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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Ending the headline at the fourth word would have been more efficient. :)