The article is light on the actual allegations, but at least they link to the complaint [1] (so few articles do). The claims are: Public Nuisance, Negligence, and Gross Negligence.
The special damage they claim to have suffered seems to primarily relate to expanding and diverting resources to deal with mental health issues of students.
The table of contents of the complaint is a good summary of their assertions, including:
Defendants’ apps have created a youth mental health crisis.
Defendants target children as a core market, hooking kids on their addictive social media platforms.
Children are uniquely susceptible to Defendants’ addictive apps.
Defendants design their apps to attract and addict youth.
Millions of kids use Defendants’ products compulsively.
Defendants' defective products encourage dangerous "challenges."
Defendants' defective social media apps facilitate and contribute to the sexual exploitation and sextortion of children, and the ongoing production and spread of child sex abuse material online.
- Defendants’ apps have created a youth mental health crisis.
Causality is really hard to establish, possibly impossible in this case. Nonetheless, there does appear to be a youth mental health crisis, and it arose around the time of the smart phone. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/honestly-its-probably-the-phon...
- Defendants target children as a core market, hooking kids on their addictive social media platforms.
It certainly appears that way to me; but it would help to get actual documentation of intent.
- Children are uniquely susceptible to Defendants’ addictive apps.
There is a lot of science that says that teens are vulnerable to addiction; the dual systems view, a pretty influential perspective, is that sensitivity to reward (particularly social rewards) increases dramatically in adolescence, but cognitive control lags; this leads to an increase in exploration vs exploitation, which is adaptive, but risky. I think they are on strong ground here.
- Defendants design their apps to attract and addict youth.
Like the last, documentation of intent would be the best thing for the case.
- Millions of kids use Defendants’ products compulsively.
This is probably true. Adults too. Defense is going to say that its up to parents and guardians to police the use of these apps. That argument didn't work with cigarettes and alcohol, so I'm guessing won't work here eitehr.
- Defendants' defective social media apps (a) facilitate and contribute to the sexual exploitation and sextortion of children, (b) and the ongoing production and spread of child sex abuse material online.
I've denoted one as (a) and one as (b). (b) is undoubtedly the case. (a) is more culture-war-y, but its hard to argue that a lot of the viral video content is not sexxed up*
* I'm no prude, but find it annoying that 90% of the reels that Facebook suggest to me are sexual in nature, and that the sexually arousing nature of the suggested videos grabs my eyeballs. I mean, it works. But, I don't want those kind of distractions when I'm scrolling to see what friends and family are up to. Oh look, my sister took her kids to the beach. Oh look, that couple is simulating sex on a picnic table! Oh look, Mom got her first ripe tomatoes!
Regarding evidence that social media targets children as a market and strategizes how to continue engagement (aka addiction) I actually don’t think this will be extremely hard to prove. Instagram already has internal documentation showing they’re aware that their application has a causal relationship to the harm of the mental health of teenaged girls, but obviously Instagram hasn’t done much of anything to improve things. At minimum I bet similar studies exist in other platforms in internal discussions, and gross negligence if not intent can be measured via subpoena and discovery. It would only take one higher up writing a slack message that effectively says, I want this feature done, no I don’t want this mitigating implementation that would make it less harmful.
I've recently quit Twitter and Facebook, and I must admit that these apps are mentally addictive in the same way that cigarettes are addictive. I often think about them when bored, wondering what I'm 'missing' with my friends or followers. It's taken a level of mental strength to avoid re-installing or re-activating in both cases. So in my view, the addiction is 30% of the argument. The 30% is that they cause harm, and remainder, which I agree will be more difficult to prove, is that it was done with intent.
Gaming too. And then we put it into our kid’s pockets, and started hiring psychologist to consult on game development…
They don’t stand a chance.
Part of the human experiment I guess. We’ll see where we end up. I suspect authoritarianism, rampant viruses, and a toxic environment while we entertain ourselves to death.
> This is probably true. Adults too. Defense is going to say that its up to parents and guardians to police the use of these apps. That argument didn't work with cigarettes and alcohol, so I'm guessing won't work here either.
But cigarettes and alcohol is legally age restricted. Or did that happen later?
seems like Baltimore leadership is just trying to find ways to blame other people for problems they created. They are also suing Kia on the same weak basis of "public nuisance".
I agree this case probably shouldn't succeed, but pretending that these companies have no part in a ongoing youth mental health crises, and that they arnt targeting youth purposefully, is also not the way to go about this.
I'm very happy that USA schools are trying to fight unsocial media. This is an example the world should take. For example, there is such a thing as parenting burnout. I as a father of 6 yo child which uses smartphone very rarely just to play two games we approved, am thinking too much about moment my child will start school. The moment where she will see most children have smartphones, use them without supervision and watch stupid videos. Support from schools would help me to worry less and allow me to feel that my child is safe.
I'm not sure what's really new here, and if it's such a problem. When I was a kid, there were similar discussions. Kids watch too much TV, play too many video games, watch porn VHS when parents are away. In the end, it wasn't such a big deal.
I don’t remember being able to do this at school while in a classroom. So I guess that part is new. And likely a problem if that’s the only venue for required learning.
Computers aren't really new. Addition and writing have been around for a long time. There's nothing that a computer can do that can't theoretically be accomplished by a team of people with abaci and carrier pigeons.
The entire value proposition of modern computation is about scale and cost. It's the same things, but with much higher quantity and intensity. Something that can be tolerably safe at 1 unit/day may be very dangerous at 1000 units/day. I would be surprised if pre-teen porn consumption has only risen by 1000x in the past 30 years.
At what point does it go from entertainment to obsession to something like heroin? There's a point where it does, and we could probably figure out a metric.
It's disingenuous to pretend 'oh there's nothing new here'
I may be older than you so ... TV (we only had broadcast) sucked during the day since it apparently targeted housewives. That, as it turns out, sent us outside to play, ride our bikes.
Video games had not arrived — when they did they cost a quarter to play. That kind of limited the time spent there, ha ha. Personal computers were expensive so even when they arrived, we of course did not have one.
Porn was finding a magazine in the trash can behind an office building.
The thing that saddens me the most about all of this stuff (the internet especially, perhaps) is that kids aren't out trying to fly a kite any more.
Were you playing too many video games and watching too much porn while at school, or at home? Were those video games engineered with the help of psychologists to addict you as much as possible?
You say it wasn't such a big deal, yet here we are in a thread discussing a mental health crisis that most of us agree is occurring. Maybe they were right and if we listened we wouldn't be here now.
People have been radicalized by all kinds of things: religion, crowds, friends, books, and likely broadcast television too. The amplification capability is just more widely available and there's more fringe content.
Never thought I'd have so many friends and acquaintances who doubt the world is ball shaped, the moon landing, or suspected 9/11 was an inside job. Yet I do and some of them actually came to these beliefs because of school research papers and debate classes.
Is this not a palatable alternative to shrugging your shoulders and saying, "I guess we're just fucked"? Determine root causes and pursue with full vigour, utilizing all available tools. Even if you fail, you're sending important signal to stakeholders.
When I was raising my daughters the smart phones didn't come until their peers hit middle school (their teens). They did the odd web-surfing (desktop) thing while in elementary school though.
Are smart phones really in the elementary schools now?
I was exposed to porn in 4th grade in 2001. Internet porn on the family desktop in the kitchen by 2003. My parents never stood a chance; I knew so much more about computers than they did.
It's a different animal for sure now. It had a subtle but very negative effect on my ability to start intimate relationships. I can't imagine what it would've been like if I was in highschool seeing OF girls on reddit. In the 2000s, there was a distance between the girls I knew and women I saw in professional porn. But now I know college-age women who have given OF a try. Definitely would have further warped my perceptions.
Can you elaborate on how it would have warped your perceptions?
From what I can see, todays porn is no longer an ideal but more reflective of reality, to the point where people that one interacts with in daily life could have produced it (e.g. OnlyFans).
For example, for me when I was in high school/college Playboy ran a series called Girls of the ACC where they recruited contestants from our local state school. This was over 20 years ago, and to me isn’t so different from the effect of OnlyFans, letting “normal” people participate in pornography.
It's not so much just about body-types, but what to expect from intimacy and how to obtain it. I had exposure in my life to women who exerted control on men by withholding intimacy and sex. You know, stuff like "If he wants sex, he has to give you/do XYZ". This was terrifying because as soon as I started getting crushes and feeling attraction, it was an overwhelming emotional force. If I liked a girl, then the sun rose and set with her. If she asked me for something I felt helpless to say anything but 'yes'. It was psychologically excruciating to feel so strongly about these girls.
When it quickly became clear that the girls I wanted didn't feel that same way about me, it did not change the way I felt about them. Combined with the experiences I had of the 'control men with sex' ethos, my powerful emotions for women seemed like a huge liability. There were a few very painful experiences where a couple of my middle-school crushes toyed with me. Flirting with me then turning around and laughing with their friends about what a virgin I was. Looking back, there were girls who were interested in me, but I failed to recognize it[0],[1].
I sort of developed this idea that in my relationships, sex must be established at the beginning as something that won't be 'used against me', and I sought out relationships with sex at the forefront of my mind. If intercourse wasn't going to be established as freely engaged in more-or-less right away, I took that as my sign it was a no-go.
Meanwhile, I found early on that porn was quite enjoyable. Between that, my painful emotional experiences, and popular media almost always culminating relationships in sex, I got the message that sex was 'the good part' of a relationship.
I started evaluating women mostly in terms of how much I would enjoy the sex, not the overall time spent together. It seemed like the only logical defensive position to take. This is where I think OF would be mind-breaking. I'll come back to this shortly.
I largely sought out non-committal-style FWB type relationships. This turned out to be very impractical and I did not find many women who wanted to start a relationship based on sex. In particular, most of the women I was attracted to were turned off by that approach to a relationship. However, I did find a couple, and those relationships really revolved around their sexual aspects. The nuclear core was how much sexual pleasure we were capable of achieving (they were also porn consumers). I'm fortunate that we weren't really drug users, but the sex was kind of like a drug. Chasing higher highs. They were excellent at first, just what I wanted. But the focus on pleasure became unsustainable: I felt my penis wasn't big enough for her taste, she felt like she wasn't petite enough for my taste, etc.
At some point, if you're chasing "the most pleasure" moving into BDSM and/or involving other people (threesomes, DP, orgies, etc.) start to seem like logical next-moves. We got about ankle-deep in this before things got incredibly emotionally messy. But I did recognize that this stuff was kind-of distant from the normal experience. This wasn't "what everyone is doing", it's just what they wish they were doing. Pornstars and rockstars and pro athletes were the only people that get to enjoy these zeniths of sexual pleasure.
I have been fortunate enough to realize that a holistic view of sex is more like "You can make someone feel really good. Find someone who you like to do everyday things with, share hobbies with. Believe it or not, there are women that like the things you like, and long-term, it's more fun and rewarding to share a hobby[2] than see how hard you can make each other cum."
But if OF had been available, and I was 17-23 seeing 18-25 year old girls doing anal and FFM, MMF, gapes, etc. as it is possible to now without paying a cent, I think the effect on me would have been about the same, but multiplied exponentially. Instead of that kind of thing being the purview of rockstars and pornstars, knowing it would be a challenge to find a woman who wanted that kind of lifestyle, I'd be wondering why it's so hard to find one. I'd think that they look so normal, so like the girls that are my peers.
Or, god forbid, younger me falls for a girl he meets somewhere, then she rejects him, and then he finds out she has an OF. That's an absolute black hole of self-loathing.
[0] e.g. A girl from a class asked me if I liked The Mars Volta. In hindsight it was an obvious attempt at flirting. But I was cool. "What? No they're whiny posers. I only like serious punk like Anti-Flag and Rise Against and AFI". Someone please invent a time machine so I can give myself a black eye then explain it doesn't matter what I like THE CUTE GIRL IS INTERESTED IN YOU.
[1] I think the fact that I was watching porn warped how I thought women would express interest. Sex is something that happens after you figure out you get along. But, given that I was watching fairly hardcore porn, I think I figured a girl who might want sex would signal it in a clearly sexual way. 'Intimacy' is probably a better term than 'sex', but I've already written a small essay so I won't get into that.
[2] Or even build a life together, but again, outside of scope.
That perception distortion is relatively easily solved with things like nudist beaches and home sex tapes. Should probably have parents making home sex tapes and swapping with other parents to give to their kids to give accurate perception.
This is probably a very european viewpoint, but I find it amazing how shocked people are by children seeing porn, but don't bat an eyelid when kids are exposed to violence on television or in movies.
The biggest example from my own childhood was WWE (WWF at the time). The simplicity of the scripts etc seemed to be explicitly targeted towards kids who would then, predictably, try to copy the wrestling moves on their friends.
It's a million times more harmful than seeing the human body sans garments.
Obviously there are specific types of porn that I'd be mildly concerned by my child being exposed to, but generally speaking it's the violence and inherently problematic power structures within that are the fundamental issue, not the nudity.
Porn isn't mere nudity, and much of it is extremely violent. It is designed to flood the brain with dopamine. Brains, especially developing brains, which are constantly flooded with dopamine begin to produce less dopamine to offset the flood. Low levels of dopamine cause all kinds of psychological and emotional issues.
Mainstream isn't terribly violent, but it's also not really a good representation of sex that women seem (in my experience and what my lady friends have told me) to typically enjoy. Lots of vids of roided out guys jackhammering until a woman is raw and her mascara is covering her face.
But there isn't really just 'mainstream' anymore. Weird face-slapping or gagging or bukkake stuff is a click away from the front page, frequently in 'suggested videos'.
Oddly, porn is one of the less harmful things an elementary kid can be exposed to. Empty addiction loops are much more damaging, porn just isn't interesting with no sex drive.
The UK telecommunications regulator, Ofcom, publishes some useful annual research on this topic [1]. According to the media use and attitudes report 2023 [2]:
> Smartphone ownership shifts markedly in [the children aged 8-11] group, which correlates with the children’s transition to secondary school … As reported by parents, more than half of 8-11-year-olds (55%) owned a mobile phone, a significant increase on children aged 3-4 and 5-7 (both at 20%).
multiple first graders in my childs class have phones, I regularly see children that can’t walk using their parents phones to watch youtube while being pushed in strollers
First, at 6 why does your kid even need to know what a smartphone is? At 6, a phone should be to "call people", period.
Second, it can be expensive and therefore not an option for everyone but there are schools with solid phone/media policies. My kids go to a school where phones are forbidden until 9th grade.
If 6 bothers you, the number of toddlers/infants I see using phones and tablets would really concern you. I'd say a good half of the kids who are brought into the store where I work end up on a tablet or phone without an adult. Including the little littles.
The "phone" part of a smartphone may not be of any importance to a kid, but are they even that to average adults any more? I'm not even sure when I last used that aspect on mine for anything other than SMS-based 2FA.
I wouldn't trust the general web to be age-appropriate for under-12s these days, including all advertising in any apps, but that doesn't mean I can't sympathise with parents desperate for some distraction.
My parents had it relatively easy with me: when I was five, I was using a Commodore 64, learning to read from its user manual and just starting to notice that the loading screens for some games counted oddly, going "…, 8, 9, A, B, …"
The worst that any of that meant for my parents was the incredibly minor point that that I was aware enough to notice the dual meaning of "Jet Set Willy".
To an extent, although iPod touch and iPad mini would then be potential alternatives that may be better suited.
Unfortunately there is also too much pressure for constant analytics for me to feel at ease with the modern world, even in cases where I know from the inside that GDPR is being taken 100% seriously.
I'd be in favour of a change in the law such that analytics was banned, and/or software was required to function offline…
What little kids want and need is other little kids, but we do so little of that and seem to have structured our society to make it hard for kids to get together. When we set up play dates for our kids there is zero interest in devices unless it's to play a game together with the other kids, and even that is rare.
They also lean less on the parents when other kids are around because playing with other kids is what they really want.
When you look at the stupid videos, a good chunk of them give a sense of social presence. That's what the kids are craving. Pseudo-social media is a fake substitute, like artificial fruit flavoring.
Your comment is condescending against OP's parenting style.
It is difficult to control how your child perceives phones, as managing their exposure to them is impossible, especially when taking your child outside where they'll see people using them in public. They may also visit a friend whose parents let them use a phone, so again, it's an uphill battle.
I wouldn't call it condescending but yes, I dispute the fact that "well it's how it is. Nothing parents can do." I have no problem expressing judgment or opinion on how others raise their kids.
My 8 year old has never used a tablet. He thinks phones are just to call people. He just knows that people use them for dumb things just because they can't bare to be alone with their thoughts for 2min.
Yes it is a "battle" and it requires time and effort. It's not impossible. Uphill battle for sure, one that I will probably lose, but still worth fighting.
These lawsuits make no sense. The schools can already ban phone usage and have no authority to dictate things outside classrooms. 1st amendment will squash these (and if they didn’t you should be concerned at the implication).
But since we are filing ridiculous suits they should sue fast food companies and junk food ones as well. It’s already well established that poor nutrition affects student outcomes significantly.
They should also sue state governments for blocking housing too since student homeless is a problem.
Yes, however meta and Google are inclusive of speech against the government. Under what grounds would wholesale ban be allowed then? The entire suit will fail and they know it. More waste of tax payer dollars.
If they care about this they can simply ban phones in their school districts.
This suit is analogous to banning fedex and ups because kids are addicted to mailing each other scandalous notes. Clearly will fail.
If there’s specific content posted by specific groups that are a concern the school should go after them.
To my knowledge, the reason why free speech is held in such high regard is the idea that only citizens who are well-informed and have equal access to all arguments can make reasonable decisions - which is what a democracy rests on.
If that is the reason though, I'd doubt that speech that deliberately attempts to subvert rational thought and manipulate the audience would fall under that protection.
Do you mean legally? Because ethically, I think they make perfect sense. And I would think similar about going after fast food companies and possibly other industries.
Not to spoil the good time here, but where’s the standing?
I don’t think the courts have ever broadly recognized schools’ standing with respect to things that can harm students outside of the school’s walls. I would think that the appropriate regulatory tool here is having each school (or district) institute bans on device use during school hours, not suing random companies.
Not a lawyer, but I think you are right that the case will end up hinging on this; my guess is that the argument will be that having a whole bunch of messed up social-media addicts at school is disruptive to the educational environment, preventing them from fulfilling their mission.
> my guess is that the argument will be that having a whole bunch of messed up social-media addicts at school is disruptive to the educational environment, preventing them from fulfilling their mission.
I don't think this is wrong per se, but it's hard to see a court accepting that broad environmental concerns of this sort fall under schools' purviews.
Put another way: if schools can sue social media companies for disrupting the educational environment, what stops them from suing oil companies for making the world uninhabitable for their students? The problem isn't factuality (the school is arguably correct in both cases!), but scope.
I would venture to guess they are suing BECAUSE they can’t do anything else
I’ll tell you that for the schools that my kids go to, parents would most likely throw a massive tantrum if they banned phones.
Beyond that…it wouldn’t work and would either be ignored and just another mis-applied or selectively punished thing or further turn every school into prison-lite.
In reality the entire school system is a sham intended to be public day care so that parents don’t have any reason they can’t go to work. So anything that would functionally work to improve education is orthogonal at best.
The public school system I went to has around a million students in it, and had a complete ban on cellphones until 2014. My understanding is that phones are still banned on a school-by-school basis, although there is no longer a system-wide policy.
Banning phones in schools isn’t popular with students (and is unenforceable on the long tail), but it’s the only actual tool that schools have here. Filing lawsuits with social media companies makes for fun headlines, but it doesn’t grant them standing.
IMO social media should age check by law. The problem with parental control is that it’s very difficult to say no, if the child’s friends are on socal media. Let the social media do age controls, by law.
And as a result have everyone upload their personal identification to some untrustworthy corporate database?
Thanks but no thanks.
There ought to be better solutions.
My view is that it's a question of culture. In particular, the eradication of any sort of authority (parents, teachers) and the worshipping of "I want, therefore it's good and my right" are among the root causes for this epidemic.
A government API / website to do the verification can work similar to OpenID - the end application doesn't know any PII, receiving a JWT with some basic info (name, age email) instead.
Just something on top of my head, I'm sure that there are solutions to this. It's the political will and balls that are nowhere to be found...
Sorry, no. I don't trust a government API/website with my personal information. They collect and abuse the private data that I DON'T willingly give them access to. Imagine what they'd do with the data I do.
The government already have all your personal information. If you mean that you don't trust a government API to do age verification, then that's already an option in some countries and it doesn't have to expose anything.
Denmark have MitID, which is a sort of government OIDC/OAuth2 thing. There's no issue in having it expose only a single claim, such as age, or adult=true/false in age verification scope. You don't have to open the floodgates to government data, in fact Denmark has navigated that pretty well through the last three iterations of our government issues online ID scheme. There's even laws preventing cross referencing data from different database, in the case that you for some reason have access to it.
> And as a result have everyone upload their personal identification to some untrustworthy corporate database?
What about having IRL stores sell one-time use age verification tokens after showing ID? Just like tobacco or alcohol they can make it illegal to provide them to a minor. Whereas if you're worried about privacy you can still buy with cash.
And what prevents a Malicious Actor (older student? friend who already graduated? someone who wants to sell them?) from acquiring multiple of said age verification tokens from different vendors? Well, now there has to be a database somewhere of all of the tokens that have been created along with the ID number of the person who acquired the token. Who maintains this database? The government? The companies who we don't want storing our data?
Sure, it adds more steps than just "click this checkbox if you're an adult" but kids/teens are a crafty bunch and, unlike drugs and sex, a) the penalty for violation of the rules is not immediately obvious (to the youth, OR even to society) and b) the act of violating the rules is not obvious in itself to people who aren't on that person's phone: there's no physical items left behind for parents to notice.
Effectively what we're talking about here is trying to solve the Sybil Problem, which has no widely-accepted solution.
You're asking what prevents straw purchases. Same thing that prevents straw purchases for alcohol and tobacco. Plus once it's the norm to not have kids on social networks there will be greater societal enforcement, just like with smoking and drinking.
There's no database of alcohol or tobacco buyers. The sales clerk just checks your id and forgets about it. It's a code good for use on exactly one account on one service, and expires in maybe a year. If you have multiple accounts on multiple services, buy separate codes for each one. They should be reasonably priced - no more than $5 each.
You don't need a perfect solution. Despite laws against underage drinking, smoking, and drug use it still happens.
So do it without the log. There's no log of alcohol and tobacco buyers, and also no need for "audits" there. Have some undercover inspectors do spot checks to make sure all retailers are checking ID. Fail the test, lose your license.
The store sells a scratch card containing a single-use code, after you show them ID. When you sign up with whatever social network, you enter the code and the social network validates it with the code provider service. That's it.
At best the code provider can tell the social network which store the code was purchased in. Drive over to the next state to purchase codes if you're paranoid. Mandate by law that no records of code purchases or copies of ID are kept. We don't require it for alcohol or tobacco purchases so there's no justification here.
The government could provide anonymous age credentials. A private-public key that neither the website nor the government can use to identify the user, but that confirms the user holds a key issued by the government verifying their age.
Have age checking done by a trusted third party that only certifies the age check on the spot without storing any information (post office or sth like that?)?
They do[1]. Most social media sites in the US don't allow children under 13 to use their sites, as a matter of policy. There have been proposals to expand COPPA to other forms of tracking and to children under 16.
To be clear, “age checking” involves nothing more than having the user enter their birthdate via a datepicker. Not exactly the same kind of verification used for things like cigarettes or alcohol.
Right. The alternative would be mandatory identification to websites, which would be a gross violation of user privacy, and impossible under the US’s current ID schemes.
You can use parental tools to disable these apps. Demanding thar whole world uploads private IDs to sites to check age because you refuse to parent well is absurd.
Parents can’t do it alone and parents are probably more active in their kids lives than ever. Compare todays parents to a generation that was kicked out of the house until sunset.
I’m not a fan of any of the companies listed but I don’t necessarily like blaming them for things parents shouldn’t be giving their kids access to. But maybe these lawsuits will wake some parents up.
Almost all of their friends have no restrictions at all on phone use, electronics, video streaming, etc. A few have been on TikTok and Instagram since they were in 5th grade. The amount of pressure I hear to let them have Snapchat is constant.
Regardless, we maintained the restrictions. Apple Family makes it fairly easy to manage. Xbox controls are a little more of a pain but they work too to moderate.
I’ve talked to my kids about the addictive and psychological elements of how certain games work or videos. They listened but didn’t understand.
Last week, they started talking to me about how a lot of their friends have a phone in front of their face all the time and they see what we’ve been trying to warn them about. It was a struggle to get there but seeing that they finally really understood was big.
The flip side though, the reason they understand is because they see people who have fallen victim to it. It’s like understanding why your parents warned you about drugs because you see what happened to your friend who fell into it.
We know the consequences. At this point, parents shouldn’t have to spend so much time worrying about this. It’s not easy but it should be.
Social media is toxic: it’s not real, it’s a waste of life when there’s tons of other awesome things you can do. And the legitimization of chasing Internet Points is truly sad.
I'm an illustrator/painter and instagram has been a MASSIVE net positive on my life. I have come across extremely useful products (allaprima pochade) and artists who provide unparalleled education. I have learned WAY more from artists I have found on instagram, and for a paltry $600 compared to the thousands I absolutely wasted on university classes led by professors who I discovered too late were incompetent.
Are you at all concerned that you aren't inoculating them to deal with the real world now in a safer space? In the future it will all be unlocked at once and they may be unable to deal with the addictive nature of this stuff.
They might also not know how to interact properly in the real world.
It’s a prisoner’s dilemma which is why the companies need to be regulated.
Very similar to child labor laws where there were lots of firms refusing to use it, but were getting put out of business by those who did. Solution: use the law to force everyone onto equal ground.
Otherwise many many avenues of improvement for our society are impossible to take for the two reasons you and GP mention.
I get really concerned about this as someone who worked in universities for a while. Watching the 18 year old kids get targeted by the credit card/loan/predatory industries made me really sad.
> In the future it will all be unlocked at once and they may be unable to deal with the addictive nature of this stuff.
I’m adult. I’m still unable to deal if I don’t implement heavy restrictions on every screen I use. I don’t even have Tiktok, FB, IG or Twitter, just HN and reddit. I know how addiction feels, and this feels like it. Social media is poison.
Sometimes, but I take the view of “control what’s normal” as much as I can. I want them to react to weird stuff like it’s weird and unfamiliar.
I do talk to them about things at different levels as they get older. They will have to manage it all themselves one day, but I’m going to keep them away from it as long as I can.
For me, not at all. Along the same line, I don't expose the kids to tiny bits of pornography or heroin either. These examples may sound like hyperbole, but not everything can be prevented with vaccine methodology, imo. If kids need tiktok to know how to interact properly with the world, that's a failure of parents and society. Maybe they'll instead be one of the few with cognitive superpowers that include independent thought, creativity, and attention.
I don't think parents can just keep their kids off of social media, at least teens. How are they supposed to function socially if they're not even able to enter the spaces where a huge amount of the socializing is happening? What about during the pandemic, when it was virtually all online? If the goal is to promote their mental health and their growth, cutting them off from their peer group doesn't seem like a promising strategy.
It seems silly to blame the parents when the world has shifted around them, outside of their control.
Why do you say that? I'm part of one of the earlier cohorts (I assume) to go through high school on Facebook, and absolutely a huge part of my social life was on Facebook. I organized our senior ditch day on Facebook. My awkward first attempts at flirting were on Facebook.
I'm not saying it's a good or healthy space for teens to socialize, but I do contend it's an important one.
Maybe so, but my claim is that social media is an important part of our social landscape, one that you can't simply deprive a kid of without consequence, not that Facebook is this or is that.
You can absolutely function perfectly fine without social media as a kid or adult.
Hypothesis/opinion: a large portion of the world has no access to the internet or social media and those people are doing better in terms of mental health than those with access.
Also there's a significant amount of kids without access (because their parents don't let them) even in the Western world and they seem to be doing fine (if not better) as well.
It's not that you need to log on to an app to function, it's that to function socially, you need to be in contact with the people in your community. In a community with limited Internet access, of course that happens in person. But that isn't really comparable to not being on the internet in a community that generally is.
I'm sure plenty of teens would do fine without social media, some would probably prefer it because some people prefer limited social contact, but we can't make a blanket statement that we can yank kids offline and it'll all be fine.
The criticism I'm hearing in this thread seems to be, "parents are doing something uncomplicatedly irresponsible, it's obvious kids should be off social media," but frankly the analysis I'm seeing behind that is pretty thin (I'm gathering this is more a gut feeling for people than a reasoned position? Which is valid and all, it just doesn't make for good discussion since it can't be transmitted to or evaluated by another person), and this is a complex issue without such simple solutions.
You don’t need these apps to do what you are asserting though. I am probably a part of the same cohort as you in terms of when social media arrived on the scene. I used Facebook to socialize, but ultimately my meaningful socialization came through in-person contact and was primarily organized through phone calls and texting. Facebook was kind of a sideshow. Later the same was true of Instagram. I eventually got rid of my social media accounts and my social life was unchanged, because almost none of the socialization that goes on in these sites is substantive in any way.
Cool, but since we've had different experiences, can we not both acknowledge our experience might not be representative and that we shouldn't be making proscriptions for how other people raise their children?
Facebook of your youth is a social network. TikTok is also a social network.
Maybe try launching TikTok for once and let me know whether you’d want to grow up like that.
I can't imagine unironically saying fam or poggers either, but I don't need to, that slang isn't for me. So I don't really see the point.
Help me understand the difference between this conversation and the general phenomenon of looking at what the kids are doing and finding it weird and scary. Because everything I did as a teen was supposed to destroy my generation, too.
Well those are certainly views you're entitled to. Many of my most meaningful friendships have been with people I've never met in person. Teens are/were able both to contract and to spread COVID, which are two excellent reasons they might have isolated during the stay at home/shelter in place advisories.
That said, encouraging your kids to interact in person seems reasonable to me.
On one side parents who are likely overworked, on the other a group of corporation filled with some of the top minds of our era focused on building the most addictive product imaginable. The deck is stacked very strongly against parents and it's completely unreasonable to not hold greater accountability towards these massive corporations.
As a parent I can assure you that both things need to happen.
It’s like how cigarettes weren’t allowed to be advertised to children. Sure, parents were responsible for teaching kids not to smoke but companies need to also be held accountable for the well-being of their product and it’s users too. It’s not an either / or. There is enough responsibility for all parties to be accountable.
I don't see regulators pushing for Meta and Google to be broken up, or for ISPs to nuke TikTok in the USA. It's been talked about for years but nothing ever happens.
> What if you consider social media to be like cigarettes?
Well, then people should show some ID before using the internet or something to prove they are adults? How do you enforce that? at the ISP level? at the device level? At the website level? Genuine question. Who's responsibility is that? In a society where nobody wants to be responsible for anything?
Are you a parent? It certainly doesn't sound like it. While you might be able to keep a preteen away from things, once they are teenagers you can not prevent then from doing something they want to do. The amount of teenage pregnancies in states where they preach abstinence instead of doing sexual education is a pretty strong proof of that.
I think you're being too harsh on the parents. I don't know a single parent who allowed their kids to get cigarettes, but I also don't know a single teen who ever said "I'd like to smoke but my parents don't allow it so no, thanks". They just smoked behind their parents' backs.
I feel the comparison to cigarettes is apt: I know of children who had an "official" Facebook account for their parents and a "real" one for their school friends. And while I'm not sure I 100% agree with the lawsuit, I think it's worth asking: given how much money these companies invested in hooking teens up and how much they profited from it, should they also be held accountable for the negative effects of said hooking up?
And if the cigarette companies advertise to the kids? And the second hand smoke is everywhere (everyone else using them) and are almost ubiquitous now? Such that the only way around that is to cut those kids off from society?
I agree with you on parenting, but I won't, for a second, let these companies off the hook for the damage they cause.
Give them an inch, they'll take your entire soul if they can and it will help their quarterly P&L. Don't forget it.
> And if the cigarette companies advertise to the kids?
It's illegal. Tiktok, Facebook, ... nonsense on the other hand isn't, because these platforms aren't responsible for the content they broadcast, by regulation. So should these regulations change?
Of course, I know it's illegal. I'm using the comparison to highlight it.
It's as if we're allowing cigarette companies to be all pervasive through general access and direct advertising to our kids, and then saying: "but the parents shouldn't let them smoke, man, they're not responsible parents".
The law has far more power over corporations than society has over parents and parents have over children. We are better off doing what is most effective: regulate the industry.
It's crazy to me that people can't accept that most things have both positive and negative effects. Facebook was absolutely hated on for doing research into understanding and minimizing those possible negative effects.
School should be suing the FCC or congress for lack of action around social media ... This isn't about change though, its about $$, so yes, go after the companies to "do better"™
Finally. Some action against the biggest tech companies of some sort, especially both Meta and TikTok the usual suspects.
Also an unrelated note, do NOT browse this site without an ad-blocker. Just realized that The Verge has regressed in quality and is riddled with ads just like the Daily Mail.
Section 230 protects against liability from user generated content. My understanding is the school is alleging the platforms operate in purposefully addictive and damaging behavior. IANAL of course but it sounds like the actions of the platform itself would be clearly outside of S230.
Social media is not to blame here, HCPSS is to blame for for promoting homosexuality, sexual degeneracy, and radical gender ideology on its students. It is expected that students are angry, violent, and suicidal given the abuse they have experienced at the hands of the leftist authoritarians running this “school” and to a larger extent the whole country.
Am I alone in thinking this is batshit crazy on a multidimensional fractal of levels? What possible standing does a school have in the relation between students and a third-party website? What possible resolution could one ask for, that doesn't trod all over the First Amendment like a rabid horse with muddy hooves? Also, how is "internet causes mental health issues" even an acceptable cause of action? It's just people speaking freely with each other. To say that's a "crisis" is to utterly reject the free-society value that people speak freely with each other, that that's everyone's inalienable, unquestionable right. It's unvarnished authoritarianism.
(And yet again, if people are contemplating this direction of authoritarian control, it's simply because they perceive a small crisis, and don't know how else to answer it besides brute force. (But all of civilization is a series of little emergencies; if you start thinking in policy in terms of emergency measures, you'll never have normality again)).
We have concepts like “the First Amendment” and “standing” and so on exclusively to build and maintain a strong society. All of these things are subject, at the end of the day, to the assessment of whether they are effective at preventing bad things and preserving good things.
If, for example, 100% of people under the age of 18 commit suicide within one month of being on Instagram, these arguments correctly would not prevent action against Instagram. We’d simply find a way to prevent kids from going on IG while weakening as little as possible the First Amendment’s protections of things that are good for our society.
The only point of debate here is where each individual draws the line.
From my observation, it seems people who are close to children a lot (parents, teachers, medical professionals) have been screaming their fucking brains out about this problem in ever-increasing intensity for years and years. People who are not close to children (20-something year old tech workers and HN browsers) think it’s all made up.
- "exclusively to build and maintain a strong society"
Human rights (i.e. freedom of speech) aren't utilitarian concepts for achieving some secondary end-goal, like a desired social outcome. They're an end-goal in themselves. That's the core value judgement of free societies: the recognition of human dignity, human autonomy, as an *intrinsic* moral good to be protected at great cost.
No you're not, although the zeitgeist is annoyingly against you. The same bullshit they rolled their eyes at as a kid they accept uncritically replayed as an adult. Most notably they didn't come up with that conclusion on their own after maturing, but by following demagogues and propaganda-documentaries.
Assuming that the schools are correct and social media companies are harming the mental health of children, then it should be the health authorities doing the suing. The schools are to a large extend the organisations having to deal with the mental health issues, so it is affecting their budgets and ability to do their job, that could constitute them suing for being imposed an unreasonable burden by a private companys business practices. Maybe... I'm not a lawyer, it might also be as simple as "It needs to be done and no one else seems to care".
The special damage they claim to have suffered seems to primarily relate to expanding and diverting resources to deal with mental health issues of students.
The table of contents of the complaint is a good summary of their assertions, including:
[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23832853-maryland-sc...