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Imagine being a very smart and disagreeable 15 year old stuck in a small town somewhere. You want to be on the internet, learning to code, arguing about politics, and making friends similar to you ... except social media is banned, lmao. The internet is where the future is, and where power is, keeping kids off it isn't advantageous to them.
My guess is in most cases he would be better off learning to deal with his disagreeability in a way that does not prevent him from forming meaningful relationships with his local community, as opposed to fleeing into an online bubble of like minded people and becoming atomized and terminally online and building an identity about being very smart. If anything your example makes me more convinced kids should not be on social media, not less.
Also, the fact that in some very specific circumstances social media might have a positive effect on children, does not necessarily mean it is a good idea to have children on social media. I have not looked into it too deeply so I am open to having my mind changed about it, but I have the impression Jonathan Haidt shows pretty convincingly that social media have had a catastrophic effect on teenage mental health, so if that is true it might still be a good idea to ban or at least disincentivize social media for children.
Finally, banning social media is not the same as banning the internet. In a world where social media is banned, your hypothetical very smart child can still get on the internet and look up information of coding and such, without having to be on tiktok or anything like that. This would raise questions about the definition of social media. Maybe it would be feasible to treat platforms that have some sort of addictive recommendation algorithm differently from places where you look up your own content, so kids could look up stuff about coding or politics or find an online community that they like, while not being allowed on tiktok or youtube or whatever and be exposed to algorithms that are basically trying to get you addicted to the platform's content. Or this type of algorithmic feed could become a separate 16+ feature of these platforms or whatever where everyone can use these platforms and look up stuff whereas you have to validate your account and prove you are 16+ before you get access to the addictive features. I am just fantasizing on the spot about specific policies, but trying to get kids off of addictive social media platforms does not have to mean a blanket ban on everything fun and useful on the internet.
I think there are some confusing claims being made here.
How is meeting people who are closer to your level of intelligence online "fleeing"? These are people who you can do more with, who can teach you more, who can expose you to future occupations that properly use your talents. There are some people for whom the average poster on this forum (which isn't that high of a bar) is significantly above anyone in their small town. "Building an identity around being very smart" - what? - being very smart gives you access to different careers, many of which are significantly higher paying and many of which are, most would agree, more satisfying than those the average person has.
Yeah, but not make friends with people with the same interest! I think that's a pretty basic thing to want!
This is a tangent but I think 'recommendation algorithm addictiveness' is insanely overstated as the cause of any internet badness. The thing optimizing videos for view counts isn't the 'algorithm', it's the people. MrBeast is supposedly the culmination of internet algorithms taking advantage of people, and the formula he converged on was ... game shows, which were a thing on TV too. Internet content would have all the same problems if there was no algorithm and you had to manually click links tbh. The problem is in large part the consumers who demand the stuff.
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Do you think the modal teen fits thar description?
Of course not, but someone here's more likely to have been like that in the past
Yes, but the policy debate is going to have to consider that the damages being caused to a majority of the teens out there might outweigh the loss to the comparative handful of teens who benefited from unrestricted internet access.
If one values the experiences of the most talented and capable at the same order of magnitude as the least, it's probably not a good policy, sure.
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Which is just another way of saying that they don't have the right to benefit from that ability, and that ability should be redistributed to everyone who doesn't. (It's ironic that the types of people who complain about more rules being "communism" are directionally and trivially correct, yet most of them aren't smart enough to explain why.)
I think a social media ban for this subgroup is likely to pass in some way, shape, or form, but that's mainly because we don't think anyone under 18 (21? 25? 120?) is actually a human being (more like 3/5ths of one). And because it's going to be the Boomers doing it, it's going to be something stupid and ham-fisted that includes stuff like 4chan and StackOverflow (i.e. the places high-value teenagers are more likely to visit) but excludes YouTube Shorts-type content factories (which is what everyone over 30 thinks 'social media' is, and is more about dealing with the Evil New Media that they can't get their kids off of because there's basically nothing else for them to do).
At least there's a playbook for defeating tech-illiterate Boomers that more or less just needs to be dusted off. I think there's a real future in distributed social media among people smart enough to insert an SD card into a Raspberry Pi and edit a few configuration files.
I mean, it shouldn't be controversial to say that youth is a form of 'mental disability' that most people overcome through age and experience.
I'd be in favor of there being some kind of basic test that someone can past to 'remove' that disability in a legal sense, rather than having a blanket age of consent.
The sheer size of my political outgroup is clear evidence to the contrary. Most of them are over 18, too.
Oi, where's your freedom license?I am too, but the problem is that society won't tolerate it being an actual, legible test (mainly because muh disproportionate impact, but also because there's a lot of ego/conscience-approval involved in the assumption of righteous disenfranchisement by default, much like there is with all the -isms).
This is currently fulfilled by "having enough common sense to lie to the website about his or her date of birth, and intelligent enough not to contradict that lie after the fact". Fake IDs serve a similar purpose, or at least they did back when they were easier to make; half the problem I have with this scheme is that it makes this much harder (they are/were natural escape valves), as in the face of -ism-driven lawmaking the question of who it actually applies to and what they'll be doing instead won't be seriously considered.
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