You've misunderstood this conversation and/or are applying statistics extremely poorly. This is not serving whatever point you're trying to make, and is a distraction from productive discourse.

Again, you being right doesn’t change anything. This is the world we live in, and that means we need to work with what we have. Which includes inattentive parents.

Well yes, street smart is both.

It's a temporary solution based on the delusion that you can't work on a systemic level to reduce criminal or thuggish behavior.

Ultimately I do think some form of self defense is good to know, but you can't expect it to be effective than situational.

Having a cell phone isn't going to help even a little bit if there's an active shooter at a school. The only thing a kid should be doing in that situation is hiding, or escaping if it's safe to do so. Likely it'll make things worse... some kid will get a loud notification on their phone, which will give away their location to the shooter.

The predator example sounds pretty flimsy and unlikely to me as well.

Honestly, your reaction to this just seems to follow the fear-based rationales that people put forth for a lot of things, when the fears are overblown or the risks are low.

In the United States specifically, deaths from violent crime have mostly been trending down over the past few decades, with the exception of a year or so.

> - Before cell phones, we were also in an age of far less mass violence in American schools. I completely empathize with parents wanting their kids to have an emergency contact device, given the relative increase in violence at schools.

A very US-centric problem that requires a very US-centric solution. No need to drag rest of the world into that sh*thole.

Anxieties of parents who can't manage their insecurities and other issues shouldn't propagate into how kids are raised in general, especially on families which can handle their emotions better. Some freedom, some unknown and yes some form of risk is part of it. I love my kids just like the next person but this emotional need to helicopter parent them is pretty toxic to their personality further down the line.

The stuff about abuse is so typical about any such topic - a slippery slope when there is no end on how many additional restriction on society should be applied just to prevent some potential next situation. If you live in properly dangerous place, then move and don't just follow money at all costs life is too short for that, much smarter and easy to solve than enveloping your kids in ever-increasing surveillance and security.

You have to realize that this approach really harms them in subtle but powerful ways. Then ask yourself - is the extra safety I am gaining not actually outweighed by extra damage I am making on them? I don't claim I know the objective answer, but gut feeling tells me they may be +-equal at best and at the end everybody loses.

Perhaps you have the causality reversed, friendo?

You don’t need to argue to anyone you can do what you want and lay down whatever law you want.

How does it not work? The phone is in your pocket and not your kids during the school day.

> While moderation teams are usually doing a stellar job,

This is an assumption, that I would argue, is more muddled in practice.

T&S teams largely want to do a good job, but they are a cost center, and currently they are being defunded or shifted into simple compliance.

The biggest weakness, and the current shift, is for the conversation to move towards talking about the benefits of moderation to community, rather than only reduction of harms.

That process has largely started since last year, and the defunding of teams is also underway.

All of that aside, we do not have any publicly available data, or independent third part assessment that gives us some estimated prevalence rate. (Not that prevalence is truly calculable)

"This is good for this" doesn't mean it's the only thing we use?

People are real eager to tear down a point that was simply "maybe don't let kids use algo-feed social media, because it's an actual garbage fire". The vast majority of the Internet does not have the same problems, to the same degree, as places like Instagram and TikTok. Some of it may have other problems and may be worth looking out for! But most of those other places also have, like, some redeeming features.

Am I also to let my kids wander in toxic waste dumps? I'm pretty surprised at the kind of push-back this is getting. I don't got time to supervise my kids on TikTok or whatever, so... no TikTok. I also don't have time to supervise them playing with boxes of rusty razor blades, so I try not to give them access to boxes of rusty razor blades, either [edit: I can predict the disingenuous replies to this part, so further suppose the blades are bubble-gum flavored and literal hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on packaging and presenting the box and blades to encourage kids to put them in their mouths; there, that's closer to algo feed social media, pretty much no reason to engage nor allow your kids near it, loooots of reason to keep it way the hell away].

This seems really straightforward and reasonable to me.

Exactly.

My kid has a smartphone but no data plan; no social media; can't take it to school.

When I did that, I was the annoying one, who they fought every inch of the way.

When the school banned phones in the playground, I was suddenly one of the first to get it right, in their eyes.

I'm trying to do my job too. But we need certain rules to be consistent throughout our society. Even if they will be broken, it matters that the rules are there and we can agree to them.