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by iamthemonster
64 days ago
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I've got a 12 year old in Australia and the social media ban has been amazing. Since the algorithm-distraction-machine is parasitical on users' social network, the kids just have little interest in it because their social network is not there. They aree making phone calls to each other and riding round each other's houses on bikes. Older teenagers who already has social media accounts have generally found workarounds, but the young teenagers are just not joining up. It's been an excellent success story of collective action overcoming the harmful effects of private profit-motivated interests. The tech giants literally could not care less about the mental health of some teenagers in Australia, but their parents do. It's easy to simply ban one teenager from using social media but removing a teenager from their social network is a date worse than death from their perspective. So once the parasite of social media has infected teenagers' social network and established itself, teenagers were really lumped with the choice of "do I lose contact with my friends or continue using this distraction machine specifically designed to get me hooked?" and they will always choose the latter. I was skeptical initially, but having experienced the effects, I'm incredibly impressed that for once we have put a red line against foreign private companies harming our citizens. |
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Not enough for you to stop using it though eh? Hacker news, sorry to tell you, is a "distraction machine specifically designed to get (you) hooked". So are books but that's a good kind of distraction obviously.