And I find that harm to be far less than the harm caused by identifying everybody all the time and censoring topics to people based on government provided tokens.
In dealing with the ills of social media, you do what you do with every other negative externality - you tax it. At least the parts of it you don't like.
Designing privacy, freedom, and liberty destroying mechanisms is not the way.
Big social wants these regulations to pass so that they can get better identity tracking for ads targeting. To them it doesn't matter if the tech ushers in 1984. It makes them more money.
It's definitely not just kids. Social media is a lot like meth, we should at a bare minimum stop giving it to kids as soon as possible. And then come to realise it's bad for everyone and should be wound back.
Their argument would be, "If meth is a negative externality, we should just tax it instead of banning it in stores for kids to buy." Kids may die, but I'm sure with all that extra state revenue we'll get a nice park or museum or kickback to Tesla or something.
We do that here; heavy tax sigarettes (and booze): both dropped like a lead balloon. So yes, tax it for everyone. Kids cannot pay for sigarettes and most adults don't want to (most vapers I know do it because it costs far less; that should be taxed more too imho). If browsing insta/tiktok costs an euro per hour, let's see how many still do it; I'd say they go bankrupt in a few months. Apparently it was never that interesting.
The data isn't screaming at us. That's an illusion caused by the flood of bad academic papers on the topic.
A good example is the Jonathan Haidt/Aaron Brown fiasco from a few years ago. Brown has been methodically trying to stop the stampede off yet another pseudo-scientific cliff but not enough people are listening.
> In a recent article for Reason, I argued that the hundreds of studies that New York University professor Jonathan Haidt has assembled to support his claim that social media is causing the teen mental health crisis not only don't back up his claim; they undermine it.
Age verification campaigners like Haidt play a smooth game but consistently downplay how useless social science actually is for answering questions like this:
> I didn't express "concerns" about specific studies; I argued that the majority of the 301 papers cited in his document are garbage. I went through each category of studies on Haidt's list, chose the first one that studied social media and depression to get a random sampling, and then showed that they were so embarrassingly bad as to be completely useless. They were guilty of coding errors, fatal defects hidden in mid-paper jargon, inappropriate statistics, longitudinal studies that weren't longitudinal, experiments in name only, and red flags for hypothesis shopping and p-hacking (that is, misusing data analysis to yield results that can be presented as statistically significant).
It's possible that in the past few years a wealth of robust evidence has suddenly emerged but it seems doubtful.
This stuff does matter. If you misdiagnose the problem then congrats, you just let governments censor the internet - quite possibly creating a China style totalitarian system that pretends to be democratic along the way - and kids will still have the same problems. A bad outcome!
I have a hunch that the Epstein class is getting increasingly upset about the kids encountering ideas about what ought to be done about the Epstein class, and mostly are keen to see the next generation molded back into good little subservient laborers. It really isn't about the well-being of the kids.
We're building 1984 to protect from god knows what imaginary harms.
Stop putting plastic wrap around people's freedoms, liberty, and right to privacy.
We will look back at handing kids phones with instagram like giving kids cigarettes and think wtf were we doing.
In dealing with the ills of social media, you do what you do with every other negative externality - you tax it. At least the parts of it you don't like.
Designing privacy, freedom, and liberty destroying mechanisms is not the way.
Big social wants these regulations to pass so that they can get better identity tracking for ads targeting. To them it doesn't matter if the tech ushers in 1984. It makes them more money.
Are you saying that we should let children smoke and just tax it because its better for their liberty and freedoms?
Or are you saying we should just tax social media for adults but banning it for kids is ok
A good example is the Jonathan Haidt/Aaron Brown fiasco from a few years ago. Brown has been methodically trying to stop the stampede off yet another pseudo-scientific cliff but not enough people are listening.
https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...
https://reason.com/video/2024/04/02/the-bad-science-behind-j...
https://reason.com/2023/05/30/not-every-study-on-teen-depres...
> In a recent article for Reason, I argued that the hundreds of studies that New York University professor Jonathan Haidt has assembled to support his claim that social media is causing the teen mental health crisis not only don't back up his claim; they undermine it.
Age verification campaigners like Haidt play a smooth game but consistently downplay how useless social science actually is for answering questions like this:
> I didn't express "concerns" about specific studies; I argued that the majority of the 301 papers cited in his document are garbage. I went through each category of studies on Haidt's list, chose the first one that studied social media and depression to get a random sampling, and then showed that they were so embarrassingly bad as to be completely useless. They were guilty of coding errors, fatal defects hidden in mid-paper jargon, inappropriate statistics, longitudinal studies that weren't longitudinal, experiments in name only, and red flags for hypothesis shopping and p-hacking (that is, misusing data analysis to yield results that can be presented as statistically significant).
It's possible that in the past few years a wealth of robust evidence has suddenly emerged but it seems doubtful.
This stuff does matter. If you misdiagnose the problem then congrats, you just let governments censor the internet - quite possibly creating a China style totalitarian system that pretends to be democratic along the way - and kids will still have the same problems. A bad outcome!
Sounds like denial or tunnel vision.