> The Scandinavian country already has a minimum age limit of 13 in place. Despite this, more than half of nine-year-olds, 58% of 10-year-olds and 72% of 11-year-olds are on social media, according to research by the Norwegian media authority.
I think my life today would be significantly better if I hadn’t been exposed to unsupervised internet access at around 10 years old with the Nintendo DSi web browser. Who knows how people growing up on TikTok brain-rot streams will turn out. I don’t look back fondly on my early experiences with the internet.
This is interesting because I had the opposite experience… though I think I’m a little older than you. Maybe the internet was more innocent in my time.
In any case, I feel like this is definitely needed now. I wouldn’t want to grow up as a child with the current rampant social media use among young people. I feel like I got out just in time as the fat was closing.
The popular internet was very innocent in the 90s and early 00s. Much less addiction and anxiety-inducing, which are gateways into depression. Though in the 00s, the internet also had a lot of shock content if you strayed just a bit from the golden path. I think some of the things I have seen as a kid significantly worsened my childhood.
But it was better overall. Seeing shock content is like eating a spoon of salt. The mind has defence mechanisms for it. You consume it, you are disgusted, and you never want to do it again. Consuming social media is like eating fast food. Sure, you’re less happy after you eat it, but it’s not awful, and maybe you can imagine buying another burger in the future. Which one does more damage? A constant diet of fast food or a spoon of salt once? I also heard some drug addicts talk about how they tried the hard street drugs but the consequences were about as bad as the high was good, so they didn’t get addicted to them. Instead, they first got addicted to mild ones.
The internet is worse these days because it gets us addicted in a very pleasant way. It is fun, and consuming social media or news media on it seems like a way to be informed and in touch with current events. But then slowly people develop cravings. Now they are a bit anxious if they miss a day, there is fear of missing out. And now they’re a bit anxious if they spend only a few minutes a day. And then maybe an hour is not enough to keep up with everything that’s happening online. If everyone’s first experience of the social media was clockwork orange style 12-hour blast of forced doomscrolling tied to a chair, then fewer people would get addicted. But because the negative effects are so mild, the internet and social/news media are insidiously addictive in a way the way they were not 20 years ago.
We teach our children not to do drugs, and to keep healthy diets. But we let them hang out with the drug dealer and fast food restaurant stand-ins (people and companies in the business of addiction) online without supervision in most cases. Many will fall into addiction in those circumstances.
P.S. Another example is the proverbial boiling frog. Put it into hot water and it will hop out to save its life. But condition the water just right and turn up the heat just slowly enough, and it will happily boil.
The internet was mostly a beautiful place in the early 00s. At the same time if you were looking for terrible things (and I mean the worst things) they were easy to find which really is no longer the case. You have to be on private channels/onion sites/freenet etc. to find those things now.
> At the same time if you were looking for terrible things (and I mean the worst things) they were easy to find which really is no longer the case.
I think that this is true. I have friends tell me they children blown to bits on Instagram. I’ve also heard that the experience of creating a new X account shows grim content before it grow accustomed to your preferences.
I had entirely opposite experience. At 10, I was hanging around irc where folks made various adult jokes but were very friendly and helpful. Getting mod was a dream! Also, I learned most of my shell-fu from irc. I also spent some time roaming around other generic channels but a lot of those were barren lands.
It took me many years before my parents got tired of computer at home hype and just left it alone and I reined over it and installed linux and tried to figure out how to get around. There were days, when I would install windows, print some docs(or if printer went out of ink, wrote the docs by hand on my school notebooks), reinstalled linux, tried things until I got stuck.
There were plenty other interesting things but I still cherish my irc days.
No offense intended but it makes me wonder what your social life was like and is like. Internet is not a substitute for a social life and it seems to me that early exposure to the internet stunts your social growth significantly.
I grew up in the 2000s-2010s with little restriction on internet access and don't regret one bit. Because of this I was able to make friends from all over the world (Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America, though nobody from Africa) via social media, and self-teach myself programming, art, math, and whatever else interested me. We can't leave out the benefits of social media access from this conversation either.
Very different environment back then. The content was minimal, lower quality, less engaging and there were no sophisticated algorithms. It's been finely tuned to be addictive in the last 15 years and can suck users in for hours and keep them up all night with endless content streams and dopamine hits. I also grew up in the 2000s era and am not disillusioned to think myspace and Facebook were in the same universe as TikTok and Instagram of today. The negatives for kids far outweigh the positives at this point.
Yeah, my thought was "This would actually have banned the demoscene", because BBSes were social media in every sense - and people also got effectively addicted to them. The newspapers were full of stories of kids who had stayed up all night and run up an immense phone bill.
I think this is a good move. The exposure to flagging, likes and groupthink on social media is insane and you have it 24h a day as opposed to group pressures lasting for the duration you sit in school.
As I understand it, children can still use the Internet, just not the addictive version of it.
As grown-ups I think we all know we need this and want this to happen but as grown-ups used to an unconstrained space to talk, we don't agree about some of the unavoidable consequences. To anonymity. to identity. to the role of government and private industry and governance in the wide. LEA want this, but also want outcomes we as users may not be so keen about.
We carry these phones around with us at all times of the day. It's almost akin to carrying a pill on you at all times with instant effects. Is the average person's psychology and will strong enough to resist this? What if they heavily used social media from 12-18 years old? What if they were an iPad kid? To basically run this Social Media Experiment on an entire generation might not be so wise but I guess we'll see. Hopefully we don't get an MBA study in 10 years finding that anyone born 2005-2015 is 20% less productive. Maybe AI will just fill that gap though haha so we might get bailed out if this would be the case.
I know that a significant amount of high schoolers "go to bed" at 11pm, then scroll until they pass out at 2am. Maybe we can have a law that makes social media companies restrict their own app usage after 12am in their local time. Is someone going to argue they want themselves or their kid to have the ability to sacrifice the next day (and their growth/health) for some late night scrolling?
Or perhaps a law that forces operating systems to restrict all social media consumption after a certain period. Limiting everyone (or just minors) to only a few hours of content consuming dopamine a day. Overall happiness and GDP might just go up haha and does anyone spend 4 hours scrolling and say that was time well spent?
Experiencing life and using/growing your brain is literally the opposite of using social media. Would Einstein have overcome social media to still do everything he did? Maybe he would have used it to his advantage.
There's also the problem of group think and conformity that really is a dangerous thing with social media comments paired with a society score (upvote count). That's another discussion altogether and very interesting to think about any effects from that. I like to remind myself that in 50 years it's this generation that will be running the world.
By enforcing stricter age verification methods, they hope to balance safeguarding children with respecting human rights. It’s a significant step in regulating the impact of social media
This is getting ridiculous, if you believe that social media is an unequivocal bad then ban it for everyone. Adults have no more defenses against its evils than children. It doesn't become less harmful the moment you turn 16/18/21. Laws voted on by group A that only affect group B should be under high scrutiny because there's no natural feedback mechanism— "it seems like a good idea but I wouldn't to live under it."
I remain surprised and disappointed at how many technologists seem to be agreeing with this, nodding to a textbook example of "think of the children" rhetoric, supported by anecdotal evidence and obvious failures to distinguish between correlation and causation [1].
It's very telling that Toppe treats privacy concerns as just something for the nerds to handle ("et lenger lerret å bleke" [2]) rather than a fundamental risk introduced by any attempt to implement this in a centralized fashion - with the Norwegian government already relegating important authentication to banks [3], I remain confident that any attempt to implement this will be 1. trivially circumventable 2. annoying as shit to the average user 3. an increased risk to kids trying to escape abusive situations 4. a farce akin to the UK porn passes [4]
I wish a fraction of this effort could have gone into maintaining good online spaces which don't relegate moderation to the first BERT classifier available off HuggingFace or remote workers being paid next to nothing. Aftenposten getting their FB posts deleted in 2016 [5] could have been an excellent time to start a discussion about not hitching Norway's digital infrastructure to ad companies, but they didn't - and now we are left with people assuming that social media necessarily has to handle bullying and advertising in a shitty way, because the big sites deliberately design towards the lightest possible automated/piecemeal moderation for hundreds of millions of users.
[1] e.g. "my depressed kid is on the phone all day, because The Algorithms(TM) are beaming depression into their head, rather than providing an outlet for them"
[3] Yes, there is MinID, but many services require BankID, turning the first few weeks for people immigrating - _before_ they have a Norwegian bank account - into an absolute barrel of laughs
Personally, in the face of skyrocketing depression rates since right at the advent of smartphones, and plummeting birth rates, with no actually plausible alternative culprit offered, ya I'm gonna start with the 10 hours of screens people are spending most of their waking hours on.
> no plausible alternative culprit offered [for plummeting birth rates]
"More than half the drop in America’s total fertility rate is explained by women under the age of 19 now having next to no children. Around a third of the missing births would have been unplanned, and the majority of them would have been to women on low incomes."
People not wanting to have kids has zero to do with smartphones. More to do with one more kid costing a lot of money, time, making it unable for you to socialize or have hobbies etc etc.
When people wanted to have a lot of kids, it was the situation where women had no employment options, kids were expected to help you and care in old age, kids being expected to be deferential even in adult age and expectations on parenting were lower. And people had many kids when anticonception was not available.
None of that is something we should get back to. Kids were mistreated a lot as a result, whole setup calls for it. And some of the people who decide to not have kids, actually should not have kids because they would be awful parents.
Social Media is a risk to all of us, not just kids. I think it's very reductive to frame this as a "think of the children" moment.
We have very little understanding of the impact of an always on skinner box/rage box, and I think it's fair to want to understand more about how that could impact developing minds and to be more cautious about how we deploy systems that could be significant harms.
Frankly, I'd support more restrictions for adults as well as kids (though I'd frame it more around regulating what interactions social media can offer.)
> Social Media is a risk to all of us, not just kids. I think it's very reductive to frame this as a "think of the children" moment.
The activist movement championing the age limit are explicitly framing the issue (as Haidt does) as social media use directly leading to worse mental health markers in children and teens, and arguing that this harm is so great that any proposal claiming to fix it should be implemented, consequences be damned - exactly the kind of "think of the children" argument that gets people to argue against end-to-end encryption.
> We have very little understanding of the impact of an always on skinner box/rage box, and I think it's fair to want to understand more about how that could impact developing minds and to be more cautious about how we deploy systems that could be significant harms.
> (though I'd frame it more around regulating what interactions social media can offer.)
I argue that the problem is that advertisement and VC funding are fundamentally antithetical to making good spaces for discussion. Making a good space requires moderators who are invested in participating themselves while being conscious of their role - the kind of work where the workload scales linearly with users, but the expected accuracy and severity of screwing up grows more rapidly. However, your investors want more users and eyeballs on ads as fast as possible, while making moderation work as cheap as possible.
Social sites don't have to be "always-on Skinner boxes", but it comes down to technical and organizational decisions and whether you are willing to treat discussion spaces as a common good which don't need to run with billions in profits
The Surgeon General's report on social media and youth mental health [0] cited 3 studies showing 1) that limiting social media to 30 minutes per day among college students for 3 weeks significantly reduced loneliness and depression [1], 2) deactivating Facebook before the 2018 midterm elections increased subjective wellbeing and reduced political polarization,[2] and 3) that 10,904 14-year-olds in the UK Millennium Cohort Study experienced an increase in depressive symptoms in association with greater daily social media use, with a stronger association for girls than boys (depressive symptoms in adolescents using social media for 3 to <5 h versus 1-3 hours daily were elevated 21% in boys and 26% in girls; with 5 or more hours of use versus 1-3 hours of use daily, depressive symptom scores were elevated 35% in boys and 50% in girls) [3].
Fully 57% of high school aged girls--(more than half!)--experienced feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2021, up from 36% in 2011 [4]. Over the same timeframe, average time spent using social media each day among teens doubled from about 1.5 hours to more than 3 hours [5]. Admittedly, this is not a straightforward association as mental health screening practices changed in the United States during this period.
The actions of some with a vested financial interest in continued growth of social media have purposely chosen not to protect youth mental health. According to CBS, Mark Zuckerberg, "personally and repeatedly thwarted initiatives meant to improve the well-being of teens on Facebook and Instagram...[overruling] Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri and President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, who had asked Zuckerberg to do more to protect the more than 30 million teens who use Instagram in the United States" [6]. And now developed countries with robust regulation systems are starting to do something. If all of this is happening and there is "not enough evidence" all one has to do is look back at similar statements by the tobacco and asbestos industries to muddle, obfuscate, and confuse to continue extraction of profits as long as possible. If you are working for social media companies in these efforts, at least try a new tactic to continue extraction of wealth at the expense of public health! It has become too obvious at this point.
Part of the problem is sidestepping around the issue of parental accountability. Certain parties see giving the government increased power into the home, as their opportunity for more control over their populations and any dissent in general. Saying it's "for the kids" is a smoke screen for what they are actually trying to do. The laws they often promote, will do little to solve the actual problem, but will do a lot for them to increase censorship and funnel more money into their pockets.
Bans done wrong can also make the thing being banned even more appealing, increasing harm. Telling teenagers they can’t do something is always in that realm of calling out forbidden fruit.
Even ignoring that bans tend to make things "cool" to young people, bans done wrong tend to simply concentrate roughly the same or close to the same amount of harm.
Sure, less people habitually got drunk and beat their wives/kids during prohibition, but approximately the same harm still happened, it was just concentrated in all the people who had their lives ruined or got killed by the gangsters or the feds.
Not a ban. A restriction. Which does have evidence of reducing use.
> There is no way to draw a boundary around any behavior other than theft without comparing outcomes to a subjectively valuable ideal
Isn’t this more to do with a society’s viewpoint on moral subjectivity vs. objectivity? And not the act itself?
> It's a costly systemic virus we wield out of desperation
Desperation or practicality? There is always going to be a downside to any prohibitive law put into effect. But should there be no prohibitive laws to curb self harm in a society? To reflect the values of that society? That seems extremely idealistic.
> Social media's most fundamental problem is… it creates an environment that allows people to sidestep existing restrictions
I think it’s pretty well understood that this is not social media’s most fundamental problem. I don’t think sidestepping porn guardrails (for instance) is anywhere near as damaging as ever-radicalizing echo chambers or exposure to ideas that accelerate depression and anxiety and contribute to low self worth and self harm.
I’m sorry but this whole post just comes off as overly idealistic and completely missing the point of how harmful social media is to everyone (but especially children). I actually sympathize with the war on drugs creating more issues around drug use, but I don’t think we should then conclude that all restrictions are bad and cause more harm.
First, thank you for responding to my points. I've read every reply in this thread and I think you're the first.
Criminalization is criminalization. If you don't like word "ban", please feel free to substitute "restriction", "regulation", "guardrails", or any other euphemism. A liquor restriction is drug prohibition even if you're still allowed to trade beer.
Yes, prohibition is fundamentally a conflict about state subjectivity. This is a critically under-developed aspect of virtually all democratic constitutions. That's not weird; those were developed before modern philosophy, and industry has in no small way distracted us from the development and implementation of philosophy. Industry has simultaneously provided a vector for a vast host of terrifying emerging behaviors. One of my central concerns is that prohibition is a vicious pattern that reemerges in a wide variety of domains. That's a key component of its entrenchment: we're usually too concerned with the symptom—perceived harmful behavior—to address the disease: moralization of the state and therefore the application of force.
Regarding pragmatism, let's remember that most prohibitive systems begin very reasonably: small, well-intentioned limits being enforced uniformly with apparent marginal success. The fundamental problem is that it's never as effective as everyone wants to believe (but few dare to promise) it will be. In combination with the precedent created by the first generation, this is a strong incentive for further prohibition. The topic at hand is a great example. I don't want to make doomsayer predictions but there's no way Norway is finished increasing the severity and complexity of their social media restrictions.
Prohibited behaviors are eventually driven underground, breaking the state's ability to measure them or track their mutation. When they reemerge, they are more concentrated. In The Economics of Prohibition, Mark Thornton argues that crystal meth, crack cocaine, and the ever-expanding list of synthetic opioids with microscopic lethal doses are all the direct product of prohibition, especially law enforcement "crackdown".
You think Facebook was bad? Have you seen what people get up to on the image boards of the disenfranchised? Same concept. Norway's youth will flock to them. The state will crack down. I don't want to speculate about what will happen next.
There's much more to say on pragmatism and the quantifiable costs of increasing legal complexity and eroding the prosecutor's obligation to prove criminal intent. If you're interested, I'd strongly recommend The Overcriminalization of Social and Economic Conduct by Paul Rosenzweig.
Finally, you mentioned the specific perceived harms associated with social media. As I said, I think this is a narrow view. I don't want to discuss those any more than I want to discuss the harms of eating Tide Pods (Big Bleach Kills Kids! Parents Outraged! Twitch.TV Does Damage Control!) but I would like to point out that echo chambers and depression and anxiety are issues that exist independently of social media. When I say that the fundamental problem is an environment, I mean technology creates autonomous microcosms for which our existing defenses against the horrors of human existence are not adapted. In my view, the least wasteful solution is to develop the tools and skills required to navigate these microcosms.
I wouldn't ban prohibition, by the way. That would be paradoxical. I would focus on enhancing the democratic ability to dismantle legislation that didn't work according to the professed standards of its own advocates. It's funny being called an idealist for railing against moralization. I see how that perspective works, but please believe that my concerns are justice and viability.
And as an adult, you know how to cope with dopamine and its deficits. As a young teenager you stop reaching for your parents and start reaching for your peers to help you with your problems (including neurochemicals). But if you reach for distraction and gambling and drugs instead, you fill these gaps with things that alienate you from the rest of the world.
> So there gonna be some bootleg twitter posts now?
You joke, but I worry about this if Norway implements an age limit based on geographic location - it either gets kids onto the shittiest possible free VPN which MITMs everything, or gets them onto imageboards/apps with even fewer facilities for handling abuse than FB and Snapchat have
E: > Also wouldn't HN count as social media too, as we are interacting here?
Family minister Toppe was immediately asked afterwards if the age limit would cover newspapers with comment sections, and she responded that it would - so parents would have to consent to you sharing personal info with the newspaper, which seems like a long way to say "your parents decide whether you get to read the news"
Is there any evidence that that social media causes higher levels of dopamine release than say, music? Exercise? Eating? Regular old socialization? Games? Sun exposure?
I'm highly skeptical here, largely due to all the other moral panics based on questionable science that have come before claiming everything from phones (as in landlines) to video games were as addictive as crack.
Unfortunately he doesn’t single out games versus social media, and that seems to be because his position is that video games aren’t a blight on children.
His belief in how few people this actually affects doesn’t line up with my own anecdotes about gaming addiction. And “goes away”? Well yes it’s not like heroin, you can quit without the aid of a doctor, but these people all had lifelong consequences from their overindulgence. It doesn’t “go away” like a rash, it goes away like a wound - leaving scar tissue.
If you read all the way to the end, he concludes that overuse is a symptom of another neurological problems. Which makes it self medication, and to that I say, if you find a child with depression or ADHD self medicating with large quantities of caffeine, or an adult using cocaine to do the same, you don’t leave them on that much caffeine/narcotics. You get them on medicine that works better and reduce the stimulant abuse.
The lawsuit cites one group within the company, called “TikTank,” which noted in an internal report that compulsive usage was “rampant” on the platform. It also quotes an unnamed executive who said kids watch TikTok because the algorithm is “really good.”
“But I think we need to be cognizant of what it might mean for other opportunities. And when I say other opportunities, I literally mean sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at somebody in the eyes,” the unnamed executive said, according to the complaint.
It’s not a peer reviewed double blind study but it absolutely is evidence that the people with 95% share think that their product interferes with basic human needs and becomes habit forming after half an hour, just as it was evidence that R. J. Reynolds executives knew roughly how few cigarettes a teenager needed to smoke to become a lifelong customer even if they didn’t know the exact neuroscience of how that worked or run a psychology study trying to exactly quantify effectiveness.
In this case the poison is in the dose. Sex also releases a cascade of neurochemicals, but I challenge you to have more sex in a day than you can watch videos on TikTok in two hours. You can essentially hold down the button in the Skinner Box.
You can use Google just like I can. You’re not asking because of curiosity, you’re asking because you’re hoping you won’t have to think.
TikTok’s own research showing specifically that TikTok fixation is pulling kids away from the activities that GP listed?
“Higher levels of dopamine release” is a nonsense metric. To the extent that it matters, it matters due to its ability to steer decision-making, and TikTok here is saying they know their product distorts decision-making in exactly the problematic manner.
The particular mixture of hormone signals yielding those behaviors is a red herring.
> “Higher levels of dopamine release” is a nonsense metric.
Then the correct answer to the parent comment's request for evidence to the claims of higher levels of dopamine release is "no, there isn't any, and it is likely a fabricated claim" and not "here is something completely different that I am falsely going to claim is evidence to the question you asked."
Uhhh no one claimed it releases more dopamine than other activities, so the question itself was a red herring from the actual discussion. You're right though, you can go on your pedantic way :) Thank you for your contribution!
They aren't prohibiting it, they are putting an age limit on it in the same way we do all the other things you listed. Kids are not developed enough to self-regulate,
I have watched my kid eat tons of sugar then feel terrible a few hours later and be totally unable to connect the dots between the behavior and the outcome. Their brains are not developed enough to practice self-control with highly addictive things.
This is not an outright ban, but a sensible regulation. Kids can stil use simple messaging apps, but have to wait to get their first fix of attention grabing, personalized ad feeds.
I completely agree with you, but I believe that social media has a positive impact on certain aspects of society and on some individuals, even more so than sex, drugs, gambling, and obscenity.
For example, a user with social anxiety can find a refuge where they can discuss and socialize on social media, sometimes by talking about specific topics and joining marginalized communities. In fact, speaking of marginalized communities, social media would have greatly helped homosexuals in the 1970s to meet people their age who were also gay, something that was very difficult at the time.
However, this very clearly positive aspect of social media can also backfire on people who fall into far-right conspiracy rabbit holes. This creates communities that are no longer so marginal, like incels or people who believe that the election was rigged to make Donald Trump lose. Incels are particularly young people who experience a societal problem (loneliness, emotional deprivation, social issues, leading to involuntary celibacy and what they perceive as sexual frustration) and are influenced to fight against the wrong issue (women instead of capitalism and patriarchy).
For me, if these harmful communities become so popular, it's primarily the fault of capitalism: social media platforms are all managed by private companies, whose main goal is profit. Elon Musk changed Twitter's algorithm to favor confrontation, to increase user engagement. This boosts the time spent on Twitter, allowing for more ad exposure, but I believe it also harms mental health and encourages harassment (especially against the LGBT community).
That's why I see no other solution than decentralized, free, and open-source alternatives, as you mentioned.
What a bunch of nonsense. China was full of opium addicts when their markets were flooded with it. Singapore had a massive number of opium addicts less than 60 years ago. Enforcement has bought that to a negligible number. The only reason the US is dealing with a resurgence in the heroin epidemic is because we let the Sacklers push their pills on the populace through doctors. Even marijuana use was in the single digits for habitual usage before it was legalized in a lot of states, now we’re looking at between 15-25% of the populace being habitual users in some states. Social media is an evil and I commend Norway on setting the age limit at 15 but I think it should go further and make it 18. Additionally, you shouldn’t be able to get/use/buy a smartphone until you’re 16.
“We also have strong evidence to say that SIFs not only save the lives of people who inject drugs, but also improve their lives,” George Dertadian, a senior lecturer of criminology at the UNSW https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-12/safe-injecting-facili...
I dove into this topic to understand what went wrong to the best of my ability. From what I gather, countries with successful decriminalization also have government assistance for the addicted. That’s much different than the US’s “shoot up anywhere, any time.”
That being said, the point I was responding to is that, of the two extremes, total prohibition seems better than total decriminalization.
But either way, people underestimate how expensive addiction treatment is, and overestimate how effective it is. Prohibition of alcohol, or rather the teetotaller movement, came because they realized society had a problem it couldn't individualize and pay itself out of.
We still haven't, but for a good 80 years we've had enough money to hide the problem.
> The Scandinavian country already has a minimum age limit of 13 in place. Despite this, more than half of nine-year-olds, 58% of 10-year-olds and 72% of 11-year-olds are on social media, according to research by the Norwegian media authority.
I think my life today would be significantly better if I hadn’t been exposed to unsupervised internet access at around 10 years old with the Nintendo DSi web browser. Who knows how people growing up on TikTok brain-rot streams will turn out. I don’t look back fondly on my early experiences with the internet.
This is interesting because I had the opposite experience… though I think I’m a little older than you. Maybe the internet was more innocent in my time.
In any case, I feel like this is definitely needed now. I wouldn’t want to grow up as a child with the current rampant social media use among young people. I feel like I got out just in time as the fat was closing.
The popular internet was very innocent in the 90s and early 00s. Much less addiction and anxiety-inducing, which are gateways into depression. Though in the 00s, the internet also had a lot of shock content if you strayed just a bit from the golden path. I think some of the things I have seen as a kid significantly worsened my childhood.
But it was better overall. Seeing shock content is like eating a spoon of salt. The mind has defence mechanisms for it. You consume it, you are disgusted, and you never want to do it again. Consuming social media is like eating fast food. Sure, you’re less happy after you eat it, but it’s not awful, and maybe you can imagine buying another burger in the future. Which one does more damage? A constant diet of fast food or a spoon of salt once? I also heard some drug addicts talk about how they tried the hard street drugs but the consequences were about as bad as the high was good, so they didn’t get addicted to them. Instead, they first got addicted to mild ones.
The internet is worse these days because it gets us addicted in a very pleasant way. It is fun, and consuming social media or news media on it seems like a way to be informed and in touch with current events. But then slowly people develop cravings. Now they are a bit anxious if they miss a day, there is fear of missing out. And now they’re a bit anxious if they spend only a few minutes a day. And then maybe an hour is not enough to keep up with everything that’s happening online. If everyone’s first experience of the social media was clockwork orange style 12-hour blast of forced doomscrolling tied to a chair, then fewer people would get addicted. But because the negative effects are so mild, the internet and social/news media are insidiously addictive in a way the way they were not 20 years ago.
We teach our children not to do drugs, and to keep healthy diets. But we let them hang out with the drug dealer and fast food restaurant stand-ins (people and companies in the business of addiction) online without supervision in most cases. Many will fall into addiction in those circumstances.
P.S. Another example is the proverbial boiling frog. Put it into hot water and it will hop out to save its life. But condition the water just right and turn up the heat just slowly enough, and it will happily boil.
The internet was mostly a beautiful place in the early 00s. At the same time if you were looking for terrible things (and I mean the worst things) they were easy to find which really is no longer the case. You have to be on private channels/onion sites/freenet etc. to find those things now.
> At the same time if you were looking for terrible things (and I mean the worst things) they were easy to find which really is no longer the case.
I think that this is true. I have friends tell me they children blown to bits on Instagram. I’ve also heard that the experience of creating a new X account shows grim content before it grow accustomed to your preferences.
I had entirely opposite experience. At 10, I was hanging around irc where folks made various adult jokes but were very friendly and helpful. Getting mod was a dream! Also, I learned most of my shell-fu from irc. I also spent some time roaming around other generic channels but a lot of those were barren lands.
It took me many years before my parents got tired of computer at home hype and just left it alone and I reined over it and installed linux and tried to figure out how to get around. There were days, when I would install windows, print some docs(or if printer went out of ink, wrote the docs by hand on my school notebooks), reinstalled linux, tried things until I got stuck.
There were plenty other interesting things but I still cherish my irc days.
No offense intended but it makes me wonder what your social life was like and is like. Internet is not a substitute for a social life and it seems to me that early exposure to the internet stunts your social growth significantly.
It’s hard to say what long-term effects this could have on kids today, but the brain-rot aspect is real.
I grew up in the 2000s-2010s with little restriction on internet access and don't regret one bit. Because of this I was able to make friends from all over the world (Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America, though nobody from Africa) via social media, and self-teach myself programming, art, math, and whatever else interested me. We can't leave out the benefits of social media access from this conversation either.
Very different environment back then. The content was minimal, lower quality, less engaging and there were no sophisticated algorithms. It's been finely tuned to be addictive in the last 15 years and can suck users in for hours and keep them up all night with endless content streams and dopamine hits. I also grew up in the 2000s era and am not disillusioned to think myspace and Facebook were in the same universe as TikTok and Instagram of today. The negatives for kids far outweigh the positives at this point.
Your experience highlights the dual nature of internet access.
The Scandinavian demo scene called, they need new recruits...
Yeah, my thought was "This would actually have banned the demoscene", because BBSes were social media in every sense - and people also got effectively addicted to them. The newspapers were full of stories of kids who had stayed up all night and run up an immense phone bill.
I think this is a good move. The exposure to flagging, likes and groupthink on social media is insane and you have it 24h a day as opposed to group pressures lasting for the duration you sit in school.
As I understand it, children can still use the Internet, just not the addictive version of it.
As grown-ups I think we all know we need this and want this to happen but as grown-ups used to an unconstrained space to talk, we don't agree about some of the unavoidable consequences. To anonymity. to identity. to the role of government and private industry and governance in the wide. LEA want this, but also want outcomes we as users may not be so keen about.
We carry these phones around with us at all times of the day. It's almost akin to carrying a pill on you at all times with instant effects. Is the average person's psychology and will strong enough to resist this? What if they heavily used social media from 12-18 years old? What if they were an iPad kid? To basically run this Social Media Experiment on an entire generation might not be so wise but I guess we'll see. Hopefully we don't get an MBA study in 10 years finding that anyone born 2005-2015 is 20% less productive. Maybe AI will just fill that gap though haha so we might get bailed out if this would be the case.
I know that a significant amount of high schoolers "go to bed" at 11pm, then scroll until they pass out at 2am. Maybe we can have a law that makes social media companies restrict their own app usage after 12am in their local time. Is someone going to argue they want themselves or their kid to have the ability to sacrifice the next day (and their growth/health) for some late night scrolling?
Or perhaps a law that forces operating systems to restrict all social media consumption after a certain period. Limiting everyone (or just minors) to only a few hours of content consuming dopamine a day. Overall happiness and GDP might just go up haha and does anyone spend 4 hours scrolling and say that was time well spent?
Experiencing life and using/growing your brain is literally the opposite of using social media. Would Einstein have overcome social media to still do everything he did? Maybe he would have used it to his advantage.
There's also the problem of group think and conformity that really is a dangerous thing with social media comments paired with a society score (upvote count). That's another discussion altogether and very interesting to think about any effects from that. I like to remind myself that in 50 years it's this generation that will be running the world.
By enforcing stricter age verification methods, they hope to balance safeguarding children with respecting human rights. It’s a significant step in regulating the impact of social media
This is getting ridiculous, if you believe that social media is an unequivocal bad then ban it for everyone. Adults have no more defenses against its evils than children. It doesn't become less harmful the moment you turn 16/18/21. Laws voted on by group A that only affect group B should be under high scrutiny because there's no natural feedback mechanism— "it seems like a good idea but I wouldn't to live under it."
I remain surprised and disappointed at how many technologists seem to be agreeing with this, nodding to a textbook example of "think of the children" rhetoric, supported by anecdotal evidence and obvious failures to distinguish between correlation and causation [1].
It's very telling that Toppe treats privacy concerns as just something for the nerds to handle ("et lenger lerret å bleke" [2]) rather than a fundamental risk introduced by any attempt to implement this in a centralized fashion - with the Norwegian government already relegating important authentication to banks [3], I remain confident that any attempt to implement this will be 1. trivially circumventable 2. annoying as shit to the average user 3. an increased risk to kids trying to escape abusive situations 4. a farce akin to the UK porn passes [4]
I wish a fraction of this effort could have gone into maintaining good online spaces which don't relegate moderation to the first BERT classifier available off HuggingFace or remote workers being paid next to nothing. Aftenposten getting their FB posts deleted in 2016 [5] could have been an excellent time to start a discussion about not hitching Norway's digital infrastructure to ad companies, but they didn't - and now we are left with people assuming that social media necessarily has to handle bullying and advertising in a shitty way, because the big sites deliberately design towards the lightest possible automated/piecemeal moderation for hundreds of millions of users.
[1] e.g. "my depressed kid is on the phone all day, because The Algorithms(TM) are beaming depression into their head, rather than providing an outlet for them"
[2] https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/mPzg0q/regjeringen-vil-innfoere-...
[3] Yes, there is MinID, but many services require BankID, turning the first few weeks for people immigrating - _before_ they have a Norwegian bank account - into an absolute barrel of laughs
[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/porn-passes-...
[5] https://www.nrk.no/kultur/aftenposten-sin-facebook-kritikk-f...
Personally, in the face of skyrocketing depression rates since right at the advent of smartphones, and plummeting birth rates, with no actually plausible alternative culprit offered, ya I'm gonna start with the 10 hours of screens people are spending most of their waking hours on.
> skyrocketing depression rates
Again people conflate correlation and causation very easily here, and don't account for changes in how mental health conditions are coded, see https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-coddling-of-the-american-p...
> no plausible alternative culprit offered [for plummeting birth rates]
"More than half the drop in America’s total fertility rate is explained by women under the age of 19 now having next to no children. Around a third of the missing births would have been unplanned, and the majority of them would have been to women on low incomes."
https://archive.ph/cJY3B
> plummeting birth rates
People not wanting to have kids has zero to do with smartphones. More to do with one more kid costing a lot of money, time, making it unable for you to socialize or have hobbies etc etc.
When people wanted to have a lot of kids, it was the situation where women had no employment options, kids were expected to help you and care in old age, kids being expected to be deferential even in adult age and expectations on parenting were lower. And people had many kids when anticonception was not available.
None of that is something we should get back to. Kids were mistreated a lot as a result, whole setup calls for it. And some of the people who decide to not have kids, actually should not have kids because they would be awful parents.
Social Media is a risk to all of us, not just kids. I think it's very reductive to frame this as a "think of the children" moment.
We have very little understanding of the impact of an always on skinner box/rage box, and I think it's fair to want to understand more about how that could impact developing minds and to be more cautious about how we deploy systems that could be significant harms.
Frankly, I'd support more restrictions for adults as well as kids (though I'd frame it more around regulating what interactions social media can offer.)
> Social Media is a risk to all of us, not just kids. I think it's very reductive to frame this as a "think of the children" moment.
The activist movement championing the age limit are explicitly framing the issue (as Haidt does) as social media use directly leading to worse mental health markers in children and teens, and arguing that this harm is so great that any proposal claiming to fix it should be implemented, consequences be damned - exactly the kind of "think of the children" argument that gets people to argue against end-to-end encryption.
> We have very little understanding of the impact of an always on skinner box/rage box, and I think it's fair to want to understand more about how that could impact developing minds and to be more cautious about how we deploy systems that could be significant harms. > (though I'd frame it more around regulating what interactions social media can offer.)
I argue that the problem is that advertisement and VC funding are fundamentally antithetical to making good spaces for discussion. Making a good space requires moderators who are invested in participating themselves while being conscious of their role - the kind of work where the workload scales linearly with users, but the expected accuracy and severity of screwing up grows more rapidly. However, your investors want more users and eyeballs on ads as fast as possible, while making moderation work as cheap as possible.
Social sites don't have to be "always-on Skinner boxes", but it comes down to technical and organizational decisions and whether you are willing to treat discussion spaces as a common good which don't need to run with billions in profits
honestly fair, but unenforceable in non ultra authoritarian govs
The Surgeon General's report on social media and youth mental health [0] cited 3 studies showing 1) that limiting social media to 30 minutes per day among college students for 3 weeks significantly reduced loneliness and depression [1], 2) deactivating Facebook before the 2018 midterm elections increased subjective wellbeing and reduced political polarization,[2] and 3) that 10,904 14-year-olds in the UK Millennium Cohort Study experienced an increase in depressive symptoms in association with greater daily social media use, with a stronger association for girls than boys (depressive symptoms in adolescents using social media for 3 to <5 h versus 1-3 hours daily were elevated 21% in boys and 26% in girls; with 5 or more hours of use versus 1-3 hours of use daily, depressive symptom scores were elevated 35% in boys and 50% in girls) [3].
Fully 57% of high school aged girls--(more than half!)--experienced feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2021, up from 36% in 2011 [4]. Over the same timeframe, average time spent using social media each day among teens doubled from about 1.5 hours to more than 3 hours [5]. Admittedly, this is not a straightforward association as mental health screening practices changed in the United States during this period.
The actions of some with a vested financial interest in continued growth of social media have purposely chosen not to protect youth mental health. According to CBS, Mark Zuckerberg, "personally and repeatedly thwarted initiatives meant to improve the well-being of teens on Facebook and Instagram...[overruling] Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri and President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, who had asked Zuckerberg to do more to protect the more than 30 million teens who use Instagram in the United States" [6]. And now developed countries with robust regulation systems are starting to do something. If all of this is happening and there is "not enough evidence" all one has to do is look back at similar statements by the tobacco and asbestos industries to muddle, obfuscate, and confuse to continue extraction of profits as long as possible. If you are working for social media companies in these efforts, at least try a new tactic to continue extraction of wealth at the expense of public health! It has become too obvious at this point.
0. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-heal...
1. https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751
2. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658
3. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
4. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Sum...
5. https://images.nature.com/lw1200/magazine-assets/d41586-023-...
6. https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/zuckerberg-rejected-...
[flagged]
> all society's ills would have been resolved long ago
This is pointlessly reductive. Bans don’t have to be 100% effective to reduce harm.
Part of the problem is sidestepping around the issue of parental accountability. Certain parties see giving the government increased power into the home, as their opportunity for more control over their populations and any dissent in general. Saying it's "for the kids" is a smoke screen for what they are actually trying to do. The laws they often promote, will do little to solve the actual problem, but will do a lot for them to increase censorship and funnel more money into their pockets.
Bans done wrong can also make the thing being banned even more appealing, increasing harm. Telling teenagers they can’t do something is always in that realm of calling out forbidden fruit.
Even ignoring that bans tend to make things "cool" to young people, bans done wrong tend to simply concentrate roughly the same or close to the same amount of harm.
Sure, less people habitually got drunk and beat their wives/kids during prohibition, but approximately the same harm still happened, it was just concentrated in all the people who had their lives ruined or got killed by the gangsters or the feds.
> If banning harmful behavior
Not a ban. A restriction. Which does have evidence of reducing use.
> There is no way to draw a boundary around any behavior other than theft without comparing outcomes to a subjectively valuable ideal
Isn’t this more to do with a society’s viewpoint on moral subjectivity vs. objectivity? And not the act itself?
> It's a costly systemic virus we wield out of desperation
Desperation or practicality? There is always going to be a downside to any prohibitive law put into effect. But should there be no prohibitive laws to curb self harm in a society? To reflect the values of that society? That seems extremely idealistic.
> Social media's most fundamental problem is… it creates an environment that allows people to sidestep existing restrictions
I think it’s pretty well understood that this is not social media’s most fundamental problem. I don’t think sidestepping porn guardrails (for instance) is anywhere near as damaging as ever-radicalizing echo chambers or exposure to ideas that accelerate depression and anxiety and contribute to low self worth and self harm.
I’m sorry but this whole post just comes off as overly idealistic and completely missing the point of how harmful social media is to everyone (but especially children). I actually sympathize with the war on drugs creating more issues around drug use, but I don’t think we should then conclude that all restrictions are bad and cause more harm.
First, thank you for responding to my points. I've read every reply in this thread and I think you're the first.
Criminalization is criminalization. If you don't like word "ban", please feel free to substitute "restriction", "regulation", "guardrails", or any other euphemism. A liquor restriction is drug prohibition even if you're still allowed to trade beer.
Yes, prohibition is fundamentally a conflict about state subjectivity. This is a critically under-developed aspect of virtually all democratic constitutions. That's not weird; those were developed before modern philosophy, and industry has in no small way distracted us from the development and implementation of philosophy. Industry has simultaneously provided a vector for a vast host of terrifying emerging behaviors. One of my central concerns is that prohibition is a vicious pattern that reemerges in a wide variety of domains. That's a key component of its entrenchment: we're usually too concerned with the symptom—perceived harmful behavior—to address the disease: moralization of the state and therefore the application of force.
Regarding pragmatism, let's remember that most prohibitive systems begin very reasonably: small, well-intentioned limits being enforced uniformly with apparent marginal success. The fundamental problem is that it's never as effective as everyone wants to believe (but few dare to promise) it will be. In combination with the precedent created by the first generation, this is a strong incentive for further prohibition. The topic at hand is a great example. I don't want to make doomsayer predictions but there's no way Norway is finished increasing the severity and complexity of their social media restrictions.
Prohibited behaviors are eventually driven underground, breaking the state's ability to measure them or track their mutation. When they reemerge, they are more concentrated. In The Economics of Prohibition, Mark Thornton argues that crystal meth, crack cocaine, and the ever-expanding list of synthetic opioids with microscopic lethal doses are all the direct product of prohibition, especially law enforcement "crackdown".
You think Facebook was bad? Have you seen what people get up to on the image boards of the disenfranchised? Same concept. Norway's youth will flock to them. The state will crack down. I don't want to speculate about what will happen next.
There's much more to say on pragmatism and the quantifiable costs of increasing legal complexity and eroding the prosecutor's obligation to prove criminal intent. If you're interested, I'd strongly recommend The Overcriminalization of Social and Economic Conduct by Paul Rosenzweig.
https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/report/the-over-c...
Finally, you mentioned the specific perceived harms associated with social media. As I said, I think this is a narrow view. I don't want to discuss those any more than I want to discuss the harms of eating Tide Pods (Big Bleach Kills Kids! Parents Outraged! Twitch.TV Does Damage Control!) but I would like to point out that echo chambers and depression and anxiety are issues that exist independently of social media. When I say that the fundamental problem is an environment, I mean technology creates autonomous microcosms for which our existing defenses against the horrors of human existence are not adapted. In my view, the least wasteful solution is to develop the tools and skills required to navigate these microcosms.
I wouldn't ban prohibition, by the way. That would be paradoxical. I would focus on enhancing the democratic ability to dismantle legislation that didn't work according to the professed standards of its own advocates. It's funny being called an idealist for railing against moralization. I see how that perspective works, but please believe that my concerns are justice and viability.
Dopamine. They have dopamine in common.
And as an adult, you know how to cope with dopamine and its deficits. As a young teenager you stop reaching for your parents and start reaching for your peers to help you with your problems (including neurochemicals). But if you reach for distraction and gambling and drugs instead, you fill these gaps with things that alienate you from the rest of the world.
The current US political climate would indicate adults are no better equipped to handle the dopamine from social media.
But we tried that already with alcohol and we got organized crime.
So there gonna be some bootleg twitter posts now?
Also wouldn't HN count as social media too, as we are interacting here?
> So there gonna be some bootleg twitter posts now?
You joke, but I worry about this if Norway implements an age limit based on geographic location - it either gets kids onto the shittiest possible free VPN which MITMs everything, or gets them onto imageboards/apps with even fewer facilities for handling abuse than FB and Snapchat have
E: > Also wouldn't HN count as social media too, as we are interacting here?
Family minister Toppe was immediately asked afterwards if the age limit would cover newspapers with comment sections, and she responded that it would - so parents would have to consent to you sharing personal info with the newspaper, which seems like a long way to say "your parents decide whether you get to read the news"
https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/mPzg0q/regjeringen-vil-innfoere-...
Is there any evidence that that social media causes higher levels of dopamine release than say, music? Exercise? Eating? Regular old socialization? Games? Sun exposure?
I'm highly skeptical here, largely due to all the other moral panics based on questionable science that have come before claiming everything from phones (as in landlines) to video games were as addictive as crack.
This guy seems to be getting cited a lot:
https://theconversation.com/debunking-the-6-biggest-myths-ab...
Unfortunately he doesn’t single out games versus social media, and that seems to be because his position is that video games aren’t a blight on children.
His belief in how few people this actually affects doesn’t line up with my own anecdotes about gaming addiction. And “goes away”? Well yes it’s not like heroin, you can quit without the aid of a doctor, but these people all had lifelong consequences from their overindulgence. It doesn’t “go away” like a rash, it goes away like a wound - leaving scar tissue.
If you read all the way to the end, he concludes that overuse is a symptom of another neurological problems. Which makes it self medication, and to that I say, if you find a child with depression or ADHD self medicating with large quantities of caffeine, or an adult using cocaine to do the same, you don’t leave them on that much caffeine/narcotics. You get them on medicine that works better and reduce the stimulant abuse.
Yep!
The lawsuit cites one group within the company, called “TikTank,” which noted in an internal report that compulsive usage was “rampant” on the platform. It also quotes an unnamed executive who said kids watch TikTok because the algorithm is “really good.”
“But I think we need to be cognizant of what it might mean for other opportunities. And when I say other opportunities, I literally mean sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at somebody in the eyes,” the unnamed executive said, according to the complaint.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/tiktok-aware-risks-kids-...
Straight from the horse’s mouth
That is absolutely not evidence.
It’s not a peer reviewed double blind study but it absolutely is evidence that the people with 95% share think that their product interferes with basic human needs and becomes habit forming after half an hour, just as it was evidence that R. J. Reynolds executives knew roughly how few cigarettes a teenager needed to smoke to become a lifelong customer even if they didn’t know the exact neuroscience of how that worked or run a psychology study trying to exactly quantify effectiveness.
So, absolutely not evidence of dopamine release which is what the parent comment asked for.
No, it is evidence but it’s at different levels as explained. Trying to be pedantic is just obscuring whatever point you are trying to make.
From a lawsuit standpoint, that is evidence.
In this case the poison is in the dose. Sex also releases a cascade of neurochemicals, but I challenge you to have more sex in a day than you can watch videos on TikTok in two hours. You can essentially hold down the button in the Skinner Box.
You can use Google just like I can. You’re not asking because of curiosity, you’re asking because you’re hoping you won’t have to think.
TikTok’s own research showing specifically that TikTok fixation is pulling kids away from the activities that GP listed?
“Higher levels of dopamine release” is a nonsense metric. To the extent that it matters, it matters due to its ability to steer decision-making, and TikTok here is saying they know their product distorts decision-making in exactly the problematic manner.
The particular mixture of hormone signals yielding those behaviors is a red herring.
> “Higher levels of dopamine release” is a nonsense metric.
Then the correct answer to the parent comment's request for evidence to the claims of higher levels of dopamine release is "no, there isn't any, and it is likely a fabricated claim" and not "here is something completely different that I am falsely going to claim is evidence to the question you asked."
Uhhh no one claimed it releases more dopamine than other activities, so the question itself was a red herring from the actual discussion. You're right though, you can go on your pedantic way :) Thank you for your contribution!
Yep, dopamine plays a crucial role in how we cope with challenges, especially during adolescence
They aren't prohibiting it, they are putting an age limit on it in the same way we do all the other things you listed. Kids are not developed enough to self-regulate,
I have watched my kid eat tons of sugar then feel terrible a few hours later and be totally unable to connect the dots between the behavior and the outcome. Their brains are not developed enough to practice self-control with highly addictive things.
This is not an outright ban, but a sensible regulation. Kids can stil use simple messaging apps, but have to wait to get their first fix of attention grabing, personalized ad feeds.
Building systems that detach users from legal identities may lead to more constructive outcomes yet it sounds like utopia
I completely agree with you, but I believe that social media has a positive impact on certain aspects of society and on some individuals, even more so than sex, drugs, gambling, and obscenity.
For example, a user with social anxiety can find a refuge where they can discuss and socialize on social media, sometimes by talking about specific topics and joining marginalized communities. In fact, speaking of marginalized communities, social media would have greatly helped homosexuals in the 1970s to meet people their age who were also gay, something that was very difficult at the time.
However, this very clearly positive aspect of social media can also backfire on people who fall into far-right conspiracy rabbit holes. This creates communities that are no longer so marginal, like incels or people who believe that the election was rigged to make Donald Trump lose. Incels are particularly young people who experience a societal problem (loneliness, emotional deprivation, social issues, leading to involuntary celibacy and what they perceive as sexual frustration) and are influenced to fight against the wrong issue (women instead of capitalism and patriarchy).
For me, if these harmful communities become so popular, it's primarily the fault of capitalism: social media platforms are all managed by private companies, whose main goal is profit. Elon Musk changed Twitter's algorithm to favor confrontation, to increase user engagement. This boosts the time spent on Twitter, allowing for more ad exposure, but I believe it also harms mental health and encourages harassment (especially against the LGBT community).
That's why I see no other solution than decentralized, free, and open-source alternatives, as you mentioned.
What a bunch of nonsense. China was full of opium addicts when their markets were flooded with it. Singapore had a massive number of opium addicts less than 60 years ago. Enforcement has bought that to a negligible number. The only reason the US is dealing with a resurgence in the heroin epidemic is because we let the Sacklers push their pills on the populace through doctors. Even marijuana use was in the single digits for habitual usage before it was legalized in a lot of states, now we’re looking at between 15-25% of the populace being habitual users in some states. Social media is an evil and I commend Norway on setting the age limit at 15 but I think it should go further and make it 18. Additionally, you shouldn’t be able to get/use/buy a smartphone until you’re 16.
I don’t know that this is true. Safe injection zones don’t seem to be working. I feel like we’ve got good evidence prohibition works in some cases.
What do you mean by 'not working'. The evidence from Sydney and Melbourne says that safe injecting zones save lives.
“Without this place I would be dead. Simply, the MSIC saves lives.” Uniting MSIC client https://www.uniting.org/community-impact/uniting-medically-s...
“We also have strong evidence to say that SIFs not only save the lives of people who inject drugs, but also improve their lives,” George Dertadian, a senior lecturer of criminology at the UNSW https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-12/safe-injecting-facili...
Sorry, I meant to say decriminalization. I live near Oregon and decriminalization was a disaster. This video captures it well: https://youtu.be/2GU3TGSWPsw?si=fie4SFowzdnKNFRK
I dove into this topic to understand what went wrong to the best of my ability. From what I gather, countries with successful decriminalization also have government assistance for the addicted. That’s much different than the US’s “shoot up anywhere, any time.”
That being said, the point I was responding to is that, of the two extremes, total prohibition seems better than total decriminalization.
Out of curiosity, was the money saved from decriminalization reallocated into addiction treatment?
Bold to assume there was any money saved.
But either way, people underestimate how expensive addiction treatment is, and overestimate how effective it is. Prohibition of alcohol, or rather the teetotaller movement, came because they realized society had a problem it couldn't individualize and pay itself out of.
We still haven't, but for a good 80 years we've had enough money to hide the problem.