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somenameformetoday at 12:54 PM1 replyview on HN

In a country where it is banned, there will be no 'normal' social pressure to use it. There might be some fringe pressure to use it, akin to drugs in countries where such is banned, except probably far less. Drugs are at least enjoyable, while basically everybody rates social media as a cancer - especially children, yet they continue to use it through a mixture of addiction and learned dependence.

And no the effects are not "relatively innocuous." It's having a catastrophically negative effect on children, especially girls. Rather than cherry picking one of the zillion studies to support this I'll just link to a search [1], because the evidence is not ambiguous.

[1] - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=effects+of+social+media...


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applfanboysbgontoday at 1:18 PM

Cigarettes were banned for children and are extremely unenjoyable and yet there was still tremendous social pressure to smoke them (before vaping became cooler). I think that plenty of people clearly enjoy social media, meanwhile. Social media is much like alcohol - not so toxic in responsible dosages, but susceptible to abuse. Even if you don't like social media, it's borderline mandatory to use it in order to form social connections when everyone else is using it. Perhaps that's not a concern for an adult of child-rearing age, who already has their social network established and can snub their nose at social media, but I believe it would be profoundly damaging to a child's social development in this day and age.

Psychology, incidentally, is a completely bunk field of fake science, with somewhere between 2/3rds and 3/4ths of papers being unreplicable. I am highly amenable to applying research and statistics to inform decision-making, but it does you no good if you're using faulty research and statistics. Using the 'authority' of a bad field as a bludgeon to avoid actually making your argument is not compelling. I suggest articulating a case yourself rather than reaching for an article dump as though it proves you objectively correct, unless your goal is simply to reinforce your own biases and assure yourself of the correctness of your decisions, their actual correctness be damned.

Also, I'd note there's kind of two different points of discussion here. One is "banning it for my child even though it's legal" and one is a "national ban". Even if you support the latter and believe it would have a positive outcome, that does not mean it will necessarily have a positive outcome to still ban your children when all of their peers are definitely using it. As far as I see it, a national ban is a complete non-starter for positive outcomes because, regardless of whether it has or doesn't have a positive outcome on a child's social environment, for it to be enforceable requires acceding to a surveillance state in which internet usage is directly tied to your government ID, at which point the negative outcomes for society outweigh any possible positive outcome for children by 100 to 1. You do not want to give government complete and total control of the means of communication, I promise you. Even if you trust your current government to not abuse it, once they have that control it's never becoming undone, so you must also trust that every future government in your and your children's lifetimes will also not abuse the uncontrolled power they've been given -- and if you have that level of unconditional trust in any society, I have a mighty fine bridge to sell you, a real beauty it is.

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