there is no reason to bring one
It is extremely hard to make a phone detector that's able to detect only phones in a specific room, considering how far the cellular signals can travel, and how pervasive wifi is for everything
If they don’t take it out and use it (or at least don’t get caught using it), what’s the problem? If they’re using a phone in class, take it like any other distraction.
I have four kids in school and while extreme incidents are rare, if I set my kid to school with a phone it would be to contact me in an emergency. I completely agree with no phones out, on silent, etc., but I’m unsure how I feel about schools taking away tools that could be used to get help.
I don't see a problem with taking the phone, as long as it's returned by the end of the day. The school should have your phone number on file and can reach you in an emergency. The situations where your child would specifically need to reach you on their own phone with no other possibilities of getting help (or getting their phone back in a hurry) while at school are so uncommon as to be not really with considering.
The problem is that districts and schools have tried this, but then parents complain and threaten to sue about "stealing the phone" and such. The district doesn't have a leg to stand on.
They need a state law to back them up so that they can tell the parents to take it to their legislature instead of the principal.
> Unfortunately, no law can protect against poor parenting.
Oh, but they most certainly can. See the aforementioned vaccine laws. Or the law that provides free breakfast and lunch to every California student regardless of income. Of the law that requires dental coverage for anyone in the state under 18 (and provides it to those who can't afford it).
No matter how bad your parent is about feeding you, at least you know you'll get breakfast and lunch every school day, and you can get your teeth checked.
There are many laws that protect against poor parenting.
California already implemented that separately. Los Angeles Unified district opened the fall term enforcing the prohibition; the statewide mandate begins 2025.
i’m so glad to be finished with high school with all this happening. as a trans girl who was closeted in high school, being able to use my phone in between classes to text my accepting friends was the only way i survived. it sucks seeing that legislation doesn’t seem to consider that at all really.
If you listen to legislators pushing social media bans, they are taking cases like this into intense consideration in order to maximize the damage it would have on kids like you.
From [1]:
> A co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill intended to protect children from the dangers of social media and other online content appeared to suggest in March that the measure could be used to steer kids away from seeing transgender content online.
You can't enforce silly laws. Who would enforce this ban? Teachers? That would be a school regulation, not a state law. Or do you want police walking around school arresting kids with phones? Do you enforce all of your guidance for your kids using legislation? A real solution to the distractions and harm that phones cause when used at school is harder, of course.
My child goes to a charter school in Arizona. Their policy is that phones are stored in lockers. If a kid is caught with their phone in the building then the phone is confiscated and brought to the office. The parents are notified and the phone is only given back to the parent. I don’t understand why something similar couldn’t be implemented in public schools thus requiring no state law.
as a parent with kids in school I am 100% in favor of this. In my son's middle school schools are not allowed in class but that puts the burden of enforcement on the teachers instead of just making it a blanket rule that you can't have it at school period
I use to be pro-phone ban in schools but with all the creepy crap going on in public school systems, I think kids should be able to record their teachers/other students/staff.
Hungary just banned phones (and also all devices capable of connecting to the internet, and/or capable of recording audio and video) from school.
I'm a student in an IT technical school. The only thing this affected is now instead of my classmates playing on their phones during class, they're now loudly playing card games - and now people who do want to learn can't because the teacher has to constantly stop and yell at the people playing cards.
I think students should be able to do whatever they want during breaks - they can do actually useful things with their devices, other than scrolling social media or playing games.
Also, this new ban completely eliminated kahoot and similar, since phones are collected at the start of the day and giving them out for a class involves incredible amounts of paperwork. (So much for modern teaching/learning methods)
This gets messy because you already have problems with (mostly substitute) teachers ripping out implants (ex: insulin pump), cutting wires/tubes, or preventing kids from using their phone to monitor blood sugar, etc because they try to be "tough" on the no phones rule.
Saying this is similar to saying "I won't fly 500 miles, flying is dangerous, I'd rather drive!"
The truth of the matter is that school shootings are still much rarer than the daily use of phones in school. Talk to a current middle/high school teacher. They will tell you that in most classes there are at least some kids on their phone the entire time, and there is nothing they can do about it. And those kids distract the ones around them.
Kids get "emergency" texts from home midday, and it turns out to be stuff like "I put your socks away for you".
They can't take the phone away anymore because if they do, a parent comes in making the same argument you did, or they accuse the school of theft.
A statewide ban of phones during class time would at least give the local administration and district some air cover in these cases to confiscate phones that are being used during class.
With (I assume) cell phone use prevalent in every single classroom in the nation that hasn't banned them, and school shootings a minuscule probability, "much rarer" is doing a lot of work here hah.
This is meant to be darkly humorous I'm sure, but this question is a serious one. I think the market is ripe for an application that could be a part of the educational suite installed on the in-class tablets, which could be enabled only during lockdown.
No need to overdesign the architecture at this stage, but the requirements are pretty simple. Each user could be configured via school it adminstrator to allow video chat connections only to parent/gaurdian devices with the app installed.
As a parent, school shootings are the real serious issue and one the kids actually care about as well.
Phones should be banned like Pokemon cards were banned. Bringing them to school is fine, using after class and even lunch is fine, but having them out in class gets them taken away and detention for repeat offenses.
the question may be serious but the "solution" (kids have a phone so they can call their parents before they get shot) is not
there are other ways to prevent school shootings, but because we have so many people in this country who like to play with guns we can't get it together enough to take the measures needed that would greatly reduce and perhaps totally eliminate school shootings (which are an almost uniquely American experience, and as a parent with kids in school, it's frankly terrifying and I couldn't give 2 f's about what the founding fathers wrote 250 years ago when the context and reasons for the 2A, which made sense at the time, have nothing to do with our modern era. It's like saying "well our illustrious all all-knowing founding fathers didn't find it necessary to ban slavery in the Constitution, and in fact, provided for it (3/5s etc.), so we should bow to their infinite wisdom and continue to allow it today."
I really wish legislation like this was structured as an experiment, so we could robustly determine if it worked. Otherwise someone will come along in ten years and rip it out, saying there’s no evidence it improved things.
The sad thing is that politicians who get these laws passed don't want to collect data about whether the laws were successful.
If they collect data and it turns out the laws aren't helpful or the laws are actually harmful, then the politician's career and reputation may be trashed. But if they pretend like the law can't possibly be bad and never check on that, then they're protected.
The US is structured like an experiment; different states have different policies, so in ten years we can compare the mental health of teens in California with teens in other states without this bill and see if it made any difference.
Laboratories of democracy, I get it… but simply allowing law to vary by state is just the enabler. There’s a lot of structure you could add to make it an actual experiment.
Instagram and TikTok saw this coming. Both have recently dropped features to meet the spirit of this law.
TikTok now has "feed mirroring" for adults to use with their teens, so they can see what the algorithm is pushing at them. And Instagram now has a teen mode that lets parents choose which topics show up in their feed and disables notifications at night.
If I am reading the legislation [0] correctly, teenagers now have to tell Spotify what song to play one after another, every single time one track ends. Unless someone has previously made a playlist (I think) - in which case you can only listen to playlists that you or (someone else has made) if you are a teenager.
I'm surprised that the music industry let this happen to them.
For this interested in topic, you might enjoy reading The Anxious Generation, which has been on the NYT nonfiction bestseller list for a while. It goes into the data on how teen mental illness rates greatly increased when smartphones (apps + the front-facing camera) and social media algorithms were developed. The harmful effects are obvious to anyone who ever interacts with kids. The book also proposes several basic changes like delaying when kids are given smartphones and disallowing phones in schools, as well as advocating for play-based schools.
Debunked isn’t the correct term here. That would imply that the data is false or it’s misinformation. Instead the article you linked states:
On the other hand, data on this issue is mixed, and some studies contradict one another.
So a better way to talk about it is that the data doesn’t yet make a cut or dry case one way or another.
Another quote from the article you linked
Haidt argues that waiting for stronger evidence could be even more dangerous. He writes: “If you listen to the alarm ringers and we turn out to be wrong, the costs are minimal and reversible. But if you listen to the skeptics and they turn out to be wrong, the costs are much larger and harder to reverse.” … as a mother, as someone who writes about the harms of tech and tech companies, I see his point.
So even if we don’t take the data to be 100% convincing, it’s by no means “debunked” and something that we should just completely ignore.
> prohibits online platforms from knowingly providing an addictive feed to a minor without parental consent
totally onboard with the concept; but what is the burden of proof that a feed is "addictive"? If it falls on the state, then this probably won't have much effect (other than maybe to scare tech companies to be a bit more careful, which is maybe the best we can hope for)
It’s addictive if the state says it is, according to the state’s technical definition of “addictive” (personalized content, etc. - the bill has a detailed definition).
I'm sad about how smartphones have turned out. The effects are entirely dependent on how they are used. If used as a portable information retrieval device, camera, and communications tool, they make us smarter than ever before. But it seems most people have instead chosen to focus on attention-stealing data collection apps that encourage neuroticism, narcissism, and anxiety.
We had envisioned something like PADDs on Star Trek or the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but what we got was an jingly electronic mirror that bullies you. I don't know how we are so okay with this. Keeping phones out of schools is not the cure. Keeping evil and harmful apps off the phones is a more precise solution.
> But it seems most people have instead chosen to focus on attention-stealing data collection apps that encourage neuroticism, narcissism, and anxiety.
Most didn't actively make that choice. They were coerced, peer pressured, or otherwise tricked into making it.
> We had envisioned something like PADDs on Star Trek or the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but what we got was an jingly electronic mirror that bullies you.
We're at the point where we have a pretty high percentage of about 3-4 generations of people who are probably clinically addicted to phones/social media. We're slowly starting to come to this realization as a society but escaping addiction is extremely difficult. Especially a new one, that has no name yet, that we don't understand well, that has enveloped a large percentage of us. It's definitely an uphill battle.
This. This and the recent trend to hold parents of juvenile mass shooters to account if they enabled the kid gives me hope that there our still functioning parts of our collective brains not completely rotted by the culture wars and twitter/x/facebook
Agree but I want to see this enforced not just on kids that walk into a school and opens fire. I want it enforced in large urban areas. Any minor that opens fire, their parents need to be arrested. The law is currently only being applied to kids that get their hands on so called assault rifles. It needs to be applied to handguns in urban areas that comprise the majority of shootings by minors.
I only support this if the minor is determined to have obtained the weapon from a parent that was negligent in preventing access to that weapon. E.g. when a parent fails to lock the weapons in a safe or purchases weapons for the child. I do not support this in instances where the minor unknowingly gets access to weapons behind the parent's back (illegally through telegram for example or through their friends).
As someone with a troubled teen and a witness to numerous other parents dealing with troubled teens, it's virtually impossible to prevent them from doing whatever they want these days unless you literally lock them up 24/7. Even then they will weaponize reporting you to CPS with lies about abuse. Many of these kids are growing up in perfectly decent homes and taught well by their parents, but they get influenced by their peers to cause trouble.
If your kid is that problematic and wants to get CPS involved then throw them to CPS and let them ruin their lives. You clearly failed earlier on and can’t course correct any further.
You should’ve been more involved earlier on if your kid is getting involved in gang violence, getting weapons, and is going to be out there shooting people. You failed big time.
A lot of these kids don’t grow up in good homes - the parents are negligent and incompetent. They play dumb just like you are doing.
Yes, anytime a parent is directly responsible or deliberately negligent and it leads to deaths, whether school or urban area. I mentioned mass shooting because that is the most visible instance where it has been applied so far. Let's not make it about politics (sigh, maybe I'm hoping for too much)
Not to drag this out in the mud, but that 5% is filled with some really nasty legislation and policies.
And yes, I'm mostly referring to Republican lead legislation that encourages or enforces conversion therapy, minority disenfranchisement (Haitians most recently, but also black, mMuslum, and Palestinian groups), and anti-LGBTQIA+ (more specifically anti-trans) actions.
All I see is left and right agreeing that social media has become too dangerous and they need to create a moral panic and smokescreen as a pretext to regulate it. Same shit as the FUD around TikTok and "Chinese mind control."
Can social media be addictive? Yes. Should we trust the government when it claims it wants to "protect the children?" Absolutely not.
This will end up being about enabling surveillance, harassment of minorities and policing political wrongthink, like every other such initiative. And it's kind of sad that Hacker News, which is usually critical of the motives of government almost to a fault, is willing to let its hatred of social media excuse naked and authoritarian power grabs like this.
Like y'all rise up if Apple tries to track CP on people's phones but if someone declared all social media illegal tomorrow most people here would have a party.
You can trust that the government wants to protect the children. The question is what does "protect" really mean.
Western governments do a pretty good job of protecting kids from labour exploitation, for example.
But that's because it's relatively easy to enforce. Protecting them from other harms is more difficult and involves tradeoffs with personal or parental freedoms.
I really don't think these initiatives are intentional power grabs... although you're correct that opportunist entitites will exploit these regulations to empower themselves.
The left and the right both agree 100% on protecting Israel, and social media is the biggest threat to Israel's existence given how low support for Israel has plummeted in Americans aged 18-25 thanks to unfiltered access to imagery from the war in Gaza.
The American military industrial complex couldn't care less about optics. The Iraq War led to some of the biggest protests in history and it didn't matter, and the current social media landscape doesn't actually matter wrt policy in Israel.
Also, it shouldn't be the role of social media to ensure the existence of Israel, even if one assumes that opposition to their actions in Gaza is de facto opposition to their existence as a state, which I wouldn't.
Also what you're describing immediate, unfiltered journalism which provides one of the strongest arguments against having social media be regulated by governments. Seeing the cruelty and violence of government unfiltered by media gatekeepers and in realtime is a good thing. Americans should have the opportunity to question their government's unwavering support for Israel and the consequences of their own imperialism.
Of course social media can also be just as much a platform for propaganda and misinformation as traditional media, but it's also easier to undermine than traditional media. We need a way for the masses to be able to publish to the masses, and social media is currently the best option to allow that, even with its downsides.
It's crazy how far from scientific consensus these extremist states on both "sides" of the USA have strayed in their performative legislation. There is no such thing as social media addiction no matter how many times celebrities, politicians, and scammer detox camp repeat it. It's not that the DSM V or ICD 10 haven't addressed the issues. They repeatedly have and each time come away saying there's no evidence to support using the word addiction to describe computer or other rich multimedia system usage. If this were 1800s it'd be a bill banning newspaper addiction. 1900s banning electrical addiction. 1920s, radio addiction, 1950s TV addiction. Whatever is the big new thing involving lots of money (and so attention from these kinds of people).
But it's not just funny sad: it also has real effects on real people and invokes the use of force in a situation where there is no coercion or damage being done.
> Researchers delved into whether the platform’s introduction across college campuses in the mid 2000s increased symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. The answer was a clear yes, says MIT economist Alexey Makarin, a coauthor of the study, which appeared in the November 2022 American Economic Review. “There is still a lot to be explored,” Makarin says, but “[to say] there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, to that I definitely object.”
Policymakers are doing their jobs based on evidence. Ignore the vocal minority and push on. Parent better? Hah, in this fucking macro? [1] [2] Will power? Not a thing, that's why GLP-1 agonists are so effective against addiction [3]. Social media operating under existing legal frameworks? We can change the framework to better serve the human (see: here).
Evidence shows many die each year due to lack of medical care; we can find all kinds of cases where policymakers engage in pageantry and little else
Policy makers do the job the public says and the public is fine not arguing for new systems, just improving their own lot through minor reforms. See teacher strikes; soon as they get theirs, they quit bothering with the labor organization…more pageantry, little else
If healthcare was the tent pole of our economy; still needs STEM Ed, still needs technology, still needs the physical logistics we have; doesn’t need stupid jobs people could do on down time
We need to stop with the minor reformism of trickle down which was only ever an obfuscated sarcastic joke about poor people
Yes. But aside from the occasional moral panic that went a little overboard, and while the causation is a little fuzzy, they were basically right. Sitting in front of the TV all day is unhealthy both mentally and physically.
The first of those is a reaction to another piece:
> Psychologist Candice Odgers recently stated the skeptics' case in an essay in Nature titled The Great Rewiring: Is Social Media Really Behind an Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness?
The second and third are by the same person, who keeps mentioning his new book for some reason.
The fourth includes a counterpoint:
> “Those who feel worse may turn to social media for solace or community,” Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, said of the research. “It’s not a vacuum, it works both ways."
The fifth is an opinion piece by a computer scientist about careers.
Oh, you added some more while I was writing this. Stop it?
So for the two extra ones: the APA one opens with "Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people." The other one is by the same guy as the NYT opinion piece, who incidentally also has a new book out on the subject.
The comment I replied to said there is no proof of social media addiction. That is false. One does not need to convince folks on HN, only policymakers. California and Florida (both enacting such regulation) are the first and third most populated states in the US, respectively, with a total population of ~61.5M people. Federal legislation is pending in Congress.
What makes you right on the topic? A belief system based on a personal mental model? Genuine question. Provide evidence it is a net positive compared to the robust evidence of harm it causes, or evidence that revoking or regulating access for children is going to cause harm vs being neutral; children lived lives before social media, for example.
Continued unregulated access to social media is likely to cause harm to children and teens, based on available evidence. Not having access? What harm does that cause?
What "robust evidence of harm it causes"? Which of your many links is the robust one? And why is this on me? Yes, I think it's a moral panic, there are many previous examples of x entertaining thing supposedly corrupting young minds (or female minds, going further back). But you have to show how it's harmful. What is meant by "addictive" in the "addictive online feeds" that this prohibits? Extra points if you manage not to say "dopamine".
I don't believe any evidence would be sufficient to meet your requirements to make policy actions legitimate unfortunately. The harm is diffuse, so while action to counteract it (regulatory and policy) will be imperfect, it is still necessary based on the evidence collected so far (imho). The cost to regulate is low, and the harm by regulating is also low. Good enough.
> “Addictive feed” means an internet website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users are, either concurrently or sequentially, recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information provided by the user, or otherwise associated with the user or the user’s device, unless any of the following conditions are met, alone or in combination with one another: (1) The information is not persistently associated with the user or user’s device, and does not concern the user’s previous interactions with media generated or shared by others. [And some other more trivial exceptions.]
So basically it's banning suggestion algorithms accompanied by tracking. And since I personally hate suggestion algorithms accompanied by tracking, it's hard to feel very upset by a law against it ... except that makes me feel sleazy and unprincipled if I base this only on my own preferences. The general idea is to prevent the unwitting sinking into echo-chambers where the world is made to look a particular way by a feedback effect (an automated one, in fact). That might be a good law.
I do, as I think you asked somebody else, [edit: as somebody
else asked somebody else] object to the inaccurate use of the word "addiction".
>many previous examples of x entertaining thing supposedly corrupting young minds
My reply to that is that in fact newspapers, paperback romance and adventure novels, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock music, television, video games and pornography probably have been broadly harmful (particularly to children and teenagers) but we didn't have a detailed neuroscientific description of the mechanism of harm when they were introduced, so the people pointing out the harms were ignored or shouted down, and now that those things are no longer in the news, people believe they know all they need to know about them, with the result that most believe that the verdict of history is that those thing are benign.
And it is tricky because all of those things plus social media and Youtube can be and often are used in such a way that they do not cause harm. And they all have positive effects as well as harmful effects.
Because it's a scattergun approach, and a dirty trick. The large volume of references gives the impression of being overwhelmingly supported by evidence, but they're really low quality, the points are contentious, and many are the same author repeated.
Also, to argue back, we have to actually read the fucking things.
tldr for others: no evidence up to 2019, suddenly spike of depression/anxiety after 2019. I wonder why? So do they. I can think of many things that changed at the end of 2019 but social media wasn't one of them.
What a silly statement. There is 100% such a thing as social media addiction and it is real.
Apps consume mass amounts of data in attempts to keep you using their app for as long as possible and build a uniquely tailored experience just for you to keep you coming back.
This won't convince you, but heuristics obviously indicate people are using social media too much [1] and that it's bad [2]. Nobody used newspapers like this. People didn't watch TV at school 2 hours a day in the 90s. You're going to nitpick that the study doesn't say people use social media for 2 hours a day at school but that's a conservative estimate based on my experience in high school and college. That and like... talk to young people.
Do you just not like the word "addiction" being used? Or you really don't think there are negative side effects from social media and how companies run it and encourage use?
I object mainly to the misuse of the word addiction. If they were not able to misuse this word then the causation of the proposed harms would shift. Imagine just for a moment that the concept of addiction does not apply here. How would the blame for the perceived harms (self reports of being sad, anxious, etc) shift? Addiction implies control and loss of volition. Removing addiction from this context and there is no control by the third parties and no loss of volition for the minors.
The mitigations for the actual situation would be much different than the performative situation. Anxiety/depression in minors has indeed gone up since 2019. But the causes are not screens. Rising housing, food, etc prices relative to incomes, the whole worldwide pandemic, knowledge of environmental damage, and increasing totalitarianism and conflicts around the world account for most of that.
In terms of what government can do, they can address the core issue of fractional reserve banking without periodic debt forgiveness meaning there is always more debt than money supply leading to worse lives and conflict for everyone including young people. To truly make peoples lives better we should have government act to create a sustainable system not pretend mandating what's on screens will fix things.
The TL;DR: for "addictive feeds" is basically blocking a feed that is built based on their previous interactions with posts (whether associated via the device or the account). Doesn't impact searches or followed feeds.
So, you can still use TikTok or Facebook or Instagram, just without the hyper-personalized discovery/FYP/etc feeds.
I'm cautiously optimistic, since this kind of block doesn't really create a moat around existing businesses. And frankly, I like that kind of non-personalized feed sometimes.
EDIT: Downvoters, that's from the text of the bill itself. I recommend reading it if you don't trust (or don't like) this TL;DR.
I wish they'd go a step further and offer this for adults too. Facebook has become the lowest common denominator communication platform (at least in my family/friend circles). It would be great to have a site to log in and periodically scroll through family photos, hear about milestones, etc. without influencers and video shorts. I'd even pay $ to have that feed without ads.
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