alt Hacker NewsSurprised to see this seemingly presented positively on HN.
Social media "feels" like it should be uniquely bad for children but the evidence is low-quality and contradictory. For example, high social media use is associated with anxiety and depression, but which direction does that relationship run? Meanwhile there are documented benefits especially for youth who are members of marginalized groups (e.g. LGBTQ). Don't get me wrong, I think there are a lot of problems with the big social media companies. I just think they affect adults too and that we should address them directly.
But setting that aside, the practical implications of age gate laws are terrible. The options are basically to have an LLM guess your age based on your face, or uploading sensitive identity documents to multiple sites and hope they are stored and processed securely and not reused for other purposes.
But OK let's assume social media is always bad for kids and also that someone invents a perfect age gate... kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse?
Replies
Social media being bad for mental health in childhood is one of the most robust theories I've ever seen for these kind of society-wide problems. You can peruse the After Babel Substack for the evidence if you're not convinced, but Jonathan Haidt has consistently done incredible work here.
Do you think there is a more compelling explanation for the mental health decline in teenage girls?
People likely need a fairly large shared set of beliefs to operate without constant friction. Hence national identities. Either let people freely associate into these communities or force algorithms to be "shared" in a sense between couples or families.
I think couples' X could be interesting. But I'd prefer free association (possibly VR?)
This is not surprising at all. HN’s perspective seems to generally go further with banning under 18 year olds from having smartphones in general.
> kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse?
Some will. But I bet a lot of kids "have to be" on Instagram/TikTok/etc because everyone else is. I don't think they all gonna flock to 4chan because they got locked out of the big platforms.
> But setting that aside, the practical implications of age gate laws are terrible. The options are basically to have an LLM guess your age based on your face, or uploading sensitive identity documents to multiple sites and hope they are stored and processed securely and not reused for other purposes.
Those aren't the only options. See the comments on almost any of the many other discussions of age verification on HN for details of ways to do it that do not involve giving any sensitive information to sites (other than what you explicitly trying to give to them, like your age being above their threshold) and do not involve guessing your age via LLM or any other means.
Put it this way: is it good for a child to spend an appreciable fraction of their day browsing social media? Did children previously just have free hours at hand to burn on this? The answer is of course no, there are not more hours in the day after the creation of social media, so its usage comes at the cost of something else in that child's life, usually their precious little downtime where they might plan and think about their own life. Or maybe at the cost of other activities that might be more engaging physically or mentally.