[The Week] Child safety advocates are begging Facebook not to launch Instagram for kids

Is that where they kill themselves and put gorilla glue in their hair for likes? @tinman @Os Trigonum

“Instagram exploits youngsters’ fear of missing out as they constantly check their devices seeking approval and uploading pictures, CCFC said.”

 

Well, FB internal memo said it's not a nothingburger.

Private company should get to do whatever it wants unless it has major impacts on particular areas such as public health. See tobacco as an example.



Facebook's Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls - The Atlantic
Social Media Is Probably Harming Girls, and That's Enough to Act
The preponderance of the evidence suggests that social media is causing real damage to adolescents.

...

For several years, Jean Twenge, the author of iGen, and I have been collecting the academic research on the relationship between teen mental health and social media. Something terrible has happened to Gen Z, the generation born after 1996. Rates of teen depression and anxiety have gone up and down over time, but it is rare to find an “elbow” in these data sets––a substantial and sustained change occurring within just two or three years. Yet when we look at what happened to American teens in the early 2010s, we see many such turning points, usually sharper for girls. The data for adolescent depression are noteworthy:

Some have argued that these increases reflect nothing more than Gen Z’s increased willingness to disclose their mental-health problems. But researchers have found corresponding increases in measurable behaviors such as suicide (for both sexes), and emergency-department admissions for self-harm (for girls only). From 2010 to 2014, rates of hospital admission for self-harm did not increase at all for women in their early 20s, or for boys or young men, but they doubled for girls ages 10 to 14.

Similar increases occurred at the same time for girls in Canada for mood disorders and for self-harm. Girls in the U.K. also experienced very large increases in anxiety, depression, and self-harm (with much smaller increases for boys).

...

Social-media platforms were not initially designed for children, but children have nevertheless been the subject of a gigantic national experiment testing the effects of those platforms. Without a proper control group, we can’t be certain that the experiment has been a catastrophic failure, but it probably has been. Until someone comes up with a more plausible explanation for what has happened to Gen Z girls, the most prudent course of action for regulators, legislators, and parents is to take steps to mitigate the harm. Here are three:

First, Congress should pass legislation compelling Facebook, Instagram, and all other social-media platforms to allow academic researchers access to their data. One such bill is the Platform Transparency and Accountability Act, proposed by the Stanford University researcher Nate Persily.

Second, Congress should toughen the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. An early version of the legislation proposed 16 as the age at which children should legally be allowed to give away their data and their privacy. Unfortunately, e-commerce companies lobbied successfully to have the age of “internet adulthood” set instead at 13. Now, more than two decades later, today’s 13-year-olds are not doing well. Federal law is outdated and inadequate. The age should be raised. More power should be given to parents, less to companies.

Third, while Americans wait for lawmakers to act, parents can work with local schools to establish a norm: Delay entry to Instagram and other social platforms until high school.

Right now, families are trapped. I have heard many parents say that they don’t want their children on Instagram, but they allow them to lie about their age and open accounts because, well, that’s what everyone else has done. Dismantling such traps takes coordinated action, and the principals of local elementary and middle schools are well placed to initiate that coordination.

Haugen’s revelations have brought America to a decision point. If public officials do nothing, the current experiment will keep running—to Facebook’s benefit and teen girls’ detriment. The preponderance of the evidence is damning. Instead of waiting for certainty and letting Facebook off the hook again, we should hold it and other social-media companies accountable. They must change their platforms and their ways.

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Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Righteous Mind and the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, which originated as a September 2015 Atlantic story.

 

I think it’s a bad idea. But Matt Gaetz needs a place to holler at chicks.

 

The responsibility is ultimately on the parents to dictate what their children engage with, there’s nothing wrong with protesting this but if it’s not Facebook or Instagram it’s going to be something else.

In general I agree, I’m not sure the benefits of social media outweigh the negatives, and we’re supposed to look out for what’s best for our kids right, so likely a road I will have to navigate one day.

 

Parents of the BBS: at what age do you let your kids have a smartphone and how do you monitor what they do on it?

 

I had to scope the ins and outs of the interwebz to see if it was okay for the kids you know

 

Middle school for after school activities communication. I don't monitor. I do enable parental control to approve of App installation and set some restrictions on content and time usage - features built into most of today smart phone.

 

Facebook certainly has the ability to do this and I'm not aware of any laws that would prevent them from doing it but I still think it's a bad idea. I agree too that if Facebook doesn't do it someone else likely will but Facebook's market size will make it easier for them to launch something like this and would rather see an upstart company try this and have to build market share from scratch than simply having Facebook do it.

Either way this sounds like a bad idea and I would hope this that people of all ideological stripes would recognize that.

 

Don't understand how communists don't understand the concept of the invisible hand. If this product is bad for society then invincible hand will do its thing. This has always been the case and it's fool proof.

Kids committing suicide is an externality. Externalities are mitigated by the invisible hand.