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Google asks Congress to not ban teens from social media
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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I completely get where you're coming from and this is something I think about a lot. There are so many people I know (myself included) who have benefited as kids from being able to access the internet and find a community, but overall the data I've seen shows a net negative in terms of social outcomes. And to be completely honest I just think that a lot of spaces on the internet suffer from having too many adolescents around.
I don't want to enforce a law or something but I think we just need to be more socially aware of the kinds of spaces that kids have access to
As a teenager I found it utterly stupid when adults thought they knew better than me what was good for me, and I decided I didn't ever want to be one of those adults. I have not (yet?) become one of them even though my teenage years are long over.
Today's Internet is a lot "safer" (locked down) anyway than it used to be. Posts I made as a teenager and even preteen to online forums can still be found through search engines even now today. Compare that to interactions on today's social media sites that are mostly not indexed by search engines, mostly forgotten after a short time and it is easy to delete them (or even one's entire account).
I don’t think social media is the problem. It’s the fact that something like 60% of children aged 7-14 have watched Andrew Tate. There’s just so much more shit out there nowadays than there was in the past. I don’t care if kids see a dead body or porn on the internet, I care that there are some people with sinister ideologies who are doing serious damage to impressionable children. And it’s just an endless of stream of content that caters to our worst instincts in a way that is not healthy for development as a human. This shit is like a drug for constant dopamine.
When I was a kid I swore not to be someone who acted like I do now, but yknow what? I didn’t have near as much knowledge or experience. I thought I knew everything back then but the reality is that, yeah, sometimes adults do know better. I’m a big advocate for more freedoms for adolescents because I genuinely believe they are treated like shit in society but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still some lines that you have to draw