A Child is advocating for a Back Surgeon who has made a General Call? Am I reading that right?
Took me several seconds to parse that sentence as well.
“Childrens advocates “ have been backing the most egregiously unconstitutional, paternalistic, data broker friendly, moral panic, privacy dystopia bullshit bills around the country. “Childs advocates” are why we have anti pornography pearl clutching panopticon laws that require you to scan a government ID to jerk off. Fuck off with that.
s/country/world/: FTFY“Think of the children” is somehow the gotcha for so many of the hard-of-thinking amongst us.
I agree with all of this.
But this is none of that. This is informing people that the evidence says that excessive social media use does harm, because most people genuinely don’t understand the risks.
This is a health issue, not a morality issue.
No, this is old as dirt shits upset that kids exist issue. Sorry Grandpa I won’t turn the music down. Now go fuck off to Florida and play bingo until you die
There’s no actual science about social media causing health problems like cigarettes.
It’s a politician and state control issue.
https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/teen-social-media-use
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7785056/
This Harvard one is over 7 years old.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/17/12/social-media-and-teen-anxiety
I think you have a critical thinking issue.
It’s literally cited on the HHS page about it: https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/youth-mental-health/social-media/index.html
I don’t get why people think this idea is equivalent to stuff like internet access bans or COPPA, it’s a warning label, not an “enter your ID” to access page.
They never banned cigarettes, but putting a giant warning on the box did help in vilifying cigarettes as very unhealthy and wrong.
I doubt it’ll go anywhere in this age of government, but its exactly the type of thing I would have gone for if I were tasked with solving a societal issue. It’s smart because it has no real effect on access, so social media companies would have a harder time fighting it, but it also gives a big bloody warning which does have a substantial psychological impact on users.
iirc someone did something similar with a very simple “are you sure?” app that gave a prompt asking if you were sure you wanted to post something or send a text. Just having a single prompt was enough for many people to reconsider their stupid text or comment.
Have those warning labels been shown to work like at all? We already have awareness saturation about just how awful cigarettes are for you.
With the government executing this message to our youth, I think they’ll work as well as the anti-piracy ones back in the day.
You Wouldn’t Steal a Car
What do you mean by work? Do they stop everyone from doing stupid things? No. Do they have a measurable effect on behavior? Yes.
So why don’t we put them on guns?
We probably don’t want to use the current leader in cause of death for kids as a template for good policy.
Not at all what I was suggesting. If warning labels save lives why are they not on guns?
My guess is gun advocates think its a restriction on the 2nd amendment?
I see.
Well as long as opinions matter more than data now. Might as well criminalize Tik Tok with one hand and give out free AR-15s to mentally ill 18 year olds with the other.
Yes. Almost no one smokes in Australia because of them
Lol no, no one smokes anymore mainly because it’s a taboo and a pack of cigs is so expensive it’s basically impossible to do so on the regular.
The labels don’t do shit.
How do you think smoking went from something nearly everybody did to being taboo? Maybe the labels don’t do anything for the last 10% of the population who still smoke today, despite the taboo, but those labels played a big role in reinforcing public awareness of the health effects of smoking.
No they didn’t, people got tired of the smell and public awareness of smoking came from watching family members die. Labels didn’t do shit. Smoking was on the decline before the labels even showed up.
The fact is, with the world we live in being like it is, why the fuck not smoke? For the chance to live a little further into the distopian hellscape of our impending future? Some reward that is for denying myself something I enjoy.
COPD fucking sucks, my dude. Living longer isn’t the goal, living comfortably is and being unable to breathe all the time is the worst.
Even if the world becomes a hellscape do you want to meet your maker choking on bits of your own lungs or breathing normally?
That is why you shouldn’t smoke. Lung cancer and COPD are not things you want to deal with if you want to do anything remotely physical later in life.
It’s not a great plan to encourage yourself to smoke while expecting a future society with even worse healthcare
John Perry Barlow was right
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Is there any hope at all left that governments might one day leave us on the Internet in peace?
I once wished for this, especially back in the days when there were next to no laws regarding it, but there’s zero chance as the money and attention has moved to it. There’s political capital in demonising online discourse.
“Just look at what you’re grandparents are into…”
They been buttoning their knickerbockers below the knee and starting to memorize jokes!
Oh, did they have studies showing that the mods and rockers damaged people’s mental health? Is that how this is the same?
“studies”
Probably with the same methodology that led to comic book burnings
“Probably”
Christian freak out 80 years ago vs modern doctors. Samesies, right? Ya dunce.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7785056/
https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/teen-social-media-use
Comparing decades old satan panic stuff with modern behavioral sciences is legit the dumbest thing I’ve read today. Congrats.
80 years ago? The Covid microchip thing was 2 years ago and your best buddies are drinking raw milk again.
Lol what? You’re going from comic book bans to covid microchips now. Idk you’re weird.
Probably yeah. The modern world is designed to hurt your mental health. Is that the fault of social media or simply the price of being aware? If I learned that many groups of people are being genocided from reading Wikipedia and that makes me depressed would you say Wikipedia causes mental issues?
That is apples and oranges. Clicking through rabbit holes isn’t the result of an aggressive algorithm designed to prime you for products being advertised. The motivation for the content being hosted is the major issue and exploitation of younger people in service of that motivation.
Advertising may be your problem, but I know the government’s not taking the “we dont allow kids to be served ads”, so then what, they’re mad it’s the Chinese in the lead? The Kids aren’t gonna be better off playing COD and watching action movies both of which are lightly disguised military recruitment propaganda aimed at them. You may be mad about it but based on their actions it’s not the fact kids are getting exploited that made the Surgeon General speak out, it’s that’s kids are getting exploited and someone else is benefiting.
The mental health isn’t going to get better even if social media didn’t exist in general. People would just find a different outlet to develop maladaptive coping strategies with. Treating the symptoms isn’t gonna cure the root issue, but the root issue is expensive so we all know they’re not going to touch that.
The advertising was an easy and obvious example. I set you up for a straw man but whatever. If you don’t understand the harmful effects social media has on mental health and how it’s different from other forms of media/content, I’m not going to hold your hand through that. The sophistication of engagement algorithms should be obvious. The purpose of a surgeons general warning would be to raise awareness of those specific mental health issues that can be aggravated by excessive social media use. Raising the awareness of an issue is step in the right direction. Fine to call it a band aid but there’s no need to shit on progress of any type.
I call shenanigans. We’ve had bullying when I was a kid in the 70s. Has anything been done about it? No. Why? Because dominance hierarchy is in among our school districts and administrators, and they like sports team lettermen over science nerds. This hadn’t changed in the aughts. It’s still the same, today. Even when kids come in with proof of violence (e.g. phone camera video) the question is why did you have a phone in school? not can we identify the dude curb-stomping kids three times smaller than him?
We had hungry kids in the 70s. Have we done anything about it? No. We try to set up school lunches, but then the programs get cancelled because socialism bad! So kids are going hungry thanks to ideology.
Are we yet teaching sexual consent (or how about consent in other places like work and TOS?) No. We’re teaching abstinence-only education in 26 states with comprehensive sex ed mandated in three (the west coast). We’re teaching girls they’re like chewing gum, that is, one-use, and a sexual assault destroys their value. And we’re teaching boys their sexuality isn’t welcome until they can afford to put a ring on it and have a salary in place, driving them to become alt-right war boys for Immorten Joe. ( WITNESS ME! )
So how about dealing with kids who are homeless? In poverty? In the abusive foster-care system? Dealing with DV at home? Not a god damn thing. Kids need food, shelter, basic needs like clothing, playtime, time to bond with their family, time to socialize, stability at home. Until they have these things, any energy we spend not arranging to providing these things is failure of society to serve basic child welfare for the public.
Warning labels on social media will not feed hungry kids, or assure their place to sleep is safe and warm, and we have an outrageous number of kids for whom the latter set are the problem, not dangers of social media. Also warning labels that are not congruent with current scientific consensus only weaken the veracity of tobacco product labels.
ETA: That’s not the best link. This search leads to a wider array of stories, and TD is pretty good about including sources within each article.
