Cutting account ownership in half is a resounding success, since it is account ownership that is the real mental health / addition / bullying problem.
Imagine you cut teen smoking or drinking by 50% after passing a single law that required no significant police enforcement. Any sane person would say that was a huge success. Yet many of those same people can't admit it here.
Also, I’m not even sure why they included YouTube in “social media.” Does anyone use it as a peer to peer social tool? I would be surprised if it had any of the same consequences for insecurity, bullying, grooming etc etc. Despite its name, isn’t it primarily a media platform?
'Social media' hasn't been about peer to peer interaction for several years now, even Facebook is mostly (about 85% iirc) used for watching short form video. Basically, everything is Tiktok now. Snapchat, Instagram and Youtube are all just Tiktok with vestigal apps attached.
Obviously cyber bullying and grooming are bad, but they're only part of the problem with social media. The main problem in my view is that children all have addiction machines in their pockets at all times. The social media account ban is part of the attempt to make the addiction machines less addictive.
YouTube tends to be more benign than most other social media. It's less composed of the type of short clips which are more prone to causing dopamine hits. It's also more likely to be viewed through a smart TV, displacing regular TV viewing. I mostly watch YouTube through my phone on the loo.
The research by Jonathan Haidt's team shows a marked exception for YouTube Shorts, which functions much like TikTok in terms of negative effects. Longer form educational or entertainment content is far healthier, and at the quality end of the market likely surpasses most content available through terrestrial channels or streaming services, even though the production values are often lower quality.
I've programmed mine to give me techno-optimistic engineering projects, amongst a whole plethora of other content. Some of the university talks and debates are also well-worth viewing.
My one quibble is that governments often make it difficult for adults to gain access to content, given they want to skew the political diet people consumer. It's a continuation of the misinformation saga and the Twitter files. People don't vote differently because they are misinformed. It's because the developmental psychology of their childhood environment has caused them to view the world in a fundamentally different way, with differing hierarchies of values.
As well as Big Five Openness to New Experience, there is Ingroup and Outgroup. David Goodhart's The Road to Somewhere is a particularly good framing for the Western schism. It also doesn't help that prolonged periods of economic precarity shows some similar effects in brain chemistry to PTSD. Anyway, I digress.
As Jon has documented though, the addiction derives from dopamine hits on likes from your own posts. Browsing Instagram is concerning (I don't recommend it for teens in my tech seminars) but accounts and posting are what cause the most serious concerns.
I will tell you: the kids will find away around way to do what they want and the bureaucrats won’t stop at protecting kids, but will spread their particular form of enlightenment to all of society. Already Australia puts restrictions on adult speech. That’s where this is going. Naughty words? No internet for you!
It's going to take a generation to reverse, if the addiction to phones is to significantly change for the better. But " a journey of 10,000 miles begins with a single step,"
Social change is hard and it takes a long time. We can do this. Freedom is not free. We need to keep fighting for the world we want to see. The world I want to see is one where the Tech Bros are not in charge.
I'm a critic of these laws and the data shared does not address my critiques. How are these laws being enforced? How are abuses of the new account information being prevented or curtailed?
This is similar to the initial data coming out after the Covid lockdowns. Unsurprisingly infection rates went down after locking everyone up. The arguments in 2020 against the lockdowns are the same as the arguments against these laws. Are the 2nd and 3rd order effects worth the initial "solution". If the cure is worse than the disease, its not a solution.
We are seeing the 2nd and 3rd order effects of Covid policies. They were predicted at the time the policies went into place.
1. Social impacts to kids and college students forced into 1-2 years of remote learning.
2. Shuttering of long time small businesses and orgs that were forced to close in favor of large corporations.
3. Speech and privacy restriction precedence set during a time of panic
4. Family and friend's fallout from an overblown panic.
I still think the root cause of the teenage social media crisis is a reduction in parental responsibility and accountability. Not access.
As a parent who intends to keep my kids off social media and screens as much as humanly possible for as long as possible, I'm much much more concerned about these yahoo social media companies selling and profiting of the torrents of data than our Government knowing how old my kid is, which they already do because we have a public health system and they have registered birth certificates. Even as I type this, I know Lord knows who is hoovering this information up and planning to sell it.
Parents actually having a wider cultural authority with the backing of the law to say no to social media makes a massive difference. It’s tough on kids and parents to hold a line when the culture and all their friends and friends parents are permitting something else. You try being the only sober kid at a party of underage drinking. Having a collective agreement like a piece of legislation helps reset the floor of acceptable bounds and back up parents holding the line.
To enforce these laws, everyone has to have "age-verified" accounts. To verify your age you have to identify yourself. So to keep kids off social media, everyone now has to identify. That is the concern. A trojan horse for mass information gathering and privacy reduction, disguised as "protect the kids".
I don't have much sympathy for the "try being the only one." reasoning. I have been, its not fun, but I still spoke up or said no. I've lost friends and my girlfriend of 2.5 years broke up with me. I made it through 5 years of college without drinking. This university is known for giving two days off every St. Pats for students to celebrate, i.e. have 4 days of drinking all day. Social pressure only works because everyone stays quiet or gives in. Then once one person speaks up and another has the courage to agree...you can all of a sudden find out 80% of people agreed with you. They all thought they were the "only one" and stayed quiet.
You, as a parent, also have the ability help your kids identify what is peer pressure and how to handle it. How to sort through BS and verify information. How to protect yourself from people who want to take advantage of you. Technology, which includes the internet, amplifies human nature it doesn't change it. Your kid is going have to deal with peer pressure, propoganda, false advertising, predators, bullies, etc. their entire life.
This is not true: "To verify your age you have to identify yourself."
Even the platform we are on Substack uses video age detection for example. I guess you could argue that your face is a kind of identification but it's a far cry from handing over a license or passport. The policy itself states "platforms must offer layered choices and privacy-preserving alternatives rather than a government ID only"
Privacy is a huge problem, this law doesn't make the situation worse. The new search and arrest laws are of much more concern to me.
The entire point is to eliminate the anonymous internet. Without anonymous publishing the American Revolution would never have happened. It would have been trivial to use Thiel’s Palantir to identify and hang everyone involved, like happened in the similar Irish Revolution a few years later. The French sent troops and everything.
“Won’t someone think of the children” is a tyrant’s call. I can’t believe someone who knows better is backing it.
I have not seen any evidence of this fairy tale in Australia. My grandchildren still glue themselves to their devices at every opportunity and one in particular thinks her her throat has been cut if, heaven forbid I tell het screen time is over and dinner is served or it’s bathtime! They watch mindless nonsense on YouTube or play games. They can talk to their friends through the games they play. Instead of talking to their friends which in retrospect was not as bad as everyone imagined.
How can the state be safely in loco parentis and restrict free speech and association? You do know that we have no such thing as free speech in Australia and that the courts are the only place where free speech is somewhat protected?
Is the mechanism really the account barrier, or is it that the law gives parents social permission to say no? Those two predict very different results once workarounds normalize.
On the same vein, it seems that 14 yo girls have personality changes, not from social media, but from group chats that evolve into a Lord of the Flies situation.
Cutting account ownership in half is a resounding success, since it is account ownership that is the real mental health / addition / bullying problem.
Imagine you cut teen smoking or drinking by 50% after passing a single law that required no significant police enforcement. Any sane person would say that was a huge success. Yet many of those same people can't admit it here.
Also, I’m not even sure why they included YouTube in “social media.” Does anyone use it as a peer to peer social tool? I would be surprised if it had any of the same consequences for insecurity, bullying, grooming etc etc. Despite its name, isn’t it primarily a media platform?
'Social media' hasn't been about peer to peer interaction for several years now, even Facebook is mostly (about 85% iirc) used for watching short form video. Basically, everything is Tiktok now. Snapchat, Instagram and Youtube are all just Tiktok with vestigal apps attached.
Obviously cyber bullying and grooming are bad, but they're only part of the problem with social media. The main problem in my view is that children all have addiction machines in their pockets at all times. The social media account ban is part of the attempt to make the addiction machines less addictive.
YouTube tends to be more benign than most other social media. It's less composed of the type of short clips which are more prone to causing dopamine hits. It's also more likely to be viewed through a smart TV, displacing regular TV viewing. I mostly watch YouTube through my phone on the loo.
The research by Jonathan Haidt's team shows a marked exception for YouTube Shorts, which functions much like TikTok in terms of negative effects. Longer form educational or entertainment content is far healthier, and at the quality end of the market likely surpasses most content available through terrestrial channels or streaming services, even though the production values are often lower quality.
I've programmed mine to give me techno-optimistic engineering projects, amongst a whole plethora of other content. Some of the university talks and debates are also well-worth viewing.
My one quibble is that governments often make it difficult for adults to gain access to content, given they want to skew the political diet people consumer. It's a continuation of the misinformation saga and the Twitter files. People don't vote differently because they are misinformed. It's because the developmental psychology of their childhood environment has caused them to view the world in a fundamentally different way, with differing hierarchies of values.
As well as Big Five Openness to New Experience, there is Ingroup and Outgroup. David Goodhart's The Road to Somewhere is a particularly good framing for the Western schism. It also doesn't help that prolonged periods of economic precarity shows some similar effects in brain chemistry to PTSD. Anyway, I digress.
As Jon has documented though, the addiction derives from dopamine hits on likes from your own posts. Browsing Instagram is concerning (I don't recommend it for teens in my tech seminars) but accounts and posting are what cause the most serious concerns.
This is just documenting first level effects so far. What will be interesting is what second level effects (positive and negative) will be observed.
I will tell you: the kids will find away around way to do what they want and the bureaucrats won’t stop at protecting kids, but will spread their particular form of enlightenment to all of society. Already Australia puts restrictions on adult speech. That’s where this is going. Naughty words? No internet for you!
The purpose of all of this is to revoke internet anonymity to crush dissenters. The teenage stuff is just window dressing.
Makes sense; young people would be less likely to use social media if their peers aren’t using it.
It's going to take a generation to reverse, if the addiction to phones is to significantly change for the better. But " a journey of 10,000 miles begins with a single step,"
Phones aren’t going away nor is social media. Humans will have to do what we’ve always done: adapt.
There has got to be Nobel Prize waiting for what you have done.
Governments do not care about "protecting" minors. They care about monitoring speech and eliminating online anonymity.
Monday, July 27, 2026 (UTC-7)
I agree. I believe kids should get senior phones instead of smartphones. It worked with me.
Loved the "quote"! Lol
Social change is hard and it takes a long time. We can do this. Freedom is not free. We need to keep fighting for the world we want to see. The world I want to see is one where the Tech Bros are not in charge.
I'm a critic of these laws and the data shared does not address my critiques. How are these laws being enforced? How are abuses of the new account information being prevented or curtailed?
This is similar to the initial data coming out after the Covid lockdowns. Unsurprisingly infection rates went down after locking everyone up. The arguments in 2020 against the lockdowns are the same as the arguments against these laws. Are the 2nd and 3rd order effects worth the initial "solution". If the cure is worse than the disease, its not a solution.
We are seeing the 2nd and 3rd order effects of Covid policies. They were predicted at the time the policies went into place.
1. Social impacts to kids and college students forced into 1-2 years of remote learning.
2. Shuttering of long time small businesses and orgs that were forced to close in favor of large corporations.
3. Speech and privacy restriction precedence set during a time of panic
4. Family and friend's fallout from an overblown panic.
I still think the root cause of the teenage social media crisis is a reduction in parental responsibility and accountability. Not access.
As a parent who intends to keep my kids off social media and screens as much as humanly possible for as long as possible, I'm much much more concerned about these yahoo social media companies selling and profiting of the torrents of data than our Government knowing how old my kid is, which they already do because we have a public health system and they have registered birth certificates. Even as I type this, I know Lord knows who is hoovering this information up and planning to sell it.
Parents actually having a wider cultural authority with the backing of the law to say no to social media makes a massive difference. It’s tough on kids and parents to hold a line when the culture and all their friends and friends parents are permitting something else. You try being the only sober kid at a party of underage drinking. Having a collective agreement like a piece of legislation helps reset the floor of acceptable bounds and back up parents holding the line.
I don't understand part of your comment.
To enforce these laws, everyone has to have "age-verified" accounts. To verify your age you have to identify yourself. So to keep kids off social media, everyone now has to identify. That is the concern. A trojan horse for mass information gathering and privacy reduction, disguised as "protect the kids".
I don't have much sympathy for the "try being the only one." reasoning. I have been, its not fun, but I still spoke up or said no. I've lost friends and my girlfriend of 2.5 years broke up with me. I made it through 5 years of college without drinking. This university is known for giving two days off every St. Pats for students to celebrate, i.e. have 4 days of drinking all day. Social pressure only works because everyone stays quiet or gives in. Then once one person speaks up and another has the courage to agree...you can all of a sudden find out 80% of people agreed with you. They all thought they were the "only one" and stayed quiet.
You, as a parent, also have the ability help your kids identify what is peer pressure and how to handle it. How to sort through BS and verify information. How to protect yourself from people who want to take advantage of you. Technology, which includes the internet, amplifies human nature it doesn't change it. Your kid is going have to deal with peer pressure, propoganda, false advertising, predators, bullies, etc. their entire life.
This is not true: "To verify your age you have to identify yourself."
Even the platform we are on Substack uses video age detection for example. I guess you could argue that your face is a kind of identification but it's a far cry from handing over a license or passport. The policy itself states "platforms must offer layered choices and privacy-preserving alternatives rather than a government ID only"
Privacy is a huge problem, this law doesn't make the situation worse. The new search and arrest laws are of much more concern to me.
The entire point is to eliminate the anonymous internet. Without anonymous publishing the American Revolution would never have happened. It would have been trivial to use Thiel’s Palantir to identify and hang everyone involved, like happened in the similar Irish Revolution a few years later. The French sent troops and everything.
“Won’t someone think of the children” is a tyrant’s call. I can’t believe someone who knows better is backing it.
I have not seen any evidence of this fairy tale in Australia. My grandchildren still glue themselves to their devices at every opportunity and one in particular thinks her her throat has been cut if, heaven forbid I tell het screen time is over and dinner is served or it’s bathtime! They watch mindless nonsense on YouTube or play games. They can talk to their friends through the games they play. Instead of talking to their friends which in retrospect was not as bad as everyone imagined.
How can the state be safely in loco parentis and restrict free speech and association? You do know that we have no such thing as free speech in Australia and that the courts are the only place where free speech is somewhat protected?
yeah about half all kids are still on social media, many helped by parents, with the remaining kids jealous. parenting is for parents not the state
Is the mechanism really the account barrier, or is it that the law gives parents social permission to say no? Those two predict very different results once workarounds normalize.
Protecting your kids from social media seems to work, while something is being built that you cannot protect them from later.
Don’t get me wrong, unrestricted internet use for teenagers is not something we should aim for. We don’t with alcohol or tobacco
either. But we found other ways than proving who you are for every bottle you drink.
Similar systems are being built in the EU and the US, and both aim for something stronger, a system that cannot be bypassed.
Sounds good when you think of your kid now. May become dangerous when your kid is ten years older, the government has
changed, and the infrastructure currently under discussion is fully implemented.
I wrote about this question in more detail here: https://thephilodev.substack.com/p/the-question-as-the-first-problem?r=55pkqz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Yes. Giving power to bureaucrats never ends well.
On the same vein, it seems that 14 yo girls have personality changes, not from social media, but from group chats that evolve into a Lord of the Flies situation.
Early results matter, but the long-term behavioral effects will tell us much more.