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by szszrk 11 days ago
There are more angles on this, not exactly easy. The easiest way to make a kid to do something, is to forbid that very thing.

If you are the one cutting it off, while your kid's whole school is very much up to date with latest brainrot content, then you still lose.

Your kid is the outcast, while it will be exposed to it anyway, through peers. Meanwhile you are the bad one, making it much harder to have an actual conversation on the topic.

I am vividly interested in this, as my kid is growing up. I hear how a bit older kids play and what they talk about on the playground and feel that I have very little time left to react (kid is still just now starting to show interest in phones and such). A ban on all social media for kids would make this so much easier.

1 comments

You're a parent. Be the bad guy if you feel it's right.

Wanting the government to levy a society-wide information tracking system because you don't want your child to be upset at you is incredibly selfish.

I mean, we already have corporations levying a society-wide information tracking system that they just sell the government information from, so there's that.

With this said, if the government doesn't ban cellphones/tablets at school all of your blocking kids at home from electronics is fucking useless.

My daughter pulled this crap as a teenager where we banned her from social media... so she got an old tablet from a friend and setup all new accounts. It was only months later that we caught her at it.

Kids are way more resourceful than you think.

Of course they pull that kind of crap. Teens are often plenty smart, just generally naive to consequences.

They'll do this kind of stuff even if we require spybotting the entire internet. Kids already lean on sketchy older siblings or friends or stolen/fake credentials to acquire booze illegally. Getting them to sign up for and verify online accounts would be next. Or paying/doing favors for random sketchy adults. Or buying them online, as the original article mentioned.

Anything more than the equivalent of "mark this device account as being PG/PG-13/Adult" isn't buying more security for kids, just more intrusion into the lives of everyone else, while pushing access into a black market that will create new dangers for the kids entering into it.

A device flag enabling an http header indicating a device account is "PG-13" could still allow a kid to sign up to non-adult sites online, but then have appropriate restrictions on usage etc applied to the accounts. Kids can access their friends, maybe the media cuts off during school hours, but they don't feel the need to escape the system, and are more likely to stay within it.

Requiring invasive overbearing authoritarian systems be put in place with the excuse of saving the children won't accomplish the stated goal, just the unstated one.

Your response is incredibly ignorant. You force your kid to be excluded if they don't have a phone. They're disconnected from friends, group chat, and common experiences.

You don't have a problem with age verification for drivers license, or buying a gun, or buying alcohol. Why is social media so different?

> Why is social media so different?

Because of what that ban entails that the others don't.