Article mostly cites self-reported studies ie the kids think that the kids are doing alright, which is a different statement from the kids are actually doing alright.
Most teachers seeing generational changes are raising five alarm fires around how badly the kids are doing. Actually testing kids is showing a startling reverse Flynn effect [1]. I’m curious what the author has in terms of actual evidence here?
Most teachers have been asking for more resources for decades, warning of the consequences of not doing so. It seems a little on the nose to ignore their warnings and when the consequences manifest opt to blame something else entirely.
It doesn't seem like there's been a precipitous drop in resources compared to the decades of requests and warnings that have led up to this point. So what's different now, if not resourcing?
Like most I've been listening to this same old argument for nearly 30 years. Old enough now to know it doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't have to even be 50% effective to mark a substantial improvement, a significant chunk of young people won't even need a technical restriction beyond being told the behaviour is against the law because it's bad for them.
But keep goading with "it's technically impossible" and watch what's left of the Internet turn into a government licensing fest, because it is entirely technically possible. Imagine how much cleaner and shiny the nation's pipes would be if we simply throttled any ciphertext flow that couldn't be matched to an Ofcom license holder. They'd never do that. No country in the world has done that, right?
The ‘technically impossible’ arguments always frustrate me. I used to buy into them to - but over time I’ve come to realise that the people making these anrguments are not speaking the same language as lawmakers - or most of the rest of society.
It’s ‘technically impossible’ to stop convenience stores selling alcohol or pornography to minors, or to make people to adhere to contracts. Non-engineers don’t care what’s technically possible, they care what’s legally possible, or societally possible.
It’s the same thing when techies try to decipher what _exactly_ a law does and look for loopholes, when to the rest of society the standard is ‘whatever a reasonable person thinks it does’.
You need to make the argument about why the proposed thing is bad for society for it to be taken seriously.
I don't care if it's trivial to implement and impossible to bypass: it's an effort to eliminate anonymous Internet browsing/commenting because everyone over 16 has to submit ID as well. Its the end of free speech on the part of the Internet the UK controls.
If anything it’s makes the discussion from parents to the kids so much easier. Why can’t I use it? Because it’s illegal. When will this happen in the US? We need it yesterday.
At what cost though? Everyone will now need to submit real ID to access social media.
Smaller social media sites will probably just shutdown since it’s unlikely they can afford the whole verification process.
The same was true of food safety. Aunt Tracey might not be able to sell cupcakes from her home any more (made in the oven next to where the cat likes to sleep because of the heat), but we centralised things enough that when BSE and Salmonella outbreaks happen, which nowadays is extremely rare, we know how and why almost immediately. If the cost of ridding ourselves of animal torture, terrorism and child pornography is a few hundred fewer Mastodon instances I could most certainly live with that
what a wild comparison, millions (billions?) of humans have died from food-borne disease, and yet we do in fact still let people very casually sell food to the public (even unpasteurized milk in the US)
> it doesn't have to even be 50% effective to mark a substantial improvement
It is not even 10% effective, and rightly so. It’s so absurdly easy to work around that the whole thing is silly. If the kids can’t be on Instagram they’ll find an equally welcoming place like Roblox to hang out.
You aren’t going to stop kids from being kids, and you probably shouldn’t try.
Note how we’re trusting all these US companies with their safety because any of these companies in the EU would immediately be regulated out of existence?
Psychologists call this black or white thinking - in this case, either something works perfectly or it's useless.
Next to impossible to get a person who believes this that they're engaging in a cognitive distortion though. I tried the same thing you're doing, once. I gave up. They will die on this hill and then wonder why they lost long after everyone else had moved on.
It's possible to make effective arguments in line with their values. They simply don't want to be helped.
Isn’t it normally the case when politicians in any part of the world say they need to do something for the children, it’s just theatre to cover up them doing nothing or to hide legislation with a different purpose?
My 15-year old niece who recently visited her cousins in Australia assured me that the recently enacted Aussie law did not affect her ability to access socials while in Australia, nor has it affected her U16 cousins, who still have their accounts. Apparently the age checking there only applies to newly created accounts.
Is there a plan to start fining the social media companies themselves? Or raise their liability thresholds?
This is sort of like the illegal-immigration debate. If you’re serious about fixing it, go after employers. Same for underage social media users. If you want to actually solve it, you have to penalize the platforms.
<s there a plan to start fining the social media companies themselves? Or raise their liability thresholds?>
they will apparently be fined around AUD$50M if they fail to do due diligence (not sure how the legislation phrases. I am not sure if any social media company has at this stage. Unfortunately we have a dictator as a so-called e-safety commissioner backed up by an equally useless PM who seem to think all parents are unable to monitor themselves or their kids online behaviour
>> Aussie law did not affect her ability to access socials while in Australia
I think that's expected.
>> Apparently the age checking there only applies to newly created accounts
Social media companies had to try and identify existing accounts owned by < 16 year olds and start removing them at the start of this year. I'd guess that process is slow and they don't do it unless they're certain. But if they stop new accounts effectively then within a few years the ban would be pretty effective.
> Again, every detailed study on the subject has found that the number of teenagers who have negative experiences on social media is tiny.
The study they linked is just self reported data from an internet survey. I'm sure that 13 year olds who don't get enough sleep because they're endlessly scrolling through ads, influencers, and disinformation don't see any problem with it the same way that a survey of alcoholics will show that beer is great, alcohol improves their lives, and that of course they can quit any time they want.
I'm not even suggesting that this ban will be effective or helpful, or that such bans are a good thing, but we know that these platforms are used to prey on their users, that "negative experiences" can be found easily, and that there's actual evidence of actual harms caused or facilitated by social media (including corpses). It should take a lot more than the opinions of just over a thousand children to discredit all of that and cause us to assume there's no problems with these platforms, how they're being used, or the effects they have on children.
It's interesting to see UK-based influencers all citing these weak studies (internet surveys) about how social media is not so bad for children, or bemoaning the huge loss for children whose access to educational videos will be cut.
While the financial motive is clear, they must all believe it to an extent, because social media made their careers and changed their lives.
The reality is that the vast majority of kids aren't interested in learning video editing or movie directing, they are mindlessly consuming AI-generated videos and similar content served to them. 30-second videos on random facts sprinkled here and there aren't education.
Not that I think this ban will help, but downplaying the harm to children is a bit too much coming from people with ties to these platforms, like the author of this article.
The point is. I’ve heard all of this before. Does anyone else remember being 15 and having every adult nearby tell you that staring at a screen for 6 hours a day is going to destroy my eyes and my life? I can tell you it’s worked out pretty well for me.
Of course I agree the pointless AI generated shit is a massive waste of time, but it doesn’t really matter what it actually is as long as it allows them to connect over a shared thing. I think it’s far more important we ensure there’s spaces for kids to meet that are not purely digital.
>> The reality is that the vast majority of kids aren't interested in learning video editing or movie directing
Also the idea that they can't do these things without social media or YouTube is absurd. The people actually interested in learning something new will go down even deeper rabbit holes, try things themselves, and come out better than they would have following some YouTube tutorials.
Fear not, Roblox will not be subject to the policy for the older games within Roblox and as such young children allegedly may be able to get the latest news from their possibly maybe perhaps adult groomers. The newer games within Roblox are purportedly going through a 16+ check. [1]
Jup, I can’t publish anything useful to Roblox any more unless 100+ 16 year olds first enjoy it. Of course none of this retroactively applies to the games already frequented by 10M U12’s every week, because why would they actually follow the spirit of their own rules if it harms them financially.
This is a "can't lose" for Starmer. If it inevitably doesn't work exactly the way he wants, then he'll just blame the tech companies for not trying hard enough. Best bet here is to require that the government provide exacting requirements for what they want done and to hew to those requirements exactly.
Some form of malicious compliance is necessary here.
It would be great if we could test the harms of social media societally. Hypothetically if a democratic country with a free press was able to effectively ban Facebook, X, etc for a few years there's no doubt in my mind that the division we see in so many countries would clear up relatively quickly.
The tone gave it away before he finally disclosed but - shocker - the author is on the board of a social media company.
Social media has been a pretty clear net-negative for society. The opinions of a guy in away connected with the industry are irrelevant.
As usual when tech people are asked to do something to control the harms of their products the excuse is "you don't understand, it's not possible". The author thinks preventing children sharing nude images on platforms is some impossible task - yet Apple has already implemented pretty good controls for this.
I'm not saying the regulations are perfect but continuing to ignore the problems caused by social media is irresponsible.
There was an interview with a kid in the UK that went viral yesterday. The interviewer pointed out the kid had spent 9 hours on a screen the previous weekend and asked what they would do now. The answer - stare at the wall. Funny. Maybe said in jest. But I think it still sums up the reason we need to do something about this. If kids literally don't know what to do with themselves without a screen the future isn't looking good. Another kid said it was taking away his planned career...as an influencer.
Yeah, and what they could actually do about it would be banning the whole social media thing. Ever tried to enforce rules you don’t follow yourself on teens? They see through that shit in three seconds.
Social media isn't the problem cellphones are. The Yookay isn't gonna ban those because they are useful surveillance devices.
> 9 hours on a screen
> do something about this
Yeah ban cellphones. And I don't mean just for children. If you want to be a shut in nerd that spends "9 hours on a screen" then you'd best sit down in front of a computer.
Social Media is actually one problem, and that's not just cellphones. I don't disagree with the premise that this could be all a smokescreen by the UK spying on citizens but Social Media is a huge issue. If you are keen, read up on the intersection of Epistemology, Sociology and Social Media research.
This legislation is not for the odd family who has some discipline and education in relation to the upbringing of kids.
This is for those families who have parents who are either too stressed / overworked to keep a proper eye on their children - this is prevalent in low income families.
I’ve seen first hand how such families deal with kids - they hand them a smartphone to watch slop and they stop crying. Why? Because YouTube et al have invested billions in scientific research to figure it all out to groom future generations of slop consumers.
Is that how it should work? The worst of us can’t be trusted to to behave appropriately in one area of life, therefore everyone must be banned from it?
That's how it works everywhere with lots of other things. Drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc. Given the amount of money that's gone into making social media as addictive as possible and the majority of mobile games really being gambling masquerading as games why should they be treated any differently?
Bucketing everybody who can't efficiently regulate children's access to the internet as "the worst of us" is unrealistic, and hideous. It's disgusting (or, charitably, inexperienced) of you to use these words.
As I age, I understand more and more the non-realism of the argument "monitor your kids" in relation to the internet specifically. Everything else? Sure. The internet? That's like restricting a kid's access to the planet. The notion is out of touch and elitist.
I don't think these regulations are necessarily correct in their specifics, but they are absolutely a shadow of something necessary to protect our species. It's time we stop being be so glib about such a hugely important topic and recognize its actual complexity.
Article mostly cites self-reported studies ie the kids think that the kids are doing alright, which is a different statement from the kids are actually doing alright.
Most teachers seeing generational changes are raising five alarm fires around how badly the kids are doing. Actually testing kids is showing a startling reverse Flynn effect [1]. I’m curious what the author has in terms of actual evidence here?
[1] https://pure.eur.nl/en/publications/the-negative-flynn-effec...
Alright covers a broad spectrum of properties.
Most teachers have been asking for more resources for decades, warning of the consequences of not doing so. It seems a little on the nose to ignore their warnings and when the consequences manifest opt to blame something else entirely.
It doesn't seem like there's been a precipitous drop in resources compared to the decades of requests and warnings that have led up to this point. So what's different now, if not resourcing?
Like most I've been listening to this same old argument for nearly 30 years. Old enough now to know it doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't have to even be 50% effective to mark a substantial improvement, a significant chunk of young people won't even need a technical restriction beyond being told the behaviour is against the law because it's bad for them.
But keep goading with "it's technically impossible" and watch what's left of the Internet turn into a government licensing fest, because it is entirely technically possible. Imagine how much cleaner and shiny the nation's pipes would be if we simply throttled any ciphertext flow that couldn't be matched to an Ofcom license holder. They'd never do that. No country in the world has done that, right?
The ‘technically impossible’ arguments always frustrate me. I used to buy into them to - but over time I’ve come to realise that the people making these anrguments are not speaking the same language as lawmakers - or most of the rest of society.
It’s ‘technically impossible’ to stop convenience stores selling alcohol or pornography to minors, or to make people to adhere to contracts. Non-engineers don’t care what’s technically possible, they care what’s legally possible, or societally possible.
It’s the same thing when techies try to decipher what _exactly_ a law does and look for loopholes, when to the rest of society the standard is ‘whatever a reasonable person thinks it does’.
You need to make the argument about why the proposed thing is bad for society for it to be taken seriously.
I don't care if it's trivial to implement and impossible to bypass: it's an effort to eliminate anonymous Internet browsing/commenting because everyone over 16 has to submit ID as well. Its the end of free speech on the part of the Internet the UK controls.
If anything it’s makes the discussion from parents to the kids so much easier. Why can’t I use it? Because it’s illegal. When will this happen in the US? We need it yesterday.
At what cost though? Everyone will now need to submit real ID to access social media. Smaller social media sites will probably just shutdown since it’s unlikely they can afford the whole verification process.
The same was true of food safety. Aunt Tracey might not be able to sell cupcakes from her home any more (made in the oven next to where the cat likes to sleep because of the heat), but we centralised things enough that when BSE and Salmonella outbreaks happen, which nowadays is extremely rare, we know how and why almost immediately. If the cost of ridding ourselves of animal torture, terrorism and child pornography is a few hundred fewer Mastodon instances I could most certainly live with that
what a wild comparison, millions (billions?) of humans have died from food-borne disease, and yet we do in fact still let people very casually sell food to the public (even unpasteurized milk in the US)
> it doesn't have to even be 50% effective to mark a substantial improvement
It is not even 10% effective, and rightly so. It’s so absurdly easy to work around that the whole thing is silly. If the kids can’t be on Instagram they’ll find an equally welcoming place like Roblox to hang out.
You aren’t going to stop kids from being kids, and you probably shouldn’t try.
Note how we’re trusting all these US companies with their safety because any of these companies in the EU would immediately be regulated out of existence?
You're just repeating the "it's technically imperfect" argument again.
Psychologists call this black or white thinking - in this case, either something works perfectly or it's useless.
Next to impossible to get a person who believes this that they're engaging in a cognitive distortion though. I tried the same thing you're doing, once. I gave up. They will die on this hill and then wonder why they lost long after everyone else had moved on.
It's possible to make effective arguments in line with their values. They simply don't want to be helped.
The UK government's turn towards authoritarianism on these sorts of things is extremely worrisome! Invest in a VPN to keep yourself safe.
Where do you suggest for VPN egress?
Isn’t it normally the case when politicians in any part of the world say they need to do something for the children, it’s just theatre to cover up them doing nothing or to hide legislation with a different purpose?
No, that’s a tech meme. If you’ve ever been near a PTA, you’ll understand that there is terrific civic potential in appealing to parents’ fears.
The true think of the children has always been national security.
except in food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care, or general well-being.
The cuts to education were the last thing that disengaged kids from the world, of course they are going to self soothe
My 15-year old niece who recently visited her cousins in Australia assured me that the recently enacted Aussie law did not affect her ability to access socials while in Australia, nor has it affected her U16 cousins, who still have their accounts. Apparently the age checking there only applies to newly created accounts.
Is there a plan to start fining the social media companies themselves? Or raise their liability thresholds?
This is sort of like the illegal-immigration debate. If you’re serious about fixing it, go after employers. Same for underage social media users. If you want to actually solve it, you have to penalize the platforms.
<s there a plan to start fining the social media companies themselves? Or raise their liability thresholds?>
they will apparently be fined around AUD$50M if they fail to do due diligence (not sure how the legislation phrases. I am not sure if any social media company has at this stage. Unfortunately we have a dictator as a so-called e-safety commissioner backed up by an equally useless PM who seem to think all parents are unable to monitor themselves or their kids online behaviour
This is the plan in the UK, yes: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=4500988470135094
>> Aussie law did not affect her ability to access socials while in Australia
I think that's expected.
>> Apparently the age checking there only applies to newly created accounts
Social media companies had to try and identify existing accounts owned by < 16 year olds and start removing them at the start of this year. I'd guess that process is slow and they don't do it unless they're certain. But if they stop new accounts effectively then within a few years the ban would be pretty effective.
> Again, every detailed study on the subject has found that the number of teenagers who have negative experiences on social media is tiny.
The study they linked is just self reported data from an internet survey. I'm sure that 13 year olds who don't get enough sleep because they're endlessly scrolling through ads, influencers, and disinformation don't see any problem with it the same way that a survey of alcoholics will show that beer is great, alcohol improves their lives, and that of course they can quit any time they want.
I'm not even suggesting that this ban will be effective or helpful, or that such bans are a good thing, but we know that these platforms are used to prey on their users, that "negative experiences" can be found easily, and that there's actual evidence of actual harms caused or facilitated by social media (including corpses). It should take a lot more than the opinions of just over a thousand children to discredit all of that and cause us to assume there's no problems with these platforms, how they're being used, or the effects they have on children.
It's interesting to see UK-based influencers all citing these weak studies (internet surveys) about how social media is not so bad for children, or bemoaning the huge loss for children whose access to educational videos will be cut.
While the financial motive is clear, they must all believe it to an extent, because social media made their careers and changed their lives.
The reality is that the vast majority of kids aren't interested in learning video editing or movie directing, they are mindlessly consuming AI-generated videos and similar content served to them. 30-second videos on random facts sprinkled here and there aren't education.
Not that I think this ban will help, but downplaying the harm to children is a bit too much coming from people with ties to these platforms, like the author of this article.
The point is. I’ve heard all of this before. Does anyone else remember being 15 and having every adult nearby tell you that staring at a screen for 6 hours a day is going to destroy my eyes and my life? I can tell you it’s worked out pretty well for me.
Of course I agree the pointless AI generated shit is a massive waste of time, but it doesn’t really matter what it actually is as long as it allows them to connect over a shared thing. I think it’s far more important we ensure there’s spaces for kids to meet that are not purely digital.
>> The reality is that the vast majority of kids aren't interested in learning video editing or movie directing
Also the idea that they can't do these things without social media or YouTube is absurd. The people actually interested in learning something new will go down even deeper rabbit holes, try things themselves, and come out better than they would have following some YouTube tutorials.
> I'm sure that 13 year olds who don't get enough sleep because they're endlessly scrolling through ads, influencers, and disinformation
I didn't get sleep as a teenager because I read books. Should we ban those too?
Fear not, Roblox will not be subject to the policy for the older games within Roblox and as such young children allegedly may be able to get the latest news from their possibly maybe perhaps adult groomers. The newer games within Roblox are purportedly going through a 16+ check. [1]
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9824zvpz9po
Jup, I can’t publish anything useful to Roblox any more unless 100+ 16 year olds first enjoy it. Of course none of this retroactively applies to the games already frequented by 10M U12’s every week, because why would they actually follow the spirit of their own rules if it harms them financially.
Crazy to think that all of that happens in the country of George Orwell that was probably too in advance for his time with 1984 and the Animal Farm.
It was supposed to be a kind of satire of his own time, but it was in the end a perfect prediction of what is coming to us now.
Scary to see how far will go the Pigs that are in command in UK, France, Canada, ...
This is a "can't lose" for Starmer. If it inevitably doesn't work exactly the way he wants, then he'll just blame the tech companies for not trying hard enough. Best bet here is to require that the government provide exacting requirements for what they want done and to hew to those requirements exactly.
Some form of malicious compliance is necessary here.
They are running a bi-election for a replacement to dump his arse, he's already out the door
It would be great if we could test the harms of social media societally. Hypothetically if a democratic country with a free press was able to effectively ban Facebook, X, etc for a few years there's no doubt in my mind that the division we see in so many countries would clear up relatively quickly.
The tone gave it away before he finally disclosed but - shocker - the author is on the board of a social media company.
Social media has been a pretty clear net-negative for society. The opinions of a guy in away connected with the industry are irrelevant.
As usual when tech people are asked to do something to control the harms of their products the excuse is "you don't understand, it's not possible". The author thinks preventing children sharing nude images on platforms is some impossible task - yet Apple has already implemented pretty good controls for this.
I'm not saying the regulations are perfect but continuing to ignore the problems caused by social media is irresponsible.
There was an interview with a kid in the UK that went viral yesterday. The interviewer pointed out the kid had spent 9 hours on a screen the previous weekend and asked what they would do now. The answer - stare at the wall. Funny. Maybe said in jest. But I think it still sums up the reason we need to do something about this. If kids literally don't know what to do with themselves without a screen the future isn't looking good. Another kid said it was taking away his planned career...as an influencer.
Yeah, and what they could actually do about it would be banning the whole social media thing. Ever tried to enforce rules you don’t follow yourself on teens? They see through that shit in three seconds.
Social media isn't the problem cellphones are. The Yookay isn't gonna ban those because they are useful surveillance devices.
> 9 hours on a screen
> do something about this
Yeah ban cellphones. And I don't mean just for children. If you want to be a shut in nerd that spends "9 hours on a screen" then you'd best sit down in front of a computer.
Social Media is actually one problem, and that's not just cellphones. I don't disagree with the premise that this could be all a smokescreen by the UK spying on citizens but Social Media is a huge issue. If you are keen, read up on the intersection of Epistemology, Sociology and Social Media research.
lol oh bore off.
This legislation is not for the odd family who has some discipline and education in relation to the upbringing of kids.
This is for those families who have parents who are either too stressed / overworked to keep a proper eye on their children - this is prevalent in low income families.
I’ve seen first hand how such families deal with kids - they hand them a smartphone to watch slop and they stop crying. Why? Because YouTube et al have invested billions in scientific research to figure it all out to groom future generations of slop consumers.
Is that how it should work? The worst of us can’t be trusted to to behave appropriately in one area of life, therefore everyone must be banned from it?
Yes, if US tech companies exploitative behaviour is a net negative for children in our society then banning it doesn't seem unreasonable.
That's how it works everywhere with lots of other things. Drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc. Given the amount of money that's gone into making social media as addictive as possible and the majority of mobile games really being gambling masquerading as games why should they be treated any differently?
Bucketing everybody who can't efficiently regulate children's access to the internet as "the worst of us" is unrealistic, and hideous. It's disgusting (or, charitably, inexperienced) of you to use these words.
As I age, I understand more and more the non-realism of the argument "monitor your kids" in relation to the internet specifically. Everything else? Sure. The internet? That's like restricting a kid's access to the planet. The notion is out of touch and elitist.
I don't think these regulations are necessarily correct in their specifics, but they are absolutely a shadow of something necessary to protect our species. It's time we stop being be so glib about such a hugely important topic and recognize its actual complexity.