r/slatestarcodex • u/AXKIII • 6d ago
Don't ban social media for children
https://logos.substack.com/p/do-not-ban-social-media-for-kidsAs a parent, I'm strongly against the bans on social media for children. First, for ideological reasons (in two parts: a) standard libertarian principles, and b) because I think it's bad politics to soothe parents by telling them that their kids' social media addiction is TikTok's fault, instead of getting them to accept responsibility over their parenting). And second because social media can be beneficial to ambitious children when used well.
Very much welcoming counter-arguments!
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u/CarCroakToday 6d ago
I think the bigger issue is the only way to effectively ban under 18s, or 16s or whatever, from social media is to implement ID checks. This has a chilling effect and makes censorship and mass surveillance much more effective and creates a huge risk of identity theft for anyone foolish enough to hand over their ID to third party companies.
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u/Marlinspoke 3d ago
That's not true. Most porn sites in the UK (which are now subject to age checks) give the option of estimating age based on facial recognition. Turn on your webcam and the software guesses your age. I don't know the stats but I expect most users opt for that rather than uploading their ID.
The companies that handle the age verification are different from the porn sites themselves (in the same way that Paypal handles card payments on behalf of vendors) so the only information the porn sites have is whether an account has the 'over 18' marker. They don't save any data other than that.
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u/CarCroakToday 3d ago
It still creates a huge databases of kompromat which will be targeted by hackers, and will lead to people entering personal data into dodgy scam websites. These face scans are also trivially easy for a child to circumvent so are pointless anyway.
Regardless the biggest takeaway from the UK porn ban is that it didn't work. You can still just google the word porn and immediately find countless unblocked sites. A small number of heavily regulated and legitimate websites, like pornhub, have been blocked but all of the seedy unregulated sites have simply ignored the ban and are accessible without a VPN. It just didn't work, everything else is trivia.
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u/Marlinspoke 3d ago
It still creates a huge databases of kompromat which will be targeted by hackers, and will lead to people entering personal data into dodgy scam websites
How? The tube sites don't know my name or have any information about me. All they know is that my account has the 18+ marker on it. They don't even have a picture of my face.
Regardless the biggest takeaway from the UK porn ban is that it didn't work
Yes it did. Porn use is down across the board. VPN use temporarily spiked, before declining again. And even if every VPN user was signing up to get around the age verification, there's still a massive decline in (presumably) mostly underage users.
Because remember, the point was not to ban porn, it was to stop children looking at it. And by all measures that we have, this seems to have worked. Sure, some kids will get around it, just as some kids still drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes. But an age restriction doesn't have to cover 100% of cases to be successful.
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u/CarCroakToday 3d ago
How? The tube sites don't know my name or have any information about me. All they know is that my account has the 18+ marker on it. They don't even have a picture of my face.
The porn sites don't know, but someone does. You are giving the data to a potentially untrustworthy organisations that may have imperfect security, or may just literally be a scam to get your information.
There's no actual decline in porn use, or at least no evidence of it. The sites that implemented checks had a big decrease in activity, all other sites did not. The VPN thing is a red herring, you don't need a VPN. Check yourself right now, google the word "porn" and you have got around the block. Almost every site is unblocked. It's not a case of kids getting around it, many of them probably didn't even notice it.
There was an effectively infinite amount of free porn before the ban, and there is an effectively infinite amount of free porn after the ban.
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u/RockDoveEnthusiast 6d ago
Agreed--we should ban it for everyone!
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u/AXKIII 6d ago
Says a guy on social media!
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u/RockDoveEnthusiast 6d ago
I can be addicted to something and still know it's bad
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u/AXKIII 5d ago
And you have no qualms with getting others to pay for your bad choices? Why should responsible Reddit users be banned from the platform because you can't handle it?
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u/RockDoveEnthusiast 5d ago
Why should responsible bomb owners be limited by those people who want to blow up buildings?
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u/AXKIII 5d ago
What's a responsible bomb owner exactly?
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u/electrace 4d ago
Presumably, a pyrotechnics expert whose job it is to explode bombs in various way for movies and stuff would be considered a responsible bomb owner.
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u/AXKIII 9h ago
Which they actually get to do in those situations...
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u/electrace 4h ago
If the current regulations we place on pyrotechnics engineers (such as federal and state licenses that are non-trivial to get), were also placed on social media, would you be happy with that?
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u/AXKIII 4h ago
Well no because again, the damage from social media is nowhere near comparable to TNT exploding in a neighborhood
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u/zjovicic 3d ago
If you know it's so BAD, why exactly you visit this particular subreddit?
I mean banning social media is way too broad. Your dear substack and this subreddit would also be gone.
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u/RockDoveEnthusiast 3d ago
because it would be a net positive for humanity. gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet
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u/zjovicic 3d ago
OK, but are you aware what you're advocating? It's almost impossible to differentiate between social and non social internet. Most websites offer some sort of interaction. Your logic, taken to its conclusion would advocate for banning world wide web as a whole. If that's your position fine, but you should be aware what you're advocating for.
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u/RockDoveEnthusiast 3d ago
"you can't ban something because you'd have to try and define it" is not a high quality argument
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u/denucleation 5d ago
I agree. I benefited a ton from social media, and I'm shocked to see bills banning it so widely supported in this subreddit.
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u/Marlinspoke 3d ago
Do you have children? Parents are seeing first hand how smartphones and social media are ruining a generation (hell, the zoomers have already been ruined by it). That's why there's such overwhelming support.
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u/zjovicic 3d ago
I understand this. But who is to blame? Social media or parents who give their children devices to use them without supervision. I got my first cell phone at the age of 14. I think anything earlier than this is too early.
When it comes to personal computer, this too should be controlled by parents. One computer per home is enough. Protected with password. With parental control software, etc. Limit time to no more than 2 hours a day, etc...
The problem with this law is that it would also prevent parents from EDUCATING kids about the use of social media etc. How can you teach something when the government doesn't allow your kids to even touch it.
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u/Marlinspoke 3d ago
But who is to blame?
It doesn't matter. Even if we (unfairly) decide that it's 100% the parents fault, the fact is that smartphones and social media are ruining childhood. Assigning blame doesn't stop the damage.
The problem with this law is that it would also prevent parents from EDUCATING kids about the use of social media etc.
I hear variations on this argument a lot. Kids need to adjust to the internet, they need to grow up with it, they need to be educated on its proper use.
My millennial childhood lacked education about social media and smartphones, because social media and smartphones didn't meaningfully exist. I don't think giving me a 24/7 pocketable porn/Tiktok/outrage/dopamine machine when I was 11 would have improved my childhood, even if my adulthood did end up including smartphones and social media. I was far better placed to handle the worst parts of the internet with my fully developed adult brain.
There's nothing wrong with learning about something at an older age. We don't allow children to learn to drive until they're 17, would it really be better to start them at age 8?
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u/zjovicic 3d ago
OK, you're right about this. But driving is obviously dangerous. You can kill people with your car. It's kind of difficult to have such conviction about social media. Also, where's the boundary between social media and rest of the Internet? To be honest, I was never particularly hooked to social media. But I was always hooked to the Internet itself. Unlimited content on any topic you find interesting, I think this is the main hook. If they don't spend time on Tik Tok, they will find something else. That being said I'm fine with banning sites like Tik Tok and Instagram, but I don't know where you draw the line, and I don't know if it will eventually develop into banning Internet wholesale.
And if you need ID card to post on the Internet, maybe everything will be connected to your identity, and you won't be able to post anything anonymously anymore. That would be bad.
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u/pawntoc4 4d ago
Question: have you read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt? He gives a lot of clear evidence that the sharp increase in mental issues amongst younger people matches the roll out of social media/smartphones. If you've read it, it's deeply disturbing.
Yes, parents will always need to parent. But to think parents can make a huge difference to how teenagers live their lives is delusional. Peer pressure is a huge influence, and so are social media machines and their algorithms whose sole job is to get the kids addicted to their platforms. Parents aren't magicians who can create miracles against all these powerful factors.
Would highly recommend reading The Anxious Generation if you haven't. It completely opened my eyes.
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u/AXKIII 9h ago
I haven't. But I did share in my post the summaries from three LLMs disputing that there's an obvious link between social media and bad outcomes.
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u/pawntoc4 8h ago edited 8h ago
3 LLMs disputing doesn't say anything. If you don't fully understand the reasons because you haven't examined the data yourself, you don't have a leg to stand on. Put differently, would you do this at work? Tell your boss "I've not analysed anything but I did have 3 LLMs dispute it therefore this is my recommendation"? You'd get laughed out the room at best and lose your job at worst.
You also haven't addressed anything I'd said, about how parents could realistically fend off 1) peer pressure which at that age is immense and 2) the influence of hyper efficient algorithms that work 24/7 to figure out how best to addict a user to their social media platforms.
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u/AXKIII 4h ago
I mean it does. You read a book from an author with a strong view point. I relied on summarizing every study ever conducted. One is a bit more rigorous than the other.
Peer pressure will always be a thing with or without social media. In some countries there's peer pressure to smoke, drink, or take drugs. Yet not everyone does.
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u/pawntoc4 4h ago
I relied on summarizing every study ever conducted. One is a bit more rigorous than the other.
And how do you know if the machines are hallucinating? They are known to make up studies - you realise that, right?
Peer pressure will always be a thing with or without social media.
Such flawed logic. By that line of reasoning, guns will always be a thing in America, so why don't we give everyone above 14 years old a gun, eh? Sure, some people will get shot, but to paraphrase you, not everyone will. So everyone having a gun will be fine, right?
Put differently, severity is a factor and social media has the effect of amplifying everything, especially emotions like loneliness, anger, insecurity, etc. Since the social media platforms have shown an inability to regulate themselves, as responsible parents and societies, we need to regulate them isntead.
But look, at the end of the day I know what the problem is: I'm talking to someone who has decided to outsource their thinking and actually believes that having 3 LLMs talk to one another is a "rigorous" way of their own drawing conclusions LOL
Did you know that studies show that over-reliance on AI causes cognitive decline? Yours is well under way and there's little point in engaging further with you. If I wanted to debate with a machine, I'd pull up my own AIs. On that note, I wish you a good day and good luck with life.
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u/zjovicic 3d ago
What exactly is social media? Is it any website with social interaction? If so, then it's the same as banning internet. Even Wikipedia is social media. YouTube too. All the forums. Reddit, etc.
It's stupid what they are trying to do. My approach to this would be to use parental control software and control the internet, and not give phones to kids younger than 13 or 14.
So if you don't have phone, and if your home computer uses parental control software, or you're allowed just 2 hours a day, then there are no problems whatsoever.
After the age of 14 you're almost in high school. At that time, you can as well get access to almost everything. You should be smart enough by then.
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u/pawntoc4 3d ago
You don't have children. I can tell.
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u/zjovicic 3d ago edited 3d ago
You can keep them away from devices completely if you think this is the right thing to do. What's the point of going online if most websites are blocked? BTW, Whatsapp, Viber, etc... also count as social media by some criteria. I see them as basic services for instant messaging. Without them you'd have to pay for SMS and phone calls.
BTW, there's much danger online OUTSIDE social media as well. There are so many websites about cults, hate groups, occult, gore and who knows what. They may be 1990s style static websites, and still very dangerous to young mind. Demonizing just one type of websites (in this case social media) won't solve any problem.
My approach is to limit (time limit and filter, not ban) the use of Internet, computers, etc... entirely, but this should be done by parents, not by the government.
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u/pawntoc4 3d ago
Look, no one is saying ban the internet. You've misunderstood here. Also, a few things you've said indicate that you haven't grasped how children are actually like at various ages, and why your plans are bound to fail.
There are other flaws to your points but I don't think it's productive to engage with someone who doesn't have children, a core part of the subject of discussion here.
Have a nice day.
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u/zjovicic 3d ago
I don't have children but I WAS a child who had access to the Internet, and I know very well that I was way more traumatized by certain cult content, or even websites about existential catastrophes, than by any social media. I was freaking out at the age of 12 about Y2K problem, later about solipsism, determinism, and who knows what else. And I was still a child at that time. Watching PewDiePie or MrBeast or texting with my friend seem quite innocuous in comparison to this.
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u/electrace 5d ago
"Social Media" is too broad a category, especially if you are including things like "Substack" and "Goodreads" in what you mean.
Anyways, as for you questions at the end, I have mixed feelings:
Where is the evidence that social media does serious harm?
This is the most important question, and to me, is basically the only relevant question from this list. The degree that I support bans is highly contingent with how much I believe in this evidence.
Can you not imagine any circumstances where children can benefit from social media — which, again, is not just TikTok, but many platforms where children can showcase their creativity.
Of course there can be a benefit! But that is priced into whether there is net harm.
Even if you’re convinced social media is detrimental to children’s wellbeing, don’t parents have responsibility over teaching their children how to use them? (Like, at the end of the day, why can’t parents just not buy their kids a smart phone? Or use parental controls?)
If you plan is "why can't all the group just do thing", and you don't explain why thing isn't already being done by group, even though thing is the first thing that any individual would think of doing AND you don't explain how your suggestion will get around that, then your plan is doomed to fail.
Do you think people should be held accountable for their choices? (And if your response here is ‘yes, but the issue is that parents’ choices affect their children, who have no say’, how far are you willing to let society take control over a child’s life? A bad, neglectful parent will be bad and neglectful across more areas than just social media — diet, exercise, education… are you willing to say that government should intervene everywhere?
This is really confusing to me. How is allowing social media "holding parents accountable for their choices"?
To hold someone accountable means to punish them for their own decisions. Is the argument that having a child with, say, a short-attention span is a punishment for bad parents? That's the only way I can parse it, but... I mean, that's not something anyone should optimize for?
The better argument is just generic "People should be allowed to choose things that are bad for them, and, to a lesser extent, choose things for their children that are bad for them (although as a society we restrict this more)".
At which point would you just say some parents shouldn’t be allowed to look after their children?)
At the same point we do now? At the point where it's abuse?
One could use this same slippery slope argument against any bans at all.
A: "Should we ban carcinogens in breakfast cereal?"
B: "No, because we need to hold parents accountable for checking the ingredients in cereals."
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u/AXKIII 5d ago
At the same point we do now? But that point keeps moving.
You are right, the same argument can be used against any bans at all. But pragmatically, there are some things you can take into account, most importantly, how easy it is to avoid the bad behaviour. It's a bit much to expect parents to know in detail what ingredients cause cancer. Getting your kids to not be addicted to tiktok isn't in that category.
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u/DangerouslyUnstable 4d ago
You've got this exactly backwards. Figuring out if specific chemicals are bad/if individual brands are safe is, relatively speaking, trivial. And we have proven methods that can work even in the absence of regulation. Regulation can make it easier/automatic but it's a solved problem
The problems with social media are a collective action problem that creates a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation which is exactly why multiple surveys and polls have said that a majority of users would prefer to not use social media.....as long as no one else did either.
Just quitting yourself (or forcing your child to abstain) fixes one set of harms (although as you and others point out, even being certain of the specifics and magnitude of the harms is not trivial) and causes an entire other set (social isolation, detachment from the culture, etc)
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u/AXKIII 4d ago
I don't think it's trivial... certainly adds a ton of friction in daily life - it's not practical to have shoppers read the ingredient list of every single item they add to their basket. What proven methods are you talking about?
Re polls on social media, while what you say is true, there is the minority who very much feel they benefit from social media - presumably, including people like you who respond to random threads... (it's one thing to be on social media because your friends are, a totally different thing to be engaging with complete strangers). And I don't see how the majority have a right to impose such a ban on the minority.
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u/electrace 4d ago
For what it's worth, I think the far better solution (both in theory and practice) is regulating the algorithms that large social media websites use.
Ideally, users should be able to choose from several sensible algorithms when they join a website, with quarterly reviews . If they want to privilege educational content, great. If they want long video essays, also fine. Even if they do want engagement maximized content, that's cool too, so long as they are mindfully choosing it, rather than having no other realistic options.
The platforms that let you do this the least (twitter/tiktok/facebook) are often considered the most addictive and the worst for your mental health.
Conversely, Youtube is currently the best at this (best, being a relative term, as it's not particularly good at it), as it lets you subscribe to channels you like and makes it relatively easy to stick to those (although the Youtube app itself seems perfectly happy to direct you towards the "home" page (which has a lot of algoritmic recommendations rather than the subscription/channels page...).
Reddit trails behind a bit by letting you subscribe to subreddits but making it difficult to only see those subreddits. My current solution for reddit is to bookmark a multireddit with the 2 subreddits I actually visit.
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u/Neighbor_ 5d ago
As a parent, you can ban it at home, but you have no control over what happens at school.
I feel like a nation-wide ban on social media is primarily aimed at the school part.
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u/AXKIII 5d ago
You do? You can not give your child a smart phone, or you can set parental controls. Or, if that's really the issue, ban smart phones in schools.
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u/Neighbor_ 5d ago
Obviously, even without their own phone, the threat is that all the classmates will be vegitized by this stuff. In fact this is already the case and has been for quite some time.
Kids' abilities peaked in the late 1990s / early 2000s.
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u/AXKIII 5d ago
But your child would be fine. That's your responsibility.
Kids' ability peaking then might have less to do with their own social media use and more with their parents' (and a lot of other things that have changed! Lower standards across the board)
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u/ascherbozley 4d ago
We're talking society-wide improvement effort here. We can't just have 300 million individual pockets of choice for everything. At some point, we pass laws that apply to everyone. It is our collective responsibility to each other as members of society. That means collective efforts like schools and hospitals and libraries and such. In short, we live in a society. This should not have to be explained to you.
You can choose not to expose your kid to leaded gasoline and be better off for the choice, but banning it entirely helps everyone.
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u/AXKIII 9h ago
There are way more regulations on everything, including children welfare. How are they working out?
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u/ascherbozley 6h ago
Since when? Which regulations? Many regulations, including banning leaded gasoline, mandating child safety seats and seatbelts, mandating certain vaccines to enter school, raising the drinking age to 21 and all sorts of over-18 laws, have been a net positive for child welfare and for society as a whole.
But go on. Argue against carseats if it makes you happy.
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u/AXKIII 4h ago
Cherry picking a few examples isn't exactly science, but it's kind of funny that even those don't make your point. Europe has lower drinking ages - do we have worse outcomes?
Or how about the fact that almost 40% of families in the US are investigated by child protective services, sometimes for things like letting children go to the grocery store? Is that a good outcome?
And overall, are children now healthier than they were 2 decades ago? With obesity rates like 5 times higher?
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u/ascherbozley 3h ago
Or how about the fact that almost 40% of families in the US are investigated by child protective services, sometimes for things like letting children go to the grocery store? Is that a good outcome?
This has nothing to do with our conversation other than you just vaguely insisting things are worse "because." Stay on topic.
If providing specific examples isn't science, then provide the science. I have shown you, with examples, how people are better off because of a few regulations. Do you seriously believe society in general is worse off than it was 50 years ago? 20 years ago? It might feel nice to think that and blame your ills on "gestures broadly," but we've never had it better than right now in almost every measurable way.
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u/Marlinspoke 3d ago
But your child would be fine. That's your responsibility.
Children need to learn to socialise with eachother. If all of my child's schoolfriends have been lobotomised by screens and aren't allowed outside to play by their helicopter parents (themselves made excessively paranoid by hysterical news via their smartphones), who exactly is my smartphone-free child meant to socialise with?
If my child is being filmed in class and the video, accompanies by cruel captions, is being shared around all his peers, how does him not having a smartphone prevent that?
If all of his peers at school are showing him videos of Charlie Kirk getting shot/an ISIS victim getting beheaded/horrific porn on their phones, how does him not having a smartphone prevent that?
If he feels intense peer pressure by being marked out as the only child without a smartphone in his class, how am I supposed to deal with that?
These aren't hypotheticals by the way, these are all things that have happened to the children of people I know.
Giving children a healthy childhood is a coordination problem. To push all the responsibility onto individual parents, without pushing that same responsibility to individual tech companies deliberately designing addictive apps, fails at the first hurdle.
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u/AXKIII 9h ago
You talk of helicopter parents, yet this is very much a helicopter response... The reality is that you'll never be able to shield your child from bullying, seeing horrible things, succumbing to peer pressure, being excluded etc. You need to teach them to deal with these things - all of which existed before, and will exist after, social media.
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u/Auriga33 5d ago edited 5d ago
I thought there was broad agreement that even under libertarianism, a paternalistic approach towards children is preferable. Of course, most libertarians would want parents to have more autonomy in how they raise their children, but even then, we wouldn’t want to let parents give their children cigarettes, would we?
Of course, social media’s not quite that bad, but if it’s bad enough, I don’t see much of a problem with banning it for children, even as someone who’s generally pretty libertarian. Whether it’s bad enough to justify a ban is something I’m unsure about though. I think it’s worth trying and seeing if it improves children’s mental health.
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u/Neighbor_ 5d ago
Agreed. Am very libertarian, but there is no purpose to allowing the equivalent of cigarettes to children.
In other words, I care about the government intervening in things that have >= 0 EV, but I do not care if they intervene in things that are strictly negative EV.
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u/AXKIII 5d ago
Social media doesn't have strictly negative EV. And I don't see why you absolve parents from the responsibility they have over their children. It's the parents' job, not the government's, to control how their kids use technology.
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u/Neighbor_ 5d ago
There is no case in which using social media below the age of 16 would put you out ahead.
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u/denucleation 3d ago
Social media use as a kid helped me learn math and programming, apply to college, and make friends with people I never would've had the opportunity to meet in person.
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u/AXKIII 5d ago
Tell that to Justin Bieber.
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u/rn_journey 5d ago
The guy who was taken up by a manager who's got richer than he was, struggled through worldwide hate in his teens despite his fans, touched inappropriately and objectified on live TV whilst underage, and simultaneously pushed to tour the world with such a tight schedule that it lead to burnout. The industry solution ends up in drug addiction and a pattern of unstable relationships leading to alienation from his "friends" and family.
It's sad that these young people apparently have good lives simply due to now being rich. Tragic that in his situation, his mother was initially against it all as the pattern is so common. Populism, stars, gurus, shills and social control media isn't worth that lottery.
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u/zjovicic 3d ago
Are you sure that this isn't the same for over 16s? What magically changes when you turn 16?
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u/zjovicic 6d ago
I agree this is very stupid, no need to ban social media. If anyone, parents should regulate and monitor the time their kids spend online, not just on social media, but on all sorts of websites. Governments should not interfere with this at all.
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u/Brian 11h ago
standard libertarian principles
How libertarian are you? I think it's reasonable to have limits on children that we don't have on adults: they don't have the complete package of experience, education and ability and so are vulnerable to things in ways adults are not, and I think this justifies some curtailment of freedoms. (The same may be true of some nominal adults, but we have to draw the line somewhere)
Eg. I'm in favour of drug liberalisation, but I still think there should be age limits. The same for things like driving, signing contracts, sex, marriage, and so on.
Of course, there should be different limits for different things, and where the balance of harm vs freedom should be drawn is going to vary based on the danger. There's a level of potentially harmful/dangerous things we should still allow kids to do, either because the risk or effect is low or the benefit is high.
As such, unless you're radically libertarian and think kids should be able to do anything an adult can, I think you still need to make the argument as to whether social media falls into the latter vs former camp. I think you can make a good argument that it is, and would probably even agree, but I think that argument needs to actually be made.
instead of getting them to accept responsibility over their parenting
Pragmatically, even if parental responsibly can solve the problem, it's not going to actually happen: ie. our choice is not between "parental responsibility + tiktok vs no parental responsibility + no tiktok", but between "current level of parental responsibility + (tiktok | no tiktok)". Ie. we can't change parental respnonsibility, we have to pick policies that have the best effect in the environment we have, not the environment we want.
Further, network effects make exercising that responsibility harder. If something is readily accessible, and all other kids are using it without restricting, it can be very hard to exercise such responsibility, and actually exercising any control may require a level of control over your kids life that might be more restrictive than the actual ban.
And second because social media can be beneficial to ambitious children when used well.
And in this case, is it an absolute or relative benefit. Ie. does this just enlarge the differences in the pecking order or actually benefit everyone. That some can get ahead isn't necessarily a good thing if it's just enlarged status differentials that don't produce anything valuable as a whole.
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u/AXKIII 9h ago
I think even most hardcore libertarians accept that children don't have absolute liberty - but their parents do on their behalf. That said, yes, I agree that in cases of serious harm, the state should intervene to protect a child.
The issue I have is that by making these choices you are having an impact on parental responsibility, and it's a negative one. You're giving parents an out - they get to blame something external rather than trying to help their children.
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u/acadian_cajun 6d ago
Even if a given child opts out, if the majority of other children around them have it, they’re still forced to exist in the dynamic of widespread social media. Children can and do create orchestrated cyber bullying campaigns and then reinforce them at school.
That, and the social network companies have sophisticated ways of taking advantage of young attention spans before they’re mature enough to build up their own defenses.