This is the problem: how do we ban social media for kids? First we have to know who are kids and who are adults. How do we do that? More tracking. More stored data. Pass. The real answer is to punish the people doing the harm. Throw Zuck in supermax and take away his company. Pichai, Nadella, Bezos. Cook. Huang. Altman. Hold them accountable for the crazy damage they've done to the earth and society.
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2026
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This is the problem: how do we ban social media for kids?
Be a parent.
Give your kids a locked down device. Monitor their use use of unlocked devices (PCs/Laptops) at home. Talk to your kid's friend's parents, if your kid is using their devices you will find out and can deal with it accordingly.
Parents have been stopping kids from smoking and drinking, they can keep them off tiktik till they are in high school as well.
I think you missed my point. I'm saying that any "protect the kids" call is almost invariably followed up with an implied "By taking away more privacy and by stealing more data."
I didn't imply that you should be violating the privacy of kids any more than a parent is entitled to. Locking down a device and shoulder surfing your 10 year old is not violating human rights, it's keeping your kids safe from the firehose.
I'm not worried about kids' parents monitoring their kids' use. I'm aware that they are going to implement across the board ID for every damn website "to keep kids safe". Tracking everything I say in every platform I say it on is violating my human rights. Also, all these companies are American. They have zero right to any of my data. Ever.
I got news for you the parents where not stopping the kids from smoking and drinking.
I can tell you (not a parent, in IT for education) kids, like dinosaurs, find a way. It'd amaze you how clever they are at getting on devices. Hell, we have kids hacking staff accounts so regularly we just audit all the accounts for the usual kid haunts.
I don't see it. How is your system so lax that kids are hacking them weekly?
Did I say weekly? "So lax?" Do you know anything at all about our system? How do you know that I don't work in "Prison for 17 year old hackers"? How do you know that I'm not the only IT guy for an 11,000 person education system? We have a real cybersecurity problem, yes. But this may stagger your imagination, you don't know any of the details, so of course you assume we must be fully staffed, fully funded, dealing with little kids, and just incompetent.
How is your staff enrollment so lax that it can be done by any user?
Oh simple! I didn't proofread my post before posting! Autocorrect changed "hacking" to "having".
My question stands. A simple confirmation by a human when enrolling a new account or upgrading an existing account should be enough. How many legit new staff accounts are added in a week?
Okay, we're done.
Laws exist for smoking and drinking?
I'm not sure if you are still a child or never were one.
Absolutely but Canada can’t do that, and banning social media companies is political suicide
And more pressingly to the politicians, laws restricting them is portfolio suicide
I’m glad he’s saying this. As an educator I can confirm that the effects of technology on the young generation has been positively catastrophic. The literacy crisis is not getting nearly enough attention for how serious of an issue it is, and it is caused in large part by technology
I'm impressed youre so confidently able to attribute it to technology, I gotta ask what's your testing method and metrics?
Seems to me economic factors would be a better guess, recession frequency is impressively high these days.
what is funny is the wealthy don't' let their kids use their technology and send them to schools that use less tech. Funny how that works.
There's a lot of data on this which suggests technology is to blame. This is a good overview.
Correlation isnt causation.
Im not suprised thats a gov testimony and not a respected publisbers paper, theres absolutely no attempt to acknowledge the existance of nor correct measurement error.
These sampling biases really matter to draw trends from long term data, you could write that same paper but replace 'EdTech' with climate change, and (technically) be eqully as correct.
Correlation isn’t causation, I agree, but the signal here is extremely strong (data from 71 countries is included in just one graph of that file I linked) and we seem to understand the mechanism that would cause screens to lead to poor learning outcomes (a breakdown in sustained attention).
you could write that same paper but replace ‘EdTech’ with climate change, and (technically) be eqully as correct.
That is false, because you’d have no comparison group. You can compare outcomes of kids with and without tech, but not kids with and without climate change.
The most idiotic things are done by adults and seniors. But it's done with confidence so that changes everything I guess. I'd even argue tech does not contribute in bad ways as I see myself young people are smart and good nowadays compared to adults
With respect, no one outside of education seems to understand how serious of an issue this is. This is not a “kids these days” thing. Grade 8s are now functioning at a grade 2 level and this is a systemic issue impacting every educator I know
Can confirm. My daughter is teaching.
Seems to be three problems. Admin rules , and spoon fed info from phones, and parents who don't understand how to reinforce learning.
Admin one is that they can't report how the child is doing via marks, nor can they say negative comments. So parents don't get any eye openers, and a failing child is passed to next grade anyway.
The children aren't able to grasp info from a story and repeat points they picked out, they always want it given to them. The phone gives them instant prepared info about anything in short time spans, so they don't want to put effort into any task. There also a few that ask for help with scissors because they find cutting paper a long task.
The parents aren't helping.
Children come back without homework done. And parents say its up to the teacher to force them to do their homework. Lol.
Parents sending in chatgpt lists of how the teacher can monitor the child's backpack and ensure they take home the work, book, and writing tools each day etc. The parents thinks it is acceptable to direct every action of the child to get results...which seems is why they can't think for themselves at all now.
parents who don’t understand how to reinforce learning.
This is where the problem starts. 30 yrs teaching at a tech post secondary. Ridiculous grade inflation to accommodate students' falling abilities. Spent waaaay more time than I should have dealing with plagiarism from internet sources. Many of my colleagues just gave up. Those kids are now parents.
Wab Kinew is probably my favorite politician in the country. The man knows what he's talking about.
How about you regulate them? Putting the onus on addicts to stop being addicted rather than punishing the drug peddlers is such a cop out.
To much money just like gambling look at the ads. If they ban them sports ad money would dry up over night. But they should do something.
Could be both. Systems could be in place such that the consumers have ways to mitigate consumption while implementing strict regulations on the suppliers of it.
I agree it should be both but I'm not the premier lol
He needs to do his part not tell everyone else what theirs is.