US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4966

On May 15 2025 10:23 Razyda wrote:
Honestly I am vastly against kids on social media. However: ultimately it is parent responsibility and approach.

On May 15 2025 17:01 Jankisa wrote:
I think that the bigger problem is that most parents don't really have the time to monitor their kids internet / social media use, even if you eliminate schools these kids are growing up into silos of information that they most likely never leave, they will get sorted into neat little easily advertised and propagandized to groups and who the fuck knows where that takes us.

Obviously folks in this thread are on the more thoughtful and tech savvy side, but the overall problem is much bigger and it's not just about phones and school, it's about what these things are doing to our brains in general.

To me, the most disturbing part is how easily manipulated and lied to kids today are, look at the most popular influences, Andrew Tate, Jake & Logan Paul, mr. Beast, all of these assholes built literal empires by exploiting these mechanisms, and in some cases are using their influence to push these kids into different directions.

My sister works in school, she works with a kid with behavioral issues and the shit this kid tells her, the fucked up jokes and racist insanity that he spews from being in very weird, fringe communities is disturbing as fuck.

Trump won because his media apparatus was more in tune with this shit, he made huge strides with GenZ and Millennial men for the reasons that, in my opinion can be traced all the way back to Gamergate, the RW ghouls found a mechanism and started pushing buttons, it took a while for them to get good at it but they have mastered it now, and the whole US propaganda apparatus is now being employed in hyper charging this.

On May 16 2025 00:28 Mohdoo wrote:


I want to touch on this specific detail a bit because its really important.

Is it a parent's responsibility? Yes

Does that mean we ought to respect the decision of the parent, regardless of harm to the child? No

A child has no ability to advocate for their well-being. They don't get to choose their parents. Leaving their fate up to rolling dice is already a major problem in society. Humanity 100 years from now will definitely look back at 2025 as a time when children's rights were exceptionally dreadful and sad. The children of a society are the responsibility of all adults to protect and care for. Treating children as the property of their parents is harmful and inhumane.

I don't think you were necessarily defending modern culture of children's rights. But I wanted to take the opportunity to point out why this is not something we ought to be deferring to parents for. For the same reason we banned lead paint, we ought to ban toxic technologies from children.

On May 16 2025 00:28 Mohdoo wrote:


I want to touch on this specific detail a bit because its really important.

Is it a parent's responsibility? Yes

Does that mean we ought to respect the decision of the parent, regardless of harm to the child? No

A child has no ability to advocate for their well-being. They don't get to choose their parents. Leaving their fate up to rolling dice is already a major problem in society. Humanity 100 years from now will definitely look back at 2025 as a time when children's rights were exceptionally dreadful and sad. The children of a society are the responsibility of all adults to protect and care for. Treating children as the property of their parents is harmful and inhumane.

I don't think you were necessarily defending modern culture of children's rights. But I wanted to take the opportunity to point out why this is not something we ought to be deferring to parents for. For the same reason we banned lead paint, we ought to ban toxic technologies from children.

On May 16 2025 05:35 RenSC2 wrote:

I'm not sure that you've fully thought through the consequences of every child being the responsibility of all adults. When it becomes the responsibility of all adults, we hand that responsibility to the government.

So how much control do you want to give to Donald Trump and RFK Jr to raise your child? Should RFK Jr have the power to over-ride your desire to give your child MMR vaccinations? How about when religious nuts get into power, should they be able to demand your child gets a certain religious education? Mandated conversion therapy for all gay/trans kids? In certain areas, that would be what the majority of adults think should happen.

More benign, a lot of old common wisdom on parenting turned out to not be the best. We don't know the best method of parenting until we try it and see the results and even then, people would disagree on what the goal should even be. Society has gone through many different child rearing phases, some very well meaning, that have shown poor results. If at any point we would have mandated one of those methods, society could get stuck in a rut and refused to experiment to find better methods... very much like religious totalitarian regimes that stifle development for centuries.

Having guardrails like the DCFS to prevent major abuse is a good thing, but I'd be very hesitant about the government trying to micro manage parents and parenting. The people who would do the micromanaging aren't necessarily any better than your average parent and some are much worse.

Instead, I would look at each parenting situation as a petri dish in an experiment. Children that are raised well will grow up and raise children in a similar fashion. Those children will thrive and others will not. It's basically survival of the fittest for ideas and people who pass down good ideas will see those ideas flourish.

I would also say that changing environmental circumstances will change the way children are optimally raised. Social media is a changing environmental circumstance and nobody truly knows the long term results of different methods of parenting in this era yet. At one point, the TV was the Idiot Box and people were up in arms about how it was ruining children. Society survived. Social media, even AI powered personalized social media, will be no different. It will try to take up 100% of your child's time, but that is also what a TV channel exec has been trying to do for decades. Parents will adapt in whatever way they think is best and the best ideas will flourish. The best methods may not even be obvious yet.

On May 16 2025 08:54 Mohdoo wrote:


I agree with the gist of what you and Razyda said. I was a bit lazy with my wording and I apologize for that. In short, I do think a large portion of decisions are best kept out of direct government control. But I do think its worthwhile to point out plenty of existing government mechanisms work well.

Kids can't buy cigarettes, that's a good thing. Age limitations on things are good and effective. It ought to be extended to social media. Social media algorithms are simply too powerful and manipulative to expose to young, developing brains. I don't think its ethical to market products aimed towards children. I'd say everything I advocate for with regards to children is more so about keeping them away from things rather than forcing them into things. The only exception being food and clothing. I think all children should be guaranteed food and clothing from the government. It is too unacceptable for children to live without bare necessities.

My point regarding the vulnerability of children to shitty parents mostly relates to failure to protect. Many parents will smoke cigarettes around their kids. Despite being the kid's parent, they shit the bed when they decide to do that. Same with letting kids have social media.

On May 16 2025 09:42 WombaT wrote:
I’d much rather Minibat smoke like his old man than be subsumed by social media. It costs me money, and it’ll cost me my health if I can’t kick it. But in the interim it’s not mucking with my brain too much, outside of the addiction issue.

The additional challenge is quite large. You’re basically expecting parents to thread a needle of something that long since should have been regulated for adults, never mind children.

I’m not a Luddite either, I like tech, am about to finish up retraining to enter that domain as a career. Technology has tons of enhancement properties.

It feels so pervasive now that what do even good parents do? Hell we’re at the stage where (unlike myself) you’re getting parents who themselves were brought up on it.

In a sense I don’t really see much point regulating it for kids if everyone else is partaking but that mostly comes from a position of pro regulation across the board.

On May 16 2025 00:57 Mohdoo wrote:


I know this story will sound contrived and obviously fake. But I guarantee you my friend had no incentive to make this up. He was visiting his mother, who lives near all his extended family. It’s a poor area and all his extended family are wildly uneducated. He went to dinner with 21 members of his extended family, including his cousins and their kids. At one point during dinner, one of the kids (6 years old) started crying because they realized one of the other kids, also 6 years old, had more followers on some social media thing. My friend said he was depressed beyond measure seeing how absolutely doomed those kids are.

I hope and assume this is an outlier of a situation. But maybe it’s not? As you point out, we are a mostly thoughtful and tech savvy bunch around here. So maybe I don’t realize this is more common

On May 16 2025 10:01 Zambrah wrote:
Social media could have been a good thing, but like all powerful things its grossly tainted by profit motive. Theres no incentive to do good with it when you could instead manipulate people's psychologies in ways that generate maximum profit at the expense of the mental health of the people using it.

Like AI could be a great thing, but investor freaks arent going to be jerkin' off to the thought of LLMs that help scientists and doctors make breakthroughs the same that way they jerk off to the thought of LLMs replacing people's jobs.

On May 16 2025 15:10 Zambrah wrote:


Ive heard AI is useful in science by virtue of its ability to sort through lots of numbers and data extremely quickly and do things like identify potential trends for the actual scientists to look into, not like its gonna be inventing vaccines on its own or anything, but as a tool I've heard it seems like its useful. Certainly not infinity billion dollar industry useful, but not worthless and harmful like ChatGPT and the like

On May 16 2025 18:05 Uldridge wrote:
The most interesting thing I've seen is the ability for an ML approach to find connections on a metasysyem level.
Therapy for A with metabolic deficits in B for example. This is very hard to do for humans because we don't have the time to sift through all the data or the intuition to understand all of human physiology at once, let alone a single organ system.

On May 16 2025 11:15 misirlou wrote:


To be fair, this seems a fairly normal situation. I cried for sucking at Pro Evolution Soccer and getting destroyed by my brother and cousins. Some cry because they loose at football or loosing a race.

I do agree with the need to regulate social media (and it's algorithms) though, for both adults and children. The platforms have been designed to be addictive and we regulate all kinds of addicting stuff.

On May 16 2025 11:05 Razyda wrote:


"Kids can't buy cigarettes, that's a good thing. Age limitations on things are good and effective. It ought to be extended to social media. Social media algorithms are simply too powerful and manipulative to expose to young, developing brains. I don't think its ethical to market products aimed towards children."

See my issue with it, is that this kind of reasoning is quite frankly outdated. ( it is not some sort of jab at you - it is simple statement of fact ). This is sort of few steps demise. It is somewhat hard to explain after few beers, but I will try my best.
See government imposes Social Media ban for anyone under the age of 18. Now that seems brilliant doesnt it? However the very same government needs a way to enforce it ( I mean otherwise it is a joke, not a ban). The conclusion is: we need some sort of digital ID to enforce this rule. Do you see the problem now? Things like digital ID are something which may seem nice on paper, but they are rather terrifying once you give them some thought.

Edit:


"I’d much rather Minibat smoke like his old man than be subsumed by social media." - Wombat that is up to you. I am sorry to say this ( this is not a critic of your parenting), but you have options. Take the little dude to Judo/Muay Thai/Hema/boxing/golf/football/tennis/archery/fishing/improv/chess/whatever. Now, I am not saying you dont do this, I am mostly trying to present possibilities Thing with kids is that they dont know what they want, best thing one can do is to present them with as many possibilities, as one humanly can and hope that some of them will be to their liking. Shitty part of this is, it takes 48 hours a day and if they happened to like something you have not a clue about (luckily I dodged cricket because this abomination is simply unexplainable) then it is 72 hours a day. That is when "toxic masculinity" comes into play. You work 18 hours a day and if your kids want to play with you, then you do that for the rest of the day. It is really simple even though tiring.

On May 17 2025 00:33 WombaT wrote:
...
That said I’d be interested to see if there’s any difference in nations which heavily control internet access to youngsters and their equivalents where that isn’t the case, and what differences and similarities exist.

“Between Walmart and China they should, as is said ‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!”