A new UN report raised concerns on Wednesday about the excessive use of smartphones, calling for them to be banned in schools worldwide. According to the UN's education, science and culture agency UNESCO, the over-use of mobile phones impacts learning.
I understand the logic that UNESCO is trying to make. However instead of a global ban on the device itself, ban the addictive parts of it. TikTok and most other corporate social media are designed to keep everyone, kids and adults alike as addicted to the platform as possible. Phones are still a valuable resource for a student, including being able to call in the event of an emergency or having access to maps or other things.
Ban the actual evil on the phones, not the phones themselves
Tiktok actually has (or had, last I looked at it) a lot of value for marginalized groups finding content made by and for each other. I used it for a while before the ads got to be too much, and I had NEVER seen so many regular trans and nonbinary and ace and aro people getting to talk to each other about whatever instead of only about gender and orientation (and seeing them existing as regular people in video form is just really fucking comforting if you’re not around others like you in real life), nor so many informative videos by and about disabled folks. T
he platform has (had?) an incredible ability to enable discovery of niche communities, and I rapidly learned a hell of a lot about accessibility (from videos by actual disabled people about their struggles and solutions and day to day lives), about modern Native American cultures (especially there were a lot of Native American amateur comedians that were very funny) and concerns (f the pipeline), about ex-mormon experiences, about autistic people (yes, there’s a lot of misinformation on tiktok about neurodivergence, but there’s ALSO a lot of actual neurodivergent people talking about what their day to day experiences are actually like in a way that’s really damn hard to find in other places that are dominated by Doctors and parent-directed articles), and people/culture from India (before India banned Tiktok), and so on and on, that I wouldn’t have learned about otherwise.
And there were more successful female and Black comedians than I’ve ever seen elsewhere. I had more videos by Black people and Asian people and women then I’ve ever even come close to having in my youtube feed; it’s not even comparable in that respect, really.
All of which long-winded paragraphs is to say, don’t ban Tiktok, or other specific platforms. Especially not when the bills that are ostensibly to do that hand absurd amounts of power to government to do the same to future platforms with little to no oversight and with little to no justification. And more platforms just like them will crop up out of the ashes anyways.
Instead, ban individually-personalized advertising, aka the root motivator that makes companies want to peel every scrap of information out of their users in the first place.
Individually targeted advertising hasn’t been a thing for that long, even though it feels so ubiquitous and unstoppable now, and for decades companies did just fine with population-level targeting like newspaper ads used to be.
I don’t think the individualized ad targeting has added anything of value to society.
Having typed all that, I re-read your comment and, yeah, I suppose schools could at least block social media sites on their school wifi. That can only do so much when they’ve all got data connections anyways, though.
Anyway I agree that phones shouldn’t be banned. It’s infeasible, inadvisable, and counterproductive.
Despite all those positives, the foundation of the platform is built in an abusive, addictive way. We shouldn’t ban any social media applications, we should regulate them to end their abbhorent practices / business models. I totally agree that we should ban targetted advertising, although there is a good middleground solution as well: banning targetted advertising which relies on cloud-based AI. If recommendation algorithms could run locally on your phone, with a way to validate everything is processed locally, you could keep the modern formula for social media while simultaneously maintaining privacy. I would imagine the suggestions would become more primitive to account for the extra processing power, but at least people can continue to doomscroll if they’d like. My idea applies better to post recommendations than advertising, but if ad recommendations could be kept anonymous (the entire system would need to be open source), you could have a privacy-respecting service AND tailored feeds / advertising.
Regulate Social Media (including domestic corporations) > Ban Social Media > The Current Situation, imo.
I appreciate your comment. I have personally avoided tiktok due to other parts of the internet (as well as coworkers and friends) portrayal of it. However you shed some light into things I would actually find value in as a person. I do see this sense of community as very good thing. My concern is more on the side of how addicted one can get to it, but I assume if it is giving them a community they never had, is it a bad thing?
I actually quite like your conclusion. Targeted ads have added nothing of value to the common person. I guess it also is part of the reason I blame the addictive nature of these apps, they want you addicted to show ads and make money.
There is no way to do that without giving the school remote control over the phone, which would be a security and privacy violation.
I was moreso referring to dealing with the dark patterns that apps use in general, not the school doing that.
I was with you until “TikTok and most other corporate social media”. It is all other" parts of internet that are not allowed for 13 year olds.
I would assume the average school child is more concerned about instagram or tiktok vs other parts of the internet. I would not be against finding a way to limit access to other sites, but I would prefer a privacy respecting way. Just requiring an ID is a shitty solution and screws over adults more then it helps kids (they will find grandma’s id.) If a privacy valuing solution is brought up I would be 1000% supporting it.
I think trchnical solution is not s problem, if we decide what needs to be applied we can do it.
If kid finds grandmother’s id - it is simple enough, punish grandma for providing her id, it will teach adult to be responsible. Additionally, not all kids will be able to do it. I doubt they will follow us.
My opinion, eve if it is obvious, parents are responsible Punish them for not protecting their kids.
Wouldn’t that effectively restrict a lot of platforms to people age 16 or older? I am a bit worried that such an id law could cut off younger queer teens dealing with abuse that’s severe enough to qualify as abuse in the academic sense, but not in the eyes of the law, from vital community… ~Strawberry
Yes the effects would be terrible for everyone, that’s why I am against it.