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gensym | on: Social media bans for teenagers lack evidence and pose risks, scientists say
> Not a single social media restriction experiment has included people under the age of 16. We do not know how social media bans will affect the young people being targeted by them because we have never tested this with them!

I've also never tested my ability to survive a 100ft fall. Maybe I can! We have no way of knowing!

> Virtually all schools in the United States report that they use social media for communications, including for key announcements such as making families aware of upcoming opportunities, educational programming, and key deadlines. The reliance on social media for communication and resource sharing, while banning youth from these same platforms, sends mixed messages to young people and limits their access to health promoting information and resources.

That's a good point. There's no other way that schools could communicate such things. My childhood in the 80s and 90s certainly didn't include Scouts, 4-H, Band, Drama, Cross-Country, etc! I'm sure with social media bans for youth, schools will just continue to use social media to try to communicate to kids rather than adapting.

I have to assume the authors of this paper know how dumb it is and just don't care since most people will only read the headline.

droidjj | parent | next
The title of the paper this blog post is based on, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/developmental-psycholog..., is "We don't know how social media bans will affect youth but we're doing it anyway!" Which is a little cheeky for my taste given the seriousness of the issue these bans are trying to address.
alistairSH | parent
Yeah, the "but they use the socials to communicate!" is laughable. Basically none of the parents I know want school comms to be via Meta or Tweet or whatever.

Email lists work great for the type of comms schools need to make. And/or an RSS feed on the schools homepage.