[somenameforme]

I'm about as cynical and open to conspiracy as anybody, but I strongly disagree on this one. Social media is a cancer on society as a whole, let alone children who are still trying to figure out who they are. It serves absolutely no positive purpose that couldn't be done at least as well through private chat groups and the like.

I will absolutely be barring my children from social media. I fully expect them to use it or similar sorts of stuff behind my back, but that's okay. It will then be hidden and scarce, which limits the overall negative consequences it can have. Being in a country where this is enforced at a national level is extremely appealing to me.

[applfanboysbgon]

> I will absolutely be barring my children from [drugs]. I fully expect them to use it or similar sorts of stuff behind my back, but that's okay. It will then be hidden and scarce, which limits the overall negative consequences it can have.

If you make a simple substitution, it becomes clear that "limits the overall negative consequences it can have" in no way logically follows from "behind my back" and "it will then be hidden". Draconian bans are, simply put, extremely lazy parenting, and not only lazy, but ineffectual. All the more so when it's something as relatively innocuous as social media, where your children will be actively shunned by their peers and come to resent you while still finding ways to use it. If you want good outcomes for your children, play an active role in their life and guide them positively instead of thinking you can just say "don't do X" and that will magically be the end of all problems.

[somenameforme]

In a country where it is banned, there will be no 'normal' social pressure to use it. There might be some fringe pressure to use it, akin to drugs in countries where such is banned, except probably far less. Drugs are at least enjoyable, while basically everybody rates social media as a cancer - especially children, yet they continue to use it through a mixture of addiction and learned dependence.

And no the effects are not "relatively innocuous." It's having a catastrophically negative effect on children, especially girls. Rather than cherry picking one of the zillion studies to support this I'll just link to a search [1], because the evidence is not ambiguous.

[1] - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=effects+of+social+media...

[applfanboysbgon]

Cigarettes were banned for children and are extremely unenjoyable and yet there was still tremendous social pressure to smoke them (before vaping became cooler). I think that plenty of people clearly enjoy social media, meanwhile. Social media is much like alcohol - not so toxic in responsible dosages, but susceptible to abuse. Even if you don't like social media, it's borderline mandatory to use it in order to form social connections when everyone else is using it. Perhaps that's not a concern for an adult of child-rearing age, who already has their social network established and can snub their nose at social media, but I believe it would be profoundly damaging to a child's social development in this day and age.

Psychology, incidentally, is a completely bunk field of fake science, with somewhere between 2/3rds and 3/4ths of papers being unreplicable. I am highly amenable to applying research and statistics to inform decision-making, but it does you no good if you're using faulty research and statistics. Using the 'authority' of a bad field as a bludgeon to avoid actually making your argument is not compelling. I suggest articulating a case yourself rather than reaching for an article dump as though it proves you objectively correct, unless your goal is simply to reinforce your own biases and assure yourself of the correctness of your decisions, their actual correctness be damned.

Also, I'd note there's kind of two different points of discussion here. One is "banning it for my child even though it's legal" and one is a "national ban". Even if you support the latter and believe it would have a positive outcome, that does not mean it will necessarily have a positive outcome to still ban your children when all of their peers are definitely using it. As far as I see it, a national ban is a complete non-starter for positive outcomes because, regardless of whether it has or doesn't have a positive outcome on a child's social environment, for it to be enforceable requires acceding to a surveillance state in which internet usage is directly tied to your government ID, at which point the negative outcomes for society outweigh any possible positive outcome for children by 100 to 1. You do not want to give government complete and total control of the means of communication, I promise you. Even if you trust your current government to not abuse it, once they have that control it's never becoming undone, so you must also trust that every future government in your and your children's lifetimes will also not abuse the uncontrolled power they've been given -- and if you have that level of unconditional trust in any society, I have a mighty fine bridge to sell you, a real beauty it is.

[somenameforme]

You're basically saying that you will simply reject all evidence to the contrary of your own personal opinion which is supported by absolutely nothing, contradicted by essentially all evidence that we do have, and is completely out of touch with reality. Cigarette bans were highly effective. Even prior to vaping cigarettes were basically dead. The CDC gives current total tobacco use at 5-10% and it's certainly not the 'cool kids', but moreso the weirdos. [1] They certainly have influence in their own tiny cliques, but that's nothing like "tremendous social pressure."

And as an aside, the whole point of me linking to a search of all studies that the results are not only replicable, but universal. Social media is just horrible for society, especially children, everywhere.

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/php/data-statistics/youth-data-t...

[applfanboysbgon]

> your own personal opinion which is supported by absolutely nothing,

My personal opinion is supported by life experiences and rational thinking. If all you can do is outsource your thoughts to other people with a 75% miss rate, of which 25% of studies came to the opposite effect when attempted to be replicated, you are simply a tool to be used by propagandists. Let's not forget that psychology is a field that is as likely to find a consistent effect for psychic powers - literal psychic powers - as it is anything else[1]. Those studies are not 'evidence' of anything. The bar is on the floor when it comes to the level of scientific rigor exhibited in the field.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...

[logicchains]

>Social media is a cancer on society as a whole, let alone children who are still trying to figure out who they are. It serves absolutely no positive purpose that couldn't be done at least as well through private chat groups and the like.

Social media provides decentralized information transmission, so people (kids are people) are able to obtain information without it first being filtered through a small cabal of self-interested media corporations and governments. If there was no social media, the Iran war would probably have overwhelming popular support like the Iraq one and there'd already be US boots on the ground.

[10xDev]

There isn't US boots on the ground because that would be absolute suicide, have you followed anything that's been going on? It is an asymmetric war they cannot win.

And yes "decentralised" meaning we have personal echo-chambers or a swarm of Elon sycophant accounts with inflated number of views and bots mass liking each extremist post. LLMs are going to put astroturfing campaigns on steroids.

[matips]

The way how corporations like Meta implemented modern social medias filter information as well. It does it in a different way than TV, but personalized information bubbles are important arguments again using "social" medias.

[ShinTakuya]

Except all major social media sites are also corporations with their own interests. I'd rather the business model of traditional media that rides on journalistic reputation to a recommendation feed where the only job of it is to keep you on the site, especially when said feed can easily be manipulated.

No media organisation is perfect but your description of social media as some nirvana of decentralised truth is very questionable.

[pjc50]

On the other hand, without social media, there might not be a Trump government in the first place.

[AnonymousPlanet]

Just because you have a reason to agree with something doesn't mean there's no other intention for it.

Actually, the more emotionally invested you are in it, the less likely it is for you to question the motives behind it.

[somenameforme]

The overwhelming majority of people, independent of political ideology, support banning social media for children. [1] That's just a random poll - you can find a ton, they all say the same thing, and pretty much everywhere across the world. Seeing a conspiracy or ulterior motive with politicians doing something that the overwhelming majority of people want speaks to the state of modern governance and governments, but is nonetheless unjustified.

[1] - https://yougov.com/en-gb/daily-results/20251202-12c49-2

[dv_dt]

What is it about magically turning 17 that makes social media "safe"?

If these laws were about integrity in social media, there would be disclosure laws for paid time or content creation, disclosure of who pays for ads or time of creators. This would equally protect adults and kids instead of dubious age laws

[somenameforme]

Nothing. It's a cancer on all of society, but modern societies generally agree that it's desirable to engage in a reasonable standard of protection for children while also allowing adults to engage in vice or undesirable behaviors if they so desire.

[dv_dt]

I disagree with this standard of prevention, and privacy advocates disagree. It is not a reasonable standard

[somenameforme]

I don't find this particularly compelling. I am a privacy advocate, but you already surrender such on modern social media thanks to the requirement of linking your telephone number to your account, and most (all?) major sites already require identification when accounts are flagged for reasons at their own whimsical and arbitrary discretion. To say nothing of how the vastly overwhelming majority of people use social media.

Beyond this, advocating for privacy is not some prime directive that overrides everything else. The more fundamental issue is that social media is a complete cancer on society. Of course so are alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and many other vices, but the difference between social media and those other vices are that the others are age constrained. Age constraining is not only a completely reasonable standard, but exactly how we treat near to everything else of a similar, or arguably even lesser damaging, profile as social media.

[dv_dt]

For alcohol, tobacco, gambling and many other vices, there are a wealth of other regulations that the supplier side must comply with - including labeling of content, warning labels, tests for amounts of alcohol, ingredients disclosure, enforcement of driving under the influence, regular audits of inventory, added taxation, and public health campaigns.

None of this is being proposed in concert with the age laws for social media. The age limits are the least effective part of the control of adult alcohol and cigarette consumption.

[somenameforme]

You're arguing somewhat incoherently, because what you're saying now has relatively little to what you said before. In any case, you're having an anachronism. Age restrictions on cigarettes came as early as 1883 in the US. Other restrictions started coming nearly a century later. The same is true of other vices.

Age limits are not the end, but the beginning, of regulation of a vice. In reality I don't expect social media will pass the test of time. It's just such a horrible industry. Australia's age restrictions have barely come online and people are already reporting major positive improvements with 43% already observing more in-person socialization, 38% reporting better parent-child relations, and more. [1] And again that's all within the ~6 months since the ban went live!

The Flynn Effect ('raw' IQ increasing over time) actually reversed in most of the Western world sometime in the 90s. In other words people today have a lower raw IQ than those of previous generations, and that's after controlling for immigration and other obvious factors. Australia's measured decline began in 2003, the same year MySpace was launched. I'd hypothesize that within a decade we'll see, if not an increase or stabilization, then at least a sharp reduction in decline rates. I suspect the oft said comment that social media makes people stupid isn't figurative or hyperbolic, but in fact quite literal!

[1] - https://yougov.com/articles/54334-new-yougov-research-shows-...

[leonidasrup]

Social media now is very different from social media 10 years ago. Back then it was about social interaction with friend, peers, now it's about advertisement, maximizing engagement.

"Algorithms that track user engagement to prioritize what is shown tend to favor content that spurs negative emotions like anger and outrage. Overall, most online misinformation originates from a small minority of “superspreaders,” but social media amplifies their reach and influence."

https://www.apa.org/topics/journalism-facts/how-why-misinfor...