You get a cabinet with a bunch of cubbie holes, kids put their phone in at the beginning of class, they take it out at the end of class. They can even lock and each kid takes a key with them if theft is a concern. It doesn't seem that complicated. They have these things outside every SCIF. I know they exist.
So the current situation with out-of-control phone use in schools is interesting/puzzling to me, because clearly something's changed since then—but I don't think "better smartphones" are the differentiating factor here. Something's shifted with how schools enforce (or don't enforce) these policies, or with kids' relationship to their phones (and believe me, I was plenty hooked on mine back then too :P), or something else entirely.
It's also puzzling when people argue that smartphones have opened a Pandora's box that makes it impossible to control student behavior—because I know firsthand that that's not true!
[1] I think the threat of punishment also forced us to be relatively discreet about it. If you're texting in class, you have your phone on silent, brightness all the way down, barely sticking out of your bag...
[2] Some teachers admittedly gave more of a shit than others, but I rarely saw students taking advantage of that in a disruptive way—the most blatant thing you'd see is a kid listening to music on headphones during art class or something. I might've been the biggest offender in that regard, because I would occasionally bust out a Wiimote and N64 emulator to play Mario 64 on my phone, but I knew when I could get away with that and when I couldn't.
Almost every kid has a phone...if the phone isn't in the cubby they aren't counted as being there. Cabinet locked at beginning of class.
There are only 2 students out of his entire year that don't have a phone and he makes allowances for them.
> In talking to teachers across the country, the reasons phone policies don't work or are not implemented center on three main issues: safety (parents want their children to be reachable, especially during our era of heightened school violence), liability (phones are expensive, and in some districts, teachers have been held liable when they confiscated a phone the student later claimed was damaged), and lack of clear, consistent policy support (it can be difficult to rally an entire staff around a policy, maintain energy for its consistent enforcement, and make sure the work of its enforcement is upheld equitably).
Phones are powerful tools. Ideally kids would learn how to use them properly while respecting their sharp edges. Ya know, more work for teachers on budgets that are already under attack and such.
By the way, most parents I speak to would love to have their kids off their phones and focusing on school during the day. This whole "parents, emergency" argument seems highly suspicious to me.
But you don’t even have to take the phone out of the possession of the student.
They use these at some phone free concerts.
If a child says they don’t have any cigarettes or a knife etc. etc. are you going to search them?
Most kids follow the rules. A few troublemakers with phones won’t make a difference and can be easily handled by existing disciplinary actions.
I don't understand why this is hard to enforce, or requires special laws. We had rules about not using (feature) phones back when I was in middle school (~2002), and you just kept your phone in your backpack/pocket until the class was over. It worked.
I have four kids in school and while extreme incidents are rare, if I set my kid to school with a phone it would be to contact me in an emergency. I completely agree with no phones out, on silent, etc., but I’m unsure how I feel about schools taking away tools that could be used to get help.
They have done well in districts my kids have been in.
State wide top down rules is too disconnected from the front lines for me to believe they’re anything but legislative theater.
They need a state law to back them up so that they can tell the parents to take it to their legislature instead of the principal.
I'm a student in an IT technical school. The only thing this affected is now instead of my classmates playing on their phones during class, they're now loudly playing card games - and now people who do want to learn can't because the teacher has to constantly stop and yell at the people playing cards.
I think students should be able to do whatever they want during breaks - they can do actually useful things with their devices, other than scrolling social media or playing games.
Also, this new ban completely eliminated kahoot and similar, since phones are collected at the start of the day and giving them out for a class involves incredible amounts of paperwork. (So much for modern teaching/learning methods)
From [1]:
> A co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill intended to protect children from the dangers of social media and other online content appeared to suggest in March that the measure could be used to steer kids away from seeing transgender content online.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/sena...
As someone with a troubled teen and a witness to numerous other parents dealing with troubled teens, it's virtually impossible to prevent them from doing whatever they want these days unless you literally lock them up 24/7. Even then they will weaponize reporting you to CPS with lies about abuse. Many of these kids are growing up in perfectly decent homes and taught well by their parents, but they get influenced by their peers to cause trouble.
Can social media be addictive? Yes. Should we trust the government when it claims it wants to "protect the children?" Absolutely not.
This will end up being about enabling surveillance, harassment of minorities and policing political wrongthink, like every other such initiative. And it's kind of sad that Hacker News, which is usually critical of the motives of government almost to a fault, is willing to let its hatred of social media excuse naked and authoritarian power grabs like this.
Like y'all rise up if Apple tries to track CP on people's phones but if someone declared all social media illegal tomorrow most people here would have a party.
Western governments do a pretty good job of protecting kids from labour exploitation, for example.
But that's because it's relatively easy to enforce. Protecting them from other harms is more difficult and involves tradeoffs with personal or parental freedoms.
I really don't think these initiatives are intentional power grabs... although you're correct that opportunist entitites will exploit these regulations to empower themselves.
Sorry I call bull on this. In the first part of your comment you say 'agree 100%' and in the latter part you yourself say 'how low support has plummeted' and imply social media is to blame. In what way is 'low support' == 'agree 100%' ? It sounds like you're calling for some form of censorship to enforce 100% agreement.
Also, it shouldn't be the role of social media to ensure the existence of Israel, even if one assumes that opposition to their actions in Gaza is de facto opposition to their existence as a state, which I wouldn't.
Also what you're describing immediate, unfiltered journalism which provides one of the strongest arguments against having social media be regulated by governments. Seeing the cruelty and violence of government unfiltered by media gatekeepers and in realtime is a good thing. Americans should have the opportunity to question their government's unwavering support for Israel and the consequences of their own imperialism.
Of course social media can also be just as much a platform for propaganda and misinformation as traditional media, but it's also easier to undermine than traditional media. We need a way for the masses to be able to publish to the masses, and social media is currently the best option to allow that, even with its downsides.
Used to be, you could buy a newspaper and print your viewpoint, but everyone could see it.
Now, you can trivially individually target users, invisible to any oversight.
How is that not an existential threat to democracy? (Whether from a foreign nation-state or anyone else is immaterial)
Legislators want it, site owners want to be able to prove their users are real people, advertisers, as well, etc.
And yes, I'm mostly referring to Republican lead legislation that encourages or enforces conversion therapy, minority disenfranchisement (Haitians most recently, but also black, mMuslum, and Palestinian groups), and anti-LGBTQIA+ (more specifically anti-trans) actions.
But it's not just funny sad: it also has real effects on real people and invokes the use of force in a situation where there is no coercion or damage being done.
Health advisory on social media use in adolescence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35874670 - May 2023 (169 comments)
Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35095031 - March 2023 (189 comments)
Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901571 - February 2023 (640 comments)
Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31405859 - May 2022 (474 comments)
Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268222 - May 2022 (1074 comments)
Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25928310 - January 2021 (348 comments)
Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998698 - November 2016 (548 comments)
Edit: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/social-media-teens-menta... ("Social media harms teens’ mental health, mounting evidence shows. What now?")
> Researchers delved into whether the platform’s introduction across college campuses in the mid 2000s increased symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. The answer was a clear yes, says MIT economist Alexey Makarin, a coauthor of the study, which appeared in the November 2022 American Economic Review. “There is still a lot to be explored,” Makarin says, but “[to say] there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, to that I definitely object.”
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20211218 ("Social Media and Mental Health")
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29296-3 ("Windows of developmental sensitivity to social media")
[1] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/01/24/parenti...
[3] https://recursiveadaptation.com/p/the-growing-scientific-cas...
> Psychologist Candice Odgers recently stated the skeptics' case in an essay in Nature titled The Great Rewiring: Is Social Media Really Behind an Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness?
The second and third are by the same person, who keeps mentioning his new book for some reason.
The fourth includes a counterpoint:
> “Those who feel worse may turn to social media for solace or community,” Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, said of the research. “It’s not a vacuum, it works both ways."
The fifth is an opinion piece by a computer scientist about careers.
Oh, you added some more while I was writing this. Stop it?
So for the two extra ones: the APA one opens with "Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people." The other one is by the same guy as the NYT opinion piece, who incidentally also has a new book out on the subject.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/421...
Now how is this offensive to you?
What a silly statement. There is 100% such a thing as social media addiction and it is real.
Apps consume mass amounts of data in attempts to keep you using their app for as long as possible and build a uniquely tailored experience just for you to keep you coming back.
The mitigations for the actual situation would be much different than the performative situation. Anxiety/depression in minors has indeed gone up since 2019. But the causes are not screens. Rising housing, food, etc prices relative to incomes, the whole worldwide pandemic, knowledge of environmental damage, and increasing totalitarianism and conflicts around the world account for most of that.
In terms of what government can do, they can address the core issue of fractional reserve banking without periodic debt forgiveness meaning there is always more debt than money supply leading to worse lives and conflict for everyone including young people. To truly make peoples lives better we should have government act to create a sustainable system not pretend mandating what's on screens will fix things.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social...
[2] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/social-media-teen-mental-h....
If they collect data and it turns out the laws aren't helpful or the laws are actually harmful, then the politician's career and reputation may be trashed. But if they pretend like the law can't possibly be bad and never check on that, then they're protected.
I’m curious, have you read the book?
On the other hand, data on this issue is mixed, and some studies contradict one another.
Another quote from the article you linked
Haidt argues that waiting for stronger evidence could be even more dangerous. He writes: “If you listen to the alarm ringers and we turn out to be wrong, the costs are minimal and reversible. But if you listen to the skeptics and they turn out to be wrong, the costs are much larger and harder to reverse.” … as a mother, as someone who writes about the harms of tech and tech companies, I see his point.
So, you can still use TikTok or Facebook or Instagram, just without the hyper-personalized discovery/FYP/etc feeds.
I'm cautiously optimistic, since this kind of block doesn't really create a moat around existing businesses. And frankly, I like that kind of non-personalized feed sometimes.
EDIT: Downvoters, that's from the text of the bill itself. I recommend reading it if you don't trust (or don't like) this TL;DR.
totally onboard with the concept; but what is the burden of proof that a feed is "addictive"? If it falls on the state, then this probably won't have much effect (other than maybe to scare tech companies to be a bit more careful, which is maybe the best we can hope for)
Daily use growing? So basically social media companies' KPIs.
If I am reading the legislation [0] correctly, teenagers now have to tell Spotify what song to play one after another, every single time one track ends. Unless someone has previously made a playlist (I think) - in which case you can only listen to playlists that you or (someone else has made) if you are a teenager.
I'm surprised that the music industry let this happen to them.
[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
We had envisioned something like PADDs on Star Trek or the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but what we got was an jingly electronic mirror that bullies you. I don't know how we are so okay with this. Keeping phones out of schools is not the cure. Keeping evil and harmful apps off the phones is a more precise solution.
Most didn't actively make that choice. They were coerced, peer pressured, or otherwise tricked into making it.
> We had envisioned something like PADDs on Star Trek or the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but what we got was an jingly electronic mirror that bullies you.
Beautifully put.
TikTok now has "feed mirroring" for adults to use with their teens, so they can see what the algorithm is pushing at them. And Instagram now has a teen mode that lets parents choose which topics show up in their feed and disables notifications at night.