Michelle Obama Doesn't Want Her Kids Using Facebook

http://mashable.com/2011/02/09/michelle-obama-kids-facebook/

by acconrad • 15 years ago

53 55 15 years ago

ern• 15 years ago

Since children under 13 are not allowed on Facebook it's a moot point regarding Obama's daughters.

And if they did get accounts, they'd be reported very quickly: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=underage

arst• 15 years ago

It won't be a moot point for long; Malia turns 13 in July.

kingkilr• 15 years ago

Maybe that's true if your last name is Obama, but both my sisters had accounts before they were 13 (hell my youngest sister still isn't 13...).

ladon86• 15 years ago

Right, but they're not really allowed. They're breaking the TOS and they haven't been reported yet.

michaelchisari7• 15 years ago

I'm not a big fan of young kids on Facebook either, but I do think that having a "safe" social network for the under-13 crowd would be good, and because of it's ubiquity, Facebook isn't it.

I'd prefer something owned and operated by the schools themselves. I've had a feature in Appleseed for a while now which lets you block or allow social networking domains based on regular expressions.

In the US, since all schools get a domain, a junior high in Wisconsin could block all domains except *.k12.wi.us, so that only other students could connect.

roc• 15 years ago

A portable, federated, school-based social network might be an interesting end-run around the data lock-in problem.

You could pitch the solution as a sort of portal-with-social-network-features to the school (something they're all keen to have) and you'd wind up with a huge userbase and a steady stream of profiles that want to port-out or echo-out from their school-based service each and every year. And, as even large schools are tiny on an internet-scale, scaling problems are vastly simplified.

Then each outside service that wanted to be able to take these profiles in, or allow a link between an in-school profile and one of their profiles (so Sue's uploads to the photography club make it to the flickr stream their parents can subscribe to), would essentially be signing on to a common data format and interchange protocol.

michaelchisari7• 15 years ago

That's part of my plan for Appleseed. Which is more than a little ironic, considering how Facebook got it's start.

jerf• 15 years ago

"I'd prefer something owned and operated by the schools themselves."

I strongly disagree. Part of the point of these things would be to not be the school, to emphatically not be the school. My BBS days would have been much less interesting if everything had to be sanitized for school authority consumption.

At some point children are no longer in school. It would be nice if they have some miniscule amount of experience in being in a not-school environment, what with that making up the majority of their lives. If schools are anything they are already too large, in terms of the footprint they leave on our children's lives.

michaelchisari7• 15 years ago

After a certain age, yes, I know I appreciated the freedom of BBS's when I was a teenager as well.

But up to around 13, building your social network around your classmates makes sense. And the ability to exclude older children, and non-students, as well as be able to monitor their activity also makes sense. There isn't the strong need for privacy when you're nine than there is when you're 14.

tptacek12• 15 years ago

In fact, there has already been legal drama with schools objecting to what students write about their classes and teachers and seeking to punish them for it. I agree, affiliation with the school system is a liability, not a benefit.

benwerd• 15 years ago

Club Penguin is the go-to place for the tween set, no?

michael_dorfman• 15 years ago

Yes, for the younger side of the tween set. There's an unfilled gap, though, between Club Penguin and Facebook, at least according to my eldest daughter, who went on Facebook the minute she turned 13, literally-- she sat there with the form filled out, the mouse hovered over the "submit" button as the clock struck midnight. For her, Club Penguin lost its shine around age 11, and I was a hard-ass in terms of sticking to the Facebook TOS-- according to her, all of her friends were already on Facebook, and I tend to believe her, as it took her less than 18 hours to rack up more "friends" than I have.

ligerhearted2• 15 years ago

I'm 17 and grew up on Halo CE with xchat back around 2001 to 2003. A large portion of my teenage years (and most of my friends') was spent on Halo 2 as well...4chan was all the rage 2005-2008. Early 2008 until now it's been supplanted by HN and Reddit.

When I wasn't playing Halo, I spent a lot of time reading and editing Wikipedia, which might be something for kids to try out now. But Wikipedia's barrier to entry has risen significantly...one of the reasons I've quit the community there.

Eventually, it'll turn into a war between time spent on "productive" sites and activities, and time masturbating to porn, in my experience.

fakespastic• 15 years ago

And Webkinz, but typed chat is unavailable to my kids. I have one around 12 years old now, and nearly all her friends have Facebook profiles (verified, usually wide open), so it's hard to explain why she can't have one yet. I don't really think there's anything terribly wrong with it; just another way to communicate, like cell phones and, much earlier, telephones. We let them use email, so I'm starting to question the barrier we put up ourselves to Facebook.

javanix2• 15 years ago

With the amount of vitriol thrown around in American politics these days, I wouldn't want my kids directly exposed to a public forum like that if I was in the Presidential family.

Volscio• 15 years ago

Well there's also a significant danger of security leakage if the girls talk about what their family is doing, I guess.

krakensden• 15 years ago

I doubt Mr. Obama tells them national security related things, they're a little young for that. I have no doubt they would be subject to well organized and foul trolling if anyone could locate them online.

adulau• 15 years ago

Right, they should use Internet instead, an open library to the world knowledge.

tptacek12• 15 years ago

My kids (9 and 11) aren't going to be allowed to use Facebook at 13 either.

It bothers me a bit --- it's something I've considered Asking HN --- that what meager writing ability I have, I gleaned from dialup BBS's in the early '90s; my kids lack a similar forum.

This is a big deal. Holding everything else at a low constant threshold, the ability to write and to take tests practically guarantees a B average. On a single day, no, hell, between build cycles! we write comments on HN that'd pass muster as a middle school essay. I've tried to communicate to my hemming and hawing son that I write stuff of similar length for enjoyment, and he doesn't get it.

Splines2• 15 years ago

Isn't a place like this (or reddit or any of the many special-interest forums out there) an equivalent replacement for the BBS era? Are the available platforms just not productive for "long form" writing?

tptacek12• 15 years ago

I like places like this, but Reddit isn't the answer; it needs to be populated by and welcoming to "tween-age" kids while not being entirely restricted to them. It's a tough mix to get right.

tokenadult• 15 years ago

impishidea.com

ImpishIdea was founded by a young HNer who was dissatisfied with previous literature discussion sites for young writers.

DarkShikari• 15 years ago

For my mother, writing basically made up the majority of her work. Accordingly, she spent practically a decade of my childhood making sure that I could write. She nitpicked my essays down to the last word and criticized me both on small-scale issues (e.g. sentence structure and word choice) as well as large-scale issues (structure of an argument, etc).

At the time I didn't quite realize how useful this was. As a kid, I was rather annoyed that I had to spend so much time to write short essays. Everything I did was a back-and-forth process between me and her -- in retrospect, rather like a code review.

Today, for me, writing is basically second-nature. Even when typing on IRC, if I want to, I can write reasonably well without putting much effort into it. The most surprising discovery for me as an adult was that this isn't normal -- that, particularly outside of our community here, most people really can't write without significant effort. From my perspective today, those years of nitpicking school writing assignments were the single most useful thing my parents did for me, and if I raise kids, I will ensure that I do the same to them.

One consistent observation I've made over the years is that the highest concentration of "good writers my age" during childhood was to be found in school scifi/fantasy writing clubs, text-based RPs such as MUSHs, and so forth. I don't know which direction the relationship goes in however: do such activities attract good writers, or do people become good writers through them? Or is it both?

ralphc2• 15 years ago

Your kids will have an account, if they don't already. No special software is needed, just a browser and the ability to remember a password. School, library, friend's house...in this war it isn't you vs. them, it's the smartest, most motivated kid they know vs. the dumbest, most apathetic adult they know.

tptacek12• 15 years ago

An account on Facebook, is what you're saying? No, they won't.

statictype• 15 years ago

I don't see the connection between Facebook and writing. There are still forums they can participate in that serve whatever interests they have.

Also, don't you think reading newspapers/magazines/books (either online or on paper) are a better way to improve your langauge (written/verbal/comprehension) than internet forums?

mc32• 15 years ago

Can you imagine:

"My dad said he wasn't going to sign that FTA with [country X]"

"No, I heard him say he really can't stand senator [from state X].

"My mom and I will be going shopping at [some store] at around 2."

"Yeah, I actually saw the King of [country] in the oval office --It's supposed to be a secret."

Not saying their daughters would have loose lips as exemplified above, and the example are highly unlikely as they would be trained to avoid such statements, but you could imagine people mining what they say to try to infer from what they post and extrapolate as well.

It would be a profitable mine for the opposition as well as for any wrong-doers.

sfphotoarts• 15 years ago

doesn't this mean though that you'd have to keep them off the internet in general? It's not like (no pun intended) Facebook is the only forum for expressing one's opinions.

Rariel• 15 years ago

I'm surprised bullying hasn't been mentioned in this discussion. That's one of the main reason I plan to keep my unborn children off the internet as long as possible.

It's interesting though, when I was 13 my parents took TV away from me during the weekdays, but I still got to use my computer and AOL account. I think I'll be limiting my kids use of the internet for non-school purposes. This reminded me of the chinese-mother article from the other day--sometimes we know what's best for our kids before they do. Getting on facebook at age 13 is not good for kids in a society filled with obesity and online bullying. If anything severely restrict and monitor. I intend on requiring the password to all my kids social networking profiles--there is no way a 13 year old can have a reasonable expectation of privacy from their parents!

SageRaven• 15 years ago

Our home has no broadcast TV. We do Netflix and Hulu for some (mostly advert-free) entertainment. My 12-year-old son can only go online via the living room PC (mostly because he doesn't have a PC in his room) and my 15-year-old daughter has mostly free-reign to do what she wants online via her netbook. I'd much rather have my kids reading and writing stuff online (even if some of the correspondence was questionable), as opposed to drooling in a trance while watching the boob-tube.

Call me a parent with weird priorities, but I'd rather my kids hold their own on places like Reddit and (yes, even) 4chan over watching much of the crap on TV (extreme left/right hate politics on CNN/FOX/CNBC, Hanna Montanna, reality TV, etc.). Not that either of them know of Reddit or 4chan yet (that I'm aware of), but I assume you catch my meaning.

Of course, the 'net does have a lot of TV-like mindless crap that can be just as (in my opinion) soul-killing as TV; things like Farmville and other pointless drivel. However, the kids don't seem to get hung up on stuff like that. Yet. We'll see, I guess.

This brave new world of parenting is always a mixed bag, isn't it?

scrame• 15 years ago

Good.

Michelle Obama Doesn't Want Her Kids Using Facebook

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