United States | News & Politics

At my daughter's (high) school the kids have to manage social media accounts as part of the curriculum. They're an arts school that puts on plays, musical performances, etc.

It is fully expected that the kids post tasteful videos promoting their work (e.g. a pianist kid would have to post a video of them playing and they'll be taught how to make sure the lighting/audio is right). They also have the kids create all the school's social media videos (only certain teachers have the power to actually post them though).

They are taught what's bad and good about social media and they experience it. All the teachers know everyone's (non-secret, haha) accounts and they get graded on them! There's all sorts of resources for the kids and they're all so damned professional it's easy to forget they're just kids.

Things like bullying, how to manage comments/inappropriate posts, and how to deal with trolls/unhelpful negative feedback is covered and it's fucking fantastic.

Every school should have social media management and online etiquette classes.

What I wish they spent more time on is how to protect your privacy... But I understand the conflict there: If they teach the kids how to keep things secret, well, parents might not appreciate that 🤷

Here's my prediction based on previous events:

This will eventually lead to requiring IDs like phub in red states. If you care about privacy online or free speech, this will detract from that. This isn't about children, it was never about the children. It is about control of what media people consume.

I live in a red state. If I didn't have access to the Internet I would be a trump supporter who believes anything I hear like so, SO many people I've grown up with.
This is tearing down the safe places that I grew up on who kept me from being like that.
They're already taking away federal funding for LGBT things, now they're trying to keep people from learning it's a thing.
It's banned to learn about it in school, they won't support clubs in universities, they are now trying to stop people from getting content online.

It's not for the kids.

Yeah best this does is teach them some new tricks for sneaking around whatever barriers. There’s a reason noone bothers with parental control settings as is.

IMO this is the same issue as pollution or banning carcinogenic compounds. If you all agree it’s harmful to society you need to ban it at the manufacturing level. It’s not inherent that browsing the internet has a negative impact, it’s that these individual tech companies have purposely designed their products to extract value from kids even with clear evidence the design is harmful to them. Companies with bad faith products like this (looking at you oil and tobacco) should be forcefully shut down (and prevented from reforming) based on their demonstrable malicious intent (holding back research that their products are harmful).

Edit: tl;dr you should ban harmful things at the manufacturing level not try to moderate them at the end point

Shit is so bad it makes kids want to fucking kill themselves but once you're 18, it's all good for the world.

I'm sure that will totally be enforced and definitely solve everything. /S

“I firmly believe that social media is the most harmful product that our kids have legal access to in Texas,” said Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, the bill’s author.

Agreed. I even disagree with the opposition’s take:

“What about the concern that this is helping these social media companies collect even more data on us,” State Rep. Erin Zwiener, D-Driftwood, asked Patterson.

Oh, they already know. But this takes away the corporate plausible deniability of “we didn’t know they were kids!” when, mostly, they do.

Enforcement of this will be a nightmare, kids will hate it with a burning passion, but I will take the regulation we can get. At this point, I am all for this scorched Earth approach.

All these bills have great ideas but all just boil down to, “We want to collect every single users ID ~~so we can track down dissenters~~ to protect kids”

As much as it might be a grand idea, it won't be possible. I was in the unenviable spot of having to keep a very close watch on one of my kids activities for safety reasons, they will find a way to meet up with people unless it's an outright whitelist only, and in that case they just go to some public wifi to go around it. There are plenty of sites out there that people are not commonly aware of that get used and traded in person that anyone trying to do basic category filters is already lost to.

Texas did something I agree with? This timeline is fucking weird.