It certainly feels like social media interactions should be restricted to older children. 13yo seems to be a common cutoff for administering one's own online accounts with various exceptions for many countries [1]. Perhaps social media should be restricted to those entering their penultimate year of Secondary / High school and be accompanied with some form of tuition / certification? (Along the lines of social media hygiene, online safety, local Internet law, reporting etc)
Personally, as someone who moderated a large forum for a couple years, I'd personally put the cutoff at at least 14. 13 year olds are by far the most annoying demographic I had to deal with. 12 year olds would generally behave, as would 14 year olds. 13 is somehow a magic age where a lot of the online annoyances source from.
Putting aside the privacy issues of requiring identification... what does 'social media' mean exactly? Safe to assume Facebook and Instagram are included. Probably YouTube? What about Hacker News? Discord? Online games?
There's always a lot of discussion about how bad and scary "social media" is, but I've never really gotten a clear definition of what that actually is.
This is always brought up, and the simplest way to have a big impact is restricting these features:
- Infinite scroll
- Autoplay
- Sort by popularity
- Recommender systems
Note that e.g. Facebook had none of these features when it was getting popular, so any suggestions that social networks are impossible without them is revisionism. Suggesting friends based on your stolen phone contact list isn't really a recommender system as by definition they're contacts that you already know.
Remove those, and most of the harm of social media is gone. If you want to go further, you can do away with user-facing popularity metrics (likes/upvotes/friend counts).
The following definitions are from Google (Oxford dictionary):
Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. [1]
& Wikipedia:
... interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks. [2]
Then, that would include HN, Discord and various online games imho. There's more about profiles / services in the Wikipedia page. That said, such definitions feel like they would also include emails / Discourse etc. Mailing lists feel like they could be considered part of "social media". Sending emails to family or close friends doesn't. So perhaps one needs to separate the platform from its various applications?
The Web (like the world) is constantly changing. If you're interested in mitigating the potential harms of social media, you're going to have to form a definition of "social media" that fits with your own goals and values, and the goals and values you set for your kids. Then, evaluate from there.
I agree. This comes down to parents letting their kids use this stuff.
The problem is that some people (and/or companies, organizations, etc) seem to think that they can apply their values on the rest of us with privacy-destroying legislation.
Ads dealers, who own social networks, are adept manipulators: they find your weaknesses and torture you psychologically until they break your will and make you a mindless ads user. Then those sorry doomscrollers aimlessly wander along the streets, and unable to resist the urge, use whatever ads they find on those streets. Most of the ads dealers are no better, and the ads they sell are mostly poison.
"Under-11s we feel should not be given access to smartphones. They don't need the usage of a smartphone and, actually, a feature phone - or a dumb phone, as some people call them - is more suitable."
Who are these nobodies lecturing us how to parent? I could care less how they feel and there's a clear conflict of interest. It's a bad precedent when some policy maker crawls from under the rug to explain what is "suitable"
