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
Does musk even see any of his kids often enough to set rules?
I can imagine he has access to crazy surveillance of them and their mothers.
He probably just wishes he put it in the contract signed with the mothers.
The most disturbing part is these ghouls reproduced.
You look at the
eugenicistnatalist couples who worship Elon Musk and you realize they are indeed ghouls, and they treat their children like non-sentient garbage. Hitting them during interviews in public. Imagine what they do in private.Leave it to natalists to make extinction seem the better option.
That article was an insane read. I couldn’t have written more unserious people if I tried
I’m sitting on a train reading that and it must have been a weird look for other passengers as I was constantly grimacing! I may have verbally exclaimed a few times as well!
everyone talking about “phone bad” meanwhile im reminded of how abusive parents tend to track and watch everything kids do online. Like have we forgotten all of a sudden these people are extremely linked to the child rapist to end all child rapists???
I’m extremely hesitant to hand it to Thiel, Gates and Elon, especially in anything relating to how children should be treated.
Vaguely agree with the sentiment here.
Every single person I know who had helicopter parents ended up… a bit odd… in a bad way.
That’s so much Zone of Interest.
YouTube cofounder Steve Chen said at a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business last year that he wouldn’t want his kids consuming only short-form content, noting that it might be better to limit kids to videos longer than 15 minutes.
I hope this is introduced at the LA trial in some form that demonstrates the why.
I should not be amazed, but I still am, at the entire lack of morality that tech entrepreneurs have post dotcom bursting.
I say bullshit, these people aren’t involved enough in their kids lives to even know if their “1 hour a day” or whatever rules are happening. Their kids are absolutely doing whatever the fuck they want.
This behavior seems to be very similar to NFL stars and how they never wanted their kids to play football.
Everyone involved knows how dangerous social media/football is and many of them are in positions to actually do something about it. But because it benefits them personally, they won’t even rock the boat.
Musk is the most Twitter addicted person I am aware of.
If Trump were still on Twitter he’d be a strong contender lol
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?
Meta CEO Zuckerberg blocked curbs on sex-talking chatbots for minors, court filing alleges
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?
Zuckerberg had to testify last week ‘in an unprecedented social media trial that questions whether Meta’s platforms deliberately addict and harm children’ https://lemmy.world/post/43284616
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.
Personally, I don’t feel comfortable giving my ID to social media. Especially not with the many data breaches that are happening these days. I think it was a month or three ago that Discord had their data breach and got thousands of ID’s stolen of people.
Yet Discord still decides to push forward their “verification system with ID or face scan”.
Also here’s a screenshot of a comment someone once made and that also got me thinking about the future of “showing your ID and/ or Face scan to ‘protect the kids’”. Another note; people and especially teenagers will nearly always find ways to get around rules. I mean, we all were teenagers before and we often also got around the rules.
At least germany is working on a system where people are able to verify that they are over 18 (and maybe other things if they extend the system) without needing to send the ID to some website.
They use the Zero-Knowledge-Proofs which is still quite young.
A plus about that is that it only says if the person with the proof is older or younger but not who it is and other stuff
But sadly its not reality yet
People get pisses at you for good reason
“Lesser, greater, middling, it’s all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I’m not a pious hermit, I haven’t done only good in my life. But if I’m to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all”
Like the responder below, I do not feel comfortable giving my ID to social media sites. Hell, we had our government controlled, medical database (Medicare) get hacked and leak PII. And the yanks had their SSN pasted all over the net.
And those were a supposedly hardened pipelines.
Trust Facebook? Really? Nah.
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.
Also, having people upload their ID seems like just another obvious surveillance ploy/invasion of privacy in the name of safety. These people who have given us nothing but reasons not to trust them, just keep offering us more and more solutions to the issues that they’ve created.
“We’re doing this for your own good. You should say thank you.”
I used to work at a “Big Data” company that sold browsing data to a ton of companies. One problem the dev team ran into was that the standard ad-blocking plugins that they’d install on their machines also blocked our stuff, so my support team would have to inform them of bugs.
Lots of fun stories from that job.
That should be enough evidence for the rest of the world…
Never get high on your own supply
I have to admit, I’ve gone sort of retro-tech with my kids in the main. Wii over Xbox or PS5, DS-lite over Switches, OLPC over chromebook etc. Social media - ha ha, no chance :)
My eldest asked for a phone, so I gave her my old flipfone. She loves it (and I kinda want it back now, lol).
The HMD Nokia branded Barbie phones with KaiOS is what I’ve promised to get her when she’s earned it. That’s a dumbphone with some smart features…and as bonus, I can probably (with enough effort) create some apps for her directly (KaiOS is basically Firefox OS in a container, which even my dumb-ass can probably grok with some effort)
I give them access to my tablets…but the tablets have kid mode (app lock) and are hardened with firewall, pi-hole, app timers and curated content (eg: Smart-tube with ONLY the channels I select as safe being visible, no click thrus, comment section blocked etc. ABC kids. Jellyfin pointing to ONLY kids stuff etc etc). I know this is a technical solution to a behavioral problem. OTOH as much as I would LOVE to just yeet all this shit into the sun, the realistic position is kids need to know how to use tech. I even leave little breadcrumbs for my eldest to try and “hack” my systems so she can get access to “hidden” software (which, matrix-in-matrix style, I’ve allowed her access to. Don’t give SUDO equivalent to an 8yr old…once bitten, twice shy. I could tell you a recent horror story that would curl your hair)
Anyway…it’s not 1983 any more (sadly, in some ways), But I have observed that by curating content like this it FEELS like the kids are interacting with tech like we did back in the day; morning cartoons are once again morning cartoons and not a chance for MrBeast to invite my 8yr old to “comment, like and subscribe”.
My eldest has ASD and I’ve noticed these small tweaks have had significant improvements on her behaviour / media consumption patterns (eg: she will get bored of media now and self regulate away from it…and…gasp…play).
I dunno man. I’m trying out here. Shit ain’t easy. Too many plates spinning, not enough hands, and father time is a motherfucker. I’m tired, boss.
First of all these billionaires can afford to replace for their kids; what social media is with actual socialising that is destroyed by fear, nimbyism, and systematic destruction of third places for normal people. that’s what private cities and walled off estates are for. They will continue to enjoy the fruits of socialism while selling capitalism for everybody else.
This is not a force to be triffled with or dismissed as so easy to escape from.
that’s what private cities and walled off estates are for
I would just like to add that there is a school (I think in California) that the rich sends their kids to, where electronic devices are prohibited (and access restricted I believe). Though from the video, it does look lie the interact with others outside of that circle.
Here’s the video: YouTube Link
This isn’t new. I remember fifteen years ago some Silicon Valley app engineers forbade their children from playing the games that were being developed.
It’s because they’re engineered to use your psychology against you. This is by design.
