[ksec]

I am guessing kids / child here means or include Teens? Because if they are not hooked to Facebook ( which I dont know any kids or teens are ) they will still be hooked to instagram. Which many kids and Teens do use. And increasingly they are going over to TikTok. Although instagram is fighting back.

And even if you ban them from using ALL meta product. They will still be hooked to something else. Forum ( That is a form of Social Media as well ), other media for celebrity news or whatever. Ban Whatsapp? There is iMessages on iOS and used mostly across teen age group in the US, Line in Japan, KakaoTalk in Korea. Did anyone remember SnapChat ?

Even if you DO ban all of them. They will still get spread in school talking about the trendiest topic. They will find a way to join the conversation no matter what so they dont get left out. And I have seen this first hand.

I am not against Facebook providing some sort of filter or mode for Kids or something. But it is ultimately the parents that is responsible. The world has changed. And I have always argued it is not the platform or social media. It is the internet itself, extremely affordable and accessible via Smartphone everywhere. And so far I didn't even mention Youtube.

Parenting in the 21st century is harder than ever.

On the other hand kids these days learn so so much more at their age on topics that you could never imagined over the internet. Things I could only dream of when all I had was books in library written by people not targeting my age. ( Which is actually another issues because those who are curious and willing to learn excel so much further than the bottom half of the class, it seems the information super highway has fastened inequality everywhere. )

I am actually surprised at the Hotcake being the most upvoted comments, for the past 6+ years Facebook has been the most hated company on HN and anything that goes against hating Facebook tends to get downvoted.

[true_religion]

> And even if you ban them from using ALL meta product. They will still be hooked to something else.

I hope I'm not misrepresenting your argument with this analogy, but it seems like you're saying "Don't ban heroin. Kids will still get hooked on weed!"

It's okay to ban the worst offenders and carefully regulate the 'market'.

With a free and open market, billions of dollars of investment, and thousands of smart minds working over at Facebook, it's quite possible that things will get worse if there's no regulation.

[ksec]

>"Don't ban heroin. Kids will still get hooked on weed!"

Except I can see zero good about heroin, while social Media ( inclusive of instant messengers ) have their own good. So it is not as clear cut.

[gls2ro]

It really depends what do you mean by Social Media.

For example I define Chat as a different category then Social Media.

How do you define Social Media and what is the value (or good) they add that is unique to these platforms?

[hankman86]

The internet and social media aren’t the same. Heck, it’s not even an inherent principle of social media to be the manipulating, exploitative and addictive garbage that is Facebook. The bad things happening on Facebook aren’t a coincidence, but very much an expected outcome of a) deliberate and malicious design decisions and b) the centralised platform economy that social media companies rely on.

Hence, legislation shouldn’t target individual companies, but “features” that harm people or lead to bad outcomes for society at large. One such example is Europe’s GDPR, which imposes some fundamental limitations on what companies can and cannot do with their users’ personal data. And as negative consequences of poor social media design becomes more apparent, legislators must expand on that and ban more of the malicious practices that are at fault.