I’m not a ban fan but social media like that is psychological cancer that is definitely harming the young and old mentally.
Kids growing up these days have the burden of the disgusting need for social media self-promotion. They are conditioned that attention and Likes are the most valuable social currency, and waste so much of their valuable youth pursuing that hollow bullshit.
I’m keeping my kids off social media for as long as I can so they can experience growing up without Cloud-automated peer pressure.
Look what it did to boomers. Legit. Ban all that shit. Geocities for the win.
They said this about TV. And game consoles. And computers. And every social media website. They said this about movies when they first came out too.
Social media is a reality of the world. This ban isn’t getting rid of that, just banning one specific platform. Why is Intagram Reels acceptable but Tik Tok isn’t? Because ones is owned by a Chinese company and the other isn’t. That’s all this ban is about. Literally nothing else.
Yeah, I’m almost 100% sure the “tiktok is damaging kid’s brains” is the millennial equivalent of boomers “videogames and TV are damaging kid’s brains”.
I’m a millennia by the way, and we are starting to sound a bit afraid of technologies.
Short form video is genuinely pretty bad though… Most social media is too, it’s not just a new medium people are scared of, it deliberately trains people to maximize use of it
Facebook pioneered most of the (unethical) experiments that make it so bad. They experimented with what makes people use the app for longest - controversial topics, quickly decreasing the amount of “desired” content as you scroll to push you to the optimal reinforcement schedule in operant conditioning, and copious amounts of alerts to give you fomo
Video games can be bad for the same reason - they can also be built to cultivate addiction. And social media can be built without it… The difference between Reddit pre-investment (which coincidentally, I think was also related to tencent/bytedance… They have an obscene amount of money invested everywhere) and Reddit now is a good example
It’s not just people clutching pearls about the new thing or a rise in mental illness coinciding with the growth of social media - there’s a science-backed arms race between engineering more time in app and understanding/treating the effects
(That being said, I agree we millennials are starting to emotionally reject new technology - in this case there’s just solid science showing how this is being misused with bad effects)
You can’t ban peer pressure. That’s like trying to stop the flow of water.
I’m a new parent trying to navigate all this myself.
Most research I’ve been able to find suggests that social media doesn’t cause problems, but rather kids with problems tend to spend too much time on social media. As in there’s no causal link between social media and whatever social problems.
I guess when my kids get to that age the best I’ll be able to do will be to try to keep them engaged with the physical world however I can.
