I guess many governments in the world need to try this to discover it doesn’t work. There’s tens of thousands of webpages world wide that kids can use for doing whatever it is they’re doing on social media, and governments won’t be able to find or block all of them - and the kids will just use whatever page isn’t banned. I wonder though what will happen when the governments get around to realizing their method doesn’t work, like when they have blocked site number 10,000 and site number 10.001 is up a day after. At some point they’ll go “aaargh this ain’t working”. Will they just give up and let kids use whatever pages they want or will they double down and maybe ban kids having smartphones? What CAN they even do that could work?

This isn’t very clever. Kids (or at least teens) will find a way around this. If you want proof, look no further than the UK, where everyone and their mother started using VPNs after the new “child safety” regulations started taking effect. It’s also very unlikely that the rules will be well-written. I don’t know anything about the Malaysian government, but I doubt that they are very tech-literate.

Similar discussion is happening also here in Finland. However, if something is to be banned from kids, it has to be clearly defined. What is considered “social media”? Is it platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat? Does it include messaging apps like WhatsApp or Signal? Most of this discourse is also based on works of Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff and Jennifer Twente, all of which have received a fair share of criticism. There is also a considerable amount of a classic moral panic sprinkled in.

Alice Marwick, an academic that has extensively studied kids, technology and social media, was on Taylor Lorenz’s podcast earlier this year. Her organization published a report, where the following is stated:

We strongly believe that reform of social platforms and regulation of technology is needed. We need comprehensive privacy legislation, limits on data collection, interoperability, more granular individual and parental guidance tools, and advertising regulation, among other changes. Offline, young people need spaces to socialize without adults, better mental health care, and funding for parks, libraries, and extracurriculars. But rather than focusing on such solutions, KOSA and similar state bills empower parents rather than young people, do little to curb the worst abuses of technology corporations, and enable an expansion of the rhetoric that is currently used to ban books, eliminate diversity efforts in education, and limit gender affirming and reproductive care. They will eliminate important sources of information for vulnerable teenagers and wipe out anonymity on the social web. While we recognize the regulatory impulse, the forms of child safety legislation currently circulating will not solve the problems they claim to remedy.

Dr. Candice Odgers is also a vocal critic of Haidt, accusing him of cherry picking with a pre-made agenda in mind:

The cross-country comparisons, you know, they’re they’re often a starting point to see whether there might be something interesting correlationally going on, but it’s a very slippery place to start and I think you know, unless you start with the pretty clear hypothesis about what should explain those differences, if you’re just looking at trend lines and then going backwards and starting to fill in an explanation, it’s hard to follow where it goes and whether or not we’re just fitting these lines to our existing theories, but I’ll leave it.

They should be banning all social media that uses an algorithm and “for you” feeds. As well as non chronological feeds. They should also ban target ad systems on all but store websites.