Developmental psychologist Candice Odgers argues there's little evidence smartphones are driving a youth mental health crisis. She points instead to economic stress, opioids, and caregiver mental health. Screen time has minimal impact, bans can reduce safety, and parents should prioritize trust and open communication.
@emmettoconnell
This is where I am concerned about Will Dreher.
I really want Gerry Pollet out of there but Dreher has framed his whole campaign around protecting kids from social media and AI.
@emmettoconnell @jdp23
I asked him his intentions on BlueSky. Let's see how that goes.
Cool, it’ll be interesting to see what he says!
@ohmu @emmettoconnell
@jdp23
Dreher seems like he is going to ignore my question and the story developing around where his campaign money came from is disturbing.
This is turning out to be a weird race.
Both David and Dreher, it turns out, potentially have strong ties to what I'll call toxic tech bro-ism.
@jdp23
At the same time, I don't feel like I trust what's being said in favor of Davis and against Dreher because it seems to be coming from the part of the left that sometimes gets ... upset about questions.
@ohmu On social media side, Dreher's platform says
"Help pass legislation to ban addictive feeds, endless scroll, and other problematic features of kids’ social media accounts, without requiring kids to provide more sensitive age-verification data to these companies"
The last part sounds good but then again most of the supporters of the addictive social media bill this year claimed that it wouldn't require age verification (even though the language in practice meant that companies would do age verification). So, it's worth probing, but definitely grounds for concern
Also his platform has
"Work on data privacy legislation that gives all users the right to opt-out of certain kinds of data collection and to put strict timeframes on others"
No no no no, opt-out is not a good basis for privacy legislation. Even the Bad Washington Privacy Act was at least partially opt-in! Disappointing.
And, not doing anything to counter the idea that he's big-tech friendly.
