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Most teachers seeing generational changes are raising five alarm fires around how badly the kids are doing. Actually testing kids is showing a startling reverse Flynn effect [1]. I’m curious what the author has in terms of actual evidence here?
[1] https://pure.eur.nl/en/publications/the-negative-flynn-effec...
Most teachers have been asking for more resources for decades, warning of the consequences of not doing so. It seems a little on the nose to ignore their warnings and when the consequences manifest opt to blame something else entirely.
What’s especially interesting is that a lot of teachers take a paycut [1] to go teach in private school partly because the kids are better adjusted, rich kids have more comprehensive childcare and don’t need to rely on screens/social media for the gaps in parenting.
For a taste of all these details, go on r/Teachers
[1]: https://www.ccu.edu/blogs/cags/2011/12/teaching-in-private-s...
There is correlation between socioeconomic status and academic performance, but it is not the be-all-and-end-all. Schools serving lower socioeconomic populations should have vastly higher resources to address the additional challenges. One of those resources, is the number of teachers.
A teacher taking a paycut for a different job is not because they want less money, it is because the ratio of what they are paid to the work that is asked of them is better in the lower paid job. That is exactly a resource issue. If you pay a teacher 20% more and ask them to do a job that takes two teachers, then it is unsurprising that they will go for a job that more reasonably asks of them proportional to what they are paid.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly0vk77vdko https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jun/15/educa...
“Later this year a ban on mobiles in schools – even for educational use – comes into force.”
It’s obvious to most that taking away the laptop while leaving the TikTok will not have the intended effect.
Of course if even educational use of laptops is restricted then personal mobile devices would also be. They are already banned in my country.
Random anecdotal claims from population A contradict random anecdotal claims from population B.
> I’m curious what the author has in terms of actual evidence here?
Well, it can't be any worse than you have, in that the paper you link to doesn't show anything about what causes that negative Flynn effect. It does speculate, and social media is not on even on the authors' list of guesses.
Did you have anything relevant?
Note if the article called for instituting a school board ban instead of a country-wide ban, I’d support it. But the article is fundamentally questioning the existence of the problem which was a silly over-reaction.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/us/social-media-schools.h...
Otherwise, as Bertolt Brecht said, the government might simply dissolve the people and elect a different one.
This may come as a shock but neither China or Russia had their first encounter with losses of individual freedom in the 1990s. This is what the OP is talking about, this is the kind of shibboleth of online libertarianism that has little to do with real world policy outcomes. You'll find many similar laws concerning child safety in Norway that you find in China, different political systems and cultures can value the same things, even implement similar laws, without converging on the same political system.
In most countries on earth protecting children is a collective job, not a parents private business. A functioning and safe social fabric is a condition for successful families.
Just worth mentioning one data point. In the US 50% of young men (aged 18-49) now participate in online betting or gambling, likely as a consequence of the saturation of ads on social media and gaming platforms. Good luck with your parental responsibility when an entire country operates like this.
> this takes a sledgehammer to the core of internet privacy. In all cases in the world where this has been done before like China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after.
Russia's first online censorship was for truly abhorrent things. It moved on to become a ban on things the government didn't like. The book "The Red Web" does an excellent job detailing how this downward slide took place. It wasn't overnight, but it was a constant effort by those in power to erode privacy and freedom, and the first step was putting in place a basic censorship apparatus.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andrei-soldatov/the...
The government does government things.
This doesn't seem like something crazy.
--
Don't let the kids wander Las Vegas / the adult section of town (the Internet) unsupervised?
Or even better:
Have any website that's intended for children make a Legal Claim that they are rated Child Safe / Friendly so they fall under Advertising Law coverage and/or soliciting a minor.
Then have user agents (browsers) used by children configured to limit them to those places. Or even pay for a special VPN that limits access to those places.
We need some kind of verification system that gives no extra information about users to the platforms, but I don't know if there's a true ZK way; it might require government involvement. I think that's fine. Govts could certainly run an age-verification system, give a signed yes or no token back to the user, with some permanently applied jitter per person so that platforms can't use cookies from returning users to figure out their birthday. As long as the government program has strict oversight to ensure it's not saving information about who's visiting what sites, it seems fine, or at least vastly better than entrusting photos of IDs to private 3rd parties.
"Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, began closing teen accounts from 4 December last year. It said anyone mistakenly kicked off could use government ID or provide a video selfie to prove their age."
So the bulk is done as you say but they still need* an age verification system for when they over-stepped.
* need here is because of the way the laws were written AFAIK.
While increasing harm to many others. Nobody ever wants to mention that part. It is not a clear "child safety" win. Personally I think it's probably a significant net loss.
Wealthier people who can afford to have one parent stay home or have babysitters or nannies who will actually supervise the kid can do a much better job monitoring and redirecting than when both parents work long hours and have no money.
So poorer kids are going to spend more time scrolling brain rot, which may lead to worse academic performance and concentration problems. They’re also more likely to get sucked into any number of garbage social media propagated cults, wacko ideologies, and dumb fads.
If only 50% of parents enforce the rules suddenly half your class isn't there and it doesn't become such a big deal to be missing out and it's less appealing for the kids who are allowed still.
I'd prefer it to be voluntarily organised like https://www.waituntil8th.org/ but even a bad solution is going to have a major improvement on society even if social media is less private due to the ID issue. It's not like you don't share everything with these companies anyhow. I'm pretty confident that if you are a regular user of any large social network today they could identify you 100% of the time already even without your ID.
Government makes everyone poorer through their terrible policies -> parents need to work more to stay above water -> nanny state must grow to take care of kids -> terrible government policies entrench. Nope, don't want it
The true think of the children has always been national security.
The cuts to education were the last thing that disengaged kids from the world, of course they are going to self soothe
Then suddenly it becomes performative posturing with maybe a little extra spending here and there.
I'm not a fan of social media. I'm also not a fan of authoritarian governments.
From my POV those two things are more similar than they are different.
Parents activate over their own kids. They’re seeking to protect them and will call their electeds and knock on doors and potentially back a primary challenger if you ignore them.
But keep goading with "it's technically impossible" and watch what's left of the Internet turn into a government licensing fest, because it is entirely technically possible. Imagine how much cleaner and shiny the nation's pipes would be if we simply throttled any ciphertext flow that couldn't be matched to an Ofcom license holder. They'd never do that. No country in the world has done that, right?
It’s ‘technically impossible’ to stop convenience stores selling alcohol or pornography to minors, or to make people to adhere to contracts. Non-engineers don’t care what’s technically possible, they care what’s legally possible, or societally possible.
It’s the same thing when techies try to decipher what _exactly_ a law does and look for loopholes, when to the rest of society the standard is ‘whatever a reasonable person thinks it does’.
You need to make the argument about why the proposed thing is bad for society for it to be taken seriously.
Context: the government has objectively become increasingly authoritarian, with the partial elimination of jury trials, the criminalisation of peaceful protest, the use of anti-terror sentencing laws for activities that are clearly not terrorist, and other actions which set up ideal conditions for an oppressive dictatorship.
It's hard to take the idea that this is about concern for teens seriously when the PM bypassed civil service vetting norms to make a known friend of Epstein ambassador to the US.
Funnily, I'm also not seeing any talk about holding the social media companies themselves accountable for any of the damage they've done to society.
It would be way better to just reduce the harms in general by e.g. regulating algorithms. Those are things that you can do when people are using platform that you still have some control over.
It is not even 10% effective, and rightly so. It’s so absurdly easy to work around that the whole thing is silly. If the kids can’t be on Instagram they’ll find an equally welcoming place like Roblox to hang out.
You aren’t going to stop kids from being kids, and you probably shouldn’t try.
Note how we’re trusting all these US companies with their safety because any of these companies in the EU would immediately be regulated out of existence?
You are saying that "Anything we do is better than nothing." Which I might agree with in certain situations, but this here is the wrong solution to the wrong problem.
Next to impossible to get a person who believes this that they're engaging in a cognitive distortion though. I tried the same thing you're doing, once. I gave up. They will die on this hill and then wonder why they lost long after everyone else had moved on.
It's possible to make effective arguments in line with their values. They simply don't want to be helped.
This is sort of like the illegal-immigration debate. If you’re serious about fixing it, go after employers. Same for underage social media users. If you want to actually solve it, you have to penalize the platforms.
they will apparently be fined around AUD$50M if they fail to do due diligence (not sure how the legislation phrases. I am not sure if any social media company has at this stage. Unfortunately we have a dictator as a so-called e-safety commissioner backed up by an equally useless PM who seem to think all parents are unable to monitor themselves or their kids online behaviour
I think that's expected.
>> Apparently the age checking there only applies to newly created accounts
Social media companies had to try and identify existing accounts owned by < 16 year olds and start removing them at the start of this year. I'd guess that process is slow and they don't do it unless they're certain. But if they stop new accounts effectively then within a few years the ban would be pretty effective.
it’s proving unsuccessful in australia and it’ll be unsuccessful in the uk. it’s way too easy to circumvent with vpns and social media is not going to prevent it because it’s not in their interest.
governments should put their thinking cap on and regulate the addicting ux patterns that social media uses…
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9824zvpz9po
The study they linked is just self reported data from an internet survey. I'm sure that 13 year olds who don't get enough sleep because they're endlessly scrolling through ads, influencers, and disinformation don't see any problem with it the same way that a survey of alcoholics will show that beer is great, alcohol improves their lives, and that of course they can quit any time they want.
I'm not even suggesting that this ban will be effective or helpful, or that such bans are a good thing, but we know that these platforms are used to prey on their users, that "negative experiences" can be found easily, and that there's actual evidence of actual harms caused or facilitated by social media (including corpses). It should take a lot more than the opinions of just over a thousand children to discredit all of that and cause us to assume there's no problems with these platforms, how they're being used, or the effects they have on children.
While the financial motive is clear, they must all believe it to an extent, because social media made their careers and changed their lives.
The reality is that the vast majority of kids aren't interested in learning video editing or movie directing, they are mindlessly consuming AI-generated videos and similar content served to them. 30-second videos on random facts sprinkled here and there aren't education.
Not that I think this ban will help, but downplaying the harm to children is a bit too much coming from people with ties to these platforms, like the author of this article.
Of course I agree the pointless AI generated shit is a massive waste of time, but it doesn’t really matter what it actually is as long as it allows them to connect over a shared thing. I think it’s far more important we ensure there’s spaces for kids to meet that are not purely digital.
It's too easy to look back and think "I survived online", but what adults today experienced online as kids is very different from what exists online for kids today. It's not just parents who are saying so. The social media platform's own research shows that it's harmful.
Also the idea that they can't do these things without social media or YouTube is absurd. The people actually interested in learning something new will go down even deeper rabbit holes, try things themselves, and come out better than they would have following some YouTube tutorials.
There are a lot of benefits to social media, and it could be a positive thing with fewer downsides, but there are basically no regulations to stop platforms from exploiting and harming children. The industry also refuses to regulate itself and prevent harms (many of which they created/cause in the first place). Parents clearly need to do a better job protecting their kids, but I have to admit that it's difficult when their children are being targeted and manipulated by companies with trillions of dollars while parents have to spend most of their time working just to keep their kids housed and fed.
I didn't get sleep as a teenager because I read books. Should we ban those too?
Its particularly frustrating cos they ain't even done the OAuth properly like the Aussies have taken a pass at. Could even put an NGO as a shim in-between to protect privacy. But noOoOo, we'll ignore all the tech advice, do something shit and then follow it up by trying to "ban" VPNs when it clearly doesn't work, because we're thick.
Some form of malicious compliance is necessary here.
Social media has been a pretty clear net-negative for society. The opinions of a guy in away connected with the industry are irrelevant.
As usual when tech people are asked to do something to control the harms of their products the excuse is "you don't understand, it's not possible". The author thinks preventing children sharing nude images on platforms is some impossible task - yet Apple has already implemented pretty good controls for this.
I'm not saying the regulations are perfect but continuing to ignore the problems caused by social media is irresponsible.
There was an interview with a kid in the UK that went viral yesterday. The interviewer pointed out the kid had spent 9 hours on a screen the previous weekend and asked what they would do now. The answer - stare at the wall. Funny. Maybe said in jest. But I think it still sums up the reason we need to do something about this. If kids literally don't know what to do with themselves without a screen the future isn't looking good. Another kid said it was taking away his planned career...as an influencer.
> 9 hours on a screen
> do something about this
Yeah ban cellphones. And I don't mean just for children. If you want to be a shut in nerd that spends "9 hours on a screen" then you'd best sit down in front of a computer.
It was supposed to be a kind of satire of his own time, but it was in the end a perfect prediction of what is coming to us now.
Scary to see how far will go the Pigs that are in command in UK, France, Canada, ...
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6810978a41bbc42489eaf...