I argue social media is a profound risk to anyone. It's an entire industry that's made to exploit every insecurity and vulnerability within a human psyche. Nervous about vaccines? Sure, you can go to your local doctor, but in the meantime you ask your fellow parents on Facebook and suddenly someone tells you that not only do these vaccines have the potential to fuck up your child for life, that doctors are totally in denial about it and no one in your friend group has ever had to deal with measles but one or two probably claim to have a vaccine-injured child, so do you really want to risk it?
This happens over and over again for anything. Vaccines is just one known example. I'm also talking about gay people. People who have sex before marriage. Immigrants. People with suspiciously dark skin tone. Body image. etc.
The internet has opened up the world so we don't just need to trust our local doctor, mayor, school principal, parish priest. That's a great and empowering thing.
I don't know why you're making that guess when both are obviously bad in totally different ways.
Cigarettes, which social media is sometimes compared with, are still bad for adults, and the rules for them are for a minimum age of purchase rather than to ban for everyone.
It's also illegal to partake in cigarettes in certain areas, even for adults. Cigarette packaging and location is also regulated. It's not like adults have unfettered access to things that harm them. It's illegal to drink and drive. In some places, it's illegal to drink in public, or it's illegal to sell alcohol beyond certain time periods. I'm not saying that these things are right, but that if we're going to compare social media to harmful substances we shouldn't misrepresent the access to harmful substances adults actually have.
I would suggest analogous rules should be determined for social media.
I am not particularly confident what such rules should look like — I don't think there's an easy equivalent to drunk driving, but perhaps "smoking in a confined public area" might be close to "trolling on forums that people need to use to get normal life activities done"?
But they are their own thing, and need to be treated appropriately.
Preventing teenagers from doing things that adults can do is pretty normal. They can’t drink, smoke, or drive until they’re old enough - at which point we decide it’s their life.
To some extent, if adults want to drink from the firehouse of poison we let them.
To other extents, we section those who inflict harm upon themselves or are a danger to others. Our social norms are fairly inconsistent on this and it's easy to make a case (though not widely accepted) that the sort of maladaptive social media use by older adults is both a form of psychic self harm and a danger to society.
That’s a particularly hot take but I think it’s interesting. Lots of actual honest to goodness damage to the very fabric of society in recent years was done by adults using this tech, not adolescent girls.
I understand Protecting The Children, but I can also sympathize with them pointing to us and saying “What the F have you been up to old man? Done destroying the world already? Lets focus on other things rather than controlling us for our supposed own sake.”
Replace "social media" with "alcohol" or "sexual activity."
If you are a child, limits are a very good thing. If you are an adult, take responsibility for the stupidity of your own actions.
Also, please don't do ad-hominem. For "boomers flaming antivax conspiracies," there's plenty of blame to go around and more than meets the eye. Our health experts also did crap like this that got people who listened to them killed: https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898?lang=en
This happens over and over again for anything. Vaccines is just one known example. I'm also talking about gay people. People who have sex before marriage. Immigrants. People with suspiciously dark skin tone. Body image. etc.