This isn’t even like a social media only thing. There’s so many worse things a kid could get their eyes and ears on with the compute we just hand them Willy nilly

I really am curious if anyone could demonstrate a link to the amount of access to compute and network bandwidth as a child ages, and the incidence of anxiety, social, or mood disorders.

One of the things I feel really thankful for is that the available compute and network I had access to grew up with me essentially, allowing me to generally see the harms of full scale manipulating social algorithms and avoid them.

I feel like my mental health has been greatly benefitted by staying away from such platforms.

Controversial opinion:

In the future we are going to look back on seeing children use iPads that directly connect them to the most sophisticated engagement and manipulation algorithms ever as something as horrid as a child smoking a cigarette, or doing any other drug

Now obviously this is an issue, but many of the suggested solutions are lacking.

Remember: the phones in our pocket are turing complete, any software solution can be undone by another software solution

Hardware flaws baked into chipsets will be inevitably exploited by the worst of humanity

What we need is a LEGAL framework to this issue

We need to see that allowing a full 5g 2.5ghZ portal to the unknown is simply absolutely harmful for a child to get there hands on without parental or educational supervision

I suspect it really should work like regulating a drug, allow more and more unsupervised compute and networking as the child ages

That way kids can still have dumb phones for basic safety and comms.

I suspect laws will be applied like alcohol within the home, to allow for family owned game systems and such

But lapses that lead to actual demonstrated harm such as mental illness leading to bodily harm or violence due to radicalization need to be treated as if a parent just fed their child alcohol without care. Or at least enabled them to it if it’s evident that they didn’t even try

Straight up it’s also a cultural shift 13-16 yr olds gaming at home under parental guidance, but not being bought significant personal compute since it would not be sold to them or for the purpose of giving to them

Usage in school where they get education on information technology and the harms and good it can do all fine and good , but seeing babies with iPads at the mall seen as badly as letting them smoke (and the secondhand smoke from all the brainrot leading to brainrotted adult)