>One document shows one TikTok project manager speaking candidly about the time-limit feature’s real goal: “improving public trust in the TikTok platform via media coverage,” the TikTok employee said. Our goal is not to reduce the time spent.”
TikTok's response is to claim quotes like this are out of context, but they also seem unable or unwilling to provide the context in which statements like this are OK.
Presumably because the US owned networks are just as bad.
There are many people (myself included) that oppose a tiktok ban but would happily support more stringent rules that outlawed tiktok’s bad behavior and applied equaly to facebook, youtube and musk’s ego project.
My friends with young kids 3-11 all let their kids use iPads. All of the kids seem well adjusted, able to read (a worry I saw), etc. I have no idea what limits they have but the kids are social, they don't hide on their iPad when people visit but instead interact with the parent's friends.
The point being, unlike lots of comments here, I haven't seen any evidence of ill effects of young kids have access to electronics. I have no idea what these parents do and what limits they place, only that they didn't need to ban electronics from their kids lives to raise good kids.
Of course it's anecdata. One family, 2 daughters, 5 and 8. Another, son 11. Another son 11, daughter 7. Another, daughter 3.
I have also seen the opposite. Kids who can't function if their screen is taken away and are anti-social. But given the other kids, it doesn't seem to be the screen that's the problem.
There are visible signs of kids being influenced by devices. And some parents recognize some of these signs immediately and some later. It would be a long and twisted argument that the influence is harmful or not. But as they are the parents of the children, you need to respect the influences they identify as being unsuitable for their children, for the children they hang around, and for children in general.
Ouch, that kinda hit the nail on the head of why I personally preferred the screen when I was growing up in late 90s and 00s. Didn’t even think of it in those terms until now, but yeah, it tracks nearly perfectly.
Even as an adult, I noticed that my (non-productive) screen consumption spikes during periods of high stress and turmoil.
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté might be even more insightful then for you. Healthy and happy people don't take drugs or engage in excessive dopamine-based activities. This is not a trivial insight as it explains why only some people actually get hooked on drugs like Heroin as opposed to everybody which is what most people assume.
Curious how tech-oriented parents here are approaching TikTok et al with their kids. My kid isn't walking yet, but for when the time comes, I'm not sure how I'll limit exposure to what I'd call "pure trash", but also give them freedom and the ability to 'fit in' with (inevitably) the rest of their friends using this stuff.
Which country’s system fifth grade? Or alternatively, which age are talking about? If it’s 13 year olds, that sounds very surprising and wildly impractical.
It's very easy to say this if you're not a parent.
Social media does some harm. Being socially excluded does far _more_ harm. Which starts to happen in middle school.
So as a parent, you have three choices:
1. Deal with the emotional consequences of your kid being systematically excluded and having few/no friends.
2. Construct an alternative school/community with like-minded parents and kids.
3. Just give them the damn device, with screen time restrictions and the understanding that you'll be monitoring their activity. Follow through and be involved in their social life, with open and honest conversations about what happens online.
It turns out most good parents these days opt for #3.
Your kid won't have no friends if they have no phone. They will be in school with other kids for 8 hours a day, no phone required for interaction. Pretty much all messaging apps work from computers as well if they need to talk to friends from home and you don't have a landline.
In fact, many schools are starting to ban phones on campus (for a variety of reasons, not just the negative aspects of social media), which makes this even easier.
Outside the classroom there are still plenty of in-person activities from informal gatherings, to sports teams, to clubs and civic events, and in those situations, the few people who are sitting on their phones are the ones more separated from the rest.
I think a lot of us who were early involved in building some of the web that led beyond Web 2.0 into algorithmically-driven media consumption see the massive dangers, and have probably sometimes even overreacted in terms of kids' access to it, but it's certainly better than the alternative.
I don't get how we got to the point where phones were allowed at school in the first place. Cell phones (though not smart phones) were around when I was a teenager and were universally banned in class and even in the hallways, except for emergencies. Even a non-smart phone is a huge distraction because of texting. Why were they unbanned?
No probably about it. The schools are (were? I'm seeing a lot of school districts near me banning phones) trying to reduce friction with (troublesome) parents who demanded 24/7 direct communication and surveillance.
I'm not speculating here, I am telling you how it works.
Phones ARE banned from school and the kids DO socialize in person there.
But then they all get home and stay in touch. Some have phones, some have tablets, some just their school-issued laptops. But they're constantly talking, 1:1, in various overlapping group chats. They organize getting together in the neighborhood or meeting up elsewhere over the weekend. It's where a lot of the drama happens (which isn't great.)
If you prevent your kid from accessing this communication layer, it will 100% affect their social life.
I'll find out in due time when my kids get older, but I think #1 is overblown due to #2. It probably varies by region, but there is so much demand for "back to the roots" where I live, that I don't think this will be as bad socially as you say. There will be other like-minded families, and the bonds between my kids and those families' will be more enriching and meaningful than the average, device-oriented ones.
Some degree of device pragmatism is inevitable of course. But I don't think my kids will need a smartwatch until high school, or a phone till very late HS. In other words, I think there is a balance of these options possible.
Jonathan Haidt gives a lot of hope here, as depressing as "Anxious Generation" usually is.
You can also talk to your kids candidly about social media. It's an amplifier of the issues they will have to face in middle school and growing up _anyway_, it's a conversation every parent should be having.
Yup. This is what I see missing from all the non-parents or parents of kids under 10 on HN. Once middle school hits their whole friend/support system is probably on SnapChat and if you're not on there, you're instantly excluded from everything.
Same here. Hard no on YouTube and TikTok. Sadly everything happens on SnapChat in their friend groups and SnapChat has a terrible TikTok style feed that I wish to god I could disable somehow. It adds nothing to the experience for actually socializing with one's friends group and is simply designed for mindless scrolling and consumption. I hate it.
My kid is 7. He has a Linux desktop he can use whenever he wants with no internet access from his user account. My wife and I abandoned all social media and we’ll probably get him a dumb phone when the time comes.
I’ve heard the stuff some of his friends with more internet permissive parents parrot from YouTube and stuff and honestly it’s frightening.
As for the good stuff that’s actually out there, I download for consumption offline.
As someone who grew up in the 90s and learned touch type playing StarCraft online, the internet is not for kids.
A definition of “social media” that includes HN has been stretched to the point of uselessness. We would have to invent a new term to refer to the things we actually mean by “social media”. Better to just not do that so we can keep having a useful term.
> (uncountable) Applications or websites allowing users to share content and communicate with one another via the Internet.
and HN:
[x] is a website
[x] allowing users to share content
[x] allowing users communicate
[x] via the internet
Perhaps you should invent a new term for whatever you're talking about? Depending on what you want, I might suggest "algorithmic feeds" (actually that appears to be an extant term, but it might be what you want), or "multimedia social media" (to exclude pure-text sites like this).
The Wikipedia definition isn't complete, otherwise Wikipedia itself is social media too. Basically nobody outside of HN would consider HN social media if they saw it.
> The Wikipedia definition isn't complete, otherwise Wikipedia itself is social media too.
Actually, that's a decent point; it should probably add something about being primarily focused on the user interactions. That is, Wikipedia isn't social media, but I'd hesitate to say that the talk pages aren't.
> Basically nobody outside of HN would consider HN social media if they saw it.
And on that point we definitely disagree, though I suppose I could ask around. What do you think makes it not?
Social media was originally all about connecting with people you know in real life. Nowadays some of them are about followers you don't always know, but one way or another you're repeatedly interacting with a select pool of people based on who they are.
Forums have been around longer than the WWW and are more about interacting with topics than with particular members. Some let you follow or PM someone, but that's not the primary function, and HN doesn't even have that. Some social sites have expanded to cover forum-like roles too, like Facebook (Pages).
But most people won't think that far. They'll see HN and say nah, this isn't social media.
I wouldn't classify Hacker News as 'social media' per se.
Hacker News does not have the feed-driven approach of other social media that is designed to generate addiction/engagement amongst users; we just like to talk about fun stuff. Hacker News is more of an old-school forum, where we talk about topics, rather than being a true 'social media' experience where you can talk about anything/yourself as a topic.
Moreover, the average baseline of discussions here is much higher and more intellectually-driven than discussions on X, IG, FB, and so on. That makes it keenly distinct from other social media designed for more base discussions.
That's a property of some kinds of social media. Not a definition or negation of.
The most amusing thing is that discussions on reddit, tumblr, x, etc include the very same kind of denials that gp comment is eliciting regarding those sites being social media.
Social media includes content sharing, discussions, and echo chambers, all of which are present here in abundance. Certain content gets promoted over others, and each site assumes see itself above others.
What originally set social media apart from forums was that you interact with people you sorta know. Social media apps later drifted to something else, but they still aren't forums. HN is a forum.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and the like (I don’t know of there’s something else new). The algorithmic crap where you’ll find AI generated videos of a fake Elon Musk taking to visit sense website or wherever the outrage du jour happens.
So either your kid gets infected by other kids, or it becomes a social outcast. Seems both are equality bad, I would even lean towards saying social outcast is less worse than being infected.
We aren’t. As the company itself will admit when they don’t realize they’re going to be quoted, the goal is not to create healthy community but to compete for attention. It is by definition pulling you away from normal, healthy relationships. We refuse to harm our kids by subjecting them to this kind toxic trash.
My daughter is 14. We will get her a mobile phone next year. She has an iPad and a laptop. She has issues with youtube shorts taking attention away from school work on her laptop. We will be maintaining screentime controls, and won't allow TikTok to be installed on her phone. She has a snapchat account, and uses it primarily for the messaging feature. She knows she's not allowed to view content not related to her friends and we regularly check up on that. We have the password to both her devices. Since we discovered she has problems with impulse control with YouTube shorts, she can't have her door closed if she has her computer or iPad in the room with her.
She is an avid reader, and reads for hours a day, re-reads the same books, and on YouTube she mostly consumes recipes, book reviews and book related content (like fanfic) so by most standards she's pretty good.
That being said, once she has a phone, she will not be allowed to use it in the house at all.
Our youngest has fewer issues with impulse control, and uses her iPad for things like Duolingo, Toca Life and Finch the self-care pet and messaging friends on iMessage or Facebook Messenger kids. She doesn't have access to YouTube, but does have YT kids. She likes the tiny cakes channel and regularly brings me the videos because I find them very enjoyable also.
They're both very heavily supervised and when they demonstrate there are problems, we take away their devices.
My eldest has had an apple watch SE since year 7 and we use that for communicating, and she can get in touch with friends that way. I also bought a 4g nokia with has the SIM for the same number in it (I had to use my backup iPhone to set up her watch) and if she is going somewhere further or longer than a school day she takes that for safety reasons.
My youngest will follow the same trajectory, we talk about the risks with them often, and they aren't allowed phones at school (by the school) and have had regular online safety sessions provided by the school.
Australia is also seriously considering legislation to criminalise allowing children under 16 from having any social media accounts.
Note that we only got them iPads in 2020 because of home schooling, prior to that we had given them iPhone 5s each to listen to podcasts and music. We always used screentime controls, and had them set up with family sharing and their own iCloud accounts, they have never (even as children) been allowed to use either mine or my wife's phones, we never let them watch or listen to anything during dinner or on car rides under 2 hours (a rule that still stands).
My now late-teens had complete access back when TikTok was called musical.ly. The youngest was 12 when we handed them iPhones. All we ever enforced with them was strict Screen Time lock at 9pm, and then a couple years ago we turned that off because they were already more conscientious than their mother and I are now. We still need to approve any app they install, but all the most Evil Mind Destroying Apps are on their phones, TikTok, Snapchat, IG, etc.
They are fine, do well in school, and are about to be venturing out of our house with much optimism.
I understand every child is unique. But you should understand your children's weaknesses and strengths, and build restrictions around that.
Also I want my kid exposed to technology, to learn to use and develop with it, but how do you balance that with preventing the damages it seems to cause? We are delaying screen-time for my 2 year old till he's at least 5 or 6 but not sure when is the right time to introduce.
Maybe they'll have some respect for resource consumption (unlike 99% of software development these days) and they'll end up writing a text editor that doesn't run in an embedded web browser and soak up 6 GB of RAM to open a blank document!
I haven't seen any research on this matter. How modern kids compare to their (grand) parents. Likely with free food for everyone and legal drugs more are choosing jobless path. One way is sort of a job. For example 'influencer', most of whom don't make enough for living, but hope one day..
And when he finds out later in life that it was just propaganda, his trust in you and any warnings of a similar kind will go entirely away. Which carries a massive e risk of doing the exact opposite of what you intended (despite the advice itself, at the core, being pretty decent).
Case in point, the massive failure of D.A.R.E. drug abuse prevention programs for children and teenagers in the US. Yay propaganda.
Turns out that even when the advice itself is decent, you can easily sabotage it all in the long term by using those types of propaganda methods. All just for a short-term “win”.
I know many 90s kids that had a complete ban on video games at home, myself included. I am now pleasantly surprised that while I find many games impressive and can appreciate them as feats of engineering, art and game design… I don’t get a level of enjoyment out of them that would risk addiction or avoiding other life responsibilities. It’s never the first or even the top tenth choice of activity to do on a day off. I may have lost out on many a great experience, but the amount of free time I’ve gained relative to many men my age is worth it to me.
My parents were skeptical of video games, but bought me a NES for Christmas in 1986 (or maybe it was '87?) after much begging. My memory is fuzzy about a lot of things in life (even much more recent things), but I still fondly remember spending time with friends in the neighborhood, going to each others' houses, and playing Nintendo. Through luck or nearly-unnoticeable parental restrictions, we never became addicted, and still spent plenty of time outside playing in yards, riding our bikes, and exploring the woods.
These days I game occasionally, but fill most of my time with other things.
I think complete bans on most things as a kid isn't the way to go, and can be harmful, even. Granted, today's social media makes me rethink that...
There are many ways to spend your time and money and they reward you in different ways. I can appreciate games for the feats of engineering and works of art they are same as I can appreciate wines or sports and careers with high demands on your time.
I don’t judge or look down on people who enjoy games, wine, golf or hard work, but I would be ashamed of myself if I were to mash CoD, drink excessively, take training for weekend-warrior triathlons too seriously or push myself to burnout and an early grave at a startup to the detriment of my personal relationships and responsibilities as a parent.
Given how widespread all of these behaviours are it’s certainly a risk, and it’s liberating to know that I’m highly unlikely to go down at least one of these paths.
Algorithms focusing on beautiful people is no surprise. Look at any social media and the attractive ones gain more attention, this means better engagement thus screen time.
It is absolutely mind boggling to me that even when we are aware of all these issues there isn’t an immediate reaction to it in terms of just shutting these platforms down till they fix their issues
TikTok is, in my opinion, the distillate of the algorithmic attention approach. Everything even remotely community building or social is stripped away until there is just the feed. Just the algorithm.
They do have somewhat higher credibility than Meta, or Facebook, in terms of statements by the leadership, but that is a very low bar to compare against.
Back in 2015 or so I could watch Twitter addicts' personalities and worldviews change in increasingly bizarre ways. It was weird.
TikTok is the same, but distilled: faster, more emotionally charged, and optimized more aggressively. They are not unique, they're just winning right now.
The US is in an economic war with China. TikTok is just part of their current beef. Not to say that TikTok isn't toxic; of course it is. But Instagram and Facebook are, too.
"Considered a villain" -- this means nothing unless action is taken. Meta has just gotten, in two whole decades, a few mock interviews in Congress and not more than that, left untouched primarily due to Section 230 and the convenience that a mass social network of 2B+ users worldwide happens to be US-based (not fiscally, of course.) And that is after the various leaks showing how it psychologically manipulates teens, lends itself to electioneering and genocide, etc. TikTok, on the other hand, has made it all the way to Congressional ban level in just a few years.
I believe the lawsuit brought by the states against TikTok is a part of a broader mission to arrest control over TikTok in the US at a sweeter price.
And while I don’t think TikTok is an angel, i see the whole consolidated effort at “taming” TikTok as being for show and claim of positive reformations. It’s disingenuous. It’s deceptive. It’s conspiratorial.
This won't be popular opinion but I think the tech industry is out of control with targeting kids. Like seriously my job in the banking industry was more ethical than this.
No, I want enforcement of 2252a and sending website operators to prison. I've never heard my opinion because if that was the majority opinion, why hasn't it happened?
I am obviously a bit early, as my oldest is only 7, but my wife and I decided to force ourselves to delay getting our kids (7 & 4) their own media device, such as an iPad and go straight to a laptop when it becomes a necessity in school. My 7 year old, with immense attention issues, is obsessed with reading and being creative, I could not imagine her being at her reading level if she had an iPad or some other form of digital media consumption. I can not imagine how rotten her brain would be if she had access to Tiktok or Instagram.
We have an entire generation of people i.e. us growing up with computers and TVs.
There is no evidence that it has had any negative effects.
The problem is exclusively with social media. And in particular the way it is having young kids being shaped by adult role models e.g. Andrew Tate, Mr Beast who don't have their wellbeing in mind. And being subjected to adult themed content in volumes we've never seen before.
I saw the negative effects of smartphone access firsthand all around me when I was in middle school and the iPhone 3G had come out, which predated influencers. Kids became antisocial.
I was antisocial then became relatively social just because everyone else became even more antisocial. It's like that Simpsons episode where everyone starts acting like Bart, and he realizes the problem with that.
My parents didn't let us have a TV. TV shows were a social object: in the 90s you'd come to school the next day and discuss what you watched. You signaled your in-groups by what shows you liked and what you didn't like.
I had none of that.
I had friends, but only because I got very good at hiding my oddities. I was disconnected from my peers and learned a set of behaviors that have fucked up a lot of relationships longer term.
Addiction to social media is terrible. But to those who ban your kids from social media entirely: how are you addressing the fact they will be isolated from their peers because of that.
You go out of your way to put your kids into more in person social interactions. Local events, school extracurriculars, sports teams, organizing get togethers with neighbors (and generally inviting neighbor kids to come play in the backyard whenever).
Some of those things are easier than others for a family to take on, but in a strange turn of events, the various social media "bubbles" mean one kid and the next aren't exposed to the same trending topics (like some kids don't even know what skibidi toilet is, while others are all into some NBA or NFL players, while others are following chess tournaments or LEGO stuff...).
There's still enough real world events outside influencer bubbles that you can keep social media (mostly) out of a kids life and not cause that kid to be on an island.
There's a balance between media exposure and overprotection, too. Every parent has to find it. It's one of the most difficult aspects of parenting once your kids are old enough to talk!
TV shows were regulated and relatively harmless. Social media has no filters and you have no control or idea over what it'll show to kids. The risks are unimaginable.
And not getting to fit in with such groups that base themselves on discussing brainrot sounds like a benefit to me honestly, not a drawback. Remember the "Blue Whale" challenge?
This isn’t really a fair comparison. Banning from TV was extremely uncommon in the 90s. I remember those kids, with parents like yours, and it was often just a small part of what made them odd outcasts. Their clothing choices and mannerisms put more of a target on them than the lack of TV. They were usually extremely socially awkward amongst other things that would invite bullying.
Sorry not meant as a personal attack but it’s not how kids that don’t use social media come across to me at all.
TikTok's response is to claim quotes like this are out of context, but they also seem unable or unwilling to provide the context in which statements like this are OK.