I fully agree. There should be a complete ban on social media and similar addictive platforms for those under 16, and a nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.) for users aged 16 to 18.
I agree, and this is easy to implement. My kids have to hand over their phones every day before bedtime. I see no need for any institutional interference to implement such trivial policy in any family.
> We basically give cigarettes to children.
In my opinion, this is not a good comparison. Just because parents give their kids smartphones doesn't mean they want or force them to use social networks. Kids use them because it's socially acceptable, and they aren't warned against using them.
When I was a kid, my father sometimes asked me to go to the store to buy cigarettes for him. At that time, this was a socially acceptable thing for a parent to do. However, the problem of kids smoking cigarettes was almost non-existent. This is because every kid was strongly advised that only adults could do this. There would be consequences if you didn't obey this advice. By the way, I never started smoking.
It is absurd to suggest that children should not be allowed to socialize online. Have we completely forgotten the internet we grew up on? I would be dead if I hadn't been able to make friends online.
When I was a kid I joined a random BBCode forum with a group of 10 people who taught me how to program. There were challenges some passionate person set up and he would give tips to me and a few others for free. We hung out all day. That's gone.
We can create spaces like that again, and teach the younger generations, instead of antagonizing them, coddling them and banning them from congregating on the internet.
The actual forces promote toxic platforms like TikTok, Sora, Twitter, BlueSky with no real productive value at all. Even HN is a waste of our lives yet here we are.
I have a great time on the internet. I meet new people all the time, and I have met many of them in real life, and many of them have become good friends. I am sorry you're having such a bad time, but if you looked around, you'd see there are many healthy communities built around all sorts of interests.
Some of them even live on TikTok. I don't use TikTok, but my girlfriend uses it quite a lot and while there is plenty of brainrot, she also learns a lot from it, too.
Why not vice tax the operators? Easier than using age verification schemes and giving them even more data, chat control etc. I'm thinking tiktok, meta and x. Want to operate in Denmark? The license will cost $N/person/month where the amount of people equals the country's population. It's basically a viewer tax.
We basically give cigarettes to children.