Restricting social media for children

[[Ars]Hellheart]

Can you spot the difference between these two daily routines:
1) Bullied in person at school over seven hours, then bullied remotely online over three hours.
2) Bullied in person at school over seven hours.

Evidently our understandings of the word 'limit' are incompatible.

yea, using social media is a choice, while school isn't. You can't just ignore a bully in school like you can online.

Everything else notwithstanding, these two are substantially different. And a lot of the alternative bullying methods you proposed are either direct (limited, can be blocked or retaliated against) or location-based (and can thus be isolated, compartmentalized, and avoided).

A child that is bullied at school can have a home life where they don't feel bullied. Friend groups that are separate. They can pretend to, or actually be, someone totally different in different spheres. Social media squishes that together in a way that is very unavoidably public, but also very difficult to punish in a way that direct harassment is not. It's not that people are suddenly paying attention to or caring about bullying because they can see it; a huge part of the problem for the victim is the very fact that it is more visible.

This is very particularly a social media issue: the intensely and overwhelmingly public nature of posts is nothing like forums, websites, or any more limited form of social interaction.

 

[[Ars]Hellheart]

I don't understand. Getting bullied at school is a lot more public than having a private social media page. Unless you are for some reason following your bully on social media, you are unlikely to actually see any public posts from that person.

If you struggle to understand what I mean here, you going out with your buddies is a different version of you than the you that exists as an employee. What happens to you as an employee is going to bleed into the rest of your life, but it isn't going to stick with you in other venues unless you identify as an employee in all aspects of life, which is rare (this is a small but notable aspect of the push against requiring employees to respond to e-mails during off-work hours). So your work life might suck, but that doesn't mean you want everyone else to know about it.

Children are not adept at maintaining multiple identities and properly separating social spheres in their head, let alone in their actual behavior. And bullies appear to enjoy humiliating people in as widespread and public a manner as possible. So even if a child has zero social media presence or awareness, that isn't the issue. The issue is that the bullies do, and that the bullies are able to use their own social media accounts through things like friends, following, and reposting to effectively amplify anonymous harassment to nearly everyone who has ever had contact with their victim. With or without that victim's knowledge. They add or @ the friends and family of themselves and their victim.

Now that identity of being bullied, of being a victim, of that shame? It's everywhere. It's inescapable. Everyone knows, regardless of whether you'd want them to. And based on the fact that it is both widespread and unpunished, the victim can delude themselves into believing nobody cares or everyone thinks the victim deserves it.

The social media presence of the bullies is what makes this possible. That's something you currently cannot police or restrict without additional laws.

EDIT: Cyberbullying laws do exist. Evidentiary standards are a lot harder to reach than "you're a kid, you shouldn't have these accounts" would be. A ban is a ridiculous overreach for just this one problem, but it's not just this one problem, and it's so incredibly difficult to actually address the issue in a way that isn't way too slow or convoluted or specific to limit the actual harms that this sort of behavior causes.

 

[[Ars]Hellheart]

Having been on the receiving end of more than my fair share of bullies during elementary and jr high school, I can tell you: this isn't how it works. Children are plenty good at separating social spheres and their actual behavior: the bully you meet at school is not the same person you will meet should you encounter them on the other side of town or at church: remove their friends and they become perfectly firendly. Indeed, it's the social situation that creates the bully; ultimately, it's a power game: the bully isn't doing this because he enjoys humiliating people, he's doing it because, by picking on someone lower in the social heiarchy, he's able to intimidate others and raise his position in the social heiarchy. It's a way of climbing a social ladder by using low-status people as rungs to be stepped on while climbing.

So the identity-separation portion of that post was referring to how the victim is affected by the situation, rather than how the bully might behave in other venues. A bully who acts differently in another social sphere is still actively terrorizing their victim, because the few children who can fully compartmentalize what happens to them are very likely to suffer from DID or dissociation. Bullies who are being nice are actively harming their victims still, whether or not they understand this to be the case. Hell, bystanders who are being nice can actively harm the victim. It can get very ugly.

I understand the confusion here because I transitioned into potential bully behavior in the same paragraph. What you can even get from the friends-and-family of the victim side of this is "hey, I saw this anonymous message threatening your kid and I'm really concerned," like the worst bullies work in groups and utilize social strategies that they often experience in their home lives.

Groups of bullies often follow the mob mentality, where it is very much about humiliation and control and damage. The individuals might act differently in some situations where there can be a passing of the baton, but the pressure from the group itself remains constant. Social media amplifies this, as it allows them to effectively egg each other on, share what's being done with each other, and anonymously collaborate on harmful content.