I feel like education, not abstinence, is the way forward.

Prohibition doesn’t work. Educating consumers and holding companies accountable works. It historically takes time though for that pressure to accumulate to the point of having political will.

We also need teen social media education - like we have about alcohol and drugs. Where we’re frank about the real research. Don’t moralize. Talk about the realities of the situation.

Prohibition works very well - it just has externalized costs.

Excessive drinking was curtailed by 70% during the alcohol prohibition era, and acute drinking was a problem (it was more concentrated).

There is zero doubt how much healthier at least some people would have been.

The price paid was limiting freedom for many, and some increase in crime.

Allowing children to smoke and drink from age 12 would be a social disaster, it's not even an argument - obviously - the 'prohibition' works - and in that case, there's nary any negative externality.

Yes, there is 'lost economic potential' from not having kids buy smokes, there is a degree of authoritarianism, but those are trade-offs we are happy to make.

The question is the degree of restrictions on basic freedom, and the direct / indirect externalizations - aka 'underground pubs', 'black market', 'lost benefits' etc.

For social media - kids 'sneaking' onto regular social media is hardly an enormous hazard.

There are also 'critical mass' problems - for example, its' very hard to get people away from a system if they will 'feel left out'.

The negative externalizations of a teen social media ban are likely most related to the positive aspects of social media aka community, connection etc outside of school.

Twitch, for example, I think is fine for kids.

There is probably a happy medium that's a bit nicer, for example, banning phones in schools is something that everyone seems to be ok with - that sets a good baseline.

We may want other social media places for 12-18 to have parental opt-ins and to be a bit more assertive around harassment and bullying - which is a very serious thing, and very pernicious as well. It's really hard to monitor.

Creating 'PG spaces' is probably what most parents want.

The worst negative externalization from all of this is probably state-implemented age verification, identity issues, and the leaks, failures and excessive authoritarianism that can come about aka 'slippery slope', which is a serious argument. Even then - there are smart ways to do this which avoid many of those risks.

No, educating customers doesn't work. What works is creating safe products. Remove algorithm recommendations as the default option, make collecting personal individual data for any purpose other than what the customer explicitly wants, and you will see that suddenly "social networks" and every other product becomes safe to use for everyone.

Prohibition will work exceptionally well for social media, which relies on a herd effect. If you can't send most of your friends memes on Instagram, you're a lot less likely to spend time on it.

In what way does prohibition not “work”? It would be helpful to understand the success metric when evaluating whether a solution will enable the metric to be achieved

Would you recommend that same approach to other vices like gambling, prostitution, and heroine? If not why are some vices more distinguished for you than others?

Also, you can have both: substance education and prohibition. Those factors need not be exclusive.

This is not about kids. It's about surveillance.

We also need to talk more about the third not-mutually-exclusive option: Legal liability if/when things go wrong.

It's often buried because the people making money dislike it, so much so that they will lobby the government to impose wide bans. Especially if:

* The ban makes somebody else pay most of the costs of protecting "the children" against their design-choices or business-model.

* The ban gives them a blanket pass for almost any exploitative design against adults or other acceptable targets.

The way school taught us about the Prohibition was that everyone disobeyed the law and actually drank more. That's not true though.

So the surveillance and the manipulation your kids are exposed to is safe? How does that work?

You can't educate around something that's predatory in nature.

IMHO the solution should involve defining what's natural social media and what is predatory social media. The natural one can be a system that connects real people with each other and operates discovery algorithms that have %100 open source and run on open data. When its real people interacting you can educate around it, you can have it with anonymous accounts too but you can develop protections against bad actors by actually looking into the thing to see what's happening. In real world that's how people interact and although damage from things like lying or gossip still exist we also have ways to navigate around it by teaching manners, ethics, etiquette, politeness, fairness etc.

Then there's the unnatural social media, that is most of the social media today. It is not a natural human interactions, it is managed human interactions for profit or influence. Information is hidden from the participants but it is not hidden from the host of the gathering and the host develops tools to create conflicts or control for its own benefit.

You know what else has prohibition? Alcohol and drugs for minors.

Good luck educating a 12-year-old whose friends all have social media accounts.

You can ban things for minors just fine. It’s already a thing.

When are we ever going to get beyond raising awareness/educating bad/arguably-bad things? All of these manufactured wants, needs—totally synthetic. The business model is to prey on people. But the answer is yet more things to lecture about?

By going beyond that I mean real alternatives. Like Christian abstinence organizations might not just have a say-no-to-alcohol stance, sit at home and be bored. No, they sometimes even have social gatherings and activities. They do the same thing for students. The stance towards alcohol-abstinent students is not simply, well you can choose not to drink but heh, most of your peers drink and most of the late-night activities revolve around that. They offer alternatives: alcohol-free activities.

What would I give to be able to opt out of the things that I find bad for myself? Like really, ban myself from say buying cigarettes with my credit card. But is that ever on the table? No. Just the discourse pit of freedom and unfreedom. Where freedom happens to coincide with Big Tech’s bottom line.

And education.

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