[Gigachad]

The harms of smartphones and social media are about as far from imaginary as it could get. The data is screaming at us.

We will look back at handing kids phones with instagram like giving kids cigarettes and think wtf were we doing.

[AngryData]

And I find that harm to be far less than the harm caused by identifying everybody all the time and censoring topics to people based on government provided tokens.

[kelseyfrog]

Therapy and meditation is an effective remedy for this kind of suffering.

[brigandish]

A dystopian state?

[rpdillon]

You're restating the problem, but the issue is with the proposed solution. Creating a surveillance state in an attempt to improve society is myopic. We know a surveillance apparatus will be abused to oppress people (it's already happening in the US: we have stories all the way back to the NSA/Snowden, but just last week Flock cameras were being abused to stalk ex-girlfriends, the list is endless), so pushing for that particular approach creates a bigger problem (authoritarian surveillance state) than it solves (some kids watching porn and tiktok).

Edgar Friendly got it right, back in 1993:

> See, according to Cocteau's plan, I'm the enemy. Cause I like to think, I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind if guy who wants to sit in a greasy spoon and think, "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon, butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in a non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jello all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to. Okay, pal? I've seen the future, you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sittin' around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake singing "I'm an Oscar-Meyer Wiener".

[echelon]

Are you sure it's just kids?

In dealing with the ills of social media, you do what you do with every other negative externality - you tax it. At least the parts of it you don't like.

Designing privacy, freedom, and liberty destroying mechanisms is not the way.

Big social wants these regulations to pass so that they can get better identity tracking for ads targeting. To them it doesn't matter if the tech ushers in 1984. It makes them more money.

[Gigachad]

It's definitely not just kids. Social media is a lot like meth, we should at a bare minimum stop giving it to kids as soon as possible. And then come to realise it's bad for everyone and should be wound back.

[Paracompact]

Their argument would be, "If meth is a negative externality, we should just tax it instead of banning it in stores for kids to buy." Kids may die, but I'm sure with all that extra state revenue we'll get a nice park or museum or kickback to Tesla or something.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Kids may die, but I'm sure with all that extra state revenue we'll get a nice park or museum or kickback to Tesla or something.

The argument, which has some pretty decent evidence behind it, is that prohibition is the thing that kills people. Because it has to be smuggled, dealers switch from "normal" hard drugs to overdose triggers like fentanyl with 1000x the potency because then they only have to smuggle 0.1% as much of it, which in turn kills people because street dealers cut it improperly and users get wildly different effective doses or drugs cut with dangerous contaminants.

Notice that meth literally is legal in the US. Essentially anyone can get amphetamines by going to a doctor and telling them you have the symptoms it gets prescribed to treat. It's even prescribed to kids. The primary barrier is having health insurance and the ability to take off work during the day every month to get a refill. Which is why the people dying of overdose are the people priced out of that system, who wouldn't be if they could buy it at Walmart, but because they can't they resort to the entirely unregulated black market and die of a fentanyl overdose.

[kelseyfrog]

[flagged]

[tancop]

looking for me?

[kelseyfrog]

Are you willing to expound on the meth tax idea? Just curious.

[AnthonyMouse]

But then what's the point of forcing IDs on everyone instead of cutting to the chase?

[bloqs]

I'm not sure I get your arguement here

Are you saying that we should let children smoke and just tax it because its better for their liberty and freedoms?

Or are you saying we should just tax social media for adults but banning it for kids is ok

[anonzzzies]

We do that here; heavy tax sigarettes (and booze): both dropped like a lead balloon. So yes, tax it for everyone. Kids cannot pay for sigarettes and most adults don't want to (most vapers I know do it because it costs far less; that should be taxed more too imho). If browsing insta/tiktok costs an euro per hour, let's see how many still do it; I'd say they go bankrupt in a few months. Apparently it was never that interesting.

[cortic]

I remember the video nasties of the 90s were 'far from imaginary dangers' for kids, before that it was rock music that the data was screaming at us about. Maybe social media does hold an actual danger this time, but we are a hysterical bunch of knee-jerk reactionary nutjobs, when it comes to new things and kids.

I wouldn't be surprised if 20 years from now we see social media as just another hysterical reaction that generated a generation of bad law, wrecking, or diminishing a number of lives, for no good reason at all.

[hollerith]

You're assuming that history has proven the rock music and video games weren't harmful to kids, which I do not grant.

[imjonse]

It's no coincidence cigarettes were named 'torches of freedom' to get women to start paying up for the privilege of using them a hundred years ago.

[mike_hearn]

The data isn't screaming at us. That's an illusion caused by the flood of bad academic papers on the topic.

A good example is the Jonathan Haidt/Aaron Brown fiasco from a few years ago. Brown has been methodically trying to stop the stampede off yet another pseudo-scientific cliff but not enough people are listening.

https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...

https://reason.com/video/2024/04/02/the-bad-science-behind-j...

https://reason.com/2023/05/30/not-every-study-on-teen-depres...

> In a recent article for Reason, I argued that the hundreds of studies that New York University professor Jonathan Haidt has assembled to support his claim that social media is causing the teen mental health crisis not only don't back up his claim; they undermine it.

Age verification campaigners like Haidt play a smooth game but consistently downplay how useless social science actually is for answering questions like this:

> I didn't express "concerns" about specific studies; I argued that the majority of the 301 papers cited in his document are garbage. I went through each category of studies on Haidt's list, chose the first one that studied social media and depression to get a random sampling, and then showed that they were so embarrassingly bad as to be completely useless. They were guilty of coding errors, fatal defects hidden in mid-paper jargon, inappropriate statistics, longitudinal studies that weren't longitudinal, experiments in name only, and red flags for hypothesis shopping and p-hacking (that is, misusing data analysis to yield results that can be presented as statistically significant).

It's possible that in the past few years a wealth of robust evidence has suddenly emerged but it seems doubtful.

This stuff does matter. If you misdiagnose the problem then congrats, you just let governments censor the internet - quite possibly creating a China style totalitarian system that pretends to be democratic along the way - and kids will still have the same problems. A bad outcome!

[mike_hearn]

Gonna violate a site rule briefly to comment on voting. The vote swings on this post are fascinatingly wild (at least compared to normal). There's a ton of both up and downvotes going on continuously, but no replies. On Reddit this would be considered a highly "controversial" post by their algorithm.

The interpretation is interesting. Probably, a lot of people don't like criticism of academia or have already made an emotional investment in the social media hypothesis, but aren't sure how to respond to Brown's critiques of the studies. So it just swings up and down with otherwise no engagement.

[sajithdilshan]

Why are we only focused on kids? the boomers are doing more harm to the society and democracy by spreading mis-information via social media. If we want to have an honest conversation let's talk about every age group and limit it to everyone rather than using kids as a scapegoat