The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy

I encountered something just the other day that mentioned r/Teachers. I can't remember what it was exactly, but there was definitely a huge caveat about it not being a representative sample.

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.

Buildings don't relate to student scores, they relate to how many students you can teach. If the new buildings house the same number, as before but were actually required then they spent money on basic human dignity. If the buildings were not required, the money was wasted. That is the opposite of spending it on resources.

Teachers, more of them, with more training is one of the main things that is needed. Increase the amount of one on one time. Adjust the curriculum to what each student needs. Measure the improvement in individual students, not the improvement in the mean of the lot of them.

Only teach things after the principles that they depend upon have been learned.

The postwar American glory period depended on the fact that half the brain power of society couldn’t get a job except in teaching. Now the sort of women who taught me in high school are federal judges and captains of industry. Teacher salaries would need to be two or three times as high to get the quality of the period of American greatness.

There hasn't been a preciptious drop in outcomes either. There have been statistically significant drops in average test scores, but the large number of students who take those tests means that even small differences can be statistically significant. Generally, the average test score just fluctuates within a few percentage points over the long term. The differences between individual students are much larger. If you pick two random students in a year and compare their scores, they'll likely be much farther apart than the average scores of different years.

As a corollary, the variation that people personally experience at small scales (e.g. high-school teachers comparing the various students they encountered throughout their career) is dominated by changes in class composition. Some years, there are just randomly more bad students than in others. When the students seem to be getting worse over time, the teacher might attribute this to societal decline; when the students seem to be getting better, they credit their skill at teaching instead.

Thus things are constantly getting worse and the sky is falling, yet somehow it never makes contact with the ground, and when you compare with ancient records, it's more or less where it has always been.

I'm not sure which precipitous less than a decade drop you are referring to, but I would be inclined to think, in the last decade, a period of social isolation and absence of education might have been a factor.

Resources have never been higher. Theres an expectation now that the schools will do everything and pay for everything but its never enough.

Nationalized social media bans and restricted device usage while in a classroom are different things. Why would TikTok ever belong in the classroom?

Of course if even educational use of laptops is restricted then personal mobile devices would also be. They are already banned in my country.

Revolutions have been fought over the freedom to act without constant surveillance. The obviousness and enormity of a need for privacy is well established.

We have to accept that there are policies with obvious and enormous downsides and essentially zero upsides, because they exist and get tried from time to time. Eastof (and the article) are providing an argument that this is one of those times. A pretty reasonable one too, I forget the implementation details of the UK scheme but in Australia and most of Europe the authoritarian bent of the people implementing these age restriction bans is concerning - it looks like they're setting up a general purposes minority targeting systems. I'm not sure how they're going to justify that and I don't recall seeing anyone make a reasonable argument to justify it yet beyond "We can and we're going to. Trust us and think of the children".

Your argument seems to be that the issue is more nuanced than anyone else is saying, which is cool and all but then it sits with you to identify what the nuances you want to talk about are. Pointing out that someone else has identified different tradeoffs than you have is something of a given since that is the case with almost any pairing of people.

I mean, you're cutting off the qualifier with your selected quote. They are clearly talking about online freedom:

> 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...

Americans don't care because the elite will send their kids to private school and raise children in special elitist bubbles.

The proles are allowed to amuse themselves to death.

The last option is the only correct one. A simple HTTP header would do the trick.

Governments always "Think of the kids" until they have to invest in them.

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.

> except in food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care, or general well-being

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.

You're getting swept up in a narrative that doesn't reflect reality. Public surveillance cameras and "petty regulation" are not authoritarian. The UK has a crime problem and these are needed to maintain some sense of public order, the government is democratically elected and the people are not opposed to these nor is there any wide spread abuse of this.

This seems like a popular law you don’t agree with though most of your country does for valid reasons. Nothing about that seems authoritarian especially with actual auth stuff on this side of the pond.

Seems like a drop in the bucket for these corporations. If anything, it'll just entrench the existing social media sites further and be another operating cost for them.

I'll believe this is actually about protecting children when they do anything to address the myriad of other issues young people today are facing. So far that doesn't seem to be happening.

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.

That is a weird analogy because so much of modern food borne illnesses we deal with today are because of the fact that we centralized food production so any contamination effects hundreds or more people at a time which necessitated strict safety regulations. If you ate Aunt Tracey's stuff and got sick, maybe a handful of people at most get sick, if you eat Aunt Tracey's Original Recipe Cupcake™, thousands of people could get sick.

what a wild comparison, millions (billions?) of humans have died from food-borne disease, and yet we do in fact still let people very casually sell food to the public (even unpasteurized milk in the US)

This is a social media ban. It's not going to fix any of the issues you're talking about, and there are far greater risks and costs. I say this as someone who despises social media, too.

No, I'm repeating the "The net effect is negative for more people than it's positive for." argument again.

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.

Psychologists call this black or white thinking - in this case, either something works perfectly or it's useless.

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.

I had a kind of social media when I was a teenager. It mostly involved dialing into a BBS or two, and its easy to think that it was harmless because it was a positive thing for me, but even I have to admit that there were dangers and even though those online places were similar they were also very different. Social media platforms are designed to be harmful in ways that a BBS just wasn't. There were no algorithms trained on data collected from multiple sources and focused on driving endless engagement. There were no people being paid to pretend to be regular users in order to secretly push products on me. There were games, including some that some parents would probably find objectionable, but they didn't constantly nag at me to buy things with real money (or virtual currency that could only be reasonably obtained with real money), and corporations didn't populate those games with brand ambassadors and ads.

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.

It's not that people can't learn something from youtube, but that's not where most of people (not just the children) are spending most of the time. Just because someone watches a few videos about something useful to them that doesn't mean they aren't also being exposed to things that are harmful to them.

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.