Children are not the only ones being harmed here. This selective focus is only going to destroy the perception of other groups in terms of harm. Teenagers, young people, old people are also being harmed here - it is by design, and its everyone.
I never wanted TikTok for this reason, and I remember the damage YouTube did to my brother, despite my warnings.
He was happily watching Tree Happy Friends as a toddler.
I’m thinking, how are youtube shorts and Instagram reels any different from tiktok
Damn… money laundering though LIVE with its “gifts” I never thought about this. Everything else is wrong, at scale, but this surprised me.
i mean yeah that helps the growth of idiocracy so is it a surprise?
Several folks owe me apologies.
What is this meant to prove?
This looks more like Darwinism, chocking will cause you severe discomfort no matter how old you are.
They tried warning us about fb over 10 years ago and nothing happened
back then it wasn’t about political independence from the US.
the EU has made a lot of noise in the last 2 weeks about getting off of US platforms. Here’s a few examples:
https://apnews.com/article/europe-digital-sovereignty-big-tech-9f5388b68a0648514cebc8d92f682060
https://ecfr.eu/publication/get-over-your-x-a-european-plan-to-escape-american-technology/
There’s many more. The movement is significant.
I wouldn’t say nothing happened. Young people migrated off of it and it’s now the lead gasoline of the social media world
Yeah but young people didn’t migrate off it because it was harmful
They migrated in part to instagram which Facebook bought and made even more harmful than Facebook itself
Yeah ig is the worst part of Facebook, just people curating what they want people to think their life looks like
This is in stark contrast to… Facebook???
facebook has a very different target audience
facebook is mostly about 60+ year olds holding their beer and saying sth like “beer, car, church is all we need” while instagram is predatory on 16-y.o girls telling them that they’re not pretty and worthy of love if they’re not significantly (scarily, in fact) underweight and wear lots of makeup to cover their true emotions/face.
At least Facebook has Facebook Marketplace.
The exact same thing happened with Instagram years ago.
and Facebook.
and MySpace.
and club penguin.
and…
I’m looking forward to the day when social media is heavily regulated and age-gated.
Age gated? You’d submit your driver’s license or identity to these sites?
Probably not. But I don’t use most of them and the ones I do use my account should be old enough that I don’t have to.
Or parents can do their job. We have to suffer with age verification bullshit laws that’s just there to have us all in a database.
Not having it be regulated makes it a lot harder for parents to do their job, because the kids with responsible parents are getting peer-pressured by the kids with irresponsible parents.
Or put another way: you’re not making parents do their jobs; you’re making their jobs impossible by forcing them to choose between ruining their kid’s mental health by letting her be exposed to social media, or ruin her mental health by forcing her to be ostracised for not using social media.
The only way to have a successful outcome is to force everyone else’s kids not to use it, not just your own, and no amount of rugged individualist good parenting can accomplish that by itself!
That said, I am extremely sympathetic to the arguments against age verification laws too, which is why my preferred solution would be to fucking outlaw and destroy corporate social media entirely, for kids and adults alike!
You are exactly right. We’re all in this ugly, trapped situation, together, like it or not.
As a parent, do you remove the obviously ruinous toxins from the kiddo’s environment, entirely? Seems like the only sensible choice.
But then again…for the kid, few things could feel worse. An entire childhood spent alienated from their peers? Permanently out of the loop, to where that becomes the personality trait noticed and remembered by others?
What a horrible bargain, I completely hate it.
“Well, a little hideous poison for you, routinely, I guess, dear. I wouldn’t want you to end up weird, after all…”
Agreed. Just the peer pressure for having a smartphone at all is immense. Some kids have one below the age of 10. That is absolutely insane to me.
Or like, use the ample parental controls to limit their time to a reasonable amount 🤷♂️.
the parent can only do that on devices they own. they can’t do that on classmates devices
Yeah man, you’re on top of it.
It’s just lazy parents, right? Like they’re not even trying, huh?
Couldn’t really have anything to do with - I dunno, NO parents except the born-rich, being able to parent properly, on account of having to make the dollars keep adding up.
Probably also NOT the wildly, disgustingly sophisticated Big Fucking Tech doing everything they can to pull our children into their hilariously successful maze of dissatisfaction.
If only the parents would just use the obviously available parental controls! Duh.
Fuck you, in every way, for real.
Oh won’t someone think of the parents though?! How can they be expected to parent their own children, oh the humanity
best thing on that front is same fix for most of the working classes problems…
-more pay
-shift to 6hr/4d work week
-actually invest in education
most people are good, amd would probably love to spend more time with their family, but in the US especially they’re overworked and underpaid, one accident away destitution
Durable societies are unfortunately bound to have such inconveniences for some in exchange for the betterment of many.
Tech companies have released the equivalent of digital opium so they and the government are accountable.
When we look back at the opioid epidemic of the 90s we don’t blame the addicts or their families (well I suppose we did at one point, without the benefit of hindsight or a bigger picture view), we blame the Sacklers, pharmaceutical companies, doctors that took kickbacks etc.
I’d hate for us to make the same mistake just because the drug is delivered in a way we don’t completely understand yet.
It’s also not as simple as asking parents to simply be better at parenting, whatever that may mean. The drug is already out on the street, widely available, and ridiculously addictive. Keeping your child from it is not only depriving them of a dopamine hit that their brains are not developed enough to simply ignore (even most adults are addicted) and it is in many cases relegating them to social ostracization.
This is far beyond what one parent or group of parents can fix. It requires a societal level change which generally needs to come from the government, whether we like it or not.
I’d be happy to hear out possible solutions and, as a parent, share what is viable and what isn’t. It would be nice to hear from other parents also.
This rhetoric is very dangerous. It’s fueling censorship specifically targeting marginalized people
Sure, legalize heroin for 12 year olds so parents can regulate it themselves. Imbecilic reasoning.
How does that even logic?
I hate these people. I’m at a loss for words
It isn’t (just) a technical problem for parents. Having the underage social media ban means that there isn’t the peer pressure for kids to use - well there is, but its much lower
Or parents can do their job.
They don’t, which is why regulation is essential. Not unlike how recycling failed because we expected individuals to behave responsibly instead of regulating manufacturers.
And you’re already in the database.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Nanny
And you’re already in the database.
disgusting. they should be taking us out of the database
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Wait… do you think the internet isn’t already heavily censored and monitored?
Nazis own both TikTok and Twitter. A psychopath owns Facebook.
oh what? WOW! This is so new to me. I’m astonished!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures
We need to END this shit, instead of ThInK Of tHe cHiLdReN laws that violate our privacy and human rights further, like the “Online Safety Act 2023” whose job it is to link your name, face and ID to the porn you browse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
like I linked, netnanny and similar software exist. to licence one for every child would be CHEAPER than this bullshit dragnet surveillance.
Stop licking boots.
Just to screw you over if/when you bust out the “YoUlL UdNeRsTaNd iF YoU EvEr hAvE KiDs, ItS HaRd bEiNg a pArEnT” I already have a kid.
You might as well allow kids to drink Tequila and work in meat factories. Healthier than being online.
I’m sorry you feel that your rights are violated because children should be banned from the internet.
read my actual post, there’s a way of doing this without violating human rights.
Nothing is preventing the internet from being exactly the way it was in the 90s. You’re on such a website right now. I, for one, don’t believe the internet is so far gone because 4 or 5 big, popular sites are utterly shit.
What should be. What is.
These are different things, and insofar as that remains the case, we should act accordingly.
And the “what is” here is that those terrible sites are not the majority of the internet. They’re barely even a fraction of it.
Most parents won’t. People are people. Those that would want to have to ballance the risk of excluding their children from the collective.
Yeah, and that’s how you get shitty age verification laws.
It’s a double edged sword
Bummer that they’re necessary, but they are.
Yeah bummer that big daddy fascist leader is necessary, but they are.
They are not. It’s not the governments job to parent the nations children, (and conveniently erode our privacy in the process)
How is this argument different from “it’s not the governments job to provide healthcare / education / social services”
Providing healthcare and social services is not inherently about controlling how people think and what information they have access to.
I notice you left education off that list
“Why the education system is horrible and needs to be dismantled and entirely reconsidered” is slightly off topic, but yeah you got me I do not think the argument is all that different wrt education. It is very different from those other things though.
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When I was a kid I wouldn’t dream of wearing a stackhat riding my bike. Then the laws came in, everyone did and it was fine. Same as seatbelts.
This is even more so because of the network effects.
Don’t get me wrong - the Australian laws are a very blunt instrument & I hate the idea of having to identify myself to the government. Fortunately it hasn’t happened to me - yet.Can’t say the law for kids to wear helmets on bikes has done much to get them to do so. Though I don’t think bike helmet laws did much to rob the population of their privacy either.
I don’t think they approach necessity tbh. At best, they’re a bandaid, and a crutch for parents.
But the drawbacks of the laws that have been implemented so far, and are trying to be, as vast overreaches that give a false sense of security with no real benefit. They also do that by placing even more information into the hands of the very companies causing the problem in the first place.
That’s where regulations would focus in an ideal world, limiting the companies from causing the problems in the first place, not slapping bad patches over them.
already starting to happen. Australia, for example implemented a under 16 ban on social media.
And evidence shows that it made mental health worse, because of course it did. But at least they aren’t protesting the Gaza genocide so mission acomplished
yup. sometimes under 16s have nowhere else to turn, so they turn to social media. if they don’t have that, what are they supposed to do?
Okay but designer drug algorithms are not an option.
I imagine they will go to the same places you, or I, or the billions that came before did when we were raised prior to social media.
If my brother’s only friend left is heroin. I am still not going to give him heroin.
Kill themselves. It’s what I would have dome, and what may have already happened. It’s a cruel assault on young people, which is why the only moral stance is open defiance
I mean that’s what happens when we group children with teenagers. They are treated the same despite being vastly different. In essence, majority of people where in support of striping of rights of their people. And people say we aren’t falling into fascism.
That’s why I won’t give an inch on this crap
Cutting addicts off from their drug of choice has short term affects of immediately deteriorating mental health. More at 11.
I’m deeply skeptical of anyone slinging around drug metaphors l. Can you considered that isolating marginalized people is bad for them? Or do you not care? Or do you like it better that way?
You can be skeptical of the drug metaphors all day but we know it is extremely addictive and harmful. They know it is too. Right here in this article is proof of that.
No I think that social media as a whole is a blight on society, and you can whataboutism all day to make anything seem like a positive so it’s worth keeping.
skill issue
