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You should ban your own kid from social media and leave the government out of it.
Correction: you can do that. You shouldn't because it's beneficial for young people to have social contacts and belong to positive communities, which is very much enabled by social media!
“I can’t tell you what an awful feeling it is to go into one of your kid’s rooms at 8 in the evening and they’re by themselves completely stressed out,” Lowenthal said.
During the Cold War we didn't need the internet to be stressed out. In elementary school I was taught to read the newspaper every day, and that led me to believe that tomorrow would bring nuclear armageddon.
Also the claim is that the reason this particular child is "stressed out" is:
He said girls especially are barraged with unrealistic and sometimes AI-generated images of women’s bodies at a time when they’re feeling especially self-conscious about their own bodies.
Now I was never a girl nor especially conscious about my body, I am a male nerd who quickly learned in school not to care what others thought of me too much…
But I remember around 15 to 20 years ago reading similar claims about youth magazines and advertisements, that they were promoting unhealthy and unrealistic ideas of an ideal body image. So the beauty and fashion industries or whoever didn't need computers to do those things.
In both cases, "promoting an unhealthy body image" is literally just free speech which in the US enjoys broad constitutional protection. So the government has no business doing anything against it.
But I remember around 15 to 20 years ago reading similar claims about youth magazines and advertisements, that they were promoting unhealthy and unrealistic ideas of an ideal body image.
I'd say that most concerns about social media don't really differ all that much from past concerns about television.
Social media does permit more random parties out there to influence what someone sees, maybe permits for vulnerability to influence campaigns. And it permits a user to potentially view more-highly-personalized
and thus potentially more-appealing
content than stuff at the granularity of choosing a television channel to watch (though I think that you can raise very similar issues about online ads, not just social media).
But on the other hand, social media also has less of the "mindlessness" aspect of TV, I think. Like, people can engage and can point out issues in the material.
I am certainly convinced that TV, being purely passive, is more likely to have negative effects on cognition than online communities, which are something you can actively engage in and be creative.