From last week: More than a dozen states sue TikTok, alleging it harms kids and is designed to addict them
Kids as young as 15 were stripping on TikTok’s live feature fueled by adults who were paying for it.
That’s what TikTok learned when it launched an internal investigation after a report on Forbes. Officials at TikTok discovered that there was “a high” number of underage streamers receiving a “gift” or “coin” in exchange for stripping — real money converted into a digital currency often in the form of a plush toy or a flower.
This is one of several disturbing accounts that came to light in a trove of secret documents reviewed last week by NPR and Kentucky Public Radio. Even more troubling was that TikTok executives were acutely aware of the potential harm the app can cause teens, but appeared unconcerned.
The information came after a more than two-year investigation into TikTok by 14 attorneys general that led to state officials suing the company on Tuesday.
Here are a few more of the most serious, and previously unreported, allegations against TikTok, the wildly popular app that is used by around 170 million people in the U.S.
I feel like this happens with so many popular "platforms" and social media sites. It starts off kind of small, eventually gets huge and people find ways to abuse others on the platform and then...
I feel like this happens with so many popular "platforms" and social media sites. It starts off kind of small, eventually gets huge and people find ways to abuse others on the platform and then some external investigation kicks off a firestorm of interal review.
Kinda like when people found out terrorists groups were greenlit for ad revenue on YouTube. It really makes me doubt any of these companies have any serious or useful internal auditing or moderation units.
That 95% under 17 number is bonkers. Is there anything else in that world with such a deep market penetration with their target audience? The 5% is likely cellphone absolutist parents. Not even...
That 95% under 17 number is bonkers. Is there anything else in that world with such a deep market penetration with their target audience? The 5% is likely cellphone absolutist parents. Not even Meta can boast those numbers.
See also: How TikTok Live Became ‘A Strip Club Filled With 15-Year-Olds’. I am beyond relieved that I don't permit my daughter to have any social media on her phone. Jesus fuck.
Her mother and I got her a (cheap) smartphone for her 11th birthday. With the gift came a sit-down conversation about trust, safety on the Internet, and the importance of having limits on screen...
Her mother and I got her a (cheap) smartphone for her 11th birthday. With the gift came a sit-down conversation about trust, safety on the Internet, and the importance of having limits on screen time (even for adults). We embraced that she would need one for her journey to and from school, and we didn't want her to feel ostracised from her friends.
We immediately installed the safety features that Google offers, and have set it so that her phone essentially becomes a brick at bedtime. She can't install any apps without approval from me, her mum, or her step-dad, and I have placed app time limits on a number of things such as YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, etc. I don't mind her watching TV, but I don't want her developing phone neck at (now) 13.
We talked about how if any of her parental figures asked to inspect the phone, then she was to hand it over, no quibbles, no just finishing a thing. We said that we weren't going to do regular inspections, but would be checking from time to time to make sure she's not doing anything inappropriate.
And we talked about what a ban schema would look like. A first offence would carry a ban of 1 week, the second 2, the third 4, the fourth 8, and so on. We've only once had to ban her phone, although during the ban we discovered some inappropriate pictures that she'd taken of herself, and so we immediately escalated up to 4 weeks and had a lot more conversations about safety on the Internet.
I'm sure there's an element of her telling me what I want to hear, but in the course of that month she told me several times that she was glad to be having a break from her phone, and wanted to reevaluate her relationship with it when she got it back. I've yet to really see that happen, she'll happily spend a whole day glued to the thing unless told to put it down and do something else.
When she turned 13 she asked us if she could have access to social media. Her mum and I had discussed it prior, and had initially decided that she could have one single one, since it does keep her separate from her friends. However, some trust issues (both related and unrelated) had cropped up so we changed our minds and said no to social media. And it'll be a good while longer before I'm happy for her to have it. I remember when I was a teenager and one of my friends at school wasn't allowed to have MSN messenger, and we all thought her parents were so strict, and I know it really bothered her that she couldn't be included in online banter. I never dreamed that I would be such a parent, but stories like this, and the most recent Tantacrul video are making me rethink what she can and can't be allowed to do on her phone. The more I read about smartphone addiction, and the perils of social media, the more I am convinced that giving a child a smartphone is roughly equivalent to giving them a packet of cigarettes and saying "now don't smoke too much!" Fortunately for my daughter, her mother and I are a good team about this, even though we're not together any more.
Sounds like an absolute nightmare for a growing teenager's social life and privacy and I say this as someone who hates social media with passion and doesn't use any that show faces or personal...
Sounds like an absolute nightmare for a growing teenager's social life and privacy and I say this as someone who hates social media with passion and doesn't use any that show faces or personal details. A good way to breed resentment and avoidance strategies too.
At least among my peers, inevitably the kids whose parents were most restrictive when it came to social media were the ones most adept at finding ways around those restrictions. And, of course,...
At least among my peers, inevitably the kids whose parents were most restrictive when it came to social media were the ones most adept at finding ways around those restrictions. And, of course, the easiest to cut off from their parents by groomers. If your parents clearly don't trust you, why should you trust them? Especially when there are other adults who seem to respect your intelligence and recognize your maturity? And when something goes wrong, who's there for you to tell when your parents will just punish you for wanting to use something as ubiquitous as social media?
I'm not a parent, so maybe I'm wrong and this'll all end up working out fine. But if abstinence-only sex ed and DARE-esque anti-drug campaigns taught me anything, it's that trying to ban teens from doing something popular through scare tactics doesn't work. All you end up doing is abdicating from the role of teaching them how to have a safe, healthy relationship with these things. Teens subjected to an abstinence-only approach to social media are going to end up suffering the negative consequences at higher rates than their peers, just like teens subjected to an abstinence-only approach to sex ed have higher rates of teen pregnancy and STIs. It robs these kids of the opportunity to learn how to engage with something risky in safer, healthier ways.
We've spent her whole life building our trust in her and her sense of independence. It's not that I don't trust her with social media, it's that I don't trust these platforms to make a product...
We've spent her whole life building our trust in her and her sense of independence. It's not that I don't trust her with social media, it's that I don't trust these platforms to make a product which is possible to engage with in a healthy manner for someone with an immature prefrontal cortex. Every study done by reputable organisations shows that social media is bad for the mental health of children. You might argue that sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll are also bad for the mental health of children, but the difference is that those things are considerably less easily accessed than pulling out your pocket rectangle. You can't go and have a quick bit of sex when you're bored in a queue.
We're not trying to scare her into anything; but we're trying to navigate a world in which tech companies are vying so hard for users' attention that they are not stopping to consider the health ramifications of making their product addictive within the first 35 minutes of use.
Teens subjected to an abstinence-only approach to social media are going to end up suffering the negative consequences at higher rates than their peers
Time will tell, I suppose. I have yet to be convinced that there are sufficiently dangerous consequences to not being permitted access to social media. Within my peer group, I can tell you that the happier people are the ones who don't use it.
The people in your peer group are choosing not to use it. Some of the happiest people I know abstain from sex or alcohol, but that doesn't mean it's wise to forbid people from using them....
Within my peer group, I can tell you that the happier people are the ones who don't use it.
The people in your peer group are choosing not to use it. Some of the happiest people I know abstain from sex or alcohol, but that doesn't mean it's wise to forbid people from using them.
Especially when it comes to teenagers, half the time forbidding something makes it more attractive. My mother wouldn't let us buy anything but whole wheat bread when I was a kid because it's healthier than white bread, and as soon as I was buying my own bread I basically only ever bought the whitest most processed bread ever. She wasn't even wrong -- whole wheat bread is healthier. But it turned into something cool and forbidden to me, which gave it an allure that it wouldn't have had otherwise. Just forbidding it did not equip me to make healthy choices once I was an adult; if anything, it discouraged me from doing do because I was finally free to eat garbage.
I think being cut off from social media during one's teens is going to have negative effects on a given teen's social life -- this doesn't matter a ton in the grand scheme from your perspective, probably, but it absolutely does matter to your daughter now and it will almost certainly continue to matter as she gets older. You aren't really capable of preventing her from finding a way to access it if she really wants to, no more than my religious school prevented my peers from having sex. Wholesale forbidding it is just giving up what opportunity you have to teach her how to be safe in those spaces and to build up trust that means she'll come to you with her problems and learn to make choices about her social media use herself while she's still young. How is she supposed to learn to identify grooming or even just how to balance her social media use by the time she's an adult under these circumstances? Because I promise you, it's incredibly unlikely that after being forbidden from using it as a teen, she'll decide to eschew social media herself.
I also just think parents insisting on reading their kids' texts is opposed to developing any sense of trust between them. A lack of respect for one's privacy like that can be used in some pretty dangerous ways by certain types of bad parents (would I have felt comfortable questioning my religion in my teens if my religious parents had insisted on reading my texts? would it have been safe for my friend to come out as gay to me if either of our parents had been reading our texts?) but even if there's nothing like that at play, it tends to just encourage teens to hide things in places they know you won't look. If something bad does happen, this makes stuff harder to find, but more importantly it pretty much destroys their ability to trust you. If I had been sent nudes as a teen, I probably would've gone to my parents to ask for help with what to do. But would I have felt comfortable doing that if my parents scoured my phone for nudes on a regular basis, acting on the assumption that I was hiding stuff like that from them? If anything, that would have encouraged me to cover up that anything had ever happened out of fear. Human beings deserve at least some measure of privacy, and imo insisting on reading all of a teen's texts is about as invasive -- and ineffective at stopping anything actually bad from happening -- as removing their bedroom door.
For the record, I'm definitely not trying to accuse you of being a bad parent here. I think it's clear from your comments that you care a lot about her and want what's best for her. I don't even necessarily think it's a bad idea to heavily limit her social media use at this age. But I think many parents these days jump to positions on social media and texting that end up being really overprotective in counterproductive ways, simply because they know a lot about the risks and are scared for their kids. The problem is that if you raise your kid in a padded room, the first thing they'll do when they grow up or sneak out is break an arm. Part of raising a teen has to be giving them more and more freedom and control over their lives as they grow up and teaching them how to make the right choices themselves while they still have you around to help them.
I really appreciate this exchange between you and /u/0d_billie Just wanted to jump in here and chime in with a short snippet about my own childhood. My parents took a lot of things away from me,...
Exemplary
I really appreciate this exchange between you and /u/0d_billie
Just wanted to jump in here and chime in with a short snippet about my own childhood. My parents took a lot of things away from me, tried to restrict me from viewing certain material, and so on. There were other reasons as well that I lost any trust in them, but their restrictive mindset was one of the strongest reasons. I'm sure if they were asked, they'd also say they engaged in conversations about the material and why I shouldn't have access to it, but I can tell you that the conversations they thought they were having was not how I perceived them. They failed to provide any meaningful reasons beyond "we think it's best" and they had, repeatedly proven, that they did not in fact know what was best for me. Arguably speaking, we both had similar track records with regards to what was best for me - sometimes I got it wrong, and sometimes they did. I never felt truly respected by them or listened to, because ultimately they would always overrule what I had to think and say and often when they were unsure how to engage with the discussions I was presenting they would default to the "we know best" or as I like to call it the "because I say so" argument.
Now perhaps some parents out there really do have enough skills to navigate these conversations healthily and the children out there are developed or trusting enough to listen - that parents will explain that they are afraid of the future it could bring their children, that the children will be able to explain how they are socially isolated or feeling left behind and that these feelings can be navigated in a way where both sides truly have input. Some or most of these discussions should ideally end up with concessions on both sides, and an equitable conclusion can be reached. But I somehow doubt any situation is this perfect. I think it's important to bring to light the ways in which children are affected, in the long term, by protective attitudes. On one end, we have helicopter parents who restrict everything and create children who have no sense of self, no self-confidence, no self-autonomy and are largely incapable of interacting healthily with adult life (often finding themselves needing extra years to learn all which they could not, if they ever manage to break away from the grip of their parents). On the other end, we have children who have a higher chance to be traumatized because they are more regularly being exposed to the things adults are regularly exposed to in life. I really wish we had good studies on this, because I don't know how to convince others about how a higher chance of traumatization is not something to be afraid of, because of all the benefits that come along with allowing someone to learn by themselves and to experience important learning lessons.
As a final note I'd like to mention that my interaction with the very things my parents attempted to restrict from me were extremely useful in my own life, not just because I learned from and became much more well adjusted because I was exposed to them, but because they provided me a skill-set which was rather unique. I was tech native in a way many of my peers were not. I had skills to navigate social media healthily before everyone realized it was problematic. I was using these skills and others to connect and network in ways that were extremely useful (and still are quite useful) to my career and social life. I'd also like to point out that the restrictive mindset my parents had (which I want to mention was actually quite permissive as compared to many of my friends) contributed to me feeling alienated from any semblance of family. This alienation lead to me becoming hyper-independent. This and other issues at home had me acting up at school and falling in with the "bad crowd". I was brought home by the police for the first time before I was even in high school. Ultimately it took until my 30s for me to actually reconnect with my parents, because our relationship had become so damaged in my childhood that I stopped seeing them as anything but obstacles in my life. I say all this because I want to paint a picture of how this kind of behavior can be seen and interpreted as someone on the receiving end of impermissive parenting. I want to make it crystal clear why you need to also listen to your children and you need to approach them as you would any conversation on boundaries, needs, and desires as you would with your significant other - as a true equal, not as someone who "knows" better. Whether your brain is more developed or not does not absolve you of biases and it certainly doesn't have any affect on your child's emotional state. It's human to participate in harmful and dangerous behavior, and we need to be able to stumble, trip, fall, and break things in order to learn to approach these healthily in our adulthood. Social media may be harmful and addictive to children according to literature, but it's also harmful and addictive to parents according to literature and yet here we are. Adults drink more than they should, they smoke, they drive recklessly, and they do many other things which are "harmful". Be sure to take a step back, from time to time, and reconsider the difference between making something completely off-limits, and setting healthy boundaries. The latter is almost always the right choice.
Apologies to /u/Lobachevsky and /u/sparksbet if I came across as overly defensive or antagonistic in yesterday's exchanges. I wasn't having the best of days, and it poked me in a very raw place to...
Apologies to /u/Lobachevsky and /u/sparksbet if I came across as overly defensive or antagonistic in yesterday's exchanges. I wasn't having the best of days, and it poked me in a very raw place to feel like I was being told that I'm an irresponsible or bad parent. Not that that's what either of you were necessarily saying, but it's how my brain chose to interpret it, and I'm sorry if I acted poorly.
There were some very thoughtful contributions and it's sincerely given me a lot to think about regarding how I go about teaching my daughter to have a healthy relationship with technology and the Internet. I am of the opinion that she knows and understands why we're not currently comfortable letting her have access to certain social media, because it's a conversation we've had a lot of times. But as has been pointed out, perhaps those conversations have been interpreted and internalised in a different way by my daughter than how I think they have been. I'm going to make a point to have another talk with her about all this at the weekend.
At the centre of it all is the desire that my daughter's mum and I have to keep her safe online. A desire which has been informed by our own fuck-ups and near misses, like all parents. I hope that it's clear that my restrictive stance is born out of a sense of protectiveness, and a deep and keen awareness of how damaging this stuff can be to a young mind, both in the abstract from a research perspective, and also a personal one. I can see from this discussion and the valuable contributions from those who have been in a similar position that perhaps my absolutist stance is not going to end up doing what I think it will, and it's given me a lot to think about in terms of what I'm doing right and what I'm getting wrong.
If I have given the impression that my daughter's phone is locked down completely with no access to anything remotely unhealthy on it, then that is wrong. She uses WhatsApp to chat with her friends without restriction, she can watch up to 90 minutes of YouTube a day, and she just recently got access to Pinterest (at her request), and I do intend to continue slowly loosening the permissions on her phone more and more as she gets older. The plan was never to simply loose her onto the world and the Internet at 18, with no experience or clear idea of how to stay safe and healthy. The occasional check-ins with her device were to ensure that nothing dodgy is going on that she doesn't recognise as dodgy, not to snoop on her texts. And I should clarify, we've done that twice in the two years she's had a phone.
Returning to this discussion today has been really valuable for me. Of course we all bring our own experiences and baggage to this discussion, and reading some of everyone else's stories with highly restrictive parents has been eye-opening to some of the pitfalls in my approach. On the other hand, for those of you who did have and share this experience; your narratives and stories about how it impacted you are not the only ones which exist, and there are those whom I know in real life who have turned out to have good relationships with technology, their parents, and the Internet, despite restrictions being in place as children (myself included).
Above all, my daughter is—to most of the participants in the conversation—an abstract concept, devoid of personality, agency, opinion, and image. Except to me. I alone in all of this here conversation know her, and (I hope) understand who she is. You do not see her quickness to trust, her naivety, her impulsivity. You also don't see her honesty, openness, and thoughtfulness. To you she is a totem that represents another parent making similar mistakes to those yours did, but to me she is my world, and a (somewhat) fragile being who needs boundaries and rules which accommodate who she is and the realities of the world we live in.
You're definitely right that she's ultimately your daughter and we don't know her personally at all -- speaking for myself at least, my intent was just to provide an alternative perspective that...
You're definitely right that she's ultimately your daughter and we don't know her personally at all -- speaking for myself at least, my intent was just to provide an alternative perspective that you could take into consideration going forwards, rather than to chastise you for parenting wrong.
Although I do wanna go to bat for my own parents here -- my observations aren't based on them fucking up when it came to my online stuff! They took a pretty hands-off approach with me in this respect. But I was also the type of kid who went to them crying the night after I lied about my birthday to get a fully-functional neopets account before I was 13, so that was probably an easier judgment call for them -- I definitely don't want to downplay the importance of knowing the individual kid and how they tend to respond to things when it comes to stuff like this.
She's lucky to have a parent like you. It's clear that you care quite deeply and are doing your best to make a good decision in a very uncertain space. Not many would be presented with the...
She's lucky to have a parent like you. It's clear that you care quite deeply and are doing your best to make a good decision in a very uncertain space. Not many would be presented with the discussion above and soften their stance, which I believe is a testament to your ability to also consider your daughter's thoughts on all of this. Communication is difficult, and having meta-discussions/check-ins where you come back to a topic which has been a point of contention in the past or simply check in to solicit what is working and what is not, are extremely important to maintaining trust and building a strong relationship.
For what it's worth, I don't consider the restrictiveness my parents had on me to be something worthy of turning into a totem, or something that I feel I need to vent about online. I simply shared my experience because I've thought a lot about it and I've had similar discussions with parents in the past. My hope was for you, or anyone else running across the comment, to be exposed to a side of the story not often told openly with a simple goal of adding an important experience to be weighed whenever anyone is confronted with the very issue you've been confronted with.
Thanks for coming back and sharing your experience 💜! It's not often we get to see people change their behavior or their mind on the internet and perhaps even rarer that they come back and thank someone for sharing their thoughts or opinion on what is ultimately an issue of choice.
Indeed, the kid should feel comfortable telling you that someone creepy is talking with them. How will they do that if you're gonna punish them for doing "something inappropriate"?
Indeed, the kid should feel comfortable telling you that someone creepy is talking with them. How will they do that if you're gonna punish them for doing "something inappropriate"?
Because we spent the first 11 years of her life teaching her that she can come to us with anything she needs to, and we still keep that lesson going. She knows to (and has) come to us when...
Because we spent the first 11 years of her life teaching her that she can come to us with anything she needs to, and we still keep that lesson going. She knows to (and has) come to us when something doesn't feel right, both in the before time and with her phone.
Ideally the kid needs to come to their own conclusion that these things are not good for them. Otherwise they won't follow whatever order you're trying to get them to follow. I feel like if they...
Ideally the kid needs to come to their own conclusion that these things are not good for them. Otherwise they won't follow whatever order you're trying to get them to follow. I feel like if they choose a particular road despite being educated then it's their mistakes to make. That's not to say you're doing anything wrong necessarily, and perhaps for your child it's the best approach. Parenting is difficult and sometimes there isn't anything you can do.
I do feel like checking your daughter's phone for nudes is a bit much though.
We weren't specifically checking for nudes. We were responding to the school asking us for screenshots of some group chats which were linked to allegations of cyber-bullying, and in the process...
We weren't specifically checking for nudes. We were responding to the school asking us for screenshots of some group chats which were linked to allegations of cyber-bullying, and in the process discovered that she'd been posing naked for pictures.
In an ideal world, I agree with you; it should be on her to decide what a healthy relationship with her phone looks like. But at 13 and younger, she is not sufficiently developed to have that self-control, especially in the current landscape of apps/platforms which are built specifically to hold your attention for as long as is possible.
You didn't have to go through her phone to do so. You mentioned before that you do check the phone on a somewhat regular basis or intend to. So not sure what the way that actual situation played...
We weren't specifically checking for nudes. We were responding to the school asking us for screenshots of some group chats which were linked to allegations of cyber-bullying, and in the process discovered that she'd been posing naked for pictures.
You didn't have to go through her phone to do so.
You mentioned before that you do check the phone on a somewhat regular basis or intend to.
So not sure what the way that actual situation played out has anything to do with anything. It's not the point.
It's just a breach of privacy from my point of view. I wouldn't read my kid's diary type of thing, even though the kid may be confessing to doing something "inappropriate" on those pages.
An 11-12-year-old taking nude pictures of herself is generally technically committing a crime as well as potentially putting herself at high levels of risk for abuse and exploitation. It is not...
An 11-12-year-old taking nude pictures of herself is generally technically committing a crime as well as potentially putting herself at high levels of risk for abuse and exploitation. It is not overprotective to respond to that. Setting boundaries and rules and having consequences for breaking them is not an unreasonable or particularly harsh parenting stance. I understand where you're coming from, and the consequences will have to look different for an older teen. I work with college students and see parents who treat them like they're 13 - parental controls on the phone and constant tracking on Life360 or other apps, and it's truly detrimental.
These are learning experiences, but that doesn't mean they don't or shouldn't come with consequences. I don't see enough info here that makes me think this was over the line and a straight violation of privacy. How their daughter responds to it will depend on the relationship they've built til now, and the response will probably inform the parent's responses and so on.
Indeed, and it's not the natural halo effect, allegedly they intentionally tweaked the algorithm to artificially boost people the company deemed attractive.
Indeed, and it's not the natural halo effect, allegedly they intentionally tweaked the algorithm to artificially boost people the company deemed attractive.
This stuff is so ridiculously damaging. Maybe even more damaging than all of the other potentially negative impacts highlighted by the story. When you scroll through tiktok, you really get the...
This stuff is so ridiculously damaging. Maybe even more damaging than all of the other potentially negative impacts highlighted by the story. When you scroll through tiktok, you really get the impression that everyone on the app is a supermodel.
As an adult, I obviously know that's not true, and that most people both on the app and in real life are average looking, but if you're a kid growing up, constantly asking yourself "why am I so much uglier than these people?"
I can't imagine how damaging that would have been to deal with as a kid. Girls wondering why they don't look like the girls they scroll through and interact with online. Guys wondering why they don't look like the guys that are giving them ALPHA RED PILL advice, and why their advice isn't working for them, since they're not sleeping with girls who look like the ones on the apps.
It makes me really glad I was born before most people were on the Internet.
It's devastating how many young boys are showing up in clinics with body dysmorphia now. If you go even a couple decades back, the standards for male fitness were not so high. Hugh Jackman in the...
It's devastating how many young boys are showing up in clinics with body dysmorphia now. If you go even a couple decades back, the standards for male fitness were not so high. Hugh Jackman in the older Wolverine movies versus the recent Deadpool one is a great example.
From last week: More than a dozen states sue TikTok, alleging it harms kids and is designed to addict them
I feel like this happens with so many popular "platforms" and social media sites. It starts off kind of small, eventually gets huge and people find ways to abuse others on the platform and then some external investigation kicks off a firestorm of interal review.
Kinda like when people found out terrorists groups were greenlit for ad revenue on YouTube. It really makes me doubt any of these companies have any serious or useful internal auditing or moderation units.
That 95% under 17 number is bonkers. Is there anything else in that world with such a deep market penetration with their target audience? The 5% is likely cellphone absolutist parents. Not even Meta can boast those numbers.
I have family members under 18 that use YouTube shorts instead. They said they stopped using Tiktok because it felt like it was bad for them.
Sounds like swapping regular cigarettes for menthol cigarettes, but at least good on them for recognizing it's detrimental to their health.
Ironically, it was probably the other way around since menthol cigarettes are actually more dangerous than regular cigarettes lol.
The joke being that people think menthol is safer.
I have been whooshed.
See also: How TikTok Live Became ‘A Strip Club Filled With 15-Year-Olds’.
I am beyond relieved that I don't permit my daughter to have any social media on her phone. Jesus fuck.
How old was your daughter when you allowed her to have a phone? Was it a smartphone? Asking as the parent of two elementary school-age kids.
Her mother and I got her a (cheap) smartphone for her 11th birthday. With the gift came a sit-down conversation about trust, safety on the Internet, and the importance of having limits on screen time (even for adults). We embraced that she would need one for her journey to and from school, and we didn't want her to feel ostracised from her friends.
We immediately installed the safety features that Google offers, and have set it so that her phone essentially becomes a brick at bedtime. She can't install any apps without approval from me, her mum, or her step-dad, and I have placed app time limits on a number of things such as YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, etc. I don't mind her watching TV, but I don't want her developing phone neck at (now) 13.
We talked about how if any of her parental figures asked to inspect the phone, then she was to hand it over, no quibbles, no just finishing a thing. We said that we weren't going to do regular inspections, but would be checking from time to time to make sure she's not doing anything inappropriate.
And we talked about what a ban schema would look like. A first offence would carry a ban of 1 week, the second 2, the third 4, the fourth 8, and so on. We've only once had to ban her phone, although during the ban we discovered some inappropriate pictures that she'd taken of herself, and so we immediately escalated up to 4 weeks and had a lot more conversations about safety on the Internet.
I'm sure there's an element of her telling me what I want to hear, but in the course of that month she told me several times that she was glad to be having a break from her phone, and wanted to reevaluate her relationship with it when she got it back. I've yet to really see that happen, she'll happily spend a whole day glued to the thing unless told to put it down and do something else.
When she turned 13 she asked us if she could have access to social media. Her mum and I had discussed it prior, and had initially decided that she could have one single one, since it does keep her separate from her friends. However, some trust issues (both related and unrelated) had cropped up so we changed our minds and said no to social media. And it'll be a good while longer before I'm happy for her to have it. I remember when I was a teenager and one of my friends at school wasn't allowed to have MSN messenger, and we all thought her parents were so strict, and I know it really bothered her that she couldn't be included in online banter. I never dreamed that I would be such a parent, but stories like this, and the most recent Tantacrul video are making me rethink what she can and can't be allowed to do on her phone. The more I read about smartphone addiction, and the perils of social media, the more I am convinced that giving a child a smartphone is roughly equivalent to giving them a packet of cigarettes and saying "now don't smoke too much!" Fortunately for my daughter, her mother and I are a good team about this, even though we're not together any more.
Sounds like an absolute nightmare for a growing teenager's social life and privacy and I say this as someone who hates social media with passion and doesn't use any that show faces or personal details. A good way to breed resentment and avoidance strategies too.
At least among my peers, inevitably the kids whose parents were most restrictive when it came to social media were the ones most adept at finding ways around those restrictions. And, of course, the easiest to cut off from their parents by groomers. If your parents clearly don't trust you, why should you trust them? Especially when there are other adults who seem to respect your intelligence and recognize your maturity? And when something goes wrong, who's there for you to tell when your parents will just punish you for wanting to use something as ubiquitous as social media?
I'm not a parent, so maybe I'm wrong and this'll all end up working out fine. But if abstinence-only sex ed and DARE-esque anti-drug campaigns taught me anything, it's that trying to ban teens from doing something popular through scare tactics doesn't work. All you end up doing is abdicating from the role of teaching them how to have a safe, healthy relationship with these things. Teens subjected to an abstinence-only approach to social media are going to end up suffering the negative consequences at higher rates than their peers, just like teens subjected to an abstinence-only approach to sex ed have higher rates of teen pregnancy and STIs. It robs these kids of the opportunity to learn how to engage with something risky in safer, healthier ways.
We've spent her whole life building our trust in her and her sense of independence. It's not that I don't trust her with social media, it's that I don't trust these platforms to make a product which is possible to engage with in a healthy manner for someone with an immature prefrontal cortex. Every study done by reputable organisations shows that social media is bad for the mental health of children. You might argue that sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll are also bad for the mental health of children, but the difference is that those things are considerably less easily accessed than pulling out your pocket rectangle. You can't go and have a quick bit of sex when you're bored in a queue.
We're not trying to scare her into anything; but we're trying to navigate a world in which tech companies are vying so hard for users' attention that they are not stopping to consider the health ramifications of making their product addictive within the first 35 minutes of use.
Time will tell, I suppose. I have yet to be convinced that there are sufficiently dangerous consequences to not being permitted access to social media. Within my peer group, I can tell you that the happier people are the ones who don't use it.
The people in your peer group are choosing not to use it. Some of the happiest people I know abstain from sex or alcohol, but that doesn't mean it's wise to forbid people from using them.
Especially when it comes to teenagers, half the time forbidding something makes it more attractive. My mother wouldn't let us buy anything but whole wheat bread when I was a kid because it's healthier than white bread, and as soon as I was buying my own bread I basically only ever bought the whitest most processed bread ever. She wasn't even wrong -- whole wheat bread is healthier. But it turned into something cool and forbidden to me, which gave it an allure that it wouldn't have had otherwise. Just forbidding it did not equip me to make healthy choices once I was an adult; if anything, it discouraged me from doing do because I was finally free to eat garbage.
I think being cut off from social media during one's teens is going to have negative effects on a given teen's social life -- this doesn't matter a ton in the grand scheme from your perspective, probably, but it absolutely does matter to your daughter now and it will almost certainly continue to matter as she gets older. You aren't really capable of preventing her from finding a way to access it if she really wants to, no more than my religious school prevented my peers from having sex. Wholesale forbidding it is just giving up what opportunity you have to teach her how to be safe in those spaces and to build up trust that means she'll come to you with her problems and learn to make choices about her social media use herself while she's still young. How is she supposed to learn to identify grooming or even just how to balance her social media use by the time she's an adult under these circumstances? Because I promise you, it's incredibly unlikely that after being forbidden from using it as a teen, she'll decide to eschew social media herself.
I also just think parents insisting on reading their kids' texts is opposed to developing any sense of trust between them. A lack of respect for one's privacy like that can be used in some pretty dangerous ways by certain types of bad parents (would I have felt comfortable questioning my religion in my teens if my religious parents had insisted on reading my texts? would it have been safe for my friend to come out as gay to me if either of our parents had been reading our texts?) but even if there's nothing like that at play, it tends to just encourage teens to hide things in places they know you won't look. If something bad does happen, this makes stuff harder to find, but more importantly it pretty much destroys their ability to trust you. If I had been sent nudes as a teen, I probably would've gone to my parents to ask for help with what to do. But would I have felt comfortable doing that if my parents scoured my phone for nudes on a regular basis, acting on the assumption that I was hiding stuff like that from them? If anything, that would have encouraged me to cover up that anything had ever happened out of fear. Human beings deserve at least some measure of privacy, and imo insisting on reading all of a teen's texts is about as invasive -- and ineffective at stopping anything actually bad from happening -- as removing their bedroom door.
For the record, I'm definitely not trying to accuse you of being a bad parent here. I think it's clear from your comments that you care a lot about her and want what's best for her. I don't even necessarily think it's a bad idea to heavily limit her social media use at this age. But I think many parents these days jump to positions on social media and texting that end up being really overprotective in counterproductive ways, simply because they know a lot about the risks and are scared for their kids. The problem is that if you raise your kid in a padded room, the first thing they'll do when they grow up or sneak out is break an arm. Part of raising a teen has to be giving them more and more freedom and control over their lives as they grow up and teaching them how to make the right choices themselves while they still have you around to help them.
I really appreciate this exchange between you and /u/0d_billie
Just wanted to jump in here and chime in with a short snippet about my own childhood. My parents took a lot of things away from me, tried to restrict me from viewing certain material, and so on. There were other reasons as well that I lost any trust in them, but their restrictive mindset was one of the strongest reasons. I'm sure if they were asked, they'd also say they engaged in conversations about the material and why I shouldn't have access to it, but I can tell you that the conversations they thought they were having was not how I perceived them. They failed to provide any meaningful reasons beyond "we think it's best" and they had, repeatedly proven, that they did not in fact know what was best for me. Arguably speaking, we both had similar track records with regards to what was best for me - sometimes I got it wrong, and sometimes they did. I never felt truly respected by them or listened to, because ultimately they would always overrule what I had to think and say and often when they were unsure how to engage with the discussions I was presenting they would default to the "we know best" or as I like to call it the "because I say so" argument.
Now perhaps some parents out there really do have enough skills to navigate these conversations healthily and the children out there are developed or trusting enough to listen - that parents will explain that they are afraid of the future it could bring their children, that the children will be able to explain how they are socially isolated or feeling left behind and that these feelings can be navigated in a way where both sides truly have input. Some or most of these discussions should ideally end up with concessions on both sides, and an equitable conclusion can be reached. But I somehow doubt any situation is this perfect. I think it's important to bring to light the ways in which children are affected, in the long term, by protective attitudes. On one end, we have helicopter parents who restrict everything and create children who have no sense of self, no self-confidence, no self-autonomy and are largely incapable of interacting healthily with adult life (often finding themselves needing extra years to learn all which they could not, if they ever manage to break away from the grip of their parents). On the other end, we have children who have a higher chance to be traumatized because they are more regularly being exposed to the things adults are regularly exposed to in life. I really wish we had good studies on this, because I don't know how to convince others about how a higher chance of traumatization is not something to be afraid of, because of all the benefits that come along with allowing someone to learn by themselves and to experience important learning lessons.
As a final note I'd like to mention that my interaction with the very things my parents attempted to restrict from me were extremely useful in my own life, not just because I learned from and became much more well adjusted because I was exposed to them, but because they provided me a skill-set which was rather unique. I was tech native in a way many of my peers were not. I had skills to navigate social media healthily before everyone realized it was problematic. I was using these skills and others to connect and network in ways that were extremely useful (and still are quite useful) to my career and social life. I'd also like to point out that the restrictive mindset my parents had (which I want to mention was actually quite permissive as compared to many of my friends) contributed to me feeling alienated from any semblance of family. This alienation lead to me becoming hyper-independent. This and other issues at home had me acting up at school and falling in with the "bad crowd". I was brought home by the police for the first time before I was even in high school. Ultimately it took until my 30s for me to actually reconnect with my parents, because our relationship had become so damaged in my childhood that I stopped seeing them as anything but obstacles in my life. I say all this because I want to paint a picture of how this kind of behavior can be seen and interpreted as someone on the receiving end of impermissive parenting. I want to make it crystal clear why you need to also listen to your children and you need to approach them as you would any conversation on boundaries, needs, and desires as you would with your significant other - as a true equal, not as someone who "knows" better. Whether your brain is more developed or not does not absolve you of biases and it certainly doesn't have any affect on your child's emotional state. It's human to participate in harmful and dangerous behavior, and we need to be able to stumble, trip, fall, and break things in order to learn to approach these healthily in our adulthood. Social media may be harmful and addictive to children according to literature, but it's also harmful and addictive to parents according to literature and yet here we are. Adults drink more than they should, they smoke, they drive recklessly, and they do many other things which are "harmful". Be sure to take a step back, from time to time, and reconsider the difference between making something completely off-limits, and setting healthy boundaries. The latter is almost always the right choice.
Apologies to /u/Lobachevsky and /u/sparksbet if I came across as overly defensive or antagonistic in yesterday's exchanges. I wasn't having the best of days, and it poked me in a very raw place to feel like I was being told that I'm an irresponsible or bad parent. Not that that's what either of you were necessarily saying, but it's how my brain chose to interpret it, and I'm sorry if I acted poorly.
There were some very thoughtful contributions and it's sincerely given me a lot to think about regarding how I go about teaching my daughter to have a healthy relationship with technology and the Internet. I am of the opinion that she knows and understands why we're not currently comfortable letting her have access to certain social media, because it's a conversation we've had a lot of times. But as has been pointed out, perhaps those conversations have been interpreted and internalised in a different way by my daughter than how I think they have been. I'm going to make a point to have another talk with her about all this at the weekend.
At the centre of it all is the desire that my daughter's mum and I have to keep her safe online. A desire which has been informed by our own fuck-ups and near misses, like all parents. I hope that it's clear that my restrictive stance is born out of a sense of protectiveness, and a deep and keen awareness of how damaging this stuff can be to a young mind, both in the abstract from a research perspective, and also a personal one. I can see from this discussion and the valuable contributions from those who have been in a similar position that perhaps my absolutist stance is not going to end up doing what I think it will, and it's given me a lot to think about in terms of what I'm doing right and what I'm getting wrong.
If I have given the impression that my daughter's phone is locked down completely with no access to anything remotely unhealthy on it, then that is wrong. She uses WhatsApp to chat with her friends without restriction, she can watch up to 90 minutes of YouTube a day, and she just recently got access to Pinterest (at her request), and I do intend to continue slowly loosening the permissions on her phone more and more as she gets older. The plan was never to simply loose her onto the world and the Internet at 18, with no experience or clear idea of how to stay safe and healthy. The occasional check-ins with her device were to ensure that nothing dodgy is going on that she doesn't recognise as dodgy, not to snoop on her texts. And I should clarify, we've done that twice in the two years she's had a phone.
Returning to this discussion today has been really valuable for me. Of course we all bring our own experiences and baggage to this discussion, and reading some of everyone else's stories with highly restrictive parents has been eye-opening to some of the pitfalls in my approach. On the other hand, for those of you who did have and share this experience; your narratives and stories about how it impacted you are not the only ones which exist, and there are those whom I know in real life who have turned out to have good relationships with technology, their parents, and the Internet, despite restrictions being in place as children (myself included).
Above all, my daughter is—to most of the participants in the conversation—an abstract concept, devoid of personality, agency, opinion, and image. Except to me. I alone in all of this here conversation know her, and (I hope) understand who she is. You do not see her quickness to trust, her naivety, her impulsivity. You also don't see her honesty, openness, and thoughtfulness. To you she is a totem that represents another parent making similar mistakes to those yours did, but to me she is my world, and a (somewhat) fragile being who needs boundaries and rules which accommodate who she is and the realities of the world we live in.
You're definitely right that she's ultimately your daughter and we don't know her personally at all -- speaking for myself at least, my intent was just to provide an alternative perspective that you could take into consideration going forwards, rather than to chastise you for parenting wrong.
Although I do wanna go to bat for my own parents here -- my observations aren't based on them fucking up when it came to my online stuff! They took a pretty hands-off approach with me in this respect. But I was also the type of kid who went to them crying the night after I lied about my birthday to get a fully-functional neopets account before I was 13, so that was probably an easier judgment call for them -- I definitely don't want to downplay the importance of knowing the individual kid and how they tend to respond to things when it comes to stuff like this.
She's lucky to have a parent like you. It's clear that you care quite deeply and are doing your best to make a good decision in a very uncertain space. Not many would be presented with the discussion above and soften their stance, which I believe is a testament to your ability to also consider your daughter's thoughts on all of this. Communication is difficult, and having meta-discussions/check-ins where you come back to a topic which has been a point of contention in the past or simply check in to solicit what is working and what is not, are extremely important to maintaining trust and building a strong relationship.
For what it's worth, I don't consider the restrictiveness my parents had on me to be something worthy of turning into a totem, or something that I feel I need to vent about online. I simply shared my experience because I've thought a lot about it and I've had similar discussions with parents in the past. My hope was for you, or anyone else running across the comment, to be exposed to a side of the story not often told openly with a simple goal of adding an important experience to be weighed whenever anyone is confronted with the very issue you've been confronted with.
Thanks for coming back and sharing your experience 💜! It's not often we get to see people change their behavior or their mind on the internet and perhaps even rarer that they come back and thank someone for sharing their thoughts or opinion on what is ultimately an issue of choice.
Indeed, the kid should feel comfortable telling you that someone creepy is talking with them. How will they do that if you're gonna punish them for doing "something inappropriate"?
Because we spent the first 11 years of her life teaching her that she can come to us with anything she needs to, and we still keep that lesson going. She knows to (and has) come to us when something doesn't feel right, both in the before time and with her phone.
You've also taught her that she'll be punished for certain things. I thought that was clear.
What would you suggest as an alternative?
Ideally the kid needs to come to their own conclusion that these things are not good for them. Otherwise they won't follow whatever order you're trying to get them to follow. I feel like if they choose a particular road despite being educated then it's their mistakes to make. That's not to say you're doing anything wrong necessarily, and perhaps for your child it's the best approach. Parenting is difficult and sometimes there isn't anything you can do.
I do feel like checking your daughter's phone for nudes is a bit much though.
We weren't specifically checking for nudes. We were responding to the school asking us for screenshots of some group chats which were linked to allegations of cyber-bullying, and in the process discovered that she'd been posing naked for pictures.
In an ideal world, I agree with you; it should be on her to decide what a healthy relationship with her phone looks like. But at 13 and younger, she is not sufficiently developed to have that self-control, especially in the current landscape of apps/platforms which are built specifically to hold your attention for as long as is possible.
So not sure what the way that actual situation played out has anything to do with anything. It's not the point.
It's just a breach of privacy from my point of view. I wouldn't read my kid's diary type of thing, even though the kid may be confessing to doing something "inappropriate" on those pages.
An 11-12-year-old taking nude pictures of herself is generally technically committing a crime as well as potentially putting herself at high levels of risk for abuse and exploitation. It is not overprotective to respond to that. Setting boundaries and rules and having consequences for breaking them is not an unreasonable or particularly harsh parenting stance. I understand where you're coming from, and the consequences will have to look different for an older teen. I work with college students and see parents who treat them like they're 13 - parental controls on the phone and constant tracking on Life360 or other apps, and it's truly detrimental.
These are learning experiences, but that doesn't mean they don't or shouldn't come with consequences. I don't see enough info here that makes me think this was over the line and a straight violation of privacy. How their daughter responds to it will depend on the relationship they've built til now, and the response will probably inform the parent's responses and so on.
I would be amazed if there is a single thing on this planet that doesn't prioritize attractive people - that's kind of just how it works.
Well, according to the article, it was not how it worked, until it was intentionally changed.
Indeed, and it's not the natural halo effect, allegedly they intentionally tweaked the algorithm to artificially boost people the company deemed attractive.
This stuff is so ridiculously damaging. Maybe even more damaging than all of the other potentially negative impacts highlighted by the story. When you scroll through tiktok, you really get the impression that everyone on the app is a supermodel.
As an adult, I obviously know that's not true, and that most people both on the app and in real life are average looking, but if you're a kid growing up, constantly asking yourself "why am I so much uglier than these people?"
I can't imagine how damaging that would have been to deal with as a kid. Girls wondering why they don't look like the girls they scroll through and interact with online. Guys wondering why they don't look like the guys that are giving them ALPHA RED PILL advice, and why their advice isn't working for them, since they're not sleeping with girls who look like the ones on the apps.
It makes me really glad I was born before most people were on the Internet.
It's devastating how many young boys are showing up in clinics with body dysmorphia now. If you go even a couple decades back, the standards for male fitness were not so high. Hugh Jackman in the older Wolverine movies versus the recent Deadpool one is a great example.