Play video games, read a book, be bored and come up with their own games. These are all fine. Social media is absolutely not more valuable than that.

▲

sandspar 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Teenagers don't need solitary enrichment. They need places to hang around with other teenagers. That's what they used social media for. Now we've taken away social media, but we, the adults, haven't rebuilt places where teenagers can hang out together.

Invite your buddies over - your parents are nervously hovering. Hang out at the park - adults find you strange and might call the cops. Schools close at 3, malls gone, libraries full of homeless people.

What's going to happen is the rich kids will be fine, shuttled around from activity to activity. And the poor kids, the kids who used their phones as escapes from dull, grey homes - they'll suffer.

	▲	cromka 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> They need places to hang around with other teenagers. That's what they used social media for. Sure, that's a nice metaphor, but a picture-perfect version is one with predatory Ads everywhere, weird adults pretending they're kids asking them for intimate photos, bullies coming in and out calling them names and foreign agencies trying to radicalize their political views so they hate that immigrant kid or that somewhat flamboyant boy playing with them. Meanwhile their parents pretend they don't see the problem or actually don't see the problem because they don't care about them at all. And neither does their school – unless it's one of those that began to ban phones.