> How about not having a theistic culture? How about not stigmatizing kids who don't fit into the blonde white monoculture that Utah pushes everywhere?
The teen mental health crisis is happening everywhere in the US, and in Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. It started about the same time everywhere. Utah's particular culture doesn't have anything to do with it. They're just the state that has reacted first [1].
The suicide rate among 10-14 year olds has doubled since 2010, nationwide. If you can present data that shows the suicide rate increase is caused by any of those things, I'd love to see it.
There's now lots of evidence that smartphones and social media changes childhood in a way that does not meet fundamental psychological needs [2]. Those changes are causing enormous psychological and physcial harm. Regulating technology is the only way to deal with that.
There’s no evidence regulation would help, and strong evidence the form of regulation being proposed will make things worse, which the article outlines.
Things that could work, that are not known to be harmful:
- Parental education campaigns.
- Elimination of tracking and other privacy invading technologies for all age groups, not just children.
The latter eliminates the need for age blocks, and matches consumer preferences of 90+% of the US population. It also de facto bans technologies that track and encourage mental illness (such as cambridge analytica, and arguably youtube/tiktok content targeting).
> Strong evidence the form of regulation being proposed will make things worse, which the article outlines.
The only evidence in the article that the law will be harmful is a quote from a free speech lawyer, which doesn't cite any research. If there is strong evidence that the law will be harmful it hasn't been presented yet.
These laws certainly might be harmful! But I think it's much more likely they will have no effect or a positive effect. But we don't know, because restrictions like this haven't been attempted before.
Regardless, it's the state legislature's job to protect public health. I think there's assumed ill intent because it's Utah, but I think the evidence is stronger that this measure will stop so many kids dying by suicide.
> But Common Sense Media and other advocacy groups warned some parts of the new legislation could put children at risk.
So, at least three groups concurred. Also, the only proponents quoted in the article were “commons sense media”, which is either a typo (implying the proponents are actually ambivalent) or someone trademark squatting (implying malicious intent).
Regulation is needed to kill the peer pressure factor that almost forces teens into social media. Without it even if the parents try to enforce healthy boundaries it won’t stick. Network effects are a thousand times more powerful for teens that are deeply and pervasively immersed in peer pressure and social anxiety.
This is the same reason alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, and drugs have age limits. Anything addictive needs to at least be age restricted until people are old enough to enforce their own boundaries about it.
At this point it should be obvious that social media is highly addictive and is designed that way on purpose. In some cases the same kinds of spaced repetition techniques as slot machines are used.
The teen mental health crisis is happening everywhere in the US, and in Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. It started about the same time everywhere. Utah's particular culture doesn't have anything to do with it. They're just the state that has reacted first [1].
The suicide rate among 10-14 year olds has doubled since 2010, nationwide. If you can present data that shows the suicide rate increase is caused by any of those things, I'd love to see it.
There's now lots of evidence that smartphones and social media changes childhood in a way that does not meet fundamental psychological needs [2]. Those changes are causing enormous psychological and physcial harm. Regulating technology is the only way to deal with that.
[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...
[2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...