Despite building an increasingly screen-focused world, billionaire tech leaders are keeping their own children away from the tech they helped create.
As far back as 2010, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs told a New York Times reporter his kids had never used an iPad and that, “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
Since then, the trend of Silicon Valley billionaires keeping their families away from technology has become even more pronounced, thanks in part to the rise of social media and short-form video.
At the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival, early Facebook investor and billionaire Peter Thiel joined Chen among the ranks of tech leaders who are setting strict limits on screens. Thiel said he only lets his two young children use screens for an hour-and-a-half per week, a revelation that prompted audible gasps from the audience.
Other tech CEOs, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and Tesla’s Elon Musk, have also spoken about limiting their children’s access to devices. Gates has said he did not give his children smartphones until age 14 and banned phones at the dinner table entirely. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, in 2018, said he limits his child to the same 1.5 hours per week of screen time as Thiel. And finally, Musk, who bought the social media company X, formerly Twitter, in 2022, said it “might’ve been a mistake” to not set any rules on social media for his children.
Yet, as the trials against social media companies continue and country after country moves toward legislating what Silicon Valley’s billionaires have quietly practiced for years, the private behavior of the world’s most powerful tech figures stands in contrast to what they’re promoting and building
And they’ve convinced you that it’s a-okay for your kids to be using these products, in full knowledge of the harm they cause.
It’s so fucking creepy. It’s not just making people dumber, its literally exposing kids to sexual content and sexualizing children in advertisements aimed at adults.
At what point is it ok for all of society to demand these people either be put in jail or at least exiled from the rest of society?
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Regulations are keeping your businesses from thriving? The ones you seem to be building to intentionally cater to pedophiles and harm children? Half of these creepy ass broligarchs are already confirmed to be in the Epstein files.
They’re pretty open about what they want the future to look like, and the shit they’ve already got going, like the inescapable 24/7 surveillance where they can pick and choose the victims they want to legally abduct and traffic is just the beginning. And we’re supposed to just pretend we’re all fucking stupid enough to go along with it?
I don’t agree.
I started using the web as a curious 8 years old. I was pretending to be an adult in order to sign up to forums, chat with people, etc.
Yes, I was exposed to porn, gore (remember goatse?) but that didn’t make me dumb or a molester.
But nothing beats what I learned thanks to the internet. Endless days spent on programming forums, reading articles on a newborn Wikipedia, etc.
Even just talking with older people than me made me learn how to deal with things and life.
I don’t think that the internet for a kid is bad per se. I wouldn’t like a blanket ban for kids like the UK. If it was like that when I was a kid, I would probably be a more stupid person.
I think that the real bad thing is the stupid phones and apps that give you dopamine rushes.
I hate to say this, but the Internet is not the same as it was back when I was growing up.
You always had the possibility of stumbling across a bad actor. Now the billionaire tech broligoply who own most social media are the bad actors. How many websites did you visit where the person running the website has been caught repeatedly trying to psychologically manipulate and control the masses via disinformation?
Back in the day, nobody would be doing whatever the fuck it is these people are doing with kids and their pedo adjacent targeted ads and chat bots bc they would be afraid of being sent to jail for cp
Corpocrap scrolley apps exploit you on purpose, but that doesn’t generalize. Not.that non techy people understand that
People get pissed at me but, as a short-term solution, I’m okay with giving up my ID in order to lock kids out. I personally think it is the lesser of two exceedingly great evils.
Ideally, there’d be federal regulation of these platforms in every country banning algorithmically-elevated content, ads, privacy violations, and holding the operators of these platforms accountable for CSAM, but I think that will take decades.
People get pisses at you for good reason
Why does it need to take decades though?
I bet if there were actual consequences for this shit, like in the form of seizing assets from the broligarchs who run these companies, and giving them to the victims of their creations, the issue would be solved very quickly.