The danger here is that these new laws can be the backdoor to rolling out biometric ID, harvesting sensitive data from children and adults, as is already being done in Australia and Substack's chat platform.
Strong public support, by itself, justifies nothing. There was strong public support for Hitler, right up until Germans started feeling the pain of having launched WWII. Strong public sup[port does not justify persecuting a minority.
Before going still deeper in providing further means for the state to subjugate its citizens, you might want to consider the way things already are. Check out how CJ Hopkins was treated by Germany for a simple book cover.
If you don't want your kids on social media, then keep them from it. You figure can't always do that? No you can't. And neither can the government. You have your kids from birth. You are full of opportunities to teach them values, including self-reliance and self-respect. Don't hand off those responsibilities to Big Brother. It will not/has not gone well.
It is every easier for Big Brother to track everything that everybody does, and to coerce them into abiding by the dictates of Big Brother.
It is essential, above all else, that any citizen can openly criticize his government without fear of reprisal. It is nothing like that in Germany, and it's getting worse.
Public polls can easily be framed to show support for anything. "Do you want to save all the puppies and kittens?" What is not asked is if they support that effort at extreme cost, or by sterilizing 90% of dogs/cats, or by dumping them all in your backyard. I want to know how much support would drop if the respondents were told they will need to sign into every website and/or the gov't will now have a record of every website you visit without the need of a warrant. Or you will have no anonymity on the internet, so everyone will see your political comments or your off color memes.
Feel like banning phones in schools is a no brainer but it should be parenting vs. government coercion to ban all child involvement. Sounds great but creates enormous privacy concerns for all adults as a consequence.
Unfortunately the incentives for the administrative state dictate that people be as neurotic, isolated, and chronically ill as possible. If these symptoms were barring people from the labor market then perhaps they’d be addressed. Mental health providers haven’t even started recommending no-phone lifestyles. They need patients, and the administrative state needs eternal, fuzzily-defined social problems or ‘issues’ to justify its existence and expansion. The worst disaster for the structures would be a drastic increase in the vitality of families and communities and a surge in individual mental health. Catastrophe.
While I wholeheartedly agree that kids and social media is a toxic brew, when it comes to Germany, I have my doubts that their motives are altogether pure. I think they’d love nothing more than to make it illegal for all their citizens at this point, their DSA Law being a case in point.
I support social media bans because of the effects on children. However I argued that we are looking at this problem from the wrong angle. We are treating this as the problem, but it is a symptom of a larger set of problems. We will keep facing symptoms like these in everything we do - but we need to address what lies beneath to achieve any real long-lasting outcomes.
I suggested, possibly a bit snarkly, that research needs to stop accepting money to study problems such as social media, and tell authorities and society that these are tackled because they can be seen, and it feels like "low hanging fruit" that will get instant political wins. That researchers need to force the acceptance of investigations in to the underlying issues.
Sure, most people will agree with well intentioned sounding measures, as many did with Covid, only to find out too late what these measures actually end up being used for. The question then becomes why are such measures being propagated so enthusiastically by people who should know better?
This data is striking, especially that 47% of adolescents support restrictions on their own age group. They know something is wrong even if they can't name it.
What I'd add: the harm isn't just behavioral or psychological. It's developmental and somatic. The attention economy trains the nervous system into defensive states: constriction, hypervigilance, the collapse of sustained presence. For adults who formed before the smartphone, this is deterioration. For children born into it, there is no before. Their baseline is a nervous system that never learned what settling feels like.
This is why the mental health framing, while accurate, understates the problem. We're not just seeing anxiety and depression. We're seeing nervous systems shaped by an environment that rewards shallow, reactive attention and punishes depth. The capacity to stay with difficulty, to tolerate ambiguity, to sustain presence—these are developmental achievements that require conditions the attention economy systematically undermines.
The public intuition captured in this survey is right. The question is whether policy can address not just access but the deeper work of helping a generation develop capacities that never had room to grow.
I wrote recently on this mechanism in "The Attention Wound: What the Attention Economy Extracts and What the Body Cannot Surrender." Thx
The danger here is that these new laws can be the backdoor to rolling out biometric ID, harvesting sensitive data from children and adults, as is already being done in Australia and Substack's chat platform.
Strong public support, by itself, justifies nothing. There was strong public support for Hitler, right up until Germans started feeling the pain of having launched WWII. Strong public sup[port does not justify persecuting a minority.
Before going still deeper in providing further means for the state to subjugate its citizens, you might want to consider the way things already are. Check out how CJ Hopkins was treated by Germany for a simple book cover.
If you don't want your kids on social media, then keep them from it. You figure can't always do that? No you can't. And neither can the government. You have your kids from birth. You are full of opportunities to teach them values, including self-reliance and self-respect. Don't hand off those responsibilities to Big Brother. It will not/has not gone well.
It is every easier for Big Brother to track everything that everybody does, and to coerce them into abiding by the dictates of Big Brother.
It is essential, above all else, that any citizen can openly criticize his government without fear of reprisal. It is nothing like that in Germany, and it's getting worse.
Public polls can easily be framed to show support for anything. "Do you want to save all the puppies and kittens?" What is not asked is if they support that effort at extreme cost, or by sterilizing 90% of dogs/cats, or by dumping them all in your backyard. I want to know how much support would drop if the respondents were told they will need to sign into every website and/or the gov't will now have a record of every website you visit without the need of a warrant. Or you will have no anonymity on the internet, so everyone will see your political comments or your off color memes.
When "protecting children" means the end of online anonymity is where we get ourselves into trouble.
Feel like banning phones in schools is a no brainer but it should be parenting vs. government coercion to ban all child involvement. Sounds great but creates enormous privacy concerns for all adults as a consequence.
“When you hand a child a cell phone their childhood is over” wish I knew who to credit with that, No truer words have been written
Unfortunately the incentives for the administrative state dictate that people be as neurotic, isolated, and chronically ill as possible. If these symptoms were barring people from the labor market then perhaps they’d be addressed. Mental health providers haven’t even started recommending no-phone lifestyles. They need patients, and the administrative state needs eternal, fuzzily-defined social problems or ‘issues’ to justify its existence and expansion. The worst disaster for the structures would be a drastic increase in the vitality of families and communities and a surge in individual mental health. Catastrophe.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/leviathan
While I wholeheartedly agree that kids and social media is a toxic brew, when it comes to Germany, I have my doubts that their motives are altogether pure. I think they’d love nothing more than to make it illegal for all their citizens at this point, their DSA Law being a case in point.
The problem is actually asking the public. The irony is that social media is used to control the narrative
Great piece of research, and hopefully it adds fuel to the fire needed to rein in social media
It’s the best means of free speech we have ever had.
I made this comment to Jon Haidt's post on Social Media ban in Australia yesterday - https://www.afterbabel.com/p/australias-new-social-media-regulations/comment/188316861
I support social media bans because of the effects on children. However I argued that we are looking at this problem from the wrong angle. We are treating this as the problem, but it is a symptom of a larger set of problems. We will keep facing symptoms like these in everything we do - but we need to address what lies beneath to achieve any real long-lasting outcomes.
I suggested, possibly a bit snarkly, that research needs to stop accepting money to study problems such as social media, and tell authorities and society that these are tackled because they can be seen, and it feels like "low hanging fruit" that will get instant political wins. That researchers need to force the acceptance of investigations in to the underlying issues.
Here is a link from the NZ Free Speech Union that shows how seeming well intentioned measures purported to stop internet harm to children have been systematically weaponized against adults speech in New Zealand - https://outlook.office.com/mail/inbox/id/AAkALgAAAAAAHYQDEapmEc2byACqAC%2FEWg0AN5RvHFbKXkm5%2FR6Pl3aUfgAEZ%2FMfGgAA
Sure, most people will agree with well intentioned sounding measures, as many did with Covid, only to find out too late what these measures actually end up being used for. The question then becomes why are such measures being propagated so enthusiastically by people who should know better?
This data is striking, especially that 47% of adolescents support restrictions on their own age group. They know something is wrong even if they can't name it.
What I'd add: the harm isn't just behavioral or psychological. It's developmental and somatic. The attention economy trains the nervous system into defensive states: constriction, hypervigilance, the collapse of sustained presence. For adults who formed before the smartphone, this is deterioration. For children born into it, there is no before. Their baseline is a nervous system that never learned what settling feels like.
This is why the mental health framing, while accurate, understates the problem. We're not just seeing anxiety and depression. We're seeing nervous systems shaped by an environment that rewards shallow, reactive attention and punishes depth. The capacity to stay with difficulty, to tolerate ambiguity, to sustain presence—these are developmental achievements that require conditions the attention economy systematically undermines.
The public intuition captured in this survey is right. The question is whether policy can address not just access but the deeper work of helping a generation develop capacities that never had room to grow.
I wrote recently on this mechanism in "The Attention Wound: What the Attention Economy Extracts and What the Body Cannot Surrender." Thx
https://yauguru.substack.com/p/the-attention-wound?r=217mr3