> 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.

Who is 'Candice L. Odgers'? The article's author is 'Monika Neff Lind, PhD'. 'Candice L. Odgers' isn't mentioned in the article anywhere that I see. What was your goal of implying this is a quote/this person was relevant?

> 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...

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.

You are providing an accidental illustration of why science is under attack - because people don't like having their beliefs undermined by pesky evidence.

All evidence points out that social media has increased suicide rates in teens https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6791504/

You should learn the difference between correlation and causation, and maybe read the summary of the study you're posting:

    There is an independent association between problematic use of social media/internet and suicide attempts in young people. However, the direction of causality, if any, remains unclear. Further evaluation through longitudinal studies is needed.

Also your claim that "all evidence" points anything out is contradicted by the fact that "all evidence" is not contained within a single study, and the posted article points out that the evidence itself is in dispute.

Yeah, I'm sure surviving adolescence needs even more insecurities brought by comparing yourself to the ad-fueled fake happiness machinery that's the internet, let's wait for the damage during a couple of decades so we can have conclusive data that satisfies you before we decide to do something, feels like not having enough people with terminal cancer to decide to do something about cigarettes.

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

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

Why? If asbestos is killing us we ban it, if hipotericllly some new form of asbestos is more harmful to young people than the rest we ban it too, why put the pressure of that responsibility in already stressed out population. Corporations know this very well, that's why they love when people have the opinion you just shared here.

From what I know, asbestos is bad when it gets airborne. If it's installed correctly, if workers wear PPE when handling it and if there are periodic checks for cracks, leaks and so on, it's safe. From what I've read, at least - I'm not an expert by any means. I've removed asbestos from a few old buildings but wore PPE. It was very uncomfortable to have the masks and suit on. I even threw away the cloth bags I had to my tools in, just to be safe. We disposed of the asbestos as per regulation. I feel safe and would do it again.

So maybe banning asbestos altogether is overkill.

I'd love to be proven wrong. I don't have any financial interest in asbestos besides the few jobs I've done over the years removing it.

good parenting, as always, remains the best solution

Yeah, tell that to those parents with 3 jobs and can barely make any time with their kids that they have to keep an eye on even more things, things that weren't even a thing in their childhood or their predecessors.

Wouldn't the correct solution be to empower those parents with subsidies or free child care? If you have to work 3 jobs, parent or not, there is something wrong with how we've structured our society. Banning social media in your example seems like a bandaid put on a person with external and internal bleeding. You'll stop some of the bleeding but the person will still suffer and die.

Yeah, there is almost always better solutions to all problems than the one we go to, but history has taught us that when we wait for the "better solution" we end up years without neither solution.

Parenting has never been the sole answer. We need a general sense of social responsibility to not expose children to risks of harm that they are not developmentally ready to deal with. Companies producing the harmful things have never been able to resist this temptation (see how tobacco companies had strategies to advertise to children while denying they were doing it) so often times regulations are needed.

for those with parents yes

You have too much faith in the masses.

Formally the same as stating "Everyone should get off the addiction driven drug cartel, but the government shouldn't have a single thing to do with it."

Yes. They don't actually care about the drug part anyway, beyond the excuse it gives them to operate outside their jurisdiction. We already have sane laws to cover the other crimes a "cartel" might do.

To be fair for the literal example prohibition is what creates the drug cartels in the first place so it is more coherent than it sounds at first blush. Enforcement is effectively a subsidy to those who don’t get caught.

For social media it is a whole different problem from it being entangled with protected speech. We don't want 'arrested for spreading misinformation defined as anything which contradicts the offical line' to be a thing.

Except social media is the full opposite, you can't even mention Palestine on TikTok.

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.