One lawmaker proposed a law that would make it illegal to allow your children to see “drag” so none of this has to deal with parents doing their jobs and everything to deal with giving Nazis control over what other people are allowed to see
Not having it be regulated makes it a lot harder for parents to do their job, because the kids with responsible parents are getting peer-pressured by the kids with irresponsible parents.
Or put another way: you’re not making parents do their jobs; you’re making their jobs impossible by forcing them to choose between ruining their kid’s mental health by letting her be exposed to social media, or ruin her mental health by forcing her to be ostracised for not using social media.
The only way to have a successful outcome is to force everyone else’s kids not to use it, not just your own, and no amount of rugged individualist good parenting can accomplish that by itself!
That said, I am extremely sympathetic to the arguments against age verification laws too, which is why my preferred solution would be to fucking outlaw and destroy corporate social media entirely, for kids and adults alike.
You are exactly right. We’re all in this ugly, trapped situation, together, like it or not.
As a parent, do you remove the obviously ruinous toxins from the kiddo’s environment, entirely? Seems like the only sensible choice.
But then again…for the kid, few things could feel worse. An entire childhood spent alienated from their peers? Permanently out of the loop, to where that becomes the personality trait noticed and remembered by others?
What a horrible bargain, I completely hate it.
“Well, a little hideous poison for you, routinely, I guess. I wouldn’t want you to end up weird, after all…”
Oh god, they’ll get some access? Like, I can’t completely control my children and they are individuals who have the right to start making choices? Jesus Christ, I’m not going to be able to exert my will over them indefinitely?
If your child is old enough to leave the house and sneak around on you they were going to do that.
Did you sneak around and do things you were told not to? Probably.
While doing so, did you have the context that you shouldn’t do it? Maybe. Sometimes the learning happens when you get caught, get hurt or have other consequences.
Sure, the answer is education. Tell them that they shouldn’t do <thing> and why. Hopefully, the guilt/shame/pain of doing the thing they know is incorrect will be enough of a deterrent, but adults are fallible and kids cannot be expected to be better at it than adults who also have vices they know intellectually are bad. I don’t want to “completely control” my children, but I do want to prevent harm. Same way we put guard rails at the edge of a cliff.
Just to be clear:
Oh god, they’ll get some access? Like, I can’t completely control my children and they are individuals who have the right to start making choices? Jesus Christ, I’m not going to be able to exert my will over them indefinitely?
Are you recommending that we just sit back and let kids random-walk through tiktok? At what age should algorithm-dopamine-drug-app be allowed? There are studies out there showing that this stuff is harmful to ADULTS and this thread is about known impacts on kids. We prevent kids from smoking or drinking. Why do you think preventing access to social media like this is a step too far?
There’s also a question of age. I’m talking as a parent of a pre-teen. I need these controls where I can get them because the internet is a dopamine machine. It’s a real challenge to limit access to it and my kid isn’t prepared to stop watching tiktok the same way they aren’t prepared to stop eating candy. I can physically limit the candy in the house, but guess where I find rogue candy wrappers? Maybe by the time they are 15, I’ll have taken the training-wheels off, in which case we probably agree.
Finally, there’s an additional context for parents that is cultural context: My kid has never watched squidgames, five nights at freddy’s or stranger things. Many, maybe even most, of his peers have, and that leaves him out of those conversations. There are threads up in this post that haunt me: Am I preventing my child from being able to socialize because I won’t let them play/watch <content> that I think is unacceptable? I don’t want roblox, fortnight, or predatorily-monitized games in my kid’s hands until they are ready.
I recently relented on fortnight. My kid spent about $20 of their money on skins and a battle pass. I asked them recently if it was worth it. They said, “no”. I also recently let them create a roblox account. It took about 2 hours for them to determine the whole game was dumb. I think I’m a good parent.
It’s just lazy parents, right? Like they’re not even trying, huh?
Couldn’t really have anything to do with - I dunno, NO parents except the born-rich, being able to parent properly, on account of having to make the dollars keep adding up.
Probably also NOT the wildly, disgustingly sophisticated Big Fucking Tech doing everything they can to pull our children into their hilariously successful maze of dissatisfaction.
If only the parents would just use the obviously available parental controls! Duh.
Clearly you’ve never been to a PTO/A meeting or town hall on education, or entire motorcades of parents spending days traveling with their kids for sports 🤣
Why do so many CLEARLY non parents react so strongly to a topic they have little to no experience in 🤣
Nobody has time 🤣, thank you so much for this chuckle.
Quite the charmed life you apparently lead. If you manage to peer outside your own economic bubble someday you’ll see what I mean. Doesn’t sound like you’ll be doing that though.
best thing on that front is same fix for most of the working classes problems…
more pay
shift to 6hr/4d work week
actually invest in education
most people are good, amd would probably love to spend more time with their family, but in the US especially they’re overworked and underpaid, one accident away destitution
Durable societies are unfortunately bound to have such inconveniences for some in exchange for the betterment of many.
Tech companies have released the equivalent of digital opium so they and the government are accountable.
When we look back at the opioid epidemic of the 90s we don’t blame the addicts or their families (well I suppose we did at one point, without the benefit of hindsight or a bigger picture view), we blame the Sacklers, pharmaceutical companies, doctors that took kickbacks etc.
I’d hate for us to make the same mistake just because the drug is delivered in a way we don’t completely understand yet.
It’s also not as simple as asking parents to simply be better at parenting, whatever that may mean. The drug is already out on the street, widely available, and ridiculously addictive. Keeping your child from it is not only depriving them of a dopamine hit that their brains are not developed enough to simply ignore (even most adults are addicted) and it is in many cases relegating them to social ostracization.
This is far beyond what one parent or group of parents can fix. It requires a societal level change which generally needs to come from the government, whether we like it or not.
I’d be happy to hear out possible solutions and, as a parent, share what is viable and what isn’t. It would be nice to hear from other parents also.
Some important context on this user before anyone else gets dragged into a discussion: check their post history, multiple to a “Youth Liberation” community.
No shade meant by calling it out, but I think that makes it much more clear how strong your opinions are on this. There’s nothing to be gained in trying to talk to you about this when your opinions are set so strongly. You aren’t going to see the dangers that the rest of us see because your focus is on allowing freedom from oppresive parental figures.
That’s the point, it doesn’t. Much like the argument about targeting marginalized people when you’re talking about children.
Edit: Yes, there are plenty of children and teens without access to information and the support structures they should have IRL. I was one of them and it’s fucking awful. The internet can help with that by offering exposure to different ideologies, evidence that you aren’t alone in what you’re feeling or going through.
But I don’t look back on everything I did and encountered online in mid 00s - early 10s era internet and go “that was overwhelmingly a great thing that I should have had the sort of unrestricted access to that I did”. And the internet has been even more corporatized and “skinner-boxed” since.
And with the benefit of hindsight, I can see a bunch of other ways that I could have gotten the good I got from the internet without all the bad, and through things in real life that I had dismissed in my youth.
we owe today’s teens a better internet experience. we should focus on building something that would have been ideal for us to have had when we were their age
Teens and children, and the pushback you’re seeing is because a lot of people, even terminally online people, believe that limiting or preventing children (and teens) from accessing social media as they currently exist is part of making that happen.
You have to slow the bleeding first. You can’t just ignore the broken leg and start physical therapy.
Teens vary wildly in maturity and are likely to be unfortunately caught up in rules for children. There’s no easy cutoff age before 18 for when one can be trusted to be online without guard rails. I can speak from experience that teens will find a way whether its legal or not, so I’m not really super concerned about the ones who need access. They’ll find a way.
And for every person like you that says they are still alive because of unrestricted internet, there’s another one who is dead because of it. 4chan, tumblr, reddit even (remember when they “totally figured out the boston bomber”?), and more direct cyberbullying all claim lives. There were 3 suicides in my highschool growing up, two determined to be cyberbullying caused and the third just rumored. I almost lost one of my younger cousins to cyberbullying as well.
This isn’t stopping the bleeding, the people who caused the bleeding in the first place of the ones doing this. I don’t trust a single person in the Epstein files to have good intentions towards children or teenagers.
It’s not as bad as drugs. Don’t give your kids phones. Be a parent. Don’t need to upload all our data and Id to palantir databases for tracking under the same old “protect the children” bullshit
This isn’t necessary. For instance, simply require any device to which children have access to get software that prevents access to 90% of the internet. Problem solved.
It isn’t (just) a technical problem for parents. Having the underage social media ban means that there isn’t the peer pressure for kids to use - well there is, but its much lower
well, then we need to go back before that point. There is no reason why laws that apply to my paper correspondance doesn’t apply to my digital correspondence.
If you disagree, please send your personal email credentials and medical records.
We need to END this shit, instead of ThInK Of tHe cHiLdReN laws that violate our privacy and human rights further, like the “Online Safety Act 2023” whose job it is to link your name, face and ID to the porn you browse.
Nothing is preventing the internet from being exactly the way it was in the 90s. You’re on such a website right now. I, for one, don’t believe the internet is so far gone because 4 or 5 big, popular sites are utterly shit.
Or parents can do their job. We have to suffer with age verification bullshit laws that’s just there to have us all in a database.
One lawmaker proposed a law that would make it illegal to allow your children to see “drag” so none of this has to deal with parents doing their jobs and everything to deal with giving Nazis control over what other people are allowed to see
Not having it be regulated makes it a lot harder for parents to do their job, because the kids with responsible parents are getting peer-pressured by the kids with irresponsible parents.
Or put another way: you’re not making parents do their jobs; you’re making their jobs impossible by forcing them to choose between ruining their kid’s mental health by letting her be exposed to social media, or ruin her mental health by forcing her to be ostracised for not using social media.
The only way to have a successful outcome is to force everyone else’s kids not to use it, not just your own, and no amount of rugged individualist good parenting can accomplish that by itself!
That said, I am extremely sympathetic to the arguments against age verification laws too, which is why my preferred solution would be to fucking outlaw and destroy corporate social media entirely, for kids and adults alike.
You are exactly right. We’re all in this ugly, trapped situation, together, like it or not.
As a parent, do you remove the obviously ruinous toxins from the kiddo’s environment, entirely? Seems like the only sensible choice.
But then again…for the kid, few things could feel worse. An entire childhood spent alienated from their peers? Permanently out of the loop, to where that becomes the personality trait noticed and remembered by others?
What a horrible bargain, I completely hate it.
“Well, a little hideous poison for you, routinely, I guess. I wouldn’t want you to end up weird, after all…”
Agreed. Just the peer pressure for having a smartphone at all is immense. Some kids have one below the age of 10. That is absolutely insane to me.
Or like, use the ample parental controls to limit their time to a reasonable amount 🤷♂️.
the parent can only do that on devices they own. they can’t do that on classmates devices
Oh god, they’ll get some access? Like, I can’t completely control my children and they are individuals who have the right to start making choices? Jesus Christ, I’m not going to be able to exert my will over them indefinitely?
If your child is old enough to leave the house and sneak around on you they were going to do that.
Exerting will over them infinitely is literally the objective here
Did you sneak around and do things you were told not to? Probably.
While doing so, did you have the context that you shouldn’t do it? Maybe. Sometimes the learning happens when you get caught, get hurt or have other consequences.
Sure, the answer is education. Tell them that they shouldn’t do <thing> and why. Hopefully, the guilt/shame/pain of doing the thing they know is incorrect will be enough of a deterrent, but adults are fallible and kids cannot be expected to be better at it than adults who also have vices they know intellectually are bad. I don’t want to “completely control” my children, but I do want to prevent harm. Same way we put guard rails at the edge of a cliff.
Just to be clear:
Are you recommending that we just sit back and let kids random-walk through tiktok? At what age should algorithm-dopamine-drug-app be allowed? There are studies out there showing that this stuff is harmful to ADULTS and this thread is about known impacts on kids. We prevent kids from smoking or drinking. Why do you think preventing access to social media like this is a step too far?
There’s also a question of age. I’m talking as a parent of a pre-teen. I need these controls where I can get them because the internet is a dopamine machine. It’s a real challenge to limit access to it and my kid isn’t prepared to stop watching tiktok the same way they aren’t prepared to stop eating candy. I can physically limit the candy in the house, but guess where I find rogue candy wrappers? Maybe by the time they are 15, I’ll have taken the training-wheels off, in which case we probably agree.
Finally, there’s an additional context for parents that is cultural context: My kid has never watched squidgames, five nights at freddy’s or stranger things. Many, maybe even most, of his peers have, and that leaves him out of those conversations. There are threads up in this post that haunt me: Am I preventing my child from being able to socialize because I won’t let them play/watch <content> that I think is unacceptable? I don’t want roblox, fortnight, or predatorily-monitized games in my kid’s hands until they are ready.
I recently relented on fortnight. My kid spent about $20 of their money on skins and a battle pass. I asked them recently if it was worth it. They said, “no”. I also recently let them create a roblox account. It took about 2 hours for them to determine the whole game was dumb. I think I’m a good parent.
Yeah man, you’re on top of it.
It’s just lazy parents, right? Like they’re not even trying, huh?
Couldn’t really have anything to do with - I dunno, NO parents except the born-rich, being able to parent properly, on account of having to make the dollars keep adding up.
Probably also NOT the wildly, disgustingly sophisticated Big Fucking Tech doing everything they can to pull our children into their hilariously successful maze of dissatisfaction.
If only the parents would just use the obviously available parental controls! Duh.
Fuck you, in every way, for real.
Nobody can parent 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Clearly you’ve never been to a PTO/A meeting or town hall on education, or entire motorcades of parents spending days traveling with their kids for sports 🤣
Why do so many CLEARLY non parents react so strongly to a topic they have little to no experience in 🤣
Nobody has time 🤣, thank you so much for this chuckle.
Quite the charmed life you apparently lead. If you manage to peer outside your own economic bubble someday you’ll see what I mean. Doesn’t sound like you’ll be doing that though.
Oh won’t someone think of the parents though?! How can they be expected to parent their own children, oh the humanity
It’s not their childrens they belong to the State / Corporations / System
best thing on that front is same fix for most of the working classes problems…
Most parents won’t. People are people. Those that would want to have to ballance the risk of excluding their children from the collective.
Durable societies are unfortunately bound to have such inconveniences for some in exchange for the betterment of many.
Tech companies have released the equivalent of digital opium so they and the government are accountable.
When we look back at the opioid epidemic of the 90s we don’t blame the addicts or their families (well I suppose we did at one point, without the benefit of hindsight or a bigger picture view), we blame the Sacklers, pharmaceutical companies, doctors that took kickbacks etc.
I’d hate for us to make the same mistake just because the drug is delivered in a way we don’t completely understand yet.
It’s also not as simple as asking parents to simply be better at parenting, whatever that may mean. The drug is already out on the street, widely available, and ridiculously addictive. Keeping your child from it is not only depriving them of a dopamine hit that their brains are not developed enough to simply ignore (even most adults are addicted) and it is in many cases relegating them to social ostracization.
This is far beyond what one parent or group of parents can fix. It requires a societal level change which generally needs to come from the government, whether we like it or not.
I’d be happy to hear out possible solutions and, as a parent, share what is viable and what isn’t. It would be nice to hear from other parents also.
This rhetoric is very dangerous. It’s fueling censorship specifically targeting marginalized people
Some important context on this user before anyone else gets dragged into a discussion: check their post history, multiple to a “Youth Liberation” community.
No shade meant by calling it out, but I think that makes it much more clear how strong your opinions are on this. There’s nothing to be gained in trying to talk to you about this when your opinions are set so strongly. You aren’t going to see the dangers that the rest of us see because your focus is on allowing freedom from oppresive parental figures.
Edit: they also “won’t give an inch on this”
“The dangers” are a moral Panic that’s been kicked off by Nazis
Sure, legalize heroin for 12 year olds. Parents can regulate it themselves. Imbecilic reasoning.
How does that even logic?
That’s the point, it doesn’t. Much like the argument about targeting marginalized people when you’re talking about children.
Edit: Yes, there are plenty of children and teens without access to information and the support structures they should have IRL. I was one of them and it’s fucking awful. The internet can help with that by offering exposure to different ideologies, evidence that you aren’t alone in what you’re feeling or going through.
But I don’t look back on everything I did and encountered online in mid 00s - early 10s era internet and go “that was overwhelmingly a great thing that I should have had the sort of unrestricted access to that I did”. And the internet has been even more corporatized and “skinner-boxed” since.
And with the benefit of hindsight, I can see a bunch of other ways that I could have gotten the good I got from the internet without all the bad, and through things in real life that I had dismissed in my youth.
we owe today’s teens a better internet experience. we should focus on building something that would have been ideal for us to have had when we were their age
Teens and children, and the pushback you’re seeing is because a lot of people, even terminally online people, believe that limiting or preventing children (and teens) from accessing social media as they currently exist is part of making that happen.
You have to slow the bleeding first. You can’t just ignore the broken leg and start physical therapy.
Teens vary wildly in maturity and are likely to be unfortunately caught up in rules for children. There’s no easy cutoff age before 18 for when one can be trusted to be online without guard rails. I can speak from experience that teens will find a way whether its legal or not, so I’m not really super concerned about the ones who need access. They’ll find a way.
And for every person like you that says they are still alive because of unrestricted internet, there’s another one who is dead because of it. 4chan, tumblr, reddit even (remember when they “totally figured out the boston bomber”?), and more direct cyberbullying all claim lives. There were 3 suicides in my highschool growing up, two determined to be cyberbullying caused and the third just rumored. I almost lost one of my younger cousins to cyberbullying as well.
This isn’t stopping the bleeding, the people who caused the bleeding in the first place of the ones doing this. I don’t trust a single person in the Epstein files to have good intentions towards children or teenagers.
I hate these people. I’m at a loss for words
You’re confused by the assertion that access to social media is at least as bad for children as some banned drugs? Is this your first day on earth?
It’s not as bad as drugs. Don’t give your kids phones. Be a parent. Don’t need to upload all our data and Id to palantir databases for tracking under the same old “protect the children” bullshit
Hard disagree.
This isn’t necessary. For instance, simply require any device to which children have access to get software that prevents access to 90% of the internet. Problem solved.
It isn’t (just) a technical problem for parents. Having the underage social media ban means that there isn’t the peer pressure for kids to use - well there is, but its much lower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Nanny
They don’t, which is why regulation is essential.
And you’re already in the database.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Nanny
disgusting. they should be taking us out of the database
I agree. But I think we’re past that point.
well, then we need to go back before that point. There is no reason why laws that apply to my paper correspondance doesn’t apply to my digital correspondence.
If you disagree, please send your personal email credentials and medical records.
deleted by creator
oh what? WOW! This is so new to me. I’m astonished!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures
We need to END this shit, instead of ThInK Of tHe cHiLdReN laws that violate our privacy and human rights further, like the “Online Safety Act 2023” whose job it is to link your name, face and ID to the porn you browse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
like I linked, netnanny and similar software exist. to licence one for every child would be CHEAPER than this bullshit dragnet surveillance.
Stop licking boots.
Just to screw you over if/when you bust out the “YoUlL UdNeRsTaNd iF YoU EvEr hAvE KiDs, ItS HaRd bEiNg a pArEnT” I already have a kid.
You might as well allow kids to drink Tequila and work in meat factories. Healthier than being online.
I’m sorry you feel that your rights are violated because children should be banned from the internet.
read my actual post, there’s a way of doing this without violating human rights.
Fine then. Make it the law that this software MUST be installed on any device accessible to a child. Problem solved.
🤝
Nothing is preventing the internet from being exactly the way it was in the 90s. You’re on such a website right now. I, for one, don’t believe the internet is so far gone because 4 or 5 big, popular sites are utterly shit.
What should be. What is.
These are different things, and insofar as that remains the case, we should act accordingly.
And the “what is” here is that those terrible sites are not the majority of the internet. They’re barely even a fraction of it.
Facebook: 75.27% of social media market share
X (Twitter): 5.75% of social media market share
Time Spent: TikTok (58 min/day) leads in daily time spent, followed by YouTube (52 min/day), Instagram (42 min/day), and Facebook (38 min/day).
I mean it’s a huge fraction of the internet.
SM is not 100% of the internet
10% is not a even close to a majority.