> We know parents want to feel confident that their teens can use social media to connect with their friends and explore their interests, without having to worry about unsafe or inappropriate experiences.
Or how to ignore the fact that the problem with social media is not harmful content, it's the social media itself. The addiction, the loss of time, and the constant comparison with others. Go design a social media without those.
I'm not really sure that's possible. Cohost tried and well, they died.
The nature of social media just leads to it's very unhealthy problems. By taking away the ability for social media to make viral posts, you take away a lot of the reason people use it. To see popular posts and memes. Then nobody uses it, so nobody sees the ads, so advertisers leave, etc etc.
Personally, I'd be happy if we all went back to interest forums that aren't reddit. But I'm not going to pretend that age is going to come back without deeply overreaching legislation.
My goodness I wish I could go down to just friends and family on Facebook. Maybe 6 months ago they started aggressively showing other groups I don't care about. Right now, it showed:
3 posts from pages or friends I follow
17 from pages I have never cared about or followed
1 from a page I follow
23 from pages I have never followed
It feels more like reddit than what I care about most - my friends and family.
We should really just raise the age of COPPA from 13. It’s a robust legal framework and we can amend one line in it to regulate this industry without excessive bloat or bickering.
It’s crazy that Americans can be on Instagram 8 years before having a sip of alcohol.
We should raise the COPPA consent age at least 16, but probably 18.
Because the social media companies are? I wonder if there would be a noticeable increase in VPN adoption if there were strictly enforced age restrictions targeting the US only. There certainly has been an uptick in VPN literacy among people I know after PornHub blocked my state...
We have some fairly strict rules on devices - it’s not a lack of will.
Same for the school; they don’t want kids YouTubing in class, but “a laptop for everyone” is the standard now, the teachers do a lot on Teams, etc. Kids are smart and motivated, and they share techniques. They find ways.
The key stakeholders here are the services themselves. If they placed “keep children off the network” anywhere near “keep growing DAU” on their list of priorities, all those highly paid engineers (likewise smart and motivated) would find ways too.
I’m a deeply technical well-motivated person who works with stuff like DNS and VPNs for a job and I find it quite challenging, despite physical access to the devices and the users.
Having to download a VPN and do some evasion would probably be a substantial enough deterrent for… [checks notes]… 14 year olds… that it’d be worth doing.
And realistically, if Meta et al wanted to stop harming entire generations of developing minds, they could obviously use their immense data infrastructure to separate actual Russian from allegedly-Russian children.
So all you really need is corporate buy-in (and toothsome regulations is a perfectly fine way to produce buy-in where markets fail to do so)
Edit: realized you’re talking about the case of Russian services being marketed to American children. That too seems straightforward to produce meaningful obstacles, with sufficient appetite from regulators.
My 10 year old kid is smart enough to bypass the various blocking mechanisms in place at school. A VPN is nothing. All they’d need to do is buy a pre paid credit card at the local Walgreens.
My 10 year old kid is smart enough to bypass the ignition key on a car therefore licensure requirements and car keys are stupid.
In reality, your smart 10 year old isn’t powering the toxic social dynamics of social media. It’s the armies of average intelligence kids seeking engineered dopamine hits.
Network effects work for network dissolution just the same as they work for network growth, which is of course why Meta would never voluntarily do anything that could kick off the popular kids, even if your prodigy could bypass it with no problem.
Note: “All those kids are already addicted and so they’ll be highly motivated too!” is a call to action, not to inaction.
Yeah with a "default yes" approach it'll be easily bypassed. With a "default no" it would work, ie you simply don't get an account at all until you prove your age.
I disagree. Defaults matter. “It’s illegal” is a firm line parents can hold. And, you don’t need to deter 100% - just taking a chunk out will reverse network effects and cause population collapse.
Plus, expect more services to verify IDs in an effort to combat AI spam.
I struggle to think of time on Instagram being well spent. Perhaps less badly spent?
Also I wonder how they'll do age verification and "parent" verification, might end up being very trivial for most teens to work around the restrictions using secondary accounts. Thinking about it, the policy might be more for show than anything else.
In my opinion the addiction cost likely outweighs the benefit in this particular example, especially since there are so many other less addictive ways to get inspiration for art.
A good start. Should also include the ability for the parent to approve any new follows by the teen, not just new followers.
Still not letting my kids have social media accounts (FB, IG, TT, X) until their later teens (messaging groups with friends they already have -- Messenger Kids, despite being a FB app, is pretty good for that).
My younger ones use Messenger Kids and it gives me some confidence that Meta has thought about the problem and have solutions that actually work for all parties.
Messenger Kids was a pragmatic effort by Meta to improve safety on the Messenger platform. It works well, and it looks to me like Instagram Teen accounts is a similar effort. You can bemoan the effects of social media or whether teens should be there but the teens are there, so credit to Meta for making a serious investment.
Always lacking in these conversations is a proper definition of "social media". Kids want to talk to their friends, many want to be social, so if we're going to talk about the dangers of social media we need to be specific. E.g. the problems with algorythmic content are entirely different to the issues of bullying and inappropriate direct messaging. Conflating them under a "social media is bad" banner doesn't help us build healthier, safer systems.
It remains to be seen whether these controls will have an impact on the second-order / emergent effects of rampant social media. Would prohibited words or time-limitations stop the algorithm from making an embarrassing moment viral?
What happens when these strict restrictions cut someone off from their support systems?
> Teens will get notifications telling them to leave the app after 60 minutes each day.
It is insane that someone thinks that an impressionable child/young adult wasting ~ 1/16 of their waking time every day on this drivel is OK! But, I guess profit motive gotta win over sanity.
I could justify "5 minutes", maybe "10 minutes". But I am not the one making money from selling their attention and selling them pointless shit.
In my household the policy is and remains: kids can have instagram/facebook/tiktok/$latestMindRottingShit when they buy their own phone and their own cell plan.
Very surprised that you or anyone thinks 60 minutes each day is "a long time!"
I agree that anything past 15 minutes undeniably unhealthy. But large masses of people are very commonly online for hours upon hours. And all along and alongside there's TV.
I'm speaking toward empathy perhaps. I agree that values shouldn't be relative to some lowest common denominator.
> It is insane that someone thinks…
This is overly critical. Social media is an addiction. We're an a new epidemic and we have to assess how to respond. We should be discussing treatments in a similar vein of drug rehabilitation.
So I think shooting for your kids to only get 15 minutes is the right value, but very tricky and risky in how one gets there.
> We should be discussing treatments in a similar vein of drug rehabilitation.
Have you been through a drug addiction? I have. I wouldn't compare having an account on a social media platform to being addicted to hardcore drugs. It doesn't make you sound very smart.
Depending on the type of content one consumes, those activities are a net positive, or at least neutral. Meanwhile social media is a net negative for nearly everyone except "influencers" who get paid to shill for products and services.
As an adult I agree on principle, but how old are your kids? The social pressure to be present in these things must be tough to deal with as a teenager. Can they still access it on a computer?
I was an uncool outcast in school. Now, the "cool kids" from my high school bag my groceries when I go shopping. Social pressure is what got them to where they are. Not succumbing to it is what got me to where I am. I am OK with my kids hating me for now. They'll thank me when they can afford things they want while the former "cool kids" waste their lives bagging cabbage.
I urge you to take your kids' complaints seriously, your comment reads quite dismissive with some strange generalizations of how "cool kids" and "outcasts" will do later in life.
Pressure can turn some people into diamonds (you, apparently), but it can also crush them psychologically.
> In my household the policy is and remains: kids can have instagram/facebook/tiktok/$latestMindRottingShit when they buy their own phone and their own cell plan.
> We know parents want to feel confident that their teens can use social media to connect with their friends and explore their interests, without having to worry about unsafe or inappropriate experiences.
Or how to ignore the fact that the problem with social media is not harmful content, it's the social media itself. The addiction, the loss of time, and the constant comparison with others. Go design a social media without those.
I'm not really sure that's possible. Cohost tried and well, they died.
The nature of social media just leads to it's very unhealthy problems. By taking away the ability for social media to make viral posts, you take away a lot of the reason people use it. To see popular posts and memes. Then nobody uses it, so nobody sees the ads, so advertisers leave, etc etc.
Personally, I'd be happy if we all went back to interest forums that aren't reddit. But I'm not going to pretend that age is going to come back without deeply overreaching legislation.
People hate it, but the ideal social media platform was early Facebook.
Connect with just your friends and family, and optionally groups/pages.
> optionally groups/pages.
My goodness I wish I could go down to just friends and family on Facebook. Maybe 6 months ago they started aggressively showing other groups I don't care about. Right now, it showed:
3 posts from pages or friends I follow
17 from pages I have never cared about or followed
1 from a page I follow
23 from pages I have never followed
It feels more like reddit than what I care about most - my friends and family.
I almost exclusively use the Friends feed[1] now.
Unfortunately it doesn't get rid of sponsored posts or reshares of pages/links from friends, but its closer.
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
Engagggge. Consume the slop. Shareholders demand it!
Early Facebook was great, heck even Google+ at launch was great.
> People hate it, but the ideal social media platform was early Facebook.
Even that has two major flaws:
First, people while using it compare other's highlights to their own norm. Look, this couple can afford a fancy vacation while we don't.
Second, it was still a tool to peer int other people's lives, and gossip.
TikTok forced instagram to go down the route of short form videos that source content from outside your immediate network.
The most attention capturing innovations will take the market. If Facebook didn’t stay on top of it, someone else would.
True, but the things you mentioned are the (unhealthy) reason social media is so popular.
And we all know that being popular is the most important thing at all times. :-/
It's pretty much the most important thing for for-profit social media companies, yes.
This is cute but ignores the rampant unpoliced grooming.
We should really just raise the age of COPPA from 13. It’s a robust legal framework and we can amend one line in it to regulate this industry without excessive bloat or bickering.
It’s crazy that Americans can be on Instagram 8 years before having a sip of alcohol.
We should raise the COPPA consent age at least 16, but probably 18.
Barring some kind of effective globally enforced age verification system, good luck.
I don't see how changing the age limit would have any effect on how effective enforcement would be.
We can’t even keep the eight year olds off. Raising the age likely just means more hassle and near-zero beneficial impact.
> We can’t even keep the eight year olds off
Because there's not really a service for that. However, there are turnkey plugins for keeping <18 year olds off your site.
> Raising the age likely just means more hassle
It either increases the hassle, or increases the effectiveness- not both. If you're not verifying ages, then who cares what the number is?
Why does it need to be global?
Because the social media companies are? I wonder if there would be a noticeable increase in VPN adoption if there were strictly enforced age restrictions targeting the US only. There certainly has been an uptick in VPN literacy among people I know after PornHub blocked my state...
A solution doesn’t need to be bulletproof to have a meaningful and worthwhile effect.
How often do you see 14 year olds joyriding cars?
How often do you see 14 year olds evading internet restrictions?
(Allllll the time. My kids figured out how to bypass the pihole within a day, without even knowing I’d installed it.)
It’s almost like the most important stakeholders have no interest in preventing them from evading those restrictions…
We have some fairly strict rules on devices - it’s not a lack of will.
Same for the school; they don’t want kids YouTubing in class, but “a laptop for everyone” is the standard now, the teachers do a lot on Teams, etc. Kids are smart and motivated, and they share techniques. They find ways.
The key stakeholders here are the services themselves. If they placed “keep children off the network” anywhere near “keep growing DAU” on their list of priorities, all those highly paid engineers (likewise smart and motivated) would find ways too.
I’m a deeply technical well-motivated person who works with stuff like DNS and VPNs for a job and I find it quite challenging, despite physical access to the devices and the users.
Yet somehow these platforms figure out how to reliably market kid stuff to kids, and adult stuff to adults.
The piss-poor relevance of my Facebook ads and recommendations is a pretty clear counterpoint to this idea.
The revenue of Facebook is a pretty clear counterpoint to this counterpoint.
Sure, just like the Twilight novels are empirically good writing because they sold a lot of copies.
Because other countries can host websites too?
And their citizens can sign up for Instagram. “Oh, I’m Russian, we don’t have that.”
Having to download a VPN and do some evasion would probably be a substantial enough deterrent for… [checks notes]… 14 year olds… that it’d be worth doing.
And realistically, if Meta et al wanted to stop harming entire generations of developing minds, they could obviously use their immense data infrastructure to separate actual Russian from allegedly-Russian children.
So all you really need is corporate buy-in (and toothsome regulations is a perfectly fine way to produce buy-in where markets fail to do so)
Edit: realized you’re talking about the case of Russian services being marketed to American children. That too seems straightforward to produce meaningful obstacles, with sufficient appetite from regulators.
My 10 year old kid is smart enough to bypass the various blocking mechanisms in place at school. A VPN is nothing. All they’d need to do is buy a pre paid credit card at the local Walgreens.
My 10 year old kid is smart enough to bypass the ignition key on a car therefore licensure requirements and car keys are stupid.
In reality, your smart 10 year old isn’t powering the toxic social dynamics of social media. It’s the armies of average intelligence kids seeking engineered dopamine hits.
Network effects work for network dissolution just the same as they work for network growth, which is of course why Meta would never voluntarily do anything that could kick off the popular kids, even if your prodigy could bypass it with no problem.
Note: “All those kids are already addicted and so they’ll be highly motivated too!” is a call to action, not to inaction.
Yeah with a "default yes" approach it'll be easily bypassed. With a "default no" it would work, ie you simply don't get an account at all until you prove your age.
I disagree. Defaults matter. “It’s illegal” is a firm line parents can hold. And, you don’t need to deter 100% - just taking a chunk out will reverse network effects and cause population collapse.
Plus, expect more services to verify IDs in an effort to combat AI spam.
"[...] help ensure their time is well spent."
I struggle to think of time on Instagram being well spent. Perhaps less badly spent?
Also I wonder how they'll do age verification and "parent" verification, might end up being very trivial for most teens to work around the restrictions using secondary accounts. Thinking about it, the policy might be more for show than anything else.
"I struggle to think of time on Instagram being well spent. Perhaps less badly spent?"
There are a lot of people that use Instagram to follow artists for inspiration for art. This seems like a pretty good way to spend time.
In my opinion the addiction cost likely outweighs the benefit in this particular example, especially since there are so many other less addictive ways to get inspiration for art.
Agree, the price is too high for 30 seconds of actual inspiration per week.
messaging and sharing pictures with friends?
A good start. Should also include the ability for the parent to approve any new follows by the teen, not just new followers.
Still not letting my kids have social media accounts (FB, IG, TT, X) until their later teens (messaging groups with friends they already have -- Messenger Kids, despite being a FB app, is pretty good for that).
My younger ones use Messenger Kids and it gives me some confidence that Meta has thought about the problem and have solutions that actually work for all parties.
> that Meta has thought about the problem and have solutions
They just want to ensure that when the kids become "of age", that they'll still be on Meta's services in some shape or form.
Yes, for sure it's self-serving. But at least it's useful for us parents.
Messenger Kids was a pragmatic effort by Meta to improve safety on the Messenger platform. It works well, and it looks to me like Instagram Teen accounts is a similar effort. You can bemoan the effects of social media or whether teens should be there but the teens are there, so credit to Meta for making a serious investment.
Always lacking in these conversations is a proper definition of "social media". Kids want to talk to their friends, many want to be social, so if we're going to talk about the dangers of social media we need to be specific. E.g. the problems with algorythmic content are entirely different to the issues of bullying and inappropriate direct messaging. Conflating them under a "social media is bad" banner doesn't help us build healthier, safer systems.
The teens are there because Meta hooked them and brought them there. No credit to Meta at all.
Cool. Like lite cigarettes.
It remains to be seen whether these controls will have an impact on the second-order / emergent effects of rampant social media. Would prohibited words or time-limitations stop the algorithm from making an embarrassing moment viral?
What happens when these strict restrictions cut someone off from their support systems?
Now introducing menthol cigarettes! "Part of this healthy lifestyle."
lol
> Teens will get notifications telling them to leave the app after 60 minutes each day.
It is insane that someone thinks that an impressionable child/young adult wasting ~ 1/16 of their waking time every day on this drivel is OK! But, I guess profit motive gotta win over sanity.
I could justify "5 minutes", maybe "10 minutes". But I am not the one making money from selling their attention and selling them pointless shit.
In my household the policy is and remains: kids can have instagram/facebook/tiktok/$latestMindRottingShit when they buy their own phone and their own cell plan.
Very surprised that you or anyone thinks 60 minutes each day is "a long time!"
I agree that anything past 15 minutes undeniably unhealthy. But large masses of people are very commonly online for hours upon hours. And all along and alongside there's TV.
So this 60 minutes seems very out of touch.
"Daddy can be online 10 hours a day but it's ok because he is being paid money."
Gee I wonder how that can go wrong.
"When you are paying for the internet and the device, you can also be online 10 hours a day"
> But large masses of people
And I would consider myself a failure as a parent if my kid aspired to such a low standard as "like large masses of people"
I'm speaking toward empathy perhaps. I agree that values shouldn't be relative to some lowest common denominator.
> It is insane that someone thinks…
This is overly critical. Social media is an addiction. We're an a new epidemic and we have to assess how to respond. We should be discussing treatments in a similar vein of drug rehabilitation.
So I think shooting for your kids to only get 15 minutes is the right value, but very tricky and risky in how one gets there.
> We should be discussing treatments in a similar vein of drug rehabilitation.
Have you been through a drug addiction? I have. I wouldn't compare having an account on a social media platform to being addicted to hardcore drugs. It doesn't make you sound very smart.
Online account is not the same as being addicted to hardcore drugs. You made that up just now.
Social media is addictive, like a drug addiction. And there's a spectrum to it.
Most people spend that much time watching YouTube or TV everyday, if not more.
Depending on the type of content one consumes, those activities are a net positive, or at least neutral. Meanwhile social media is a net negative for nearly everyone except "influencers" who get paid to shill for products and services.
As an adult I agree on principle, but how old are your kids? The social pressure to be present in these things must be tough to deal with as a teenager. Can they still access it on a computer?
I was an uncool outcast in school. Now, the "cool kids" from my high school bag my groceries when I go shopping. Social pressure is what got them to where they are. Not succumbing to it is what got me to where I am. I am OK with my kids hating me for now. They'll thank me when they can afford things they want while the former "cool kids" waste their lives bagging cabbage.
Do you think popular people in highschool don’t become successful? Because I assure you this is a faulty assumption.
I was an uncool outcast in school. It has affected me negatively to this day, 20+ years later.
At least a handful of the "cool kids" from my school are wildly successful millionaires.
I urge you to take your kids' complaints seriously, your comment reads quite dismissive with some strange generalizations of how "cool kids" and "outcasts" will do later in life.
Pressure can turn some people into diamonds (you, apparently), but it can also crush them psychologically.
> In my household the policy is and remains: kids can have instagram/facebook/tiktok/$latestMindRottingShit when they buy their own phone and their own cell plan.
Based