[trey-jones]

As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15 (or some other number, higher or lower I don't care). I'm pretty sure they're worse than cigarettes for the future of humanity.

[willio58]

Agreed. Teachers are seeing the massive benefits from banning phones entirely during school hours. I think once we get data from bans for certain things like social media for kids, we'll all want to get on the wave.

[blitzar]

Once the data is in bosses will see the massive benefits and ban mobile phones entirely during work hours.

[b112]

Good.

I recall "no personal calls" at work as a rule, in the old days. Inbound emergencies allowed, of course.

Why do people think looking at their personal email, or looking at their phone is acceptable at work?

It's no different than sitting, reading a magazine pre-Internet. The very idea would have been absurd.

[musicale]

> It's no different than sitting, reading a magazine pre-Internet. The very idea would have been absurd

Breaks improve employee health and reduces burnout. Not taking breaks harms performance.

Work breaks are also required by law in many states.

[fragmede]

> It's no different than sitting

I'm curious, do supermarket cashiers where you live stand or sit? Why/why not?

The job of pick items up from a belt, finding the barcode, moving that across the scanner until there's a beep, and then putting it on the "out" belt, really does not require the employee to be standing for it.

So why then, are they standing? Because merely sitting looks lazy and unprofessional? Sure if it's a 20 year old they have the energy, but if the employee is 64 about to retire? Making them stand for an entire 8 hour shift, I mean, that's how it is, but it doesn't seem cruel to you when the job doesn't require it and isn't affected by giving the 64 year old employee a stool to sit on until she retires?

[pqtyw]

Really hope this is sarcasm..

Or do you also feel the same about the 6x14 hour workdays?

[gametorch]

Why do you care?

Basic human decency says your workplace environment should be chill enough to let you take breaks as you, yourself, dictate. If you're underperforming because of it, you're fired. Enforcing a rule as you claim strips the employee of what little respect they have left. To be honest, your suggestion is sickening to me.

[ethbr1]

This is part of the K-shaped economy.

Highly skilled jobs can absolutely be 'perform or be fired', because you're paying for a person's ability to do a specialized thing, and there's usually only so much specialized work to be done.

But there are also a lot of 'we need bodies at a low cost' jobs.

And those latter jobs run on work_output : labor_cost, which can always be maximized by making fewer workers do more.

(Consequently, why the real goal for people studying / graduating in the modern economy should be to find a way to get into the former jobs...)

[gametorch]

Yes, and this dichotomy has been analyzed by political and economic theorists for centuries and everyone except autocrats and slave owners has agreed that the conditions surrounding the "work_output : labor_cost" jobs you describe are a huge miscarriage of justice and ought to be discarded with the past. Whether that is predicted to occur via bloody revolution or capitalist accelerationism is a matter of your particular economic and philosophical taste. But every ethical human being says we shouldn't treat people like that.

[zepolen]

This sort of work culture ruined the world way more than social media ever did.

[illiac786]

I am looking for data regarding this, do you have references? I need to convince my school ;)

[colechristensen]

This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.

Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.

And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.

So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.

[cycomanic]

> This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.

The interesting tidbit in the case of social media and smart phones is that they are at least partially pushed by the parents (I've seen plenty of examples of parents demand that their children have smartphones at school).

> Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.

> And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.

I think there is a difference though. There is the "off my lawn" crowd of "children today are so bad because..." sure, but I think they are not the ones demanding social media bans. The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.

> So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.

[liamdgray]

Some students even wish for a ban to reduce the pressure to keep up with social media.

That reminded me of Warren Buffet asking for his kind and to be taxed more.

[throwaway-blaze]

By "his kind" you mean human beings?

[phatfish]

Just the fuck you rich, I'm buying a football team for a laugh human beings. Not that Warren would necessarily buy a football team for laugh, but that "kind".

[ghostpepper]

> The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.

Do the stats prove that cell phones are the cause of the dire mental health indicators? Or at least that there is a correlation?

[colechristensen]

"but this time it's different" has also been a universal historical argument

>The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture.

Honestly you could just cut and paste the same arguments about jazz music in the 1920s or rock music in the later 20th century and they'd be indistinguishable. Just replace the mentions of jazz with social media topics and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference whether it was an article today or 100 years ago. "Health professionals" wringing hands about social media and jazz music in hilariously similar terms a century apart to a bunch of old people who are convinced the kids these days are going to shit because of the things they like to pay attention to.

https://daily.jstor.org/when-jazz-was-a-public-health-crisis...

Young people ARE SUPPOSED TO make poor decisions and be stressed out about it.

Middle aged people are supposed to clutch their pearls and wail about how this time it's different and truly awful (but what we did as kids was reasonable)

[phatfish]

But all the middle aged people are wasting their lives on the junk information addiction train as well. It's not some generational divide.

It's like a parent telling their kid not smoke, while they are still addicted and smoking in the garden themselves.

[edmundsauto]

Making bad decisions is only a net benefit if they can recover from them in time. Then it becomes a lesson and not an anchor. With addictive behaviors like drugs, nicotine included… making the early mistake ends up being a permanent mistake.

[pembrook]

Lots of bending over backwards and appeals to authority to rationalize an emotional feeling of "This time is different."

Again, every generation thinks that.

This time might be different. But it's probably not.

[placatedmayhem]

> Again, every generation thinks that.

> This time might be different. But it's probably not.

And this is an appeal to tradition.

This article[1] from 2024 discusses this the studies on this topic. It seems to me the results are mixed, but conclusions range between social media being neutral to harmful. There is a lot in that article, so it's worth a read.

[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/728739

[pembrook]

When appealing to the authority of academic studies, it's very important to be aware of the replication crisis for studies in the field of Psychology specifically, which is one of the worst offenders. Reproducibility has been found to be as low as 36% [1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project

[AppleBananaPie]

Letting people figure out cigarettes were bad for them took a very long time, and if social media is another form of addiction why not treat it how we treat other addictive products?

We could assume that this time is different and people, well children and minors specifically, will learn to avoid the addiction rather than banning them like alcohol, cigarettes and gambling.

This time might be different. But it's probably not.

[card_zero]

Books, for instance. Some people will read for five hours without pausing, and they can use three or four books every week.

[burnished]

Just nitpicking your first sentence: prohibition broadly works, just in the US (at least) it breeds negative externalities that don't seem worth it in balance.

[logifail]

> prohibition breeds desire

Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever.

My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.

Me: "Umm. You'll find out. When you get to it."

[wizzwizz4]

It's not that hard to drive a car! Unfortunately, physics motivates us to have unreasonable expectations of our drivers, like "doesn't drive off the road at 100km/h ever", and "avoids all obstacles all of the time". That's the hard part.

[colechristensen]

>My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.

I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard and if you have the attitude that things aren't hard that tends to be true. Don't set your kid up for failure.

[logifail]

> I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard [..]

I would hazard a guess you didn't meet that many other drivers on the farm (!)

> Don't set your kid up for failure

I'm doing my damndest not to ... but you have no idea ;)

[colechristensen]

Driving on the farm is actually a lot different, you usually have no more than one or two other drivers, but there's no rules. You have to know where everybody is, know what they intend to do, and know whether or not they know where you are and if they can see you.

it makes people much better and more patient drivers because you can't just rely on traffic laws you have to know the intention of somebody in a piece of machinery and if they plan to back up or where they're going and what's in their head... and how to communicate with hands or a yell

[eastbound]

Many countries have the driving license at 16. In France it’s accompanied by a parent; in USA it’s the full driving license (I’ve learnt at 13 and never had an accident for 30 years). 16 is ok if you withstand peer pressure.

[pempem]

Insurance and actuarial science is some of the most data-drivenwork we have. It is incredibly hard to withstand peer pressure and there is not much wrong in admitting what the data has already proven.

[tintor]

It doesn't look to be that hard to be a dentist.

You drill a dark spot on tooth and put some resin inside to fill it up. /s

[DocTomoe]

Teachers are not good indicators of measuring 'benefits', as they are both the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body, they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be, and they are also grading the success - which all too often comes down to compliance.

That's why if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are diametral or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test. If control group with smartphones gets consistently less points by graders who do not know them or their smartphone habits as compared to those who live in digital exile, we can talk. Until then, 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.

Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study. For me, that's an indication that the outrage is pearl-clutching.

[levistrauss]

How do you a double blind sutdy on smartphones? It seems to me that the group that would get smartphone would understand they’re the smartphone group, and the one without would know they don’t have one.

[DocTomoe]

Neither the test group nor the control group does have to know they are part of an experiment.

[ghtbircshotbe]

That's not how double blind studies work.

[DocTomoe]

You misunderstood my point.

I didn't claim the participants wouldn't know whether they own a phone - obviously they would. I said they wouldn’t know they’re in a study whose purpose is to correlate smartphone use with academic performance.

That's perfectly compatible with a double-blind setup:

* the *students* just think they’re taking standardized tests, not that the effects of their smartphone habits are being monitored;

* the *graders* don’t know whose tests belong to whom.

That’s about as "double blind" as social-science research gets. The commenter I replied to latched onto the literal impossibility of hiding the phone itself, not the intentional design of the experiment.

[Jap2-0]

> they are... the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body

> 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.

To clarify, do you think that phones or the removal of phones leads to these outcomes? Do you think that teachers like or dislike phones? Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?

> they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be

Some do. Are teachers the only ones?

> if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are [detrimental] or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test.... Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study.

I am not sure how you would set this up in a way that does not fall victim to a dozen confounding variables. There have been comparisons of standardized tests before and after phone bans, of course, but those also fall victim to similar statistical issues.

[DocTomoe]

> Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?

My point is that if you ask wagonmakers what they think about cars, you won't get many positive replies, but enthsiastic ones where city governments decide to go full Amish. New times and new technology necessitate changing the craft, and the methods of yesteryear, though trained into teachers, just don't work anymore. Change is scary.

[Sleaker]

You also can't have double-blind study on something both the participant and teacher know is present or not.... But that doesn't mean the study is invalid, it just means you have to account for it.

[rileymat2]

That’s interesting, what if they don’t know it is an experiment or that any study is being done?

School A bans them, school B does not. None of the teachers know a study is being done.

[eikenberry]

I did close to the same with my kids.. their PCs were in a common room, they got their first phone at 14 and it stayed at the downstairs charging station at night until 17. IMO it worked great and both our kids have a healthy relationship with their phones and tech in general.

[teekert]

I got my first smartphone at 23 (an HTC touch) and have an unhealthy relationship with my phone ;)

You’re lucky. Some kids do prefer the real world.

[eikenberry]

When I say they have a "healthy relationship with tech" it doesn't mean they don't use tech, they both are heavily into tech, but don't let it impact their life adversely. It is more a balance that works for that individual than a preference for real vs. tech.

[angiolillo]

I'm not sure how I feel about making it illegal, but it does benefit from some sort of collective action.

If none of your child's friends and classmates have cell phones yet, I'd strongly encourage establishing a smartphone pact with the other parents. Our community used http://waituntil8th.org pledges but even a shared spreadsheet would work.

[colechristensen]

One of the things that seems necessary is to make it illegal for a kid to use a phone in class before a certain age.

If you don't have that you get the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards.

[angiolillo]

> the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards

True, but that's why you don't do it alone. You need to talk with other parents and encourage them to talk to others until the majority of parents understand the risks and let the administration, school board, and teachers know that they have your support.

[dyauspitr]

All that local level stuff doesn’t work. As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone, the online world becomes vastly more interesting than the day to day.

[angiolillo]

> All that local level stuff doesn’t work

I can't speak to anyone else, but it seems to be working well enough in our town. The overwhelming majority of kids don't have cell phones until high school. That doesn't mean your kids won't beg you for a smartphone, it just means you can say "no" without socially isolating them.

> As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone

The point is to engage in collective action early enough that you can prevent these situations in the first place. Once a critical mass of kids have smartphones and their socialization and coordination moves to online spaces it becomes intensely isolating to be the only kid in a friend group without a smartphone.

[dyauspitr]

Collective action that is effective is hard to pull off in a million homes a million times around the country. Most people without extra time and resources are just not going to do it which at this point is a large part of the country. It’s like advocating for town level collective action on alcohol or age of consent. It’s way more sensible to just make it law.

[angiolillo]

> Collective action that is effective is hard to pull off in a million homes a million times around the country.

True, but it is significantly easier for a single motivated individual to pull it off in their own community than for them to change laws at the territory/state or country/federal level.

And even if your end goal is a universal law, it usually makes sense to start at the lowest level from a process perspective. Laws at the community level are often a precursor to laws at the territory/state level, just as territory/state laws can be a precursor to country/federal laws. In the USA, both alcohol and age of consent laws have gone through (and in some respects are still going through) this process. Bypassing this (admittedly slow) laboratory of democracy to implement novel laws directly at the country/federal level results in controversial laws that often have unintended consequences.

> It’s way more sensible to just make it law.

Centralizing laws can be sensible if you're somewhat confident that the people writing and enforcing those laws will behave sensibly.

[lukasm]

I fully agree. There should be a complete ban on social media and similar addictive platforms for those under 16, and a nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.) for users aged 16 to 18.

We basically give cigarettes to children.

[thw_9a83c]

> nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.)

I agree, and this is easy to implement. My kids have to hand over their phones every day before bedtime. I see no need for any institutional interference to implement such trivial policy in any family.

> We basically give cigarettes to children.

In my opinion, this is not a good comparison. Just because parents give their kids smartphones doesn't mean they want or force them to use social networks. Kids use them because it's socially acceptable, and they aren't warned against using them.

When I was a kid, my father sometimes asked me to go to the store to buy cigarettes for him. At that time, this was a socially acceptable thing for a parent to do. However, the problem of kids smoking cigarettes was almost non-existent. This is because every kid was strongly advised that only adults could do this. There would be consequences if you didn't obey this advice. By the way, I never started smoking.

[soulofmischief]

It is absurd to suggest that children should not be allowed to socialize online. Have we completely forgotten the internet we grew up on? I would be dead if I hadn't been able to make friends online.

[WhyOhWhyQ]

The internet we grew up on does not exist.

[ipaddr]

Kids socialize in video games now.

[WhyOhWhyQ]

When I was a kid I joined a random BBCode forum with a group of 10 people who taught me how to program. There were challenges some passionate person set up and he would give tips to me and a few others for free. We hung out all day. That's gone.

[soulofmischief]

We can create spaces like that again, and teach the younger generations, instead of antagonizing them, coddling them and banning them from congregating on the internet.

[lukasm]

> addictive platforms

[petre]

Why not vice tax the operators? Easier than using age verification schemes and giving them even more data, chat control etc. I'm thinking tiktok, meta and x. Want to operate in Denmark? The license will cost $N/person/month where the amount of people equals the country's population. It's basically a viewer tax.

[thw_9a83c]

> As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15.

I see no logic in the above statement. You gave your kid a smartphone when she was 14. By today's standards, that's very late, and it's basically just one year before Denmark's proposed ban on social media. You can ban your child from having a smartphone for an arbitrary amount of time, but they are a future adult. Adults use smartphones. You can either prepare your child for the potential negatives of smartphone use, or they will learn that through their own experience later. There's no escaping smartphones and social networks.

The only way to deal with this is to talk to your kids, warn them, and educate them. I gave my kids smartphones when they were 8 and 9 years old. Those phones were fully managed by me, and the only web pages they could access were their school pages and Wikipedia. Every year, I relaxed these restrictions and frequently talked to them about the dangers of social media. Now, they have almost fully unrestricted phones, and I don't think there's anything to worry about.

The problem with social media for kids and teens is constant comparison. Any kind of comparison, but predominantly about visual appearance. Most people will never win this fight, and I believe it is a parent's role to explain this to their children. Banning smartphones or social media won't save anyone from facing the reality later on.

[martin82]

"adults use smartphones"

Is this so?

I think of it like the time when Hong Kong was flooded with Opium.

"adults smoke opium"

If you find that too crass, there are countless other ways to put it:

"adults eat sugar"

"adults watch TV"

Just because everyone in the mainstream does something, DOES NOT mean that this is a good thing or a smart thing to do.

In fact, we can easily observe that the few adults who are at the absolute top of their game, the most skilled, the most wealthy, the most powerful... well guess what? They DO NOT use smartphones. They don't tweet. They don't have profiles anywhere.

Except for GPS directions, there is actually very very little actual need to use a smartphone. At work, you have a computer for access to Google. At home, you have a tablet or TV or books or a Kindle for media consumption.

You can just swipe a credit card for payments.

A smartphone is not at all needed to be a highly functioning adult.

In fact - it actually prevents you from ever unlocking your fullest potential by removing any chance for your brain to ever catch a breath and just be bored for half an hour and hear your own thoughts.

[thw_9a83c]

> "adults smoke opium"

That's a bad comparison. The main reason for importing opium to Hong Kong at that time was to use it as a sedative drug. Smartphones, on the other hand, have many legitimate uses for every user. The addiction to social networks is not a primary motivation to sell smartphones.

> A smartphone is not at all needed to be a highly functioning adult.

It depends on your definition of "highly functioning." You probably also don't need a Google account, a tablet, a TV, books, or a Kindle to be a highly functioning adult. I guess I can just go on. Arguing this way is meaningless.

When your kid reports that 90% of the other kids in their classroom already have a smartphone, you either give your kid a smartphone or make them feel like a loser in their social group.

Besides, having a smartphone doesn't mean having access to social networks, the open internet, or the ability to install any application. It's up to parents to properly configure parental controls for the respective age group.

> Except for GPS directions, there is actually very very little actual need to use a smartphone.

It conveniently replaces many things, usually in a more secure way. For example, paying with a phone is more secure than paying with a plastic card. And most importantly, kids listen to music on their smartphones, just as I used a Walkman/Discman in the past.

[greygoo222]

> In fact, we can easily observe that the few adults who are at the absolute top of their game, the most skilled, the most wealthy, the most powerful... well guess what? They DO NOT use smartphones. They don't tweet. They don't have profiles anywhere.

Terrence Tao regularly posts on Mastodon, and Geoffrey Hinton on X/Twitter. Sam Altman has a huge X presence. Elon Musk, no comment.

[raw_anon_1111]

Or parents could just take responsibility for their own children and not buy them a phone instead of outsourcing their parental responsibilities to the government.

[hdgvhicv]

So no social life for kids then?

It’s not 1995 any more. My 13 year old gets social contact doing things like playing Minecraft with people from school, organised via WhatsApp with group chats and then yelling about diamond swords and lava chickens or whatever.

There’s then the simple reality that most schools require smartphones for things like homework. It’s set on devices you can only access via an app. Ok maybe you could run some form of android emulator and maybe that works and maybe they can’t do the homework on the bus on the way home and instead can just stare out of the window, but then the teachers tell them to do something in class.

Then once they leave home at 18 and get introduced to something which has been banned yet is completely normal, they go overboard anyway.

[martin82]

The opposite. Those children who are barred to own phones are forced to actually seek out an actual social life.

The digital illusion of a "social life" that smartphones create is neither social, nor living.

[dr_kretyn]

Those very responsible would likely do that. But then you have a spectrum from "fully responsible but on occasions slip" to "not responsible at all". You can help some make the "good" decision and prevent others from making "bad" decisions. Hopefully those who grew up with healthier environments will have higher chances for becoming "fully responsible".

[raw_anon_1111]

It amazes me after seeing the corruption of the current government that people want to give it more power over our lives.

[dr_kretyn]

Seems we don't live in the same country and so we don't have the same "current government." Yes, if I were living in US, I wouldn't want to give the "current government" more power. Though, one might consider what is the cause and what is effect in the US political situation.

[all2]

My wife and I have this discussion on a regular basis. We want kids, but we've both had to navigate technology usage without any guide, and I've personally experienced how ruinous a smartphone can be.

We want to teach our children how to _responsibly_ use technology. We're still not sure what that looks like in detail, but the general agreement we've come to is something like 'no screens before age X'.

[pembrook]

Denmark's government has authoritarian aims and are one of the primary groups pushing chat control in the EU. I think you are falling for the "think of the children..." fallacy here.

This is a stepping stone towards further control elsewhere, especially once a framework for enforcement is in place (which nobody actually thinks about when emotionally reacting to feel-good ideas like this). How easy would it be to expand ID based age enforcement to tracking ALL online activity and cracking down on "non-approved" speech? No thanks. I'll handle parenting myself.

Also, if you don't care about the age number, and think social media is just objectively bad...why are you on this social media site? Isn't posting here the definition of hypocrisy...given you're supporting what you believe to be worse than cigarettes?

[nullify88]

I don't think HN is a social media site. The goals of a social media site is to keep you engaged for as long as possible with the assistance of various algorithms, dark patterns while your data is sold to businesses so they can have a slice of your attention pie via ads and supported content.

I dont feel as if any of that applies here. In fact HN has gotten further from a social media site by not displaying comment points.

[pembrook]

You can argue this, but if you hand over this authority to government, it will not be up to you.

Fundamentally this is an upvote driven social media platform no different from Reddit, which everyone agrees is social media.

If you live in Denmark, get ready to tie your State ID to your HN profile to login and hope that you don't say anything that would make the wrong official (or your employer) upset with you.

As we know from history, well-intentioned government laws have zero unintended consequences, always work perfectly every time, and are very easy to remove once they've been created...

[Reefersleep]

Happen to be a Dane and I fully agree with your sentiment. I happen to agree (I think) that keeping children away from social media on a large scale, to avoid social isolation for those who might opt out of choice, might be overall good for the children. But the means that will likely be required to do so are, like you say, essentially more steps towards mass surveillance. And like you say, laws that can be exploited so easily by a government in bad faith are so dangerous to allow into public law, even in times when exploitation seems unlikely, because they'll likely never be removed (hah) or even amended before it's too late. Like Chat Control (though it seems pretty clear to _me_ that that is set up for abuse to begin with). I'm so embarrassed we're spearheading that abomination.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

You mean like a continuously changing front page?

[phatfish]

"Old media" was (and is) quite heavily regulated. Not everywhere turned into an East German surveillance state.

The idea that governments are incapable of acting in the interests of their citizens is just a narrative designed to weaken public democratic institutions and hand power to the real authoritarians.

[ipaddr]

Old media the three networks censored so much and the rise of cable allowed a more open playing field where someone could swear or show an HBO gritty cop show that mirrored reality.

The world of variety shows died for a reason.

[Parka3458]

Whenever a politician wants you to think of the children, you should be alert. What we see Danish politicians push for is the same we see in England. I don't think Danish politicians are acting on their own, it is much more likely that this is a push from EU.

We see similar attacks on personal freedom with the new GDPR updates: https://noyb.eu/en/eu-commission-about-wreck-core-principles...

[oytis]

I would be pretty happy about social media being banned for everyone if not the immense possibilty for the government to abuse this law to disrupt undesired communication altogether.

[tuveson]

This website is social media.

[bluebarbet]

Technically true but I've found it to be less addictive than other text forums (like the R-site and Lemmy), let alone the algo-powered video-based abominations that normies are all hooked on.

I'm thinking that it comes down to one thing in particular: the absence of response notifications. There's only so much addiction you can get out of a page of text without so much as a bell icon.

[oytis]

This is true, it's also not devoid of addictiveness :)

But you know what I mean, right? The ones using intricate algorithms and tracking to keep you "engaged" and manipulate what you read and see

[tuveson]

I know what you mean, but I think the issue is not social media, but rather big corporations being shitty. PepsiCo makes addictive beverages that cause people develop to diabetes and heart disease, but that doesn't mean beverages should be illegal. I think it would be better to regulate or ban the specifically harmful things, rather than a blanket ban on something that is actually useful. And like you alluded to, banning social media could easily lead to a general crackdown on freedom of expression, journalism, etc, now that it is the primary way people communicate with one another.

I'll also add that I'm not specifically opposed to banning minors from using social media. It would probably also be better if it was illegal for children to buy their own soda tbh.

[kayodelycaon]

What exactly do you mean by “social media”?

There are a lot of communities built around things like Discord and Telegram. IRC existed long before these.

There are many websites that allow you to post pictures and have other people comment on them. DeviantArt pre-dates the vast majority of modern apps.

There are also vast numbers of iterations on forums.

At what point should you prevent people from finding and talking to each other?

[SunshineTheCat]

Crazy to think how less government would need to act like a mom if there were one or two parents out there who were familiar with the word "no."

[ceejayoz]

I, too, was a really great parent before having children.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-goes-viral-for-tweeting-fr...

> Dorothy, who runs an Ariana Grande fan account, was suffering through a typical teenage nightmare: Her mom took away her phone. But the resourceful teen didn't let that stop her from communicating with her followers. First, she started using Twitter on her Nintendo DS, a handheld video game device.

> Sometime after finding her DS, it was taken again, so Dorothy started tweeting from yet another connected device: her fridge. "My mom uses it to google recipes for baking so I just googled Twitter," she told CBS News.

[yard2010]

She would make a great entrepreneur one day, if she manages to survive the mental illness that comes with social media.

[GaryBluto]

I doubt this is true. I doubt that the Nintendo (3)DS web browser would be sufficient to post on Twitter, even in 2019.

[ceejayoz]

There was a whole mobile.twitter.com simplified interface for devices like that. Removed in 2020.

Plus this: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Support/Nintendo-3DS-2DS/Usag...

> As of 25 October 2022, it is no longer possible to use Nintendo 3DS Image Share or Wii U Image Share to post images on Facebook and Twitter.

[radu_floricica]

That's... pretty awesome?

And I'm pretty sure she did it just for laughs. I also built a listening device to hear what my mom was saying when I wasn't there. But it was too boring to me to actually listen to the conversations, I don't think I ever actually did it. But I did enjoy immensely setting it up.

[eszed]

That's the hacker spirit!

[barbazoo]

If you live in isolation, totally! We live in a civilization so we have to coordinate and compromise to get along.

[mikkupikku]

Let's do away with the laws requiring shops to check ID before selling cigarettes. After all, a parent can simply tell their child not to smoke cigarettes and that's clearly good enough, right? All in the name of less government, which is clearly the most important priority here.

[ipaddr]

That system has massive holes. Using convenience store employees many recent immigrants to be the gatekeeper to cigarettes for your kids seems foolish. Who trusts that last line of defense? If a kid fails at once location another location will succeed and there are no punishment for attempting to purchase underage.

[card_zero]

You make a persuasive case, but nicotine is genuinely addictive. Something to do with releasing stored glucose and substituting for food, and causing irritability on what I take to be a physiological level on withdrawal. Otherwise I'd agree.

[benregenspan]

But in this context, is it so important to distinguish between whether something is physiologically addictive vs. just seriously habit-forming? Except for substances where withdrawal is genuinely life-threatening, the practical difference seems to be in degree, not kind. Nicotine withdrawal causes irritability, but (I know having experienced both) so can breaking a bad social media habit.

(And it seems like there's a physiological basis to both cases, it's just that one involves endogenous chemicals and the other doesn't)

[josephg]

If all the other kids are on social media all the time, it makes it much harder to keep your kids off it. Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online? Would you want that for your kids?

Bans like this make much more sense at a community level. Not an individual level.

[SunshineTheCat]

The idea that it's "hard" therefore we need government to save us is exactly why the program itself will never work. The problem is much deeper than law or government can fix.

[josephg]

You don’t need the government. Just some form of collective action.

I know of plenty of alternative communities & schools in which all the parents agreed to keep their kids away from phones until they were 15 or something. Great! If you try to roll something like this out to state schools, it looks like “the government”. But it’s the same idea.

I don’t understand the hatred and mistrust of government in this thread. The government protects us from lead in our food, from underage drug use, unsafe roads and lots of other stuff. Why not social media too?

[jmye]

> Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online?

I mean, who cares what the kid wants? It's your job as a parent to be a parent. Sometimes that means telling your kid no, even if that means they're not your best friend for a day or two.

> Would you want that for your kids?

Unequivocally, yes. Social media is cancer. I'd prefer my daughter not be pathologically depressed and my son not turn into a little hateball because of Meta's shitty algorithms. I have no idea why this is even a question, aside from the pure cowardice of Millennial parents.

None of this to comment on GP's suggestion that we don't need laws, or the idea that we shouldn't do this societally anyways.

[ipaddr]

They will move back to smaller communities away from the public or parents.

[pembrook]

Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level. This is terrible "we'll make it up on volume" logic.

It's also the justification used for some of the dumbest laws in history.

Think about what level of enforcement is going to be required for this (National IDs tied to online activity), and then think about the fact that Denmark is one of the main governments pushing chat control. Now start to think about how, once this tracking/enforcement scheme is created, that it might be expanded to things outside the scope of this law.

Like communism, this idea sounds good in theory, but is going to turn into an authoritarian nightmare in practice.

[josephg]

> Bans that don't make sense at an individual level do not suddenly make sense at a community level.

Social media itself doesn’t make sense at an individual level. If you’re the only one on a discord server, it’s not much of a party.

Personally I’m happy for some countries trying this. Let’s run the experiment and see how it goes. I too worry about the age verification system. Let’s see if the mental health of young people actually improves and by how much.

Rest assured, if the US couldn’t take collective action in the face of a global pandemic, there’s no way a law like this will come for America.

[tjpnz]

Then give parents the tools they need! I can reliably black hole all social media on my home network, and can configure DNS on their phones to do similar. A lot of that knowledge I picked up working in tech, but no tech company is going to offer such robust solutions to parents.

[Barrin92]

For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids. More importantly the constant appeal to the responsibility of parents misses that this is a collective action problem.

The reason most parents give up to regulate their children's online activity is because the children end up isolated if an individual household prevents their kid from socializing online. All the other kids are online, therefore switching individually ends in isolation. What might be beneficial for each household is unworkable as long as there is no collective mechanism. (which is the case for virtually every problem caused by social networks)

[SaltyBackendGuy]

> For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids

This one hit me recently. My 4th grader has a friend who is on tik-toc and has a phone. Me, living in a bubble, where other parents I've met are terrified of social media and phones for their kids, was shocked when I met the mom and she wasn't aware of all the negative impact of social media. But, like with smokers, you can tell them it's bad for you but it's up to them to quit.

It's absolutely a collective action problem.

[sfpotter]

So... you don't have kids, I take it?

[mtoner23]

oh yeah, children famously do what their parents are told. especially when it comes to interacting with their friends. and they never are more adept at understanding technology and circumventing parental controls.

[yard2010]

Do you have children? You are correct. But it's easier said than done.

[exssss]

Except it's not so easy, because there's social pressure on the kids to use them to fit in with the group.

[isaacremuant]

How about you parent your kid instead of trying to get the government to parent everyone else's? What the hell is you and everyone else's problem who want to get into other families' business.

Disgusting intrusiveness and authoritianism.

[trey-jones]

A late reply to your outrage: I said I'm in favor, I'm not trying to parent your kids, but the effects of putting a phone (or similar) into most peoples' hands is easily observable and marked. I'm not limiting this to children. I observe it in my father who is 75 and I never would have imagined that he would be addicted to his phone. I observe it in myself, despite taking what most would call extreme precautions against phone addiction.

And I especially observe in my children that whatever limit I set, they will use all of it before they do anything else. I observe kids with their chins on their chest looking at a phone and I know it's not physically healthy. All I said is it's worse than cigarettes (meaning if cigarettes are regulated, phones might outta be too), and I stand by that.

[Aeolun]

It’s just easier to do some things if they’re prohibited by law. If you don’t want children to smoke, not selling them ciggarettes is a great first step.

[raw_anon_1111]

All the statistics I’ve seen show that 25-30% of teenagers smoke weed.

It’s but the governments job to make you out not to be the bad guy to your kids.

[Aeolun]

It’s not their job, but if it needs to be done anyway I don’t mind them doing it for me.

And smoking weed is a hell of a lot healthier than social media.

[t0lo]

Far worse.

[skapadia]

1000% agree.

[porsager]

If you're a parent then act like one. You're perfectly able to enact that ban yourself - why do you need the governments help?

[owisd]

you can take a teen’s phone off them and they can just walk into a store and buy an inexpensive second hand handset and use the WiFi from a local cafe.

[JoshTriplett]

And if they do it with their own money, it's their phone.

Children prior to 18 are not subhuman. If you're old enough to buy your own phone, you're old enough to decide whether and how to use it.

[Der_Einzige]

The idea of treating under 18s like they are human is extremely undesirable in the USA because it among other things opens up a lot of doctors to be held accountable for their participation in the mass mutilation of baby boys. It also holds a whole lot of physically abusive parents to a standard where their children could call CPS and get their parents in legal trouble for corporal punishment.

Of course, these are indeed good things in worlds that don't endorse physical violence as the primary method to enforce control. This is why Finland his tail docking, ear cropping, animal crating, corporal punishment, circumcision, etc bans and why the US South is so ruthless.

[LEDThereBeLight]

This is unhinged.

[lurking_swe]

what did i just read

[Der_Einzige]

You are also impacted by the real life ketar SCP object that keeps the masses not caring that millions of baby boys in the USA get mutilated shortly after birth.

I am not. One day, that object will be found, shut down and destroyed. I hope you eventually see the error in your current sensibilities.

[phatfish]

Are you a parent?

[EarthMephit]

You could make that exact same argument for alcohol, cigarettes, prescription medication - The reasons are the same.

[raw_anon_1111]

And because of the laws, it has stopped children from smoking, drinking and abusing drugs. The entire war on drugs has been such a success.

[phatfish]

Of course age laws have worked. Adults are the smokers, drinkers and drug abusers.

Do you want a situation with kids being drunk in school because they can just go to a shop during break and get a bottle of Vodka, no questions asked?

[raw_anon_1111]

Really?

30%+ of teenagers smoke weed

https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/everything-you-and-your-...

Statistics for drinking

https://www.responsibility.org/alcohol-statistics/underage-d...

Even when I was in school in the 90s high schoolers were sneaking and smoking during school

[buu700]

To be fair, the "War on Tobacco" has actually been a huge success[1]. I've been saying for years that we should end the War on Drugs in its current form and extend tobacco policy to other drugs. If you're old enough to drink, smoke, and get shipped off to a warzone, who is anyone else to tell you that you don't deserve the freedom to buy a bottle of pharmaceutical-grade heroin at CVS and shoot it up in the privacy of your own home?

But because we collectively insist on infantilizing ourselves, hundreds of billions of dollars per year are redirected from the pharma industry to black market criminal syndicates. Instead of funding medical research and stock buybacks, we're actively choosing to fund global chaos and mass atrocities. We could stop tomorrow, and it would cost us nothing. In fact, it would save the US billions of dollars in annual losses at all levels of government and generate billions of dollars in annual tax revenue, all of which could be used to fund things like addiction treatment services, law enforcement, and border security.

1: https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/tobacco...

[raw_anon_1111]

And it’s been replaced with more people smoking weed.

https://nida.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/2024/08/canna...

[buu700]

That's great to hear, although they really should prefer vaporization, sublingual administration, and edibles/potables to smoking.

[arcfour]

As a parent, you should be able to parent your child, rather than having the government arbitrarily and capriciously do so on your behalf, and for everyone else's kids, too.

As someone who got my first BlackBerry at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or led to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone.

(Funny anecdote, but I didn't even figure out how to sign up for Facebook until I was 11-12, because I wouldn't lie about my age and it would tell me I was too young. Heh.)

[beloch]

First, if some parents let their kids use social media and some don't, all kids will eventually use it. You can't cut kids off from social spaces their peers are using and expect them to obey.

Second, this move by Denmark reflects a failure to regulate what social media companies have been doing to all their users.

e.g. What has Meta done to address their failures in Myanmar?[1] As little as was legally possible, and that was as close to nothing as makes no difference. More recently, Meta's own projections indicate 10% of their ad revenue comes from fraud[2]. The real proportion is almost certainly higher, but Meta refuses to take action.

Any attempts to tax or regulate American social media companies has invited swift and merciless response from the U.S. government. To make matters worse, U.S. law makes it impossible for American companies to respect the privacy of consumers in non-U.S. markets[3].

Put it all together, and American social media is something that children need to be protected from, but the only way to protect them is to cut them off from it entirely. This is the direct result of companies like Meta refusing to respond to concerns in any way other than lobbying the U.S. government to bully other nations into accepting their products as is.

Good on Denmark. I hope my own country follows suit.

------------

[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[2]https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

[3]https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...

[HeinzStuckeIt]

Cultures around the world have barred children from certain social places until they go through a rite of passage that the whole society, not just the parents, recognize.

[arcfour]

Yes, cultures around the world have done this through parents parenting their child successfully, and not through arbitrary government overreach telling you how to parent.

[HeinzStuckeIt]

Not really. The ideal you are describing, where there is no role for the community in regulating public spaces outside the household and determining when young people can enter them, strikes me as highly unusual historically and geographically. It’s an example of that streak of libertarianism that took off from early American internet culture and hardly exists outside internet pontificating.

[dlisboa]

Social media in the early 2000s is nothing like today.

[arcfour]

You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry—appropriate timing for a government to make a law to save kids from the evils of it.

[mikkupikku]

> You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry

You're either operating with an anachronistic notion of what constitutes social media, or you're very out of touch with the public. Not sure which one.

The "myspaces" and "facebooks" are trending down, but other forms of social media like tiktok, discord, reddit, youtube, etc are alive and well, still hooking kids young as they always have.

[stOneskull]

i think the ban on youtube accounts will just be mildly inconvenient, like not being able to subscribe to channels, or chat in a livestream. they can't ban just watching youtube without an account.

[knollimar]

I feel like grouping discord as something hooking kids after we teliably took their third spaces is problematic.

You wouldn't have called the equivalent when you were a kid problematic or even had a word for it. It's often just how they communicate with friends.

I feel as though algorithms dedicated to grabbing as much attention as possible are a major problem (youtube, tiktok), while notification checking on public spaces is also similarly an issue.

But is it so hard to teach your kids how to internet? Id advocate for restrictions but banning seems silly.

[zurfer]

The issue is rather the algorithmic feed optimized for grabbing our attention. It's definitely addictive and should be regulated like other drugs.

Give people technology, but let's have an honest conversation about it finally. As a adult it's already hard to muster enough self control to not keep scrolling.

[arcfour]

Okay, so explain this to your child, just like you tell them they shouldn't do drugs. Are there not people who are sober by choice? The only thing preventing you from going and smoking crack right now is most certainly not because it's illegal, but because you make a choice not to do so, knowing the negative effects it has on you.

I don't scroll social media. When I was 14-17, sure. But then I lost interest, much like most of my peers did.

(I do probably refresh HN more than I should though, but I think that's probably the least evil thing I could do compulsively...)

[AOsborn]

The part you’re missing is that the decision to be online isn’t like choosing to do drugs. It’s closer to deciding to go to parties and socialise at all.

Social media for teens is ubiquitous and where your peers connect. It’s being included in your social group, not opt-in thrill seeking.

Most teens will have multiple accounts for various networks - private accounts for their friends, and then again for closer friends. Or they use apps like Discord that parents have no visibility into at all. There is a lot that most parents never see.

For better or worse.

[bathtub365]

Over what time scale are you suggesting that social media is dying?

[arcfour]

I don't think it will ever disappear, but it certainly plays a less outsized role now than it used to, and it's not exactly an industry I see huge growth in.

What we define as "social media" I think is important. I don't really consider things like TikTok to be "social media" even if there is both a social component and a media component, since the social part is much smaller in comparison to the media part. People aren't communicating on TikTok (I think), which is what people concerned about "being left out by their peers" would be referring to. This type of "social" media probably is not dying, but I think is likely stagnant or will become stagnant in growth, while traditional "social media" continues to regress over the next decade.

[mrtesthah]

The problem is the kid feeling left out at school when they're the only one without a smartphone and can't participate in their friends' activities.

[arcfour]

...and this needs to be solved with a law? Kids feeling left out over something well and truly inconsequentual?

[angiolillo]

Not necessarily a law, but it requires some form of collective action.

I highly recommend discussing a smartphone pact such as http://waituntil8th.org with fellow parents before anyone in their friend group gets a cell phone.

[GaryBluto]

> Find out why smartphones need to be delayed in your home (emphasis mine)

Do parents actually fall for this drivel?

[foobarian]

Who needs laws! Let's also let them all smoke cigarettes too then while we're at it.

[mothballed]

Lol you can order a cigar or pipe tobacco on the internet completely legally without any ID check. Most people don't know this. You can do it with wine, too, for the vast majority of the US. It's not really a problem.

[cycomanic]

I suspect you need a credit card though? Can kids sign credit card contracts without parent consent in the US?

Moreover just because that laws and regulations are applied inconsistently in the US (and we are talking about Denmark here), does not mean we should completely do away with them.

[dmje]

Yeh, no.

Parents are doing what they can, but it inevitably comes down to “but my friend x has it so why can’t I have it” - so all and any help from government / schools is a good thing.

This is so, so, so obviously a nasty, dangerous technology - young brains should absolutely not be exposed to it. In all honesty, neither should older ones, but that’s not what we’re considering here.

[arcfour]

"Because I'm your parent, and I said no."

Do you buy your kids a toy every time you go to the store? Do you feed them candy for dinner?

[davzie]

Neither of those examples result in social ostracism from peers.

[arcfour]

I think you are massively overstating how important it is to the kids that they have a social media account. How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?

[AOsborn]

With respect, you’re very out of touch.

Connecting online is the primary social space for many kids nowadays, not in person.

Some parents (or those without kids) have a bit of a naive view and think ‘social media’ and just imagine Facebook, instagram etc - things they understand and that don’t provide much connection.

The kids connect using private accounts, completely different apps, or even just inside the chat of other apps like games, if that is where your specific group hangs out.

[dmje]

With all due respect, I suspect you don’t have teen kids. Almost their entire social life is organised online.

[josephg]

> How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?

Easy. If half the conversation happens online, and your kid wasn’t part of that, they’d constantly need to be “filled in” when they got to school.

Imagine if your company used slack but you weren’t on it. You could still go to all the meetings, but there would have been conversations held and decisions made that you wouldn’t even know about. You would feel like you were on the out. Banning an individual kid from social media would be just the same.

[thatguy0900]

Comparing the internet we grew up with and the modern internet where a army of psychologists have been unleashed with the express intent to massively increase addiction to everything they touch is very foolish

[arcfour]

Demanding a law because you are unable to tell your kids "no" makes you the bigger fool.

[thatguy0900]

This is not about telling kids no. This is about companies (and foreign hostile governments!) worth billions of dollars openly studying how best to prey on children's minds. There are things that are just poisonous to society as a concept.

[ctoth]

You gonna at least gesture at one of these Cognitohazards that are so poisonous we can't even discuss them? Because I admit to being curious!

[GaryBluto]

> You gonna at least gesture at one of these Cognitohazards that are so poisonous we can't even discuss them

I would show you but you'd need your shatter goggles.

[mothballed]

The same people demanding the anti-smart phone laws will rat your ass out the second your kid is spotted walking alone, playing independently, etc. They want to put you in a catch-22 situation.

The real problem here is way less people are parents or people that have no idea what parenting is like, so they don't understand the practicalities of raising children so they come up with the dumbest laws possible and then lord it over you with the full weigh of the state so they can pretend to be parents but with none of the responsibility and all of the smug moral superiority.

[hobom]

Jonathan Haidt, the most prominent psychologist pushing for restrictions on social media use for children, is also the most prominent proponent of letting kids play and roam more freely. So no, those are not the same people.

[thatguy0900]

The people doing that are themselves victims of social media and news fear mongering and engagement maxxing

[cycomanic]

As someone who sold their first joint at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or let to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone.

/s

Absolute statements like yours rarely work, because the discussion is hardly ever about absolutes and more about where to draw the line.