Together, we can create the necessary technological and social conditions which ensure children can again enjoy the space to learn, the anonymity to err, and the time to mature. We would welcome the chance to support your continued efforts to safeguard their wellbeing.
We think there’s a different revenue model to emerge from today’s technological innovations in web3—a model whereby users themselves are in control of their identities, their data, their monetization, their connections.
Digital assets and cryptocurrencies are being addressed in the https://t.co/PPEFMjIasC, confirming #Web3 's potential for finance. We believe the next step is in social media, and that means that the time is now to reset the conditions which have damaged one generation already.
Dear @MELANIATRUMP@FLOTUS#BeBest
An open (abridged) letter on #socialmedia and children
Thank you for bringing your voice and reach to this fundamental social concern. There are few enough addressing how social media is hurting children yet we all, on some level, know it.
The result is (1) to target youth, earlier = better. Of course, youth have little disposable capital, so (2) allow free accounts (3) which can readily be created in massive numbers, and then (4) monetize users who can’t pay. Algorithmic addiction is inevitable.
It is our hypothesis that negative impacts on children are a direct result of the economics of #web2 technology infrastructure and Silicon Valley’s approach to modern #venturecapital : maximise annual revenue per user multiplied by years.
The miners carrying the now-dead bird only observe the bird after it has succumbed. This indicates the miners should exit, and their more resilient forms do so with limited severe damage. The dead bird is tossed in the garbage.
We are treating children like canaries.
Suicide is the “canary in the coalmine” because it is binary (“alive”/“not alive”), discrete, observable, and irrefutable. Notably, it is also irrecoverable. In a coalmine, the fast-metabolism and limited lungs conspire against the canary and it thus dies from too much coal gas.
The damage of social media on children is known across:
· Cyberbullying
· Mental health
· Impaired social skills
· Educational distraction
· Inappropriate content
· Neural rewiring toward addiction
These effects aren't addressed because, sadly, they are too difficult to measure.
The ADF also neglects the sum of all incidents which prove non-lethal but incur cost nonetheless—the broken legs, the organ ruptures, the concussions and debilitations, etc. But there are a host of other drawbacks and disabilities that result from negative engagement.
However, while all other categories have increased less than 10% over this period, teen suicide has increased 50% and accounts for almost the entire increase in national suicide rates.
Similarly teens spend only slightly more daily time on social media (2:32 for males, 2:59 for females) than other age groups (unweighted, 2:13 and 2:26), so suicide impacts should be only a little higher.
The first flaw of the ADF demonstrates a collective sociopathy: these aren’t just “suicides” which could be measured against the whole population; these are “teen suicides”. For example, a teen drives 1/2 as much as a 40-some but is in 2x the fatal accidents.
It reads: no one dies from cars until their invention, therefore the new universal utility of the car outweighs the new loss of life. In furtherance of the fallacy, economists call these “externalities”, and these deaths become footnotes to the overall benefit of the technology.
Some argue that the ~50% increase in teen suicide since social media isn’t sufficient to warrant a crackdown when compared to the enormous prosperity provided by these platforms. This is the “automobile death” fallacy ("ADF").
There is a clear uptick in teen suicide which has a profound correlation with the advent of Facebook and since. The unadjusted r-squared was >0.93; the data available were only annual, yet with a one-year lag adjustment, the r-squared rose somewhat (>0.94).
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