My question to these sorts of articles is, okay so what do we do then?
What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids. Its not good for their attention spans or mental health to a much greater degree than other forms of media.
Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones, but they should be able to use them without being engulfed in social media content that has been shown to have a negative impact on them. Whether its algorithmic feeds targeting particular age groups or short form video content that is reducing attention spans and the ability to concentrate.
I have no idea how an adult filming young girls on a train has anything to do with social media bans. The Senior Legal Officer is absolutely entitled to having a phone, but absolutely not to use it however he means. The teenagers are entitled to having a phone, but potentially may have limits to how they can use those devices.
Just because there are adults with full agency that do the wrong thing, doesn't mean we should remove protections on young people. Just because adults with full agency drive recklessly, doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds the ability to drive.
Social media, as we have it today, is not healthy for anybody. It is bad, truly bad, and the companies responsible know it.
You can't lace beer with crack and sell it. Not to a 12yo, not to a 50yo. Regulate the proverbial crack, then we see if further regulations are required.
Earlier this year (0):
> “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,”
From 9 years ago (1):
> Facebook showed advertisers how it has the capacity to identify when teenagers feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”
A concrete example is the annulation of the 2024 Romanian elections. It probably happened because a certain candidate was able to manipulate the TikTok algorithm using (undeclared) paid influencers and spam.
Thank you, it's been infuriating reading these social media bans for children, as if when kids suddenly turn 16 or 18 or whatever magical nimber the courts come up with, they are suddenly immune to the psychological tricks from multi million dollar companies hiring the best psychologists with no morals money can buy.
Social media needs to be heavily regulated to the point where it's safe for everyone, or banned entirely. I don't understand why there's this belief it should have a right to exist when basically everyone agrees it's a net negative to society.
> Thank you, it's been infuriating reading these social media bans for children, as if when kids suddenly turn 16 or 18 or whatever magical nimber the courts come up with, they are suddenly immune to the psychological tricks from multi million dollar companies hiring the best psychologists with no morals money can buy.
This is sort of true, but there is definitely a scale of development that means the most harm will be done the earlier you start. Same with access to pornography. People's brains don't suddenly become immune to it at 18, it's just that that's the age of legal responsibility that ties in with other things.
Men who turn 18 don't suddenly become disposable meat-based gun-holders in times of war, and yet we still treat them that way.
I don't think there is that agreement that it is in total a net negative to society.
That said, with bans upcoming or in force in a lot places, what measures should we monitor to see improvements in wellbeing etc. (screen time isn't one there, I'd say)? What do we do if those do not go up noticably?
For starters, what's "social media"? It's kind of a undefinable phrase. Obviously Facebook and Instagram are agreed to be "social media".But is Youtube social media? How about HN? Or any website with a comment section?
Just saying "regulate" it is not an answer and won't give you the results you think.
What you'll get is restrictions on speech. UK arrests thousands every year for what essentially amounts to mean tweets. There have been people that comment publicly on horrendous crimes that get harsher sentences than those that commit the crimes.
At any point in time politicians could have enforced existing terms of service violations like kids must be 13 or older. But they choose to look the other way and target only things that's a threat to their political future.
Social media helps organization and political action. Maybe you don't like the outcome at this point in time but it's a powerful weapon against those in power. It's no wonder politicians will try to neuter it. But it will not help anyone but themselves.
Currently, the fact that these large platforms can block you and they block you randomly (which is the case of Reddit for me, because I dared to use privacy protecting extensions when I commented on a subreddit to which I wasn’t subscribed; Instagram permanently blocked me because I used VPN when I wanted to login) is way larger restriction on my speech than removing these harmful platforms completely. Currently, I’m not allowed to react to others at all on some of these platforms. Even TV is better, because there is contact information for all of them.
Sure there was basically a cartel in social media. You saw coordinated censorship campaigns to ban the former president of the United States for example. But I wouldn't discount the amount of political interference there as well. The last administration admitted to flagging individual posts for the social media companies.
But it's true there is a lot of coordinated censorship even without state interference. But this tends to resolve itself as there is a market opportunity to create a better product. This coordination and censorship campaign has led to the acquisition of Twitter, which lifted its restrictions and other companies more or less followed suit because an open platform is obviously better for most people. And you had offshoots like Bluesky that had the old centralized censorious pre twitter acquisition policies, and things work out in the long run
I'm not familiar with what you're talking about. Can you share a real world example of a case like this? You're saying a social media comment about a crime is somehow punished harshly and much harsher than the crime itself?
It's a common (and somewhat right-wing) trope, but it's not really true. Thousands of people aren't arrested for "mean comments" or similar. That isn't to say the UK has no problem with the balance of freedom of expression and regulation, but it is nothing like the impression you'd get from some sources. There are some high-profile cases which are commonly misrepresented to support these claims.
It is definitely true. It's "right wing" because the soft power is with the left (or was until maybe very recently) and so only principled people of the left (e.g. Bill Maher) and all the people of the right (either principled on speech or saying things that are more likely to be censored) are going to be talking about it.
I said "regulate the proverbial crack" and gave two concrete examples of things going wrong. At no point did I hint at "stop people from conversing freely".
We regulate the platforms, not the users:
We ban (most? all?) targeted advertising.
If we still have to go further, we force tech giants to publish their recommendation algorithms and aggregated user data (e.g. statistics about time spent on what types of content on the platform by user cohort)
If we still have to go further, we can adapt policy restricting concrete addictive usage-patterns (e.g. the infinite scroll proposal recently discussed here[1])
On an unrelated note: yes, I also don't understand how this incident has to do much with social media bans…
> Just because there are adults with full agency that do the wrong thing, doesn't mean we should remove protections on young people. Just because adults with full agency drive recklessly, doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds the ability to drive.
That's contextual advertising, not targeted as such.
A targeted example for this case would be to switch the digital billboard to tampons because they read your number plates, visually identified the driver is a woman, and your recent texts with a friend mentioned needing some.
We ban targeted ads. Great but then what? My oldest is 17, no targeted ads to him so that means he gets a million political ads. To me, it is just as problematic. I would argue that under 18, there should be zero ads. Yeah I know it will never happen.
I don’t think political ads should be legal. Political information should be freely available to all, including children. But in no way should we be bombarded with the manipulation from whatever political entities have the most cash at hand.
> What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids
Regulate social media if that is the case.
Bans are ineffective anyway - if you doubt that, compare and contrast the outcomes of Prohibition and the War on Drugs, versus regulating Tobacco companies...
What it has to do with social media bans, is that the incident was propagated on social media. The author is arguing that the ability to shame others on the internet, should not be restricted to the old and powerful.
In answer to your first question, what do we do. We regulate the platforms, not the users.
There are loads of things that can be done to reduce online harm, that don't just say "OK, you're over this age, you can experience online harm now".
Platforms can become legally responsible for content, they can be compelled to be transparent about their feed algorithms, enable monitoring via public APIs. We can ban infinite scroll. There are so many policy levers that can be pulled, without getting the ban-hammer out for people of an arbitrary age, and without forcing the rest of us to hand over our IDs to platforms.
Well your ability and areas you can shame people might be limited until you're of age.
I'm not asking "what do we do" but that plenty of people write articles poking holes in current policy or suggested future policy, but lack providing a potential solution.
The author is highlighting an ugly contradiction in a policy that is being rolled out across the anglophone world as we speak. I see plenty less-substantive think pieces on this site, I don't feel it's necessary for every blog post to be accompanied by policy recommendations.
I pulled a few alternatives out there. What's your take?
I still don't see the ugly contradiction. The guy was caught and shunned by the general public regarding their actions, the guy could've used a video camera and it would be no different. Again, just because a group of adults have used a piece of technology incorrectly, doesn't mean the identified risks of those devices for young people people are any different. Just because there are drunks walking around committing offences doesn't mean we should allow underage people drinking.
From my perspective I think we do need to ask social media companies to reduce algorithmic feeds that create echo chambers or as you say provide transparent metrics on this. Social media companies should potentially ban infinite scroll/short form video content, however this is going to be difficult to do if its based on age as it will fall back to the ID/age verification issues.
Feeds should also not show content considered R18+ unless manually hidden, this shouldn't be able to be removed. There is some horrifying content that can pop up on these platforms that young people shouldn't see unsolicited.
Interesting framing in "we should ask" and "social media companies should ban". We have sovereign states that make laws, companies must comply with them if they wish to make money in our markets.
Otherwise, I think my perspective here is very similar. I'd personally emphasise legal publisher responsibility, a repeal of Section 230 in American.
By absolving social media platforms of legal responsibility for the content they publish, we've allowed some very unpleasant scenes to flourish in the most mainstream of places.
Well with you on the issues of addictive design. I'd throw in data harvesting, sketchy advertising, and increasingly platform- level political bias.
Age restrictions simply increase the age at which users are exposed to harms, rather than addressing those harms themselves.
These platforms have become staggeringly wealthy and powerful, it is them what needs to be controlled, not kids.
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
seems less justifiable as an excuse for platforms that consist primarily of externally created content, have very large amounts of varied content, and select and target specific subsets of that content to present to specific users. It would seem more justifiable if it were random, or not individualized, or chronological.
Aye, it's the curation, innit. If the platform is making opaque decisions on what you see, then it should be accountable for what it's showing you.
I think scale is important here too. If you've got a user-base that's an appreciable proportion of a country's population, you're a utility. My energy supplier has a tiny fraction of the customers of say, Meta, and is subject to considerably stronger oversight.
> What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids. Its not good for their attention spans or mental health to a much greater degree than other forms of media.
Do we know this? As far as I can tell, the studies are ambivalent at best. Some kids are damaged, others benefit.
Kids need freedom to make their own decisions, without that they won't grow to be self realized adults.
For this specific issue, the solution is simple and straightforward: shaming. None confronted the pervert in the train, because no one knows what is acceptable today and what is not.
> What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids.
IMHO it's not healthy for anyone. From kids, to retired pensioners not knowing what to do with their time, to profesionalls doing linkedin "hacking" and "networking" on twitter, etc.
Question: aren't you allowed to photograph or film anyone you want in public? Or the target being underage somehow removes this right? I always thought you can film whoever you want, but you can't publish what you filmed in some cases.
It really matters which country you're talking about, because depending on that you'll get answers from "filming in public is effectively forbidden" to "film and publish whatever you want".
Lets say that was true legally, its certainly frowned upon and you will be shamed for being an adult blatantly filming underage girls on a train without their permission or reason.
Which is why others on the train were not happy with it.
There are various limits on this, likely country dependent. And being free from legal sanction doesn't mean being free from public condemnation and shaming.
So, legal limits - if your behaviour constitutes harassment especially if you're targeting certain individuals, then it's likely to be illegal. Or if your behaviour constitutes 'disturbing the peace' in some vague way the police might put a stop to it.
But beyond that you're talking about the law but not everything is about the limits of the law, and the law is only a loose guide on morality. You can behave in a legal manner and still be doing something most people would consider wrong.
If you take your camera and try to record someone's kids up close in the park, you should absolutely expect to be told to GTFO, possibly by a whole gang of people. "Oh but it's in public I'm not breaking any laws, you have no expectation of privacy here" doesn't mean squat. Nor is it OK to film a bunch of girls like a drunken old pervert and try to say "It's not illegal".
> No need to be a Luddite, but what do kids possibly get out of a phone?
In far more cases than is ideal, the phone gives them an element of freedom/safety from their living situation.
Imagine a kid whose own parents are abusing them, or an LGBT kid growing up in a deeply conservative family, and one day the government suddenly decides you don't deserve being able to connect with support resources...
Then first we need to fix the issues in the parents, especially those with only one kid, reading social media and low rent news sites, who believe their kid is constantly in immortal danger, thereby forcing the phone upon the kid, in an attempt to ease their insecurities
This aspect needs talking about way more especially when the parents don't admit to it and to being the instigator
The question isn't just "what do the kids get out of it", it's also what do the parents: they get surveillance and some kind of reassurance. But at what cost?
I got my first bug bounty at 16. Not having access to compute would've drastically changed the direction of my life. I wouldn't have been able to afford university & would likely be working on a farm right now like my cousins
As a kid I was using my PSP to browse the web at night. Will you also restrict a Nintendo DS, a Switch, and any other device that comes with a web briwser?
Kids with phones are alright. Attention economy of social media is not. As did tabaco companies, they (soc. media tech giants) push proposals to regulate phone use based on age in hopes that the their information asymmetry advantage and addictive dark patterns that are the problem in the first place won't be regulated and they can keep exploiting the public held in their trap by network effect.
Do people want to restrict 16 year olds with phones? That seems like a really bad idea. For 10 year olds it makes sense, but 16 is nearly adult; they need to really learn this responsibility. And of course they need a phone when they go out like these girls.
A bit of a weird tangent from what apparently is harassment in a train or something like that? I admit it's hard to follow what is going on.
Seems wise to experience at least a little bit of “functioning as an adult in the world” independently of phone habits…
It seems like, in this situation, we watch primarily non-phone-enabled virtues save the day: a clear sense of right and wrong, assertiveness, courage, steadiness in a tense situation, an attentive social environment with bystanders who both noticed and backed each other up…
Even having practiced some of those skills in moving through the world, I worry that, if I were a phone-carrying person, I’d be tempted to “just record it and let the internet sort it out.” Which is orthogonal to fixing the wrong in the moment.
The severity depends on where you are, even within a country, but in many places you can't authentically "function as an adult in the world" without a phone, unless you want to roleplay an adult from the previous century.
In some places, payment requires a phone. Tracking unreliable public transit requires a phone. Getting rideshare requires a phone.
The issue probably isn't the phone but letting them outside in the first place.
This is obviously an overstatement. Sure, a phone is convenient, but we managed to function just fine without smartphones. I assure you, it's possible to do all those things without a phone.
Without knowing where GP is posting from, you can't make that claim. We can want and wish it were true, but there exist places where it's no longer possible to do things without a phone because the service requires signing in online, or the form is only available via the website, there is no paper version anymore. Parts of the world are moving on from bits of paper, no matter how much you don't want that to be true. Parts of the world also aren't, we simply don't know where GP is so you can't make that claim.
Personally, I would rather see public resources used to teach parents how to use the existing controls (in iOS and Android) to restrict what their own kids can do on their own smartphone.
However, if a school district wants to restrict the use of smartphones during the school day for all students, I would be OK with that.
>> if a school district wants to restrict the use of smartphones during the school day for all students
Both of my kids went to public school. My sisters kids both went to a private school. The policy was the same at both places. Kids come in the classroom, turn off their phones, put in a pouch at the front of the class. At the end of the class, kids get their phones back.
Apparently since there is little or no time between classes, I guess with the lack of time to be on their phones, in person conversations have increased and more face-to-face interactions are the norm. Its faster and easier to meet someone down the hall then it is to go through the process of texting someone, which is the entire point.
The goal was to create enough friction (psychological or real) so kids simply revert back to just meeting up at a regular spot to catch up, as opposed to constantly being on their phones. The school admins I talked to said its really pushed kids back into communicating like humans. Many have forgone their phones in between classes, except a quick check for emergency purposes, that sort of thing.
> There’s some good stuff on there, just not in the “Shorts” tab.
Why do people get so weird about the shorts tab? There are perfectly good videos in there, they're just tilted weird. You can fit quality content into 3 minutes.
And remember Elsagate? That was entirely landscape videos.
Exactly. Drew Talbot's brilliant "Bistro Huddy" (which anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant whether as a server or in the kitchen can relate to) is done as Youtube shorts because that makes sense for comedy sketches. What exactly is wrong with a short vertical video? Just that it reminds people of Tiktok?
There are good Shorts. One problem is a flick of the thumb scrolls you down to the next, then the next, and many are crap. The uncertainty about whether you're going to see crap or gold is part of what makes recommendation-based infinite scrolling addictive.
And that uncertainty doesn't apply to watching normal videos? I dunno, if shorts gets unreliable because it ran out of the channels I regularly visit then I just leave.
Never done that, muscle memory is simply not there. But then again i dont watch youtube on phone, computer with ublock origin is vastly superior experience.
There is whole world to read and discover before switching to passive videos. Or even spend time here lol
> And of course they need a phone when they go out like these girls.
Do teens need phones? Sure, they need a phone. Arguably any child old enough to know how to make a phone call needs one. But do they need a miniature computer to scroll through AI slop 10+ hours a day?
These aren't the same question. Confusing these two is dangerous.
Kids don't want to call, and parents don't want to receive calls except for critical situations. Only elders and scammers are actually phoning.
> AI slop
Same deal as what the GP is pointing at: you need to train kids to deal with slop, and not have them face it on their own at once at some arbitrary adult age.
My kids call. Only they tend to call through Discord or Whatsapp instead of just using the actual phone, for some reason. But they call, and they pick up when I call them. They also call their friends for gaming.
> Kids don't want to call, and parents don't want to receive calls except for critical situations.
Curious where this idea comes from, most parents I know (including mine) would much rather call than text. Discord and your average x-stack in a game are also a good sign that voice chat isn't really something people of any age are averse to.
Maybe back in some earlier era when we all had so many children that 3 or 4 were basically disposable, stupid parenting methods like "letting them learn to deal with this ruinously dangerous vice on their own" would have worked (or maybe there's a reason no one did that then). But for those of you that have just the one or two, this is well beyond reckless. Nothing I could ever say will persuade you otherwise, and even observation of reality won't help since the aftermath will play out for 50 or more years. Good luck, you'll need it.
This metaphor, while it seems intended to challenge the OP, kinda reinforces it. Many countries and cultures give some limited access to alcohol at a younger age, and the result is generally that they end up having fewer instances of problematic binge drinking when they come of age. A little bit of exposure instead of complete abstention helps people learn to have a healthier relationship than letting them hit 21 and dropping them into the deep end unrestricted.
16 used to be the minimum drinking age in Netherland, until they raised it to 18. It wouldn't surprise me if there were still countries where it's 16.
But it's not really a fair comparison, because alcohol has a very direct detrimental effect on brain development. Many things can have a detrimental effect, but alcohol always does. Which is probably why they raised the age to 18.
In Europe, I think it is more common tbh. Even in the UK my dad would let me try making cocktails etc. at the weekend when I was 17.
It meant when I got to university I knew how much I could drink (although as a student I was too poor to drink much anyway haha) whereas there were people drinking like half a bottle of vodka.
I don't drink any alcohol nowadays so it's not like it turned me into an alcoholic either.
I think the evidence points the other way. Giving younger people a drink with their meal during adolescence leads to more drinking problems later in life.
It's interesting how many conclusions are being assumed here
In many countries cultures, strict parents/laws are seen as loving and protecting. Being told "don't drink untl you're at least 20" isn't seen as "forbidden fruit" you're being denied.
What countries do you have in mind? I find it hard to believe you can tell teenagers not to do some kind of fun activity based purely on age and cause no significant feelings of forbidden fruit.
In parts of europe you can legally drink wine and beer at the age of 14-16. In many parts of europe you start drinking alcohol at around 14-15 illegally but socially acceptable to some extent. I started at that age, which is the same age adolescents start going out and dating.
It would be nice to ease people into alcohol over a greater amount of time, but with phones you're using them constantly and "avoid it" or "only have two" are not workable solutions like they are with alcohol.
I appreciate giving another perspective, but alcohol is not a good analogue of phone. There's no need to “learn” how to use alcohol --- one can do without it. Yet, practically speaking, a phone is a necessity.
my apologies for sounding more blunt than im meaning to, but, im not at all sure where i would fall on the idea of banning kids from having social media powered phones, but i know they’re not a “necessity”.
I could have been clearer. A phone is practically a necessity of modern life. Sooner or later people have to use it, unlike alcohol. Whether social media is a necessity is a different question. I bet everyone gets their own dose of it, whether they like it or not.
> A phone is practically a necessity of modern life.
It isn't yet.
> Sooner or later people have to use it, unlike alcohol.
So far I've avoided having a smart phone, I've not had a mobile phone since flip phones - I went off always being contactable about that time, having had bleeding edge sat phones for decades.
I have a land line, an answering machine, travel, purchase, am part of several overlapping businesses and deliver work for clients.
"The kids are alright" is evergreen. So much of the <insert current generation who are teenagers> are doomed rhetoric is pure nonsense, a lot of that rhetoric is on here.
Phones and social media are a completely new type of pacifying and attention stealing threat which we have only just begun to discover the effects of. This is not your standard 'kids are doomed' rhetoric.
No, they're not, and yes, it is. I sincerely hope we do not take phones and other computers from future generations. That would be a terrible thing to do to them.
I very much hope we continue to bring our children up outside of a digital world, encouraging them to interact and learn physically before introducing them to digital devices later in life when they can treat them sensibly as a small part of a healthy and full life.
Giving addictive and attention stealing tech to children from a young age is like giving drugs to rats, they will continue to hit the feeder bar until they effectively kill themselves.
Tax social media and other forms of attention products. Time users spend on these products is time taken away from earning revenue that can be taxed. Balance must be restored. If viewers’ available time/ability is harvested so that they have less taxable income, transfer the tax to where the wealth generation is being transferred to.
While I wish it wasn't framed in a 'lost revenue' sense, it isn't a bad idea. Would be funny if they were taxed based on how long people use it. At even $0.10 an hour of use, some of these companies would find the costs involved far too high to justify.
The political analysis there is completely wrong. How can she blame the "Tatler/Telegraph/Times set" for legislation passed by a Labour government? The opposition to this sort of legislation (e.g. the OSA) has largely come from the right.
> These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults.
Really? I would have said the opposite. Part of the problem is she lumps the affluent and the wealthy together. The affluent professional class go out of their way to encourage independence. They are the people who take gap years to travel, who are pushed to go away to university rather than a local one while living at home (a Scottish "policy wonk" should notice that the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews are full of affluent kids from the South of England).
The story is powerful and i agree with some of the conclusions, but forcing the conclusions to fit narrative that all bad things are the other sides fault is terrible.
Well that's the question isn't it, agency but to what extent. It makes sense to allow teenagers to have more agency over themselves than a 10 year old, but clearly there is an argument for limiting their agency on social media platforms.
Just because there are adults that abuse their agency of the use of alcohol (alcoholism) doesn't mean we should remove restrictions on young people.
Just because there are adults with full agency who drive recklessly doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds to drive cars.
The point is very clear to the rest of us. You inserted the word "full" where the author was not talking about full agency. It's hard to believe that you don't follow.
We are arguing over how much agency children should have. The article argues they should have more, the comment you originally responded to said practically definitionally we limit the agency of children. The obvious implied point is that it's not unreasonable to think their phone use may be part of the agency that they are denied, and that would not be a departure from how children are treated.
I know a few upper-crust families, including a hereditary title. They all care about their children, like the majority of human beings. But this blogger doesn't think we hate posh people enough, so necessarily they abuse their young.
It snacks of "jews will eat your baby". It's not the vitriol that offends me, it's the stupidity.
I've known plenty of very rich people and they're just normal people, every bit as capable of loving or abusing their children as anyone. So while I kinda agree with the first half, your comment smacks of knowing less extremely wealthy people and still being at the stage where you're just so happy you bumped into a few and feel the need to glaze them, lacking the outlook and the jadedness available to someone like me (not to mention someone who knows even more rich people, or even is a rich themselves).
The article spends a long time conflating actual proposed policy in the UK with things that aren't being proposed and sound much worse. I did some googling, the UK's gone a bit further than the US in proposing that < 16 year olds can't use social media with real age verification instead of current "I promise I'm over 13" approaches, curfews on social media specifically for 16-17 year olds that are opt-out, and smart phones must be put away at school.
No one's proposing banning teenagers from owning smart phones entirely. I would agree that not allowing 17 year old girls going out to have phones on trains would be bad policy, if that was actually a thing anyone was suggesting. It's unclear how any of the teens in the anecdote at the start of the story would be affected by the proposed legislation at all.
> It’s watching precisely why young adults need phones, the agency to use them, and the life skills to make their ways in the world with their phones in their pockets.
The link between creepy old men being called out and documented on a train and whether or not 14 year olds should be spending 8+ hours a day scrolling tiktok is unclear to the point of feeling like I'm missing something in the article. I guess the idea is that teens are being punished? And we should be holding our leaders accountable instead of restricting the teens? The counter argument to this would be "holding our leaders accountable" looks a lot like "passing regulations to keep children from being harmed by digital nicotine"
> Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday
This is the same reason I think we should give 13 year olds a couple of cigarettes a week, just enough for them to still feel sick from the nicotine and start to figure out how to integrate into adult society.
We've long accepted that certain activities carry enough harm that people under a certain age lack the development for it to be fair to expect them to engage with it in a healthy manner. Does it deny 14 year olds some agency that we don't allow them to ride motorcycles? Yes. Is it sound policy? I think so. We have plenty of evidence for real harms in teenagers with regards to social media, a fact that took me a long time to accept while I worked in the industry, but is plainly obvious in the data and studies done on it over the past decade.
I have said it for a long time. Look at the original iPhone release. It was a hyper focused device that was designed to consolidate devices, make using a phone easier so that you could get on with your day.
Once the app store and opened the gate for social media to wonder in, that is when these things got turned into potential addiction machines.
HN title automangler automangled this title. It references a specific song: “The kids are alright”, and removing the “The” reduces the impact of the reference.
But the main point here is that a guy was taking pics of some teens "secretly". Right?
The controversy about teens' rights to use cellphones and how to use them is quite debatable since it implies modern cultural behavior on tech and social media.
Interesting reversal of the "think of the kids" argument, though: think of the kids who could have used their phones to document their mistreatment at the hands of alcoholic perverts.
Reminds me of the "good guys with guns" narrative tbh. Being able to document such transgressions is not enough of an argument to do a mass rollout of ad display technology IMHO.
The ability to film people on their phone is not the same as the ad display technology.
I think the argument upthread about "conflation" has a point, but .. it's social media itself that forces the conflation. You can't just have a social network that lets you communicate with your community, it has to get tied up with international politics and exploitative advertising.
the even more direct analogy is the Arab Spring, where social media and phones were widely advertised as a means to bring evil dictators down, as a democratic, youth empowering anti evil old pervert technology.
The tech industry obviously jumped onto it because it's a rhetorically powerful argument but it tells you very little what the systemic consequences are ten years down the road.
It's still funny how much it's celebrated because it brings down establishments, not realizing it'll also bring down their own. Reminds me of why no one should start biological warfare.
Age 16-17 is very different than Ages 5-10 for kids to carry a device.
The former is no issue. I just don't think the author's take is nuanced as they think.
Kids (Age 5-13) safety is of ultimate importance. Devices, independently are also a major issue in schools. Social media use of bullying also is a major issue. To the point they are banned.
The UK is not proposing disallowing 16-17 year olds (or any children) from carrying smart phones on public transit, though, which makes the entire article fall apart.
The author leaps from a proposed ban on 15 year olds using tiktok to wholesale bans on smartphones.
Removing a means of bullying that leaves a trail is not the same thing as removing bullying. It's just removing undeniable bullying.
If people truly agreed that children needed to be protected from the desires of others, teaching them that a particular religion is the true one would be restricted until they were of an age where they could provide informed consent.
For some, communication devices are the only way to escape that particular abuse.
Forgive me if I am misinterpreting or getting in the way of your primary point -- but I think it is relatively well recognized that, though cyberbullying might not be objectively worse than analog bullying (obviously direct physical abuse/altercations cant happen electronically....yet), the 24/7 pervasiveness, anonymity, lack of emotional feedback for the bully, reach, and permanence of cyberbullying has had a meaningful impact on the state of the bullying game and the impacts it has on children.
That doesn't mean I agree with the general thrust of taking technology away from kids and young adults....I don't. But I do think we should probably understand the bad that we are taking with the good.
I think a lot of people here just don't have kids of a relevant age yet. They assume either the bullying doesn't happen, or it isn't any different than bullying in person, or that it's easy to stop when it happens.
You can just not have phones, but it's socially isolating. You have to frequently audit what's on their phones because they often won't volunteer what's happening. You take them out of one group chat only to have the bullies reappear in another one.
Old fashioned bullying kept regular business hours. This gives them a portal into your home life 24/7, and that's the best case, when you put a ton of effort into managing it.
And if you're not having this problem somehow, you might want to double check and make sure your kid isn't the bully.
> You can just not have phones, but it's socially isolating.
I hear this plenty, but kids are literally forced to go be with their peers (hopefully including some friends) for 6+ hours a day (in my country). Don't they have enough time to arrange their social lives in person?
I seem to recall both of us being children once, although admittedly not at the same time. The research my daughter does as part of her charity work probably counts as well.
Learning about something doesn't invalidate it entirely on that basis alone, just like the experience of one parent doesn't speak for all parents, or those concerned about the impacts of phones on kids (who are future adults).
Removing phones doesn't remove a means of bullying, it removes a magnifier and multiplier of bullying.
There's lots of ways to capture bullying. But it might be hot water right? What if it was a watch with a camera? What if it was a camera alone? :)
Bullying is serious enough it can't be conflated with the desires of device manufacturers and social media platforms to manufacture young consumers of their feeds.
An issue here is the unfiltered internet is not capable of raising children, as much as they want to be exposed to everything, it doesn't work out the same for every child based on a whole host of independent factors than those who take the position above.
Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue. I’ve been bullied before social media was mainstream. A little later in life, when internet as a whole was majorly taking off, it helped me actually socialize. I met people some of whom I’m friends to this day, but more importantly - I could meet people to go out with, to talk to.
Should we ban schools then? Because school grounds are famously place where the most bullying, especially kids 5-13 (which you highlighted yourself), is happening. Or maybe ban real life interactions? Because you can meet someone who will bully you or be of bad influence?
We both know that’s not the right way, just like banning social media is not solving any problems. It’s just a convenient argument to introduce internet-wide surveillance, as well as to take away any autonomy or rights kids may have. Instead of investing in moderation, and actually scrutinizing big tech, which is the real cause of more bullying, shorter attention spans, and whatever else people say is wrong with the kids these days.
> Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue. I’ve been bullied before social media was mainstream.
The differences with bullying via social media are: the difficulty to escape it in space or time as well as its reach. I don't think we can argue that social media is not an issue on these fronts.
> A little later in life, when internet as a whole was majorly taking off, it helped me actually socialize.
I agree, but I also have to wonder if the nature of the Internet has changed to the point where the benefits are secondary to the costs. In the early days, it was far easier to access the positives and far easier to ignore the negatives since we made explicit decisions about where to go. While you can still do that today, by avoiding social media, it is far more difficult. The mainstream has consolidated to the point where you pretty much have to isolate yourself to avoid it. Much of what mainstream social media sites provide is pushed to the user in some for or another. On top of all of that, the online world had far less reach in the past. At least when I was younger, the bullies simply didn't go online and while exploitive people were online there seemed to be far fewer of them.
As for the Internet wide surveillance: I don't think that is the driving force behind the current regulations. We already have Internet wide surveillance. That is why your proposal is all the more important, the bit about moderation and scrutinizing big tech, because we let them get away with far too much.
> The differences with bullying via social media are: the difficulty to escape it in space or time as well as its reach.
Just log off of Instagram / TikTok / wherever. Or block the people bothering you. If anything I'd say digital bullying is easier to escape because unlike school kids aren't required to be on those sites six to eight hours a day, and blocking someone needs a lot less effort and cooperation from adults than reporting them to school authorities.
A large number of youth will do that, but there is also a reason why children and youth are considered a vulnerable population.
I cannot speak too much on youth since most of my experience is with children. While some of them are more than happy to navigate their social lives by choosing who their friends are and ignoring those who cause them grief, where possible (as you suggested, there is the physical proximity in schools to complicate things), a great many more want to belong. They want to belong even where they are unwelcome and the unwelcomeness is manifested as bullying. What little I've seen of teens suggests that much the same does happen, only the bullying is meaner.
And that only addresses bullying. It does not address content directed towards adults, much of which is perfectly fine for younger people to know but they should also learn about it under the guidance of an adult so they don't come to think it is acceptable or the norm. It also fails to address the manipulative nature of some sites, something that they probably haven't learned to recognize never mind how to handle.
Yes, in a sense, you can turn off the problems and a lot of the problems will just go away. I'm not going to say they will disappear completely. Remember, social media has a larger audience and the others in that audience may bring it back to real life. Also remember that the people we are discussing don't always have the wisdom or experience to turn it off. Heck, a lot of adults don't have that wisdom or experience (but, at least for adults, we can claim they ought to know better).
Technologies when not learned by the people to use in proper ways, too often can be used against people by people with vested financial interests.
Social Media worked out that way. So did device addiction.
It's great to find ways to socialize, and those ways existed before, and will also exist after.
The exclusion of current forms of social media and connectivity as default doesn't mean better solutions don't step up.
I'm not really sure of the tying of schools to phone bans in schools. Schools aren't perfect, but they have a legal liability to keep kids safe (or safer). Devices and social media don't.
A large part of this is life coming at parents faster than they can keep up, let alone stay one season ahead of their childs growth. This would probably be a way.
Societally, rules and laws, including public health are a social contract and agreement on how to live together in a tight place.
Inside the home, though, is the opportunity for parents to learn and expose as they wish.
Solving today's social media can solve a ton of problems, or at least provide an impetus for it to improve. Schools are supposed to be safe places for kids, right? And the entire unfiltered outside world was coming into it via device.
For example, one solution is parents getting literate in tech enough to know how to lead young people before this even becomes a conversation. One way to do this is to offer unlimited screen time for creating, and much less for passive consuming. The generation that wants to experience the real world through a little screen has it backwards, and that's coming form the people who built the little digital world too.
I'm not anti-technology for young people at all. I'm anti-addiction and anti-manipultion by unlimited people and parties interested in reaching eyeballs.
Parents, legally, are required to provide a safe and growing environment.
I'm reminded of the way that universally carried high resolution cameras made UFOs and crop circles disappear, but police suddenly became a lot less trustworthy.
The abuse question .. well, "social justice" is a term that starts fights, but there have been a lot of people who've been able to get some sort of justice only because they raised their cause on social media, having been ignored by the authorities. #MeToo is probably the big example, culminating in the Epstein revelations.
Not who you’re responding to, but I also don’t really think the article makes any kind of sensible argument that I can follow. Yes, it’s bad that a creepy drunk man used his phone to take pictures of teenage girls. Yes, it’s commendable that bystanders called him out. Yes, some countries are thinking of curtailing social media access for teenagers. I’m not sure what any of these things have to do with each other but the author presents them as somehow related, without drawing a coherent thread through them.
I don’t agree. Whether or not these girls had phones, or social media, was irrelevant in this case. And I’ve never heard anyone seriously argue that 16-year-olds shouldn’t have phones, or that 16-year-old girls are at fault when an old man secretly makes videos of them. Both these groups seem like imagined bogeymen that the article is railing against.
Perhaps there's stuff going on in the UK that I'm missing but:
- I have not heard of a general cell phone ban for children and youth. They may "ban" the use of phones in schools (in reality: phones must remain in a bag or locker) and parents may choose to forbid their children from having phones (which is difficult to enforce after a certain age), but nothing general.
One may argue that children and youth may use phones to document improper or abusive situations in schools, which certainly can happen, but that is not the dominant use of phones by children and youth in schools and there are other avenues to document such circumstances.
- Most of the regulations we are discussing today are related to access to adult content or sites that are run in an exploitive manner (e.g. "the algorithm"). I have heard of no prohibitions of children and youth accessing sites outside of that context, even though there is plenty of room to question where the boundaries should be.
So I will agree that the author is either misrepresenting or conflating the regulations, to the point where the article is nonsense.
I think most reasonable people can agree social media/internet can be a dangerous place where your images will be taken and posted to others without your consent. This isn't a matter of age.
Except this is exactly what Heather Burns is doing.
Not this guy, who (I had to check) was apparently following the law(?) and the article even admits this:
> as far as policymakers are concerned, it’s the senior legal officer with the phone who is rightfully entitled to have the phone and use it any way he pleases
(if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article)
It's just a strange argument to say we should loosen the regulations when you have people like Heather exhibiting the problematic behavior that these laws are supposed to protect people from.
i feel like there's a time and a place to split hairs on whether or not legality clears moral wrong doing, and this is certainly not that time nor place. in what universe are these even remotely equivalent without broad abstractions?
* elite boomer filming underage girls for his own gratification
* bystanders filming a perpetrator mid-act
heather touches on those willing to get hung up on this stretch of an inconsistency and even links her other Darnella test post.
> (if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article)
that is literally the article. she's a tech policy writer critiquing the policy framework.
in general the weird undertones of your comment feel like you're asserting heather is like morally compromised or something and that the article is worth dismissing. if there was some discussion about the actual stuff she's talking about in this article i'd be singing a different tune right now, you know about whether or not under 16 bans punish young people for stinky perf perpetrator behavior... but since there isn't it feels even crazier that you're dotting this with your assessment that heather is somehow being the problematic one here. wat
What’s easier: waiting until your child is mature enough before giving them a smartphone, or trying to regulate social media companies and every addictive website?
I'm with the "This whole article is a non-sequitur" crowd.
The old pervert using his camera shouldn't be doing that. His behaviour was not OK.
Nobody is talking about keeping kids off social media because their behaviour is not OK. They're talking about keeping kids off social media because they believe it's harmful to them, and that the companies designing the products know it's harmful and addictive.
We can disagree about whether or not that's true, or what actions might be helpful (or not), but there is no common thread with the example given.
We need limits though and that's the whole point. The effect of doom scrolling on the young brain is something we can't just turn a blind eye to. Add to it bad people trying to hurt the young ones and using them
I joking argue that we should cap computer speed at 486 level's. You can still do office stuff, some graphics and audio but you are not running a doom scrolling setup with that kind of limited hardware. You are barely running Doom!
I think smart phones are really cool when they aren't in the attention economy. But high performance but low power draw chips and media accelerators unintentionally allowed for these kind of social media setups to be viable.
He was only caught because he was on his phone and someone could see his screen. No one would stand up for the girls if he was wearing one of those meta glasses taking the same pics.
Here is something I am not seeing anyone else addressing. Some yonks ago I was going to work by train and I stopped partially as a result of an incident on that train that involved someone recording my rather candid political conversation with a colleague. It is not the social media; tech etiquette needs to be seriously adjusted and while I am willing to give grace as we are trying to figure out proper balance as a society, I am not willing to have my life examined on the interwebz for everyone's amusement.
The kids in that sense, are just a convenient vessel for an argument; the same way they function for the author of that article.
What offences would those be? It isn’t an offence to record somebody on a train or else the person who recorded the video of the guy also committed an offence (and neither that person nor the guy did).
Didn’t read past that part. Mindless outrage culture is neither intellectually interesting nor healthy to be around.
The problem is not phones. Phones are fine. The problem is specific apps that make use of addiction engineering. These are bad on desktops too but the extreme portability of phones makes them a hundred times more potent.
Like all risks it doesn’t affect all kids equally either.
Some are less vulnerable for various cognitive reasons just like some are less prone to chemical addiction.
Kids with wealthier and/or more engaged parents or parents with more free time are also less vulnerable. Wealthier kids have more activities available and can often afford to have one parent stay home.
Lastly kids in healthier communities or suburbs or safe urban settings where they can roam free are less vulnerable.
They children of the poor, those with ADD or ASD conditions, and those with less third spaces or other activities are most vulnerable to becoming addicted to endless stupefying doom scrolling and addictive games that pre-train them for future gambling addiction.
It’s not just kids either. The elderly and the isolated become addicted to this stuff.
Addiction engineering is the problem, whether it’s via a phone, a web site, or a chemical.
IMO if you intentionally and knowingly engineer something for addiction you are committing a form of assault.
Would it not be a better approach to remove any incentive to provide an addictive product. Companies don't do that just to be evil. Evil is just the byproduct of money.
Make it illegal to advertise to anyone under the age of 18. Make it illegal to trade data about anyone under the age of 18.
What incentive would then remain? I don't think they will do it for the long term gains of training behaviour for when they are old enough to exploit. Companies that engage in behaviour like this are notoriously immune to long term ideas.
> I don't think they will do it for the long term gains of training behaviour for when they are old enough to exploit.
They would definitely do that. It is a pretty basic idea to advertise to kids so there will be a customer base in later years. There was related emails leaked too
At the very least I think we should seriously consider taxing advertising.
It’d be almost impossible to pick and choose so just tax all of it. I think the knock on effects would be positive. It’s an almost unmitigated vice at this point and is the main engine behind this stuff.
I agree. Even the platonic ideal of something like Facebook isn't really a problem (assume a Facebook with a chronological feed which shows nothing but what your friends and liked pages have posted, and it'll be a lot less addicting than what we have today, and a lot more social!). It's possible to have a phone and not have any apps on it which are engineered to make you addicted. If the relevant companies behaved themselves, we wouldn't be in this rut (or at least not as deep into it).
> IMO if you intentionally and knowingly engineer something for addiction you are committing a form of assault.
Whilst I agree that addictive things can be bad how far does this ago? Food manufacturers purposely make foods that are addictive. Video game companies use ways to make games more addictive.
Companies make things that we want and sometimes we get addicted to wanting it too much.
> This runs against the grain of 2026 tech policy, which decrees that it’s young people who need their behavior censored and constrained, in ways that punish them for the actions of the perpetrator.
I mean social media is simply misanthropic. If humanity had any balls it'd burn these places down. Calling banishment from social media a punishment is a stretch. The point of these decrees has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with persecuting adults for behaving in ways the state doesn't like. The author's read is just weird
That is a fair take. Yes the kids are particularly susceptible to these things but some equally concerning behavior comes from adults that one wished the knew better.
Unfortunately, a lot of people run teenage software on adult hardware and that is a wild combo.
this. the problem with a lot of "think of the children" argument is that we often rule out the failure in whatever policing is needed for the general public.
the adults of today, albeit the younger ones, were kids growing up with post-IM world. the ones before that could speak with their friends from their homes instead of only meeting in person (due to telephones). we all are products of the environment we were raised in. but despite those learnings, it seems like we are not self-regulating as a society.
charity begins at home, and before bringing children in a conversation, we should think if we all are alright.
Oh the power may remain, but at least finally the buses and subways will be free of the constant noise of someone blasting short form content or games who doesn't have headphones. I'll take that.
While that is true, the friction to access has been made far too easy. Adding in some inconvenience may actually be a good thing. It also helped that in the print/radio/television period, you couldn't hyper focus content at a specific individual. What was broadcast was free for all to see and critique.
I'm not advocating for a return to that, but that was one of the highlights of the era.
So it's not propagandists that are the problem, but rather the people they target? That's an odd take.
Maybe we should've shown a little more spine when they asked us to build a medium for the strong would use to prey on the weak. Maybe we're the problem.
TFA gives an example where kids are at risk and an old person is misusing a phone. It is clearly not advocating for this scenario to occur more often. Can you show anything else to indicate that the conclusion is "toughen them up"?
> Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday.
> the cultural values that a detached elite wish to impose on their offspring for life have been transposed into law, policy, and regulation, and from there, into the personal lives of young people
Isn't this what happens in Islamic countries all the time though?
This is a weird take. I don't understand how what this guy did or didn't do with his phone has any relevance for whether kids should have phones or do certain things with them. About the most I could say is that I would agree that many of the problems with phones are problems for adults as well as kids.
This essay extends one anecdote involving 16+ year old teenagers to the unsupported conclusion that kids should have phones and those who wish to restrict that are all wealthy 1% right wing authoritarians. Then with the personal note it seems clear that the core of the essay stems from the author's own personal trauma/experience.
I don't disagree that big adtech's reliance on dopamine-driven addictive behavior is real evil, but regulations that at least wall kids off from that makes sense and there's all kinds of research to suggest as much, in contrast to a personal essay about a video online.
This whole article just boils down to the argument "If badly-behaved adults are allowed to have cameras, why shouldn't well-behaved children have access to for-profit social media platforms designed to addict them and feed them misinformation?"
It's complete nonsense. The conversation in the UK right now isn't about whether or not teenagers should be allowed to own cell phones; it's about whether they should be allowed to have access to the myriad of addictive and harmful apps and services available on those devices, often maliciously targeted at them.
The drunk pervert filming them on the train has nothing to do with this argument. He's using his phone like a camera. Teenagers are allowed to have cameras, and assuredly every one of the girls he was filming had a camera of some sort on them of their own. Nobody was on uneven ground in this situation technologically.
If people actually were worried about perverted adults preying on children, they would take a look at the countless examples of perverted adults preying on children via their social media accounts and devices. It's been open season on children online for the past decade.
If people actually cared about accountability, they would stop pushing for age-verification laws, and start penalizing social media companies for their laissez faire attitude towards inappropriate sexual conduct, because currently, sites like Instagram and TikTok cater directly to pedophiles and do absolutely nothing about the predatory behavior coming from their user base towards children that are clearly too young to legally use social media in most parts of the world (<13 in the USA).
We need to reframe this whole conversation. It's not about keeping kids away from social media. It's about keeping trillion-dollar businesses from profiting off of children while actively doing harm to them with addictive algorithms, misinformation, and exposure to malicious actors.
The problem is not the ability to communicate, but rather the addiction generated by those algorithms. They should absolutely be regulated, for all ages.
I agree with your sentiment completely. I think there's nuance that a lot of people don't bother with because of tribalism but your take is the one I most align with in this instance. Children do need protecting, I grew up with the Internet and it made me partly who I am today, but I also recognise it is completely different now. Gore/shock/NSFL websites being linked between friends as pranks are no longer a thing (thankfully), but we have replaced that with garden walls (Facebook, Reddit, YT, etc.) that are much more insidious and have mechanised the harm to children and young people to an unbelievable scale.
Did the UK get rid of the Muslim rape gangs already? No one is being raped on social media, yet all the hysteria is focused on social media when it should be focused on a completely different issue that actually harms children in real life on a massive scale - outside and unrelated to the internet.
What do we do when we know that social media it not healthy for kids. Its not good for their attention spans or mental health to a much greater degree than other forms of media.
Nobody is saying kids shouldn't have phones, but they should be able to use them without being engulfed in social media content that has been shown to have a negative impact on them. Whether its algorithmic feeds targeting particular age groups or short form video content that is reducing attention spans and the ability to concentrate.
I have no idea how an adult filming young girls on a train has anything to do with social media bans. The Senior Legal Officer is absolutely entitled to having a phone, but absolutely not to use it however he means. The teenagers are entitled to having a phone, but potentially may have limits to how they can use those devices.
Just because there are adults with full agency that do the wrong thing, doesn't mean we should remove protections on young people. Just because adults with full agency drive recklessly, doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds the ability to drive.
You can't lace beer with crack and sell it. Not to a 12yo, not to a 50yo. Regulate the proverbial crack, then we see if further regulations are required.
Earlier this year (0):
> “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,”
From 9 years ago (1):
> Facebook showed advertisers how it has the capacity to identify when teenagers feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”
0 - https://www.biometricupdate.com/202602/meta-plans-launch-of-...
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/01/facebook-...
Social media needs to be heavily regulated to the point where it's safe for everyone, or banned entirely. I don't understand why there's this belief it should have a right to exist when basically everyone agrees it's a net negative to society.
This is sort of true, but there is definitely a scale of development that means the most harm will be done the earlier you start. Same with access to pornography. People's brains don't suddenly become immune to it at 18, it's just that that's the age of legal responsibility that ties in with other things.
Men who turn 18 don't suddenly become disposable meat-based gun-holders in times of war, and yet we still treat them that way.
That said, with bans upcoming or in force in a lot places, what measures should we monitor to see improvements in wellbeing etc. (screen time isn't one there, I'd say)? What do we do if those do not go up noticably?
What you'll get is restrictions on speech. UK arrests thousands every year for what essentially amounts to mean tweets. There have been people that comment publicly on horrendous crimes that get harsher sentences than those that commit the crimes.
At any point in time politicians could have enforced existing terms of service violations like kids must be 13 or older. But they choose to look the other way and target only things that's a threat to their political future.
Social media helps organization and political action. Maybe you don't like the outcome at this point in time but it's a powerful weapon against those in power. It's no wonder politicians will try to neuter it. But it will not help anyone but themselves.
But it's true there is a lot of coordinated censorship even without state interference. But this tends to resolve itself as there is a market opportunity to create a better product. This coordination and censorship campaign has led to the acquisition of Twitter, which lifted its restrictions and other companies more or less followed suit because an open platform is obviously better for most people. And you had offshoots like Bluesky that had the old centralized censorious pre twitter acquisition policies, and things work out in the long run
https://substack.com/@mleverything/p-41310456
There are 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages. It's not heavily reported for some reason but it's very real.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
https://x.com/WMPolice/status/1282627004018364416
What are they arrested for, or are you disputing the number?
I said "regulate the proverbial crack" and gave two concrete examples of things going wrong. At no point did I hint at "stop people from conversing freely".
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48897104
On an unrelated note: yes, I also don't understand how this incident has to do much with social media bans…
> Just because there are adults with full agency that do the wrong thing, doesn't mean we should remove protections on young people. Just because adults with full agency drive recklessly, doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds the ability to drive.
also agree wholeheartedly.
Will we ban posters along highways that advertise car wreck lawyers? Where do you draw that line?
Quite a few places around the world have already done so, on the basis that they are an eyesore. Where there's a will there's a way.
A targeted example for this case would be to switch the digital billboard to tampons because they read your number plates, visually identified the driver is a woman, and your recent texts with a friend mentioned needing some.
Regulate social media if that is the case.
Bans are ineffective anyway - if you doubt that, compare and contrast the outcomes of Prohibition and the War on Drugs, versus regulating Tobacco companies...
In answer to your first question, what do we do. We regulate the platforms, not the users.
There are loads of things that can be done to reduce online harm, that don't just say "OK, you're over this age, you can experience online harm now".
Platforms can become legally responsible for content, they can be compelled to be transparent about their feed algorithms, enable monitoring via public APIs. We can ban infinite scroll. There are so many policy levers that can be pulled, without getting the ban-hammer out for people of an arbitrary age, and without forcing the rest of us to hand over our IDs to platforms.
I'm not asking "what do we do" but that plenty of people write articles poking holes in current policy or suggested future policy, but lack providing a potential solution.
I pulled a few alternatives out there. What's your take?
From my perspective I think we do need to ask social media companies to reduce algorithmic feeds that create echo chambers or as you say provide transparent metrics on this. Social media companies should potentially ban infinite scroll/short form video content, however this is going to be difficult to do if its based on age as it will fall back to the ID/age verification issues.
Feeds should also not show content considered R18+ unless manually hidden, this shouldn't be able to be removed. There is some horrifying content that can pop up on these platforms that young people shouldn't see unsolicited.
Otherwise, I think my perspective here is very similar. I'd personally emphasise legal publisher responsibility, a repeal of Section 230 in American.
By absolving social media platforms of legal responsibility for the content they publish, we've allowed some very unpleasant scenes to flourish in the most mainstream of places.
Well with you on the issues of addictive design. I'd throw in data harvesting, sketchy advertising, and increasingly platform- level political bias.
Age restrictions simply increase the age at which users are exposed to harms, rather than addressing those harms themselves.
These platforms have become staggeringly wealthy and powerful, it is them what needs to be controlled, not kids.
I think scale is important here too. If you've got a user-base that's an appreciable proportion of a country's population, you're a utility. My energy supplier has a tiny fraction of the customers of say, Meta, and is subject to considerably stronger oversight.
Do we know this? As far as I can tell, the studies are ambivalent at best. Some kids are damaged, others benefit.
For this specific issue, the solution is simple and straightforward: shaming. None confronted the pervert in the train, because no one knows what is acceptable today and what is not.
IMHO it's not healthy for anyone. From kids, to retired pensioners not knowing what to do with their time, to profesionalls doing linkedin "hacking" and "networking" on twitter, etc.
These are capital crimes against humanity. The notion that we just have to accept it is absurdity.
Which is why others on the train were not happy with it.
So, legal limits - if your behaviour constitutes harassment especially if you're targeting certain individuals, then it's likely to be illegal. Or if your behaviour constitutes 'disturbing the peace' in some vague way the police might put a stop to it.
But beyond that you're talking about the law but not everything is about the limits of the law, and the law is only a loose guide on morality. You can behave in a legal manner and still be doing something most people would consider wrong.
If you take your camera and try to record someone's kids up close in the park, you should absolutely expect to be told to GTFO, possibly by a whole gang of people. "Oh but it's in public I'm not breaking any laws, you have no expectation of privacy here" doesn't mean squat. Nor is it OK to film a bunch of girls like a drunken old pervert and try to say "It's not illegal".
A flip phone for kids who are out of the house regularly with some contacts is fine.
No need to be a Luddite, but what do kids possibly get out of a phone? If I didn't have work and to chauffeur people around, id toss mine too.
In far more cases than is ideal, the phone gives them an element of freedom/safety from their living situation.
Imagine a kid whose own parents are abusing them, or an LGBT kid growing up in a deeply conservative family, and one day the government suddenly decides you don't deserve being able to connect with support resources...
This aspect needs talking about way more especially when the parents don't admit to it and to being the instigator
The question isn't just "what do the kids get out of it", it's also what do the parents: they get surveillance and some kind of reassurance. But at what cost?
I'll say it. Kids shouldn't have phones until the age of 16.
I am.
An extreme example, all genocides are done by people who want to set the world right. It just how they see right is warped.
A bit of a weird tangent from what apparently is harassment in a train or something like that? I admit it's hard to follow what is going on.
It seems like, in this situation, we watch primarily non-phone-enabled virtues save the day: a clear sense of right and wrong, assertiveness, courage, steadiness in a tense situation, an attentive social environment with bystanders who both noticed and backed each other up…
Even having practiced some of those skills in moving through the world, I worry that, if I were a phone-carrying person, I’d be tempted to “just record it and let the internet sort it out.” Which is orthogonal to fixing the wrong in the moment.
In some places, payment requires a phone. Tracking unreliable public transit requires a phone. Getting rideshare requires a phone.
The issue probably isn't the phone but letting them outside in the first place.
However, if a school district wants to restrict the use of smartphones during the school day for all students, I would be OK with that.
Both of my kids went to public school. My sisters kids both went to a private school. The policy was the same at both places. Kids come in the classroom, turn off their phones, put in a pouch at the front of the class. At the end of the class, kids get their phones back.
Apparently since there is little or no time between classes, I guess with the lack of time to be on their phones, in person conversations have increased and more face-to-face interactions are the norm. Its faster and easier to meet someone down the hall then it is to go through the process of texting someone, which is the entire point.
The goal was to create enough friction (psychological or real) so kids simply revert back to just meeting up at a regular spot to catch up, as opposed to constantly being on their phones. The school admins I talked to said its really pushed kids back into communicating like humans. Many have forgone their phones in between classes, except a quick check for emergency purposes, that sort of thing.
Kind of fascinating to hear to be honest.
Hard to argue below 18 actually needs more. Wants, sure, but then whole cancerous can of worms is opened and good luck there.
echo "0.0.0.0 youtube.com www.youtube.com m.youtube.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
Why do people get so weird about the shorts tab? There are perfectly good videos in there, they're just tilted weird. You can fit quality content into 3 minutes.
And remember Elsagate? That was entirely landscape videos.
There is whole world to read and discover before switching to passive videos. Or even spend time here lol
we warn kids about the impacts of heroin, we don’t shoot them up with it.
Do teens need phones? Sure, they need a phone. Arguably any child old enough to know how to make a phone call needs one. But do they need a miniature computer to scroll through AI slop 10+ hours a day?
These aren't the same question. Confusing these two is dangerous.
Kids don't want to call, and parents don't want to receive calls except for critical situations. Only elders and scammers are actually phoning.
> AI slop
Same deal as what the GP is pointing at: you need to train kids to deal with slop, and not have them face it on their own at once at some arbitrary adult age.
Sure. That's why I have mine mainlining China White. How will they learn to deal with addictive substances unless they're waist-deep in it?
Letting choose a different path than you is IMHO the minimum you should be doing.
But it's not really a fair comparison, because alcohol has a very direct detrimental effect on brain development. Many things can have a detrimental effect, but alcohol always does. Which is probably why they raised the age to 18.
It meant when I got to university I knew how much I could drink (although as a student I was too poor to drink much anyway haha) whereas there were people drinking like half a bottle of vodka.
I don't drink any alcohol nowadays so it's not like it turned me into an alcoholic either.
In many countries cultures, strict parents/laws are seen as loving and protecting. Being told "don't drink untl you're at least 20" isn't seen as "forbidden fruit" you're being denied.
no. it isn’t.
my apologies for sounding more blunt than im meaning to, but, im not at all sure where i would fall on the idea of banning kids from having social media powered phones, but i know they’re not a “necessity”.
It isn't yet.
> Sooner or later people have to use it, unlike alcohol.
So far I've avoided having a smart phone, I've not had a mobile phone since flip phones - I went off always being contactable about that time, having had bleeding edge sat phones for decades.
I have a land line, an answering machine, travel, purchase, am part of several overlapping businesses and deliver work for clients.
eMail, cash, debit cards still get me by <shrug>
Giving addictive and attention stealing tech to children from a young age is like giving drugs to rats, they will continue to hit the feeder bar until they effectively kill themselves.
Same for AI.
> These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults.
Really? I would have said the opposite. Part of the problem is she lumps the affluent and the wealthy together. The affluent professional class go out of their way to encourage independence. They are the people who take gap years to travel, who are pushed to go away to university rather than a local one while living at home (a Scottish "policy wonk" should notice that the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews are full of affluent kids from the South of England).
The story is powerful and i agree with some of the conclusions, but forcing the conclusions to fit narrative that all bad things are the other sides fault is terrible.
(It's remarkable how many of the top-level comments are pointing out this sort of problem with the article content.)
People who are not yet ready to have full agency of their own lives is more or less the definition of children.
Does she also expect children to have full time jobs, pay taxes, pay all their own bills and rent, etc etc?
Just because there are adults that abuse their agency of the use of alcohol (alcoholism) doesn't mean we should remove restrictions on young people.
Just because there are adults with full agency who drive recklessly doesn't mean we should allow 13 year olds to drive cars.
I know a few upper-crust families, including a hereditary title. They all care about their children, like the majority of human beings. But this blogger doesn't think we hate posh people enough, so necessarily they abuse their young.
It snacks of "jews will eat your baby". It's not the vitriol that offends me, it's the stupidity.
No one's proposing banning teenagers from owning smart phones entirely. I would agree that not allowing 17 year old girls going out to have phones on trains would be bad policy, if that was actually a thing anyone was suggesting. It's unclear how any of the teens in the anecdote at the start of the story would be affected by the proposed legislation at all.
> It’s watching precisely why young adults need phones, the agency to use them, and the life skills to make their ways in the world with their phones in their pockets.
The link between creepy old men being called out and documented on a train and whether or not 14 year olds should be spending 8+ hours a day scrolling tiktok is unclear to the point of feeling like I'm missing something in the article. I guess the idea is that teens are being punished? And we should be holding our leaders accountable instead of restricting the teens? The counter argument to this would be "holding our leaders accountable" looks a lot like "passing regulations to keep children from being harmed by digital nicotine"
> Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday
This is the same reason I think we should give 13 year olds a couple of cigarettes a week, just enough for them to still feel sick from the nicotine and start to figure out how to integrate into adult society.
We've long accepted that certain activities carry enough harm that people under a certain age lack the development for it to be fair to expect them to engage with it in a healthy manner. Does it deny 14 year olds some agency that we don't allow them to ride motorcycles? Yes. Is it sound policy? I think so. We have plenty of evidence for real harms in teenagers with regards to social media, a fact that took me a long time to accept while I worked in the industry, but is plainly obvious in the data and studies done on it over the past decade.
This is insane.
Smartphones are fomes peccati.
Smartphones aren't, some apps on them are.
(besides being unneeded or a nuisance in some situations)
Once the app store and opened the gate for social media to wonder in, that is when these things got turned into potential addiction machines.
Edit: now fixed, thanks mods
But the main point here is that a guy was taking pics of some teens "secretly". Right?
The controversy about teens' rights to use cellphones and how to use them is quite debatable since it implies modern cultural behavior on tech and social media.
I think the argument upthread about "conflation" has a point, but .. it's social media itself that forces the conflation. You can't just have a social network that lets you communicate with your community, it has to get tied up with international politics and exploitative advertising.
The tech industry obviously jumped onto it because it's a rhetorically powerful argument but it tells you very little what the systemic consequences are ten years down the road.
The former is no issue. I just don't think the author's take is nuanced as they think.
Kids (Age 5-13) safety is of ultimate importance. Devices, independently are also a major issue in schools. Social media use of bullying also is a major issue. To the point they are banned.
The author leaps from a proposed ban on 15 year olds using tiktok to wholesale bans on smartphones.
If people truly agreed that children needed to be protected from the desires of others, teaching them that a particular religion is the true one would be restricted until they were of an age where they could provide informed consent.
For some, communication devices are the only way to escape that particular abuse.
That doesn't mean I agree with the general thrust of taking technology away from kids and young adults....I don't. But I do think we should probably understand the bad that we are taking with the good.
You can just not have phones, but it's socially isolating. You have to frequently audit what's on their phones because they often won't volunteer what's happening. You take them out of one group chat only to have the bullies reappear in another one.
Old fashioned bullying kept regular business hours. This gives them a portal into your home life 24/7, and that's the best case, when you put a ton of effort into managing it.
And if you're not having this problem somehow, you might want to double check and make sure your kid isn't the bully.
I hear this plenty, but kids are literally forced to go be with their peers (hopefully including some friends) for 6+ hours a day (in my country). Don't they have enough time to arrange their social lives in person?
It’s not as bad as phone apologists say.
What works needs to be found.
There's lots of ways to capture bullying. But it might be hot water right? What if it was a watch with a camera? What if it was a camera alone? :)
Bullying is serious enough it can't be conflated with the desires of device manufacturers and social media platforms to manufacture young consumers of their feeds.
An issue here is the unfiltered internet is not capable of raising children, as much as they want to be exposed to everything, it doesn't work out the same for every child based on a whole host of independent factors than those who take the position above.
Should we ban schools then? Because school grounds are famously place where the most bullying, especially kids 5-13 (which you highlighted yourself), is happening. Or maybe ban real life interactions? Because you can meet someone who will bully you or be of bad influence?
We both know that’s not the right way, just like banning social media is not solving any problems. It’s just a convenient argument to introduce internet-wide surveillance, as well as to take away any autonomy or rights kids may have. Instead of investing in moderation, and actually scrutinizing big tech, which is the real cause of more bullying, shorter attention spans, and whatever else people say is wrong with the kids these days.
The differences with bullying via social media are: the difficulty to escape it in space or time as well as its reach. I don't think we can argue that social media is not an issue on these fronts.
> A little later in life, when internet as a whole was majorly taking off, it helped me actually socialize.
I agree, but I also have to wonder if the nature of the Internet has changed to the point where the benefits are secondary to the costs. In the early days, it was far easier to access the positives and far easier to ignore the negatives since we made explicit decisions about where to go. While you can still do that today, by avoiding social media, it is far more difficult. The mainstream has consolidated to the point where you pretty much have to isolate yourself to avoid it. Much of what mainstream social media sites provide is pushed to the user in some for or another. On top of all of that, the online world had far less reach in the past. At least when I was younger, the bullies simply didn't go online and while exploitive people were online there seemed to be far fewer of them.
As for the Internet wide surveillance: I don't think that is the driving force behind the current regulations. We already have Internet wide surveillance. That is why your proposal is all the more important, the bit about moderation and scrutinizing big tech, because we let them get away with far too much.
Just log off of Instagram / TikTok / wherever. Or block the people bothering you. If anything I'd say digital bullying is easier to escape because unlike school kids aren't required to be on those sites six to eight hours a day, and blocking someone needs a lot less effort and cooperation from adults than reporting them to school authorities.
A large number of youth will do that, but there is also a reason why children and youth are considered a vulnerable population.
I cannot speak too much on youth since most of my experience is with children. While some of them are more than happy to navigate their social lives by choosing who their friends are and ignoring those who cause them grief, where possible (as you suggested, there is the physical proximity in schools to complicate things), a great many more want to belong. They want to belong even where they are unwelcome and the unwelcomeness is manifested as bullying. What little I've seen of teens suggests that much the same does happen, only the bullying is meaner.
And that only addresses bullying. It does not address content directed towards adults, much of which is perfectly fine for younger people to know but they should also learn about it under the guidance of an adult so they don't come to think it is acceptable or the norm. It also fails to address the manipulative nature of some sites, something that they probably haven't learned to recognize never mind how to handle.
Yes, in a sense, you can turn off the problems and a lot of the problems will just go away. I'm not going to say they will disappear completely. Remember, social media has a larger audience and the others in that audience may bring it back to real life. Also remember that the people we are discussing don't always have the wisdom or experience to turn it off. Heck, a lot of adults don't have that wisdom or experience (but, at least for adults, we can claim they ought to know better).
Social Media worked out that way. So did device addiction.
It's great to find ways to socialize, and those ways existed before, and will also exist after.
The exclusion of current forms of social media and connectivity as default doesn't mean better solutions don't step up.
I'm not really sure of the tying of schools to phone bans in schools. Schools aren't perfect, but they have a legal liability to keep kids safe (or safer). Devices and social media don't.
A large part of this is life coming at parents faster than they can keep up, let alone stay one season ahead of their childs growth. This would probably be a way.
Societally, rules and laws, including public health are a social contract and agreement on how to live together in a tight place.
Inside the home, though, is the opportunity for parents to learn and expose as they wish.
Solving today's social media can solve a ton of problems, or at least provide an impetus for it to improve. Schools are supposed to be safe places for kids, right? And the entire unfiltered outside world was coming into it via device.
For example, one solution is parents getting literate in tech enough to know how to lead young people before this even becomes a conversation. One way to do this is to offer unlimited screen time for creating, and much less for passive consuming. The generation that wants to experience the real world through a little screen has it backwards, and that's coming form the people who built the little digital world too.
I'm not anti-technology for young people at all. I'm anti-addiction and anti-manipultion by unlimited people and parties interested in reaching eyeballs.
Parents, legally, are required to provide a safe and growing environment.
The abuse question .. well, "social justice" is a term that starts fights, but there have been a lot of people who've been able to get some sort of justice only because they raised their cause on social media, having been ignored by the authorities. #MeToo is probably the big example, culminating in the Epstein revelations.
You may disagree with the author's conclusions, but that doesn't make the article nonsense.
The article explains why that was not irrelevant.
- I have not heard of a general cell phone ban for children and youth. They may "ban" the use of phones in schools (in reality: phones must remain in a bag or locker) and parents may choose to forbid their children from having phones (which is difficult to enforce after a certain age), but nothing general.
One may argue that children and youth may use phones to document improper or abusive situations in schools, which certainly can happen, but that is not the dominant use of phones by children and youth in schools and there are other avenues to document such circumstances.
- Most of the regulations we are discussing today are related to access to adult content or sites that are run in an exploitive manner (e.g. "the algorithm"). I have heard of no prohibitions of children and youth accessing sites outside of that context, even though there is plenty of room to question where the boundaries should be.
So I will agree that the author is either misrepresenting or conflating the regulations, to the point where the article is nonsense.
Except this is exactly what Heather Burns is doing.
Not this guy, who (I had to check) was apparently following the law(?) and the article even admits this:
> as far as policymakers are concerned, it’s the senior legal officer with the phone who is rightfully entitled to have the phone and use it any way he pleases
(if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article)
It's just a strange argument to say we should loosen the regulations when you have people like Heather exhibiting the problematic behavior that these laws are supposed to protect people from.
i feel like there's a time and a place to split hairs on whether or not legality clears moral wrong doing, and this is certainly not that time nor place. in what universe are these even remotely equivalent without broad abstractions?
* elite boomer filming underage girls for his own gratification
* bystanders filming a perpetrator mid-act
heather touches on those willing to get hung up on this stretch of an inconsistency and even links her other Darnella test post.
> (if the law is bad, change it. but that's not this article)
that is literally the article. she's a tech policy writer critiquing the policy framework.
in general the weird undertones of your comment feel like you're asserting heather is like morally compromised or something and that the article is worth dismissing. if there was some discussion about the actual stuff she's talking about in this article i'd be singing a different tune right now, you know about whether or not under 16 bans punish young people for stinky perf perpetrator behavior... but since there isn't it feels even crazier that you're dotting this with your assessment that heather is somehow being the problematic one here. wat
The old pervert using his camera shouldn't be doing that. His behaviour was not OK.
Nobody is talking about keeping kids off social media because their behaviour is not OK. They're talking about keeping kids off social media because they believe it's harmful to them, and that the companies designing the products know it's harmful and addictive.
We can disagree about whether or not that's true, or what actions might be helpful (or not), but there is no common thread with the example given.
I think smart phones are really cool when they aren't in the attention economy. But high performance but low power draw chips and media accelerators unintentionally allowed for these kind of social media setups to be viable.
The kids in that sense, are just a convenient vessel for an argument; the same way they function for the author of that article.
What offences would those be? It isn’t an offence to record somebody on a train or else the person who recorded the video of the guy also committed an offence (and neither that person nor the guy did).
Didn’t read past that part. Mindless outrage culture is neither intellectually interesting nor healthy to be around.
Like all risks it doesn’t affect all kids equally either.
Some are less vulnerable for various cognitive reasons just like some are less prone to chemical addiction.
Kids with wealthier and/or more engaged parents or parents with more free time are also less vulnerable. Wealthier kids have more activities available and can often afford to have one parent stay home.
Lastly kids in healthier communities or suburbs or safe urban settings where they can roam free are less vulnerable.
They children of the poor, those with ADD or ASD conditions, and those with less third spaces or other activities are most vulnerable to becoming addicted to endless stupefying doom scrolling and addictive games that pre-train them for future gambling addiction.
It’s not just kids either. The elderly and the isolated become addicted to this stuff.
Addiction engineering is the problem, whether it’s via a phone, a web site, or a chemical.
IMO if you intentionally and knowingly engineer something for addiction you are committing a form of assault.
Make it illegal to advertise to anyone under the age of 18. Make it illegal to trade data about anyone under the age of 18.
What incentive would then remain? I don't think they will do it for the long term gains of training behaviour for when they are old enough to exploit. Companies that engage in behaviour like this are notoriously immune to long term ideas.
They would definitely do that. It is a pretty basic idea to advertise to kids so there will be a customer base in later years. There was related emails leaked too
It’d be almost impossible to pick and choose so just tax all of it. I think the knock on effects would be positive. It’s an almost unmitigated vice at this point and is the main engine behind this stuff.
Whilst I agree that addictive things can be bad how far does this ago? Food manufacturers purposely make foods that are addictive. Video game companies use ways to make games more addictive.
Companies make things that we want and sometimes we get addicted to wanting it too much.
The problem is bullets, which guns just happen to make go very fast.
I mean social media is simply misanthropic. If humanity had any balls it'd burn these places down. Calling banishment from social media a punishment is a stretch. The point of these decrees has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with persecuting adults for behaving in ways the state doesn't like. The author's read is just weird
Unfortunately, a lot of people run teenage software on adult hardware and that is a wild combo.
the adults of today, albeit the younger ones, were kids growing up with post-IM world. the ones before that could speak with their friends from their homes instead of only meeting in person (due to telephones). we all are products of the environment we were raised in. but despite those learnings, it seems like we are not self-regulating as a society.
charity begins at home, and before bringing children in a conversation, we should think if we all are alright.
Before phones/computers/internet, it was garbage on television channels. Propaganda on 24/7 “news” channels, “reality” tv shows, etc.
I'm not advocating for a return to that, but that was one of the highlights of the era.
Maybe we should've shown a little more spine when they asked us to build a medium for the strong would use to prey on the weak. Maybe we're the problem.
Isn't this what happens in Islamic countries all the time though?
I don't disagree that big adtech's reliance on dopamine-driven addictive behavior is real evil, but regulations that at least wall kids off from that makes sense and there's all kinds of research to suggest as much, in contrast to a personal essay about a video online.
The article mentions 15-16 years of age.
The best practice is to keep kids off smartphones with full internet, full social media, touchscreen and scrolling at least until 13.
It doesn't mean they can't have other kinds of devices.
This is a wide open market category.
It's complete nonsense. The conversation in the UK right now isn't about whether or not teenagers should be allowed to own cell phones; it's about whether they should be allowed to have access to the myriad of addictive and harmful apps and services available on those devices, often maliciously targeted at them.
The drunk pervert filming them on the train has nothing to do with this argument. He's using his phone like a camera. Teenagers are allowed to have cameras, and assuredly every one of the girls he was filming had a camera of some sort on them of their own. Nobody was on uneven ground in this situation technologically.
If people actually were worried about perverted adults preying on children, they would take a look at the countless examples of perverted adults preying on children via their social media accounts and devices. It's been open season on children online for the past decade.
If people actually cared about accountability, they would stop pushing for age-verification laws, and start penalizing social media companies for their laissez faire attitude towards inappropriate sexual conduct, because currently, sites like Instagram and TikTok cater directly to pedophiles and do absolutely nothing about the predatory behavior coming from their user base towards children that are clearly too young to legally use social media in most parts of the world (<13 in the USA).
We need to reframe this whole conversation. It's not about keeping kids away from social media. It's about keeping trillion-dollar businesses from profiting off of children while actively doing harm to them with addictive algorithms, misinformation, and exposure to malicious actors.