I was more convinced by Haidt’s earlier proposals that centered around convincing parents not to give their kids smartphones until high school, and keeping phones out of classrooms. The quick slippery slope from these kind of inarguably good ideas to national speech restrictions has been sad to see!
I feel like so much of this discourse has never met a truly socially isolated person for whom the internet was their only lifeline and it makes me so damned mad. I don't even seem to see anyone who believes it's a real tradeoff between the harms that are accruing to a larger group of people and the ones that they're proposing be enforced on literally everyone.
Like Kelsey I was raised online only the part of the internet I was raised online actually still exists. It was video game piracy and smutty fan fiction and yeah there was a lot of bad stuff there. But there was a lot of bad stuff in my high school. To this day I’m scared of cars slowing down in front of me from being beat up walking home.
Can social media be harmful to kids? Of Course it can. But locking a 14 year old in with the people around him who torment him isn’t mercy and saying socialize with them isn’t protecting them.
Totally. Until 2012 there was no way to solve the problems of a bullied 14yo. Thank God the social media companies came along and gave humans a tool to help for the first time in human history.
2012 is an odd start date. Social media, which is to say any kind of place where you can post comments are far older going all the way back to BBS and Usenet and really were a hand up for a lot of socially awkward people.
What is the thing you're actually proposing for training wheels for normal interaction? A huge number of autistics I know this to be the case that they can interact with their special interest in peace, or that they can learn social conventions.
I genuinely believe there's a fairly high chance I'd be dead without the internet to show me a bigger world, and to make entry into that world comfortable.
That second graph is my main point. But like when I listen to these advocates it's like they've never experienced anything like my childhood at all. A kind of desperate, almost dangerous need to be anywhere but here, with anyone but these people.
I don't intend that as a trump card but I think it's important to genuinely interact with this.
I spent a lot of time trying to find some of kind parental control software for tablets that didn't suck, and never did. Apple had one of the better ones, and it's still clumsy, prone to failure, and not granular enough. None of these seemed to have been designed by actual parents.
I, too, don't like the idea of age-gating wide swathes of the internet. Just like with experience above, I feel like we've tried nothing, and now we're jumping to something very extreme. I would be much more supportive of the king of content restrictions Kelsey mentions. Ban in-app advertising, in-app purchases, etc.
Great post, changed my thinking on this. The most appealing thing to me about your suggestions is that they improve these tools for everyone rather than just pretending at 16 we’re magically able to handle them.
I think your proposal here to seriously prohibit advertising targeting (/exploiting) kids is super relevant and should be more salient in the discourse than it is. Kids cannot by default consent to commercial contracts; why should they be collectively getting served tens of billions of dollars’ worth of inducement to consent to a commercial transaction? I remember as a kid feeling a variant of this, in of course a sticky murky kid-shaped way: it felt *messed up* to be asked to declare allegiance to first a toucan, then a talking tiger, when it came to sugary breakfast slop.
In my mind, the largest issue with the internet seems to be more that people (not just children) spend more time than they should scrolling, reading, and watching content. The addictive design of the internet is the most destructive aspect, age limits do nothing to address this problem.
Maybe the reason social media companies like Meta are supportive of age verification policies, is that their business model is based on creating an addictive product. As long as they can keep users addicted, they don’t care if certain content is gated behind age verification.
I find this to be very accurate. I'm very good at beating the algorithms into giving me fun concert footage and Disney tips and tricks but If I'm home and awake from 5-9 or so. Spending an hour of it on social media isn't a great life.
As a parent, it would be really nice to have some kind of “keep out the really bad stuff” filtering system that worked, but that doesn’t exist and isn’t even a concern of any of these laws/regulations.
“Keep kids off of large, well-known social media sites” is one of the _most_ tractable problems for parents to solve individually.
The bigger social problem, that the modern internet is a giant funnel for delivering miserable, addictive content and ads directly to your brain constantly throughout the day, isn’t even a particularly kid-centric problem.
I don't buy the argument that age-gating the internet is a threat for adults. We have minimum age requirements for all sort of things, such as alcohol, gambling, banking, voting, movies, driving, firearms, etc. They're not guarantees, but they don't have to be. They work most of the time and that's sufficient.
The problem with age-gating the internet is that we don't yet have agreement that we want it and few, if any, of the solutions work. And for things like social media, there is no incentive for it to work. With all the advanced technology we have, if we really wanted it to work, it would.
One point that your article glosses over is how difficult it is for an individual parent to enforce certain rules on their child to help guide and protect them when an entire trillion dollar industry is working against them.
Yes, parents need to be better, but there needs to be government regulation.
Wow, another article/author totally misses the essential dilemma at the root of the internet problem. Listen up! The medium itself is addicting. The medium to which I refer is ‘light based delivery’ - what I call “the photon stream.” The photon stream is highly addicting. This should not be news to anyone these days. Any ultimately sustainable solution to the problem MUST take the fact of addiction potential into full account. Using an addictive, light-based delivery system to promote, sell and otherwise influence the human brain and nervous system confers huge transactional advantages in a capitalist economy that is amoral. We can do something or do nothing. But we can’t disavow the role of addiction at the core of the internet problem.
Important to note that age-gating the internet doesn't necessarily mean _fully_ restricting youth access to certain sites/products. In most cases, it just means they get a specially-designed experience that's got a lot more guardrails and restricts certain higher-risk features like messaging unconnected accounts, access to mature content, etc.
Agree that the ideal solution is OS-level age assurance so parents can set-and-forget rather than having to manage across multiple apps. I suspect we'll get there by the end of the decade.
I'm just going to continue to deny that there is a problem. There is always some ongoing moral panic about the kids these days and what they are exposed to, and no, this time is NOT different.
I'm sure Fredric Wertham and Marie Winn and Jack Thompson could have furnished you with all sorts of studies on how comic books, TV, and video games were bad for children during their respective heydays. Surely at this point we can just default to suspicion and dismissal of the latest moral entrepreneurs?
What's powerful about the evidence that Haidt and Twenge present that now is different is that it's not based on studies about social media. Rather the really compelling data is that long time surveys of teens that have been going on for decades (most notably the Monitoring the Future survey), show a dramatic change for the worse in teen well being beginning in the mid-2010s after the rates had previously been stable for decades. And it’s also reinforced by other data like suicide rates.
Given the past "moral panics" you cite, I don't think it was wrong to start from a skeptical perspective believing that worries about social media were likely to prove overblown. I started in the same place 10+ years ago, which is why I didn't put effort into limiting my own kids’ social media use.
But the combination of both the data that Haidt and Twenge present and my experience observing my own kids and their friends has convinced me that there is not just smoke but fire. I'd encourage you to actually read their work QImmortal rather than simply dismissing it without engaging.
I generally think of this as a product problem more than a policy problem, but strongly agree that it’s a problem. Two thoughts qua parent:
1. LLMs not mentioned! LLMs are the solution to making the (abstracted) knowledge content of the internet accessible to children without slop. It is so completely underrated in this regard.
It’s not the same as the participatory internet, but it’s way more than nothing.
2. My kids are young so take this with a grain of salt, but my current plan for SM is to start giving them access (and managing their accounts, if they start young, as I suspect they will) when I have judged that they have substantive things to share, such that it would be a value to connect with people (mostly older than them) over said things.
Interacting with an LLM is fundamentally different from interacting with a person who has their own needs and desires. It's bad to replace human connection with LLMs.
Your children will find every way possible around your controls.
The technology is the problem. It has fundamentally changed the way our most basic relationships function.
Because we haven't seen *any* attempt at addressing this issue, we have no idea if anything works...other than in relatively small doses (a few weeks at a time), when kids are removed from social media and cell phone tech in large groups (sleep away camp, retreats, mission trips, etc.), they essentiallly go back to behaving the way young people have behaved since Homo Sapiens evolved.
And just to be quite clear: this is all so that CEOs in Silicon Valley can make money. That's it. It isn't a technology that has unlocked some hidden human potential.
To your note about LLMs, I am staying as far away as possible from that technology. Anyone I encounter who is just has a...vibe about them that I am uninterested in.
This is rather ridiculous. I met my wife, found my job, develop my hobbies, on things that could be called social media.
If I wanted to learn about just about anything that's not extremely academic the first place I would go would be Reddit and you tube. When my kid wants help with basketball the first place we go isn't some weird book. We go on a social media site and watch professional coaches for free before we go to the court to practice.
No we don't want it to make sundar pichai more money we want it because it's very useful to get on social media and use it.
Turns out nobody ever got married, found a job, or had any hobbies before 2004.
News to me!
Sarcasm aside: of course I see value in the internet. But unfettered, unregulated social media/LLM technology comes at a cost (ain’t no such thing as a free lunch). And that cost is paid by society, not the corporations.
I’m probably clutching pearls, and shouting into the wind. But unfettered access to any thing will not satisfy anyone’s desires.
You get 30 minutes a day in the same room as mom or I with the sound on take it or leave it. But telling them they can never watch a video about anything because You tube is by definition social media is asking them to live with one arm tied behind their back.
Also It really was a fucking hellscape for some of us. Like I don’t get the snark. The pre-online world I grew up in isn’t something i’d wish on my worst enemy.
The possible solutions you mention at the end sound promising, and I hope in the future you will consider an article exploring these ideas and their feasibility! Are these ideas
1. technically possible?
2. Legal?
3. Supported by the public?
I think the proposal for social media age restriction has emerged mainly because the answer to those three questions is “yes” for that particular topic. It’s what feels doable now. Personally I don’t think social media age restrictions will do much, but the alternative seems to be, “do nothing” and it feels better than nothing. If there are other concrete, near- term possible policy solutions, I’d love something else to get behind.
I was more convinced by Haidt’s earlier proposals that centered around convincing parents not to give their kids smartphones until high school, and keeping phones out of classrooms. The quick slippery slope from these kind of inarguably good ideas to national speech restrictions has been sad to see!
I feel like so much of this discourse has never met a truly socially isolated person for whom the internet was their only lifeline and it makes me so damned mad. I don't even seem to see anyone who believes it's a real tradeoff between the harms that are accruing to a larger group of people and the ones that they're proposing be enforced on literally everyone.
Like Kelsey I was raised online only the part of the internet I was raised online actually still exists. It was video game piracy and smutty fan fiction and yeah there was a lot of bad stuff there. But there was a lot of bad stuff in my high school. To this day I’m scared of cars slowing down in front of me from being beat up walking home.
Can social media be harmful to kids? Of Course it can. But locking a 14 year old in with the people around him who torment him isn’t mercy and saying socialize with them isn’t protecting them.
Totally. Until 2012 there was no way to solve the problems of a bullied 14yo. Thank God the social media companies came along and gave humans a tool to help for the first time in human history.
2012 is an odd start date. Social media, which is to say any kind of place where you can post comments are far older going all the way back to BBS and Usenet and really were a hand up for a lot of socially awkward people.
What is the thing you're actually proposing for training wheels for normal interaction? A huge number of autistics I know this to be the case that they can interact with their special interest in peace, or that they can learn social conventions.
I genuinely believe there's a fairly high chance I'd be dead without the internet to show me a bigger world, and to make entry into that world comfortable.
That second graph is my main point. But like when I listen to these advocates it's like they've never experienced anything like my childhood at all. A kind of desperate, almost dangerous need to be anywhere but here, with anyone but these people.
I don't intend that as a trump card but I think it's important to genuinely interact with this.
I spent a lot of time trying to find some of kind parental control software for tablets that didn't suck, and never did. Apple had one of the better ones, and it's still clumsy, prone to failure, and not granular enough. None of these seemed to have been designed by actual parents.
I, too, don't like the idea of age-gating wide swathes of the internet. Just like with experience above, I feel like we've tried nothing, and now we're jumping to something very extreme. I would be much more supportive of the king of content restrictions Kelsey mentions. Ban in-app advertising, in-app purchases, etc.
Great post, changed my thinking on this. The most appealing thing to me about your suggestions is that they improve these tools for everyone rather than just pretending at 16 we’re magically able to handle them.
I think your proposal here to seriously prohibit advertising targeting (/exploiting) kids is super relevant and should be more salient in the discourse than it is. Kids cannot by default consent to commercial contracts; why should they be collectively getting served tens of billions of dollars’ worth of inducement to consent to a commercial transaction? I remember as a kid feeling a variant of this, in of course a sticky murky kid-shaped way: it felt *messed up* to be asked to declare allegiance to first a toucan, then a talking tiger, when it came to sugary breakfast slop.
In my mind, the largest issue with the internet seems to be more that people (not just children) spend more time than they should scrolling, reading, and watching content. The addictive design of the internet is the most destructive aspect, age limits do nothing to address this problem.
Maybe the reason social media companies like Meta are supportive of age verification policies, is that their business model is based on creating an addictive product. As long as they can keep users addicted, they don’t care if certain content is gated behind age verification.
Agreed that the content is designed to be addictive to everyone, not just children.
That said:
- Its impact is particularly harmful to kids.
- Kids are particularly vulnerable.
- There are lots of potentially harmful things which we allow for adults but prohibit to kids given their vulnerability.
I find this to be very accurate. I'm very good at beating the algorithms into giving me fun concert footage and Disney tips and tricks but If I'm home and awake from 5-9 or so. Spending an hour of it on social media isn't a great life.
As a parent, it would be really nice to have some kind of “keep out the really bad stuff” filtering system that worked, but that doesn’t exist and isn’t even a concern of any of these laws/regulations.
“Keep kids off of large, well-known social media sites” is one of the _most_ tractable problems for parents to solve individually.
The bigger social problem, that the modern internet is a giant funnel for delivering miserable, addictive content and ads directly to your brain constantly throughout the day, isn’t even a particularly kid-centric problem.
I don't buy the argument that age-gating the internet is a threat for adults. We have minimum age requirements for all sort of things, such as alcohol, gambling, banking, voting, movies, driving, firearms, etc. They're not guarantees, but they don't have to be. They work most of the time and that's sufficient.
The problem with age-gating the internet is that we don't yet have agreement that we want it and few, if any, of the solutions work. And for things like social media, there is no incentive for it to work. With all the advanced technology we have, if we really wanted it to work, it would.
One point that your article glosses over is how difficult it is for an individual parent to enforce certain rules on their child to help guide and protect them when an entire trillion dollar industry is working against them.
Yes, parents need to be better, but there needs to be government regulation.
Wow, another article/author totally misses the essential dilemma at the root of the internet problem. Listen up! The medium itself is addicting. The medium to which I refer is ‘light based delivery’ - what I call “the photon stream.” The photon stream is highly addicting. This should not be news to anyone these days. Any ultimately sustainable solution to the problem MUST take the fact of addiction potential into full account. Using an addictive, light-based delivery system to promote, sell and otherwise influence the human brain and nervous system confers huge transactional advantages in a capitalist economy that is amoral. We can do something or do nothing. But we can’t disavow the role of addiction at the core of the internet problem.
Yes -- the technology itself is highly addicting. For children. For adults. It is bad for all of us.
Important to note that age-gating the internet doesn't necessarily mean _fully_ restricting youth access to certain sites/products. In most cases, it just means they get a specially-designed experience that's got a lot more guardrails and restricts certain higher-risk features like messaging unconnected accounts, access to mature content, etc.
Agree that the ideal solution is OS-level age assurance so parents can set-and-forget rather than having to manage across multiple apps. I suspect we'll get there by the end of the decade.
I'm just going to continue to deny that there is a problem. There is always some ongoing moral panic about the kids these days and what they are exposed to, and no, this time is NOT different.
Haidt and Jean Twenge have extensively documented the case for why today IS different:
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/mountains-of-evidence
Assume you have read through their work and remain unconvinced. It would be interesting to hear why.
I'm sure Fredric Wertham and Marie Winn and Jack Thompson could have furnished you with all sorts of studies on how comic books, TV, and video games were bad for children during their respective heydays. Surely at this point we can just default to suspicion and dismissal of the latest moral entrepreneurs?
What's powerful about the evidence that Haidt and Twenge present that now is different is that it's not based on studies about social media. Rather the really compelling data is that long time surveys of teens that have been going on for decades (most notably the Monitoring the Future survey), show a dramatic change for the worse in teen well being beginning in the mid-2010s after the rates had previously been stable for decades. And it’s also reinforced by other data like suicide rates.
Given the past "moral panics" you cite, I don't think it was wrong to start from a skeptical perspective believing that worries about social media were likely to prove overblown. I started in the same place 10+ years ago, which is why I didn't put effort into limiting my own kids’ social media use.
But the combination of both the data that Haidt and Twenge present and my experience observing my own kids and their friends has convinced me that there is not just smoke but fire. I'd encourage you to actually read their work QImmortal rather than simply dismissing it without engaging.
Strongly agree
I generally think of this as a product problem more than a policy problem, but strongly agree that it’s a problem. Two thoughts qua parent:
1. LLMs not mentioned! LLMs are the solution to making the (abstracted) knowledge content of the internet accessible to children without slop. It is so completely underrated in this regard.
It’s not the same as the participatory internet, but it’s way more than nothing.
2. My kids are young so take this with a grain of salt, but my current plan for SM is to start giving them access (and managing their accounts, if they start young, as I suspect they will) when I have judged that they have substantive things to share, such that it would be a value to connect with people (mostly older than them) over said things.
Interacting with an LLM is fundamentally different from interacting with a person who has their own needs and desires. It's bad to replace human connection with LLMs.
Your children will find every way possible around your controls.
The technology is the problem. It has fundamentally changed the way our most basic relationships function.
Because we haven't seen *any* attempt at addressing this issue, we have no idea if anything works...other than in relatively small doses (a few weeks at a time), when kids are removed from social media and cell phone tech in large groups (sleep away camp, retreats, mission trips, etc.), they essentiallly go back to behaving the way young people have behaved since Homo Sapiens evolved.
And just to be quite clear: this is all so that CEOs in Silicon Valley can make money. That's it. It isn't a technology that has unlocked some hidden human potential.
To your note about LLMs, I am staying as far away as possible from that technology. Anyone I encounter who is just has a...vibe about them that I am uninterested in.
This is rather ridiculous. I met my wife, found my job, develop my hobbies, on things that could be called social media.
If I wanted to learn about just about anything that's not extremely academic the first place I would go would be Reddit and you tube. When my kid wants help with basketball the first place we go isn't some weird book. We go on a social media site and watch professional coaches for free before we go to the court to practice.
No we don't want it to make sundar pichai more money we want it because it's very useful to get on social media and use it.
Turns out nobody ever got married, found a job, or had any hobbies before 2004.
News to me!
Sarcasm aside: of course I see value in the internet. But unfettered, unregulated social media/LLM technology comes at a cost (ain’t no such thing as a free lunch). And that cost is paid by society, not the corporations.
I’m probably clutching pearls, and shouting into the wind. But unfettered access to any thing will not satisfy anyone’s desires.
You get 30 minutes a day in the same room as mom or I with the sound on take it or leave it. But telling them they can never watch a video about anything because You tube is by definition social media is asking them to live with one arm tied behind their back.
Also It really was a fucking hellscape for some of us. Like I don’t get the snark. The pre-online world I grew up in isn’t something i’d wish on my worst enemy.
I think we should ban algorithmic feeds for everyone and impose severe taxes across the board. Social media is an unmitigated drain on society.
The possible solutions you mention at the end sound promising, and I hope in the future you will consider an article exploring these ideas and their feasibility! Are these ideas
1. technically possible?
2. Legal?
3. Supported by the public?
I think the proposal for social media age restriction has emerged mainly because the answer to those three questions is “yes” for that particular topic. It’s what feels doable now. Personally I don’t think social media age restrictions will do much, but the alternative seems to be, “do nothing” and it feels better than nothing. If there are other concrete, near- term possible policy solutions, I’d love something else to get behind.
Banning Starfield is harsh but fair