> Not a single social media restriction experiment has included people under the age of 16. We do not know how social media bans will affect the young people being targeted by them because we have never tested this with them!

I've also never tested my ability to survive a 100ft fall. Maybe I can! We have no way of knowing!

> Virtually all schools in the United States report that they use social media for communications, including for key announcements such as making families aware of upcoming opportunities, educational programming, and key deadlines. The reliance on social media for communication and resource sharing, while banning youth from these same platforms, sends mixed messages to young people and limits their access to health promoting information and resources.

That's a good point. There's no other way that schools could communicate such things. My childhood in the 80s and 90s certainly didn't include Scouts, 4-H, Band, Drama, Cross-Country, etc! I'm sure with social media bans for youth, schools will just continue to use social media to try to communicate to kids rather than adapting.

I have to assume the authors of this paper know how dumb it is and just don't care since most people will only read the headline.

> Candice L. Odgers serves on the Youth and Families Advisory Committee for YouTube.

> First, enforcing a youth social media ban raises major ethical concerns. Enforcement efforts invade people’s privacy and are likely to hurt marginalized people more. For example, the technology that determines age based on selfie uploads makes more mistakes with young faces and people of color. Banned youth may also miss out on important resources and communications provided via social media, as schools, clubs, and most other youth-serving organizations use social media as a main form of communication.

Really grasping the straws with this argument...

In fairness to the article, they are saying there is no evidence on how it will affect teens because all the studies excluded the audience that the ban was for.

"Not a single social media restriction experiment has included people under the age of 16. We do not know how social media bans will affect the young people being targeted by them because we have never tested this with them!"

I know anecdotally my own experience restricting social media has been more of a positive association, but that is because I am not attracted to it anymore. I have been on it for several years and it is no longer novel. To a teenager, it may be the way they relate to their peers and being unable to have access to it could have a negative consequence.

Maybe with all these countries and states that have banned social media, we should see evidence of increased mental health wellness as a proof that banning it was the right thing to do.

this is why science credibility is going down, what we call science is abused. This is like saying smoking has no evidence it causes harm.

This severely underplays the "risks" of not banning social media for teenagers. The link between social media use and mental health problems in teens is extremely well documented.

“Social media” probably has good and bad subparts that could be allowed/banned independently, but I hope we don’t need to wait for signoff from a study before being cautious, when the harms are kinda frickin obvious.

I mean there is no large RCT where a bunch of teenagers were denied social media since birth whereas a different cohort were allowed access, and then they were tracked well into adulthood and mental health outcomes tracked.

But phronesis is a thing. It's obviously bad.

My one caveat - the current excuse we have for a UK government are likely to try and use the ban as a reason to force through digital IDs.

It is universal that authoritarians want to characterize audio-visual screens as if they directly altered incentive salicence like addictive drugs do. They do this because the false comparison, the inaccurate social memes (dopamine hit, etc), all invoke the coercion of actual drugs. But the fact is that audio-visual screens do not alter incentive salience directly. They are just like any other part of our world and sometimes present enjoyable stimuli. That is vastly unlike how addictive drugs addict people. There no need for enjoyment in the first place even exists.

Chemically addictive drugs that directly alter wanting could be argued to require use of force to prevent people from being coerced. But screens have no such justification for using force against people who look at screens. It is use of force in a situation without any coercion. And that's unethical.

Everyone should get off the engagement driven platforms, but the government shouldn't have a single thing to do with it.

I take a very large grain of salt if a researcher is literally based in California and they produce "findings" in support of a California-based megacorp such as Facebook. And then the headline is "lacks evidence" and "pose risks".

No shit sherlock, it lacks evidence because Facebook gatekeeps all the scientifically interesting data and they also don't share their findings from internal studies and human trials where they psychologically manipulatated minors.

There is a reason social media apps spam you with notification popups if you have not been active for the last 23 hours. They employ every trick in the book to keep you hooked and monetize your attention.

It is clear scientific misconduct by people working for Facebook who do numerous human trials on minors in order to increase their metrics and monetization. The fact they have crossed this red line should stop the discussion for every credible researcher in that field, because human trials on minors without consent are not ethical and there is no excuse for such behavior.

What "scientists?” People just throw that word around now to give an article fake credibility. Total horse shit.

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