New social media curfews and crackdown on addictive features to better protect 16- and 17-year-olds online
www.gov.uk
Default overnight curfews and addictive features to be switched off automatically to protect 16 and 17-year-olds on social media
  • Regna@lemmy.worldEnglish
    291·
    5 days ago

    I cannot in any way see this as a net positive. Sure, kids are distracted from sleep, they view media that is damaging and shitty, they get dopamine levels fucked up. But for some teenagers, especially at 15-18, that is also their only way to communicate and cope with abuse and maliciously bad parenting, or bad early relationships.

    Me, at that age, had digital ”social” communication as a vent. I don’t know if I’d still be here without it.

    • BozeKnoflook@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      5 days ago

      I grew up in a hyper conservative family in a super conservative part of southern Indiana. Even with the remote contacts I made online via BBS, IRC, forums, etc; I was still a quasi-suicidal (and incredibly closeted) atheist and bisexual. If I hadn’t had some kind of community to which I could vent some of my frustrations I’m very confident I would have done myself in. I even met my wife over IRC when we were teenagers.

      And, weird as it is to say, if the price of my mental health and training in what would eventually become my profession is that I occasionally had people trying to trick me into looking at goatse… show me that horror anus.

    • Zedstrian@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      7·
      5 days ago

      They justify it as being just a change in the default settings and therefore reversible (despite most people not changing default settings), but I don’t trust them not to tighten the screws of the Online Safety Act further as time goes on.