[Adraghast]

Agreed, but what’s the alternative though? Just going full Amish on them until they’re 18? 25? Look at all the Baby Boomers and older Gen X’ers that got on the Internet in the past ten years and instantly had their brains rotted despite decades of life experience. Should there be some kind of emotional intelligence test everyone has to pass to earn their internet license?

This is why I think that taking steps to keep kids off social media is delaying the inevitable. Just as there’s no safe age to start smoking, there’s no truly safe age to start using social media as it currently exists. So either we accept the negative aspects of these platforms’ existence, or we remediate them.

[bcrl]

Being a GenXer, my friends and I have regular contact outside of social media because we already had those habits ingrained in us before the current crop of social media platforms ever existed. I can't imagine being a teenager today having to deal with everyone in high school being on the same social media platforms and dealing with the pressure to fit in. We had cliques for good reason.

[tempestn]

Yeah, you've got to look at percentages here. Some boomers get sucked into the pit of social media, but far more teenagers do. More life experience (and brain development in the case of young people) won't always help, but it often will.

[kelipso]

> you've got to look at percentages here

Exactly. Just because you have a bunch of kids smoking doesn't mean the anti smoking advice and practices don't work on most of them.

[remarkEon]

Agreed, and that other generations also struggle with social media is additional evidence that it should be shut down, or at least heavily regulated (or regulated out of existence). There's nothing inevitable about any of this: we don't have to let malicious companies like Meta or TikTok or whoever build products that hijack your emotions for profit.

[wizofaus]

Except Facebook has since been observed as having deleterious effects on mental health even before it was available to the public, and you'd be hard pressed to describe the Facebook of that period as a malicious company hijacking our emotions for profit. Nor is it clear that they reasonably could have known the effects it was having for quite some years (to be clear, they most certainly qualify as malicious now)

[remarkEon]

I guess I don't really care. Deep down we all know it's bad, and has been since its inception even if part of that knowledge is in hindsight. I would venture to guess that Zuck knows this too, which is part of the reason he's so strongly pivoting to VR.

It's frustrating, because every time this comes up we have these long, expansive threads about what social media is or isn't 100% responsible for (as if the standard is 100%), or if we can't exactly identify the precise mechanism by which this or that algorithm is predatory, we just throw our hands up and say "well shucks, it's a tough question!" It's really not. Social Media in this current form is a net detriment to human civilization. I'm open to a steel-manned argument that earlier iterations - without the algos, without the doom scrolling, without the tracking - are okay, or even a good thing.

[wizofaus]

"Deep down we all know it's bad"

Really? I have never felt that way about social media (esp. Fb), it's only the studies demonstrating the harmful effects that have convinced me that, at least in their current incarnations, at a population level the cons of social media outweigh the pros. That there's still no good alternative to FB for taking advantage of its "pros" is my biggest concern.

[remarkEon]

You didn't think the facebook feed was weird? Not sure how old you are, but my first experience with facebook was probably back in 2009, when it had just expanded to other colleges and had added some features like the "like" button. And it became very very obvious that "liking" things made it more prominent in the "feed". To me and my friends it was obvious that this would be manipulated on both ends of the equation, those liking things to boost them and those making things to be boosted.

I still need to be convinced that there actually exist some "pros".

[wizofaus]

Never paid much attention to the feed and almost never "liked" things, but found it a helpful way to connect with certain people, organize/advertise events, etc. etc. Still do, though far less than I used to.

[paledot]

I mean, Facebook orginated as a platform for Zuckerberg and his frat bros to rate the attractiveness of female classmates without their knowledge or consent. It has always been toxic.

[wizofaus]

Fair point. That the company is still run by the guy who was sufficiently motivated to create a tool for that purpose initially explains a lot.

[twoWhlsGud]

I also see a lot more older folks walking around outside not staring at their phones. So while having built up habits without phones isn't a cure all for later ills, I think it can help.

[linalgmixer]

Children not using social media is not "going full Amish" though. To use your example, there is no safe age to start smoking. Would you suggest that just because you can't avoid it as adults anyways, we just get rid of our restrictions on smoking for children? Society needs to recognize that social media is a vice and we should treat it as such.

[prawn]

I wonder if alcohol is a better parallel than smoking here. A vice that you speak with children about and make sure that any relationship they have with is a healthy one.

You can leave children to discover it on their own or you can talk them through what it is, what it can do, etc.

I had a close friend who came to drinking later than peers, but then hit it hard. He became absolutely unbearable with almost any amount of alcohol. Might've been a personality thing or predisposition to it, but felt like the circumstance of him starting drinking harshly like he was making up for lost time was a catalyst.

[linalgmixer]

I agree that alcohol would be a better parallel here and I was simply using the parent comment's example.

Alcohol is considered a vice and we not only have laws which prohibit children from its consumption, at least in the US, it's culturally accepted that it's generally not appropriate for children to be drinking. In the US, I do think that straight prohibition-style banning of all alcohol from children is also not a good idea largely due to the example you've given where once children become adults and have free access to alcohol, their lack of experience with the substance can cause issues.

I'm personally planning on letting my children consume small amounts of alcohol while they are under our supervision to give them experience. That way, once they do have free access, the novelty is not so great and hopefully they'll be able to behave more responsibly. Treating social media as a vice doesn't have to mean full ban until they're adults. It just means we need to acknowledge that it is and think about how we want to deal with it.

[smcin]

> Just going full Amish on them until they’re 18? 25?

Seriously false dichotomy. You understand that you can access FB/IG from a computer, right? You don't need a smartphone to do that. Could be a desktop, with shared accounts for multiple userd. And if you do have a smartphone, you can turn it off at night, or put it on the table.

And you can use social media without taking and posting selfies. Or at least, doing so excessively.

> Look at all the Baby Boomers and older Gen X’ers that got on the Internet in the past ten years and instantly had their brains rotted despite decades of life experience. Should there be some kind of emotional intelligence ...

But that's only the highly visibly subset of them who don't resist social-validation, confirmation bias, mindlessly forwarding viral crap, slurs and gossip. The other X% that behave reasonably and refrain from 24/7 ideological foodfights, we don't notice. Certainly, the big social media with quantified vote-counts, followers, shares, and in the absence of fact-checking, are incentivizing the death of civil discourse based on, uhh, facts.

It's pretty obvious one of the main necessary habits is skepticism: inquiring for the precise source and attribution of claims, checking facts, scrutinizing your own susceptibility to want to believe a specific claim (or source) without objective proof. And by extension, picking the group of people you associate with online to be like that.

Haidt also documents how socialization and playing among children [in the US] has stopped being face-to-face and moved online within that decade. This is something that can be reversed at ages 8, 12, 14 etc. Coordinated action by schools, classes and parent groups would be great.

> there’s no truly safe age to start using social media as it currently exists.

*Only as it currently exists post-2016, not as it used to be pre-2012*, which is the exact point Haidt repeatedly hammers home. People didn't complain about MySpace, Friendster, et al: why? The culprits Haidt mentions in passing: making counts of likes, upvotes, followers visible (let alone prominently showing them like as if they're the defining thing), and the (artificial) pressure to constantly post (selfie image) content that juices them, and to compare to other people's. Also, (for adults) retweeting other people arguing. We (= US Congress) can easily mandate switching FB/IG back to a 2012 interface. (Of course, they'd lose lots of advertisers and users, boo-hoo. Push the financial incentive to them to suggest solutions.)

Consider also how widely US COPPA law [0] is flouted in allowing under-18s or under-13s to register a profile and self-certify a fake age over 13 or 18: imagine if that had to proven in person with ID, just like buying alcohol or tobacco, or driving, or buying a gun. But can anyone remember a criminal prosecution of either a parent, or a social network which knew or had reasonable knowledge that one of its users was under-13? Where is basic enforcement? COPPA doesn't appear to have criminal penalties. Why shouldn't COPPA have criminal penalties, on both the parent and the social-media company (gasp)? (in conjunction with mandating changes to remove the pressure for likes, upvotes, followers). Or, less drastically, social-media can monitor its individual users' use patterns and suggest them when that becomes unhealthy or excessive ("You've been looking at influencers for the last 4 hours. Time to disconnect and do something else?").

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...