alt Hacker NewsI'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, if it's at all possible to avoid it. I'm gonna continue to run with "no social media", which has worked so far. They can message people they actually know IRL, somewhere without a feed full of crap from people they don't know. That's plenty.
Like I can't think of any analogous place in physical space I'd let my kids hang out unsupervised, and the amount of time I intend to spend watching (supervising) them scrolling Insta or TikTok on anything like a regular basis is zero, and the likelihood of their choosing that as a thing they want to do if I'm otherwise available to do something fun with them is also probably somewhere around zero, which means... no social, since it ain't happening supervised.
Like I also wouldn't take them to a bad part of town and leave them there for hours. Why would I do the digital equivalent? Even if we talk about it afterward... why? Maybe occasionally as a "here's how to spot shit" lesson but not enough that they'd need an account or anything.
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What I’m seeing in Australia is most parents know it’s bad, and want their kids off social media. But it’s a Herculean task when the social media companies have such a grip on their kids and when all the other kids have it.
It’s the same story with banning phones in schools. Everyone knows it’s the right thing to do but individual parents or teachers don’t have the power to do it alone.
> let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, if it's at all possible to avoid it.
You're talking about cutting kids from all online services, including multiplayer games and community wikis.
It also means your kid has no experience of online interactions with strangers, basically no SNS literacy, which also sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me.
> They can message people they actually know IRL, somewhere without a feed full of crap from people they don't know.
Just how do you think they get introduced to TikTok? What do you think gets posted in the school class WhatsApp group chat?
My kids' WhatsApp group chats are mostly a torrent of sharing idiotic TikToks, YouTube Shorts, and celebrity Instagrams.
Which my kids can't watch… until they're savvy enough to bypass my restrictions. Until then, they'll watch it in school, on their friends' phones - little consolation there.
And when that pauses, they just have stupid sticker wars, and the kind of impolite banter (often misogynist/homophobic in nature, definitely not age appropriate) that may well have been par for the course when I was their age, but that I would never have committed to in writing, in essentially a public space. Not to mention the almost bullying.
The mere suggestion by my kid (on my advice) that a separate space was created to discuss actually important stuff, like forgotten homework assignments, test dates, etc, was met with incredulity and laughter by peers (the almost bullying).
Kids teach their peers how to act. Peers have way more influence than their parents. We need a majority of kids to understand TikTok/etc are bad for them.
The issue is, that many people think social media like TikTok and FB and so on are good and that they are letting their children "participate in modern life" or something like that. They are utterly uninformed about these things, or so media brainwashed themselves, that they will fight you to the teeth standing up for things like FB.
I had that happening. I explained to someone, that FB is a criminal company, that's spying on everyone and everything they do, and just had that 5 billion sum to pay for mishandling personal data. But do you think that that person would come to their senses? Nope, ofc not. They argued on and on about how it is a force of good and whatnot.
> I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common,
A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone?
The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized. It is part of "being responsible for yourself". My parents taught me how to be safe in a bad neighborhood because sometimes you have to go there. They taught me how to pick good friends who wouldn't do bad things to me. They taught me how to spot the precursors to bad things. They let me hang out unsupervised. Because they taught me how to be responsible for myself. Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.