I guess it depends on if you’re a utilitarian or you approach ethics in some other way. Adding up harms vs benefits is no easy feat in this case.
I’m not a utilitarian, but, for example, I wouldn’t expose all teens to heroin if doing so would help the a small minority of disabled teens.
Yeah, I’m not willing to go down the road of Social Media being medicinal.
I can just see the ads. That oughta be fun.
I am a utilitarian of one sort or another, and I also wouldn’t expose all teens to heroin if doing so would help a small minority of disabled teens who needed it, but I would potentially let a doctor prescribe it to the ones who need it.
Likewise, maybe an exemption to the social media ban for some teens makes sense.
On the other hand, if it turns out that such an exemption isn’t helpful because the benefit disabled teens get from social media is being able to interact with other teens on even footing, then that wouldn’t necessarily help. And that sucks. But in that scenario, the benefit to the disabled teens specifically depends on activity that causes harm to the rest of the teens, so it becomes much harder to support. To keep torturing the heroin analogy, if a minority of teens benefited from heroin, but only if they got to use it with their school friends, I would not be able to support that.
I don’t think drug addiction is the right analogy. At..all.
Being social doesn’t require you to use a needle to put interaction in your vein.
But, I do agree SM can help the shut in. It helps me to be on the Dope.
There are lots of things adults can do that kids might like to do but, alas it’s not good for them.
So we must have some restrictions. If not the parents(whose job it is), the government has to step in. Which pings many folks side eye.
I’d much prefer the parent steps up. But they can’t get off their butts/phones long enough to oversee their kids usage.
It probably shouldn’t be,
I mostly agree with you here. I limit mine own social media, and my kids’ as well, because I do think it can be harmful. But whether or not it’s harmful is irrelevant to my point. The leap from it’s harmful (whether true or not) to it’s an evil that’s destroying society feels exactly like every other moral panic. We need to mitigate any harm it might cause and accept that social media is a part of our culture going into the future.
From the article:
Even now, as I come to terms with life as a quadriplegic, Instagram and TikTok offer videos, accounts and communities to remind me I’m not alone. I follow my footy team, I even DM with some of the Carlton boys before and after games, I follow the NBA and my favourite basketball accounts, and have started my own movie account where I review and rate movies.
I don’t find that persuasive. He can do those things without being on social media, except for talking to strange adults. It’s an open question whether he benefits from doing those things on social media more than he’d benefit from actually socializing with peers. I get that he wants to be on social media as much as anyone his age. It doesn’t mean it’s good for him regardless of how compelling he finds it.
Oh, no argument there - I find stuff like this extremely concerning:
From Australia, too, so you’d think they’d be aware of the danger.
I can see their point of view but ultimately I think it does more harm than good, so I’m on the side of less. It might be more appropriate to limit it to say, two hours a day.
We the parents are of course struggling with our own phone addictions.
My kid doesn’t get screens during the week but probably gets too much on weekends. He loves YouTube videos, some of which are nonsense and some of which are educational, either of which is fine, to a point. He watches so much Minecraft we’re actually getting him Minecraft for Christmas. I would much rather he play it than passively consume other people playing it.
Minecraft is the very thing my middle daughter is struggling with. Her elementary aged boys want it so bad.
It scares me how much they want it. I am trying not to buttinski in her choices. She’ll do what she thinks is right.
I believe their Dad will provide it for them. He’s much more relaxed about things.
It scares you… How much they want… Minecraft?
Minecraft looks super constructive and creative to me. I’d be proud if my kid played it a lot.
This reminds me of the story I started a thread on a few days ago about Missouri instituting an age-verification rule for “adult websites”, and that PornHub responded by blocking access to that state. Sure, it’s the parents’ job to monitor their kids’ access to the Web, but they can’t be there all the time.
I don’t live in Australia, so I personally have no dog in this fight, and I’ll leave further comments to people who know more about it than I do.
But that’s the thing. You don’t get that choice with this new law. You as a parent don’t get to decide what is good for you kid.
This is the government censorting the Internet “for the children”. It’s akin to the library book bans. Your response to “I don’t want my kids doing this” Should not be "i won’t let any kids do it.
And I know some youngsters in Australia and not a single one is in favor of this law. Social media is how many otherwise socially isolated kids even have friends. Sure, some parts of it are bad, but the part where they can socialize and chat and stuff? That part isn’t bad at all.
The government should not be censoring the Internet. Maybe you can pull off “ISPs must provide child-locks for the Internet which are on by default.” But it should be up to every parent to decide what is good for their kid.
And tha’ts not getting into the danger of having to handle IDs and using AI to age verify. The obvious place to handle that is at the ISP level, where you’re buying the Internet, you show an ID. But that’s not how any of these censorship things are set up.
Not that kids won’t find a VPN and people willing to help them use them. Like in China. And now it’s all hidden from view.
(I’m also on board with deliberating using a UK VPN to mess with their monitoring)
This is all authoritarian nonsense.
How is that obvious? I pay for the ISP, so presumably my ID would be on file, but I don’t want my kids to be able to access anything and everything as if they’re 18 based on that.
Frankly, social media accounts should be tied to something like a driver’s license. That way we can ensure they’re all real people, and that they’re really posting from the country they say they are posting from.
Well, please post a couple of cites showing real studies that rock and roll or satanism was actually harming kids. Because those moral panics were obvious bullshit from the start, whereas this one isn’t, at least to me (and plenty of researchers).
Do you have any idea what Minecraft is? Think of it as an infinite Lego set. I’m not sure why you think that one is a problem – as far as video games go, it’s about as good as it gets.