Conflates a whole load of othogonal issues that really have nothing to do with each other
Personally, I don’t even think adults with phones are alright.
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.
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?
> These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives,<p>People who are not yet ready to have full agency of their own lives is more or less the definition of children.<p>Does she also expect children to have full time jobs, pay taxes, pay all their own bills and rent, etc etc?
<a href="https://archive.is/poWGm" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/poWGm</a>
It's important to define kids.<p>The article mentions 15-16 years of age.<p>The best practice is to keep kids off smartphones with full internet, full social media, touchscreen and scrolling at least until 13.<p>It doesn't mean they can't have other kinds of devices.<p>This is a wide open market category.
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.<p>Like all risks it doesn’t affect all kids equally either.<p>Some are less vulnerable for various cognitive reasons just like some are less prone to chemical addiction.<p>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.<p>Lastly kids in healthier communities or suburbs or safe urban settings where they can roam free are less vulnerable.<p>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.<p>It’s not just kids either. The elderly and the isolated become addicted to this stuff.<p>Addiction engineering is the problem, whether it’s via a phone, a web site, or a chemical.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
The problem isn’t guns.<p>The problem is bullets, which guns just happen to make go very fast.
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?"<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.