[lapinot]

I disagree, corporations which manufacture damaging and offensive products against their users should be accountable. Yet obviously in this state of things, parents should try and do something.

Personal story: to situate, when i was teenager facebook was starting to be a thing and myspace started fading. My parents did something i find to be very sensible: they responsabilised me and introduced me to computers. I had restricted "freetime" computer hours and slightly less restricted "working" computer hours (doing school work etc), which eventually led me to programming since it somehow passed as working (my mom's a programmer so there's that). I wasn't allowed to have a facebook account and it was explained to me why that was so. Reasons where mostly not putting random private stuff online somewhere i wouldn't control it, addiction wasn't too important but i think it was implicitly said that these stuff eat you time and that now your time doing constructive things vanishes. OTOH my computer was clean of any spyware and i was trusted (had admin password and all). I surely was an outsider from this pov, but i quickly managed to own it and be proud of not having that account. For me this is the key: you cannot protect your kid against his will, you must (and surely can, kids are smart) convince them that they have more to loose than to gain. Maybe at that time it was simpler since it was the golden age of xmpp and gtalk was something i had access to (Adium for the win!).