If you’re tempted to think “this isn’t worth it, too hard to enforce without affecting something else”… read “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt. There is very real, irreparable harm being done to young people, and it merits trying to make it right, not just surrendering to it.
Surely the problem of verifying a property of someone (the Boolean of “is over X age”) without sharing further details, is a surmountable problem given all the cryptographic technologies at our disposal. If a government wants to make this possible, given they know everyone’s birthdate, they could.
I have tried to find good scientific evidence that shows that social media is a net negative for kids and or adults. I have been unable to do so.
Reports that I read on conventional media sites often summarize government reports, but they do so incorrectly. And when I go and read the government reports, they present a much more balanced picture than the summaries would suggest. In particular, for marginalized teens, social media represents a unique avenue to connect with teens in similar situations, which provides a significant support network.
I know it's popular now to say that social media is the root of all evil, but I would be very curious to see a scientific justification for banning it for kids under 16. Just a few years ago, this was a concern presented as 'screen time', but I had similar problems there. There's no real evidence to suggest that looking at a screen is the problem...the much more difficult and interesting problem is what you're doing when you're looking at the screen. There's a similar dynamic in play with social media, I think.
For example, Hacker News is the only social media that I use, and I feel that I use it very differently than folks that use Instagram, for example. Can they be effectively conflated?
> In particular, for marginalized teens, social media represents a unique avenue to connect with teens in similar situations, which provides a significant support network.
Thank you for bringing this up. I was one of those 'marginalised' kids who didn't relate to my real life surroundings so much. The internet was like an escape for me, where I was able to meet many close friends with similar interests on social medias like Twitter and Discord. Not to mention, free internet access in general taught so much about the world, developed my passions and helped determine what I'm now studying and planning to pursue as a career.
If social media was banned when I was younger, it would have made me worse off for sure. And if there were internet/device restrictions more broadly, like I'm often seeing suggested, it would have been absolutely devastating for me. My life would have turned out completely different, in a bad way.
On a site like HN, I would have expected there to be much more people who also had the same experience as younger me with the internet and social media. But for some reason, most of the dominant sentiment here seems to consider social media as a cancer, with no nuance. I'm not sure why they do, but I wish that these people would consider the experiences of people like me.
> I have tried to find good scientific evidence that shows that social media is a net negative for kids and or adults. I have been unable to do so.
The author mentioned by GP is currently working on a similar questions collecting, reviewing and categorizing known literature in these open access documents [1][2]. I suggest you take a look if you are interested in the topic.
> For example, Hacker News is the only social media that I use, and I feel that I use it very differently than folks that use Instagram, for example. Can they be effectively conflated?
Well, I would say no. But to have a meaningful discussion we need to first agree on what is meant here with "social media". Clearly, this law has been passed with the intent to affect Meta / ByteDance / Reddit and similar companies with a business model that hinges on capturing as much attention of their users as possible, which is very different from HackerNews. Most accusations to social media begin bad are towards of the former type.
> but I would be very curious to see a scientific justification for banning it for kids under 16.
From [1], it seems to me that there is a non-negligible amount of literature that has been accumulating, that could be used to justify the ban. Though, Australia is not a technocracy (I hope), so I would say that there is also a certain degree of "purely social" reasons why they might want to curb the access of social media companies to their youth.
[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-...
[2] : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vVAtMCQnz8WVxtSNQev_e1cG...
> I have tried to find good scientific evidence that shows that social media is a net negative for kids and or adults. I have been unable to do so.
Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show (wsj.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28523688
Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health (tau.ac.il)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32938622
Testimony to House committee by former Facebook executive Tim Kendall (house.gov)
See this is just thing the commenter you are replying to is saying.
Just read the comments in your second link tearing apart the study.
Given the replication crisis in psychology, the authors make bad choices in the experiment design that are not justifiable in 2022.
> I have tried to find good scientific evidence that shows that social media is a net negative for kids and or adults. I have been unable to do so.
> For example, Hacker News is the only social media that I use
Try spending an hour a day on tiktok (average tiktok user screen time) and 30 min a day on instagram (average ig user screen time) for a year and report back. This shit is crack cocaine for kids
Parents should be more responsible. That's it. This measure is, potentially, deeply ingraining the (terrible) idea that the State is responsible instead, so when all these young kids have children, they, just as their parents, will lack the ability to take responsibility and make their children more responsible by proxy, and so on, and so forth. It's a never ending cycle that is perpetuated by not tackling the problem at its real source. And let's not forget how measures taken in the name of security are oftentimes actually made to deprive us of our privacy.
The difficulty is co-ordination. My job as a "responsible parent" is much more difficult if I have to fight prevailing social norms and my kids perceive they are being excluded from conversations and arbitrarily cut off from their peers.
The social media ban is similar to the logic behind gaming limits in China. The idea is that while the controls themselves are easily circumvented, it gives everyone an excuse to do the right thing.
Parents don't have infinite "control tokens". I only have time & energy to put my foot down about a limited number of things. It is much easier to establish conventions around responsible behaviour if the whole community is behind it.
I am OK with this ban for the same reason I'm OK with tobacco sellers being not allowed to sell to under 18s.
This, I would go so far as keeping kids from social media is in conflict with (arguably) one of the most important jobs parents have which is getting kids into social interactions. (E.g. by teaching them good manners so others will play with them)
How does a parent compete with trillion dollar corporations that hire psychologist, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists to make their apps highly addictive?
Being honest here because just telling parents to deal with a societal ill seems very shortsighted and comes from an immense place of priviledge.
> Surely the problem of verifying a property of someone (the Boolean of “is over X age”) without sharing further details, is a surmountable problem given all the cryptographic technologies at our disposal.
Only if preserving privacy is the goal and I'm sure we both know it isn't.
I guess it will become self-fulfilling if everyone denies that there are privacy friendly options. Legislatures globally are starting to take this seriously so chances are it's happening one way or another.
"Everyone" isn't denying there are privacy friendly options. The government does not want to implement privacy friendly options.
The Anxious Generation is poorly researched pop science book that people believe to be true because it feels intuitively right to them.
On the surface it seems very similar to a book he previously worked on, The Coddling of the American Mind, which is also full of poorly researched pop science that confirms biases people already had.
Kind of an "airport book"
Oh, a fellow If Books Could Kill podcast listener?
It's unfortunate that truth is so hard to come by these days.
Is this just your opinion, or is there a scientific retort I can read?
Is Nature "scientific" enough?
The information theory problem is how to do so without creating a government ledger of every platform that every person uses, and a government kill switch to disable any platform the government doesn’t like.
Indeed, the challenge is already resolved in Europe by eID/EIDAS in a privacy respecting way, so the technology exists and it's already proven on a large scale.
> is a surmountable problem given all the cryptographic technologies at our disposal
I'm genuinely curious, is it? I don't know enough to be sure one way or the other, how you'd do it with some kind of private/public key thing or whatever. Can anyone here provide a quick example?
And I'm assuming it would involve some kind of code generated on the spot just for you, so somebody couldn't just post a code on the internet for all teens to use.
My issue with this idealistic and understandable perspective is that it completely ignores all historical precedent in the modern age. That is to say: if you think the government is going to use this as anything other than an opportunity to turn all those little dots on the GPS tracker into fully-authenticated names and profiles they can keep tabs on 24/7, I have a bridge to sell you.
And if you think the third parties they contract out the tracking to won’t sell that info/access for profit, I have some magic beans as well.
I support keeping kids protected. I’m just not naive enough to think the current governments of the world have any interest in achieving that goal while maintaining any semblance of privacy for their citizens.
Frankly I want Australia to go ahead with this law so the rest of us can have a test case for it. If it works well we can copy it with tweaks. If not, then we know to seek other options.
What is the acceptance criteria for this test case?
Government dissent is successfully abolished from social media (the real reason for wanting to abolish anonymity via gov't ID requirements)
Bold claims need proof. Does Australia have a history of that?
During COVID times the Australian government pressured all local media to censor criticism of the government's COVID measures. Regardless of how valid or invalid you consider the dissent, it was still dissent being suppressed.
That book is nice example of a case "if you have a hammer you want to push, everything looks like a nail".
"Ban social media for everyone because it might be bad for some kids" is as fragile as an argument as "ban guns for everyone because some bad guy might get his hands on one."
Most countries ban guns for everyone, with that being the primary reason. It is not a fragile argument, it is simply a different weighting of values.
When I say “ban”, I mean “heavily restrict and track”, which is how I gather we are using the term “ban” in this context as well.
Well, "ban guns for everyone because some bad guy might get his hands on one" has always been the law in my country, and it has worked out extremely well. There has never been a mass shooting here, ever.