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
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.
There’s gotta be a modern version of Fortunate son brewing somewhere with a cybertruck whizzing sound as the intro.
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.
I love how Elon Musk was the sole fuck up in these examples
Thats because he has like 14 kids with numerous women and doesn’t actually parent them.
Musk doesn’t even remember his kids’ names except maybe that one he named by smashing the keyboard with his fist
Surely he at least knows the name of the one he used to carry around as a human shield after the Health Care Insurance CEO got executed?!
What about the one he used as a shield? Or are they the same?
Yeah that’s the one
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/elon-musks-human-shield-son-x-ae-a-xii
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.
Yeah because they see us as animals that they can hurt to enrich themselves. They don’t give a fuck what the consequences are to your children, that’s your problem. Just because they reshape the inescapable environment you raise your kids in, doesn’t mean they will ever see themselves as responsible for the effect that has on them, or you.
The mass of humanity needs to accept that private power concentrations are a threat to humanity and take steps to ensure they don’t exist. Private interest are hostile to community interests. There is no middle ground with selfishness, it is relentless. The most selfish people will always end up with the power if power is allowed to concentrate. Democracy was literally the remedy for it and we’ve allowed democracy to be removed from the hands of the many in favour of the few.
Private power and community power can not peacefully coexist.
Democracy was literally the remedy for it and we’ve allowed democracy to be removed from the hands of the many in favour of the few.
Exactly, the entire point of having a government is supposed to be to protect society from these people.
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?
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 agree - mostly. But…things online are RADICALLY different now, vs late 90s / early 2000s.
I’ve outlined some of my media and tech curation for my kids above; I would LOVE for them to stumble across stuff like we did. Hell, in time, I’d even let them grok the edgier stuff (yes, like you, I was there 3000 years ago. I know of the old magics)
But that internet is long gone…or if not…severely booby trapped. The competence required of (say) a curious 8yr old in 2026 vs 2002 to navigate the online landscape and NOT encounter those booby traps (I feel) is several orders of magnitude higher.
I don’t think we can just park our kids in front of the 486 and say “here’s Encarta; have at it. Then I’ll show you this cool thing called a BBS”.
Kinda sucks.
Still, there are useful funnels / curation pathways. You CAN recreate that experience for your kids…but it’s no longer “are you winning, son?” set it and forget it meme. Now it’s “Daddy needs to be a part time sysadmin and know what’s what, so some pedo doesn’t catfish you for feet pics via ROBLOX”.
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
Nowadays it’s filled with giant, powerful, activelly predactorial entities using teams of Psychologists to come up with ways to subvert human falibilities and weaknesses to their ends no matter how much it fucks up their victims.
Back in the day pretty much the worst that could happen to you was getting hurt when trying to do for fun some kind of explosive based on a FAQ from Usenet.
What was like a sleepy village with some shady corners has been turned into Blade Runner’s Los Angeles whilst some governments are trying to make it more like Mega City One.
Corpocrap scrolley apps exploit you on purpose, but that doesn’t generalize. Not.that non techy people understand that
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
“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.
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.
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.”
Anti-christ thiel says whayt. Only because the billionaires have gotten thier wealth through unethical means, not including harming other people, of course the wrath will be directed at thier children too, since they benefited from it.
“Our technology is perfectly safe and harmless for all ages!”
“So you would let your own children use it?”
“Nooo. No no no no no no. God no.”
“Are you kidding? I KNOW how addicting we make that shit. I don’t want my kids anywhere near it.”
Hmmm it appears they understand how evil all the tech companies are, harvesting data to the fullest extent. Spying, influencing, etc.
Seems this would be good evidence in the case that’s currently at trial.
Oh they absolutely know. Zuck’s Meta is on trial right now not only because Instagram creates an addiction for kids, but because it was made delibarately, on purpose. Kids addictron was the goal.
They’ve always known. They just don’t care for the rest of humanity.
Look to the masters, the tobacco industry with additives to make it more addictive (been a while since I researched it and that’s the one that popped up, but they spent 60+ years making it more addictive).
Social media speedran it with something apparently innocuous (‘they trust me, stupid fucks’), and a bunch of corrupt psychologists (and marketers/advertisers also known as corrupt psychologists). Do no harm my ass, wait, that doesn’t apply to psychologists, wait again, that’s more like guidelines for doctors (not an actual vow in most places).
Next bill of rights / constitution needs to address this specifically, there’s a reason why quacks have a special hatred (and if there were one, a special hell)…
The tobacco industry is a good historical example of all the shit world dominating companies do. The most sneaky thing I can remember is that they finance perfectly good research on a lot of causes of cancer, except for tobacco, so researchers were too busy and happy to get some money to work on something, to investigate tobacco. They also have been buying companies that used to finance legitimate research so researchers that depended on them are now forced into a conflict of interest. https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q1153
Personal anecdote, a young female data scientists left my current department to join Philip Morris, it blows my mind that young educated people would join this industry willingly, I guess it was for the money.
Not to excuse that POS, but more on how we got here: You have a product that only makes money when people actively use it. How do you increase your ROI? Make people want to use it and want to use it longer. Do that by making it more interesting, more relevant, more stimulating and appear bottomless so people can use it as long as possible.
Addiction for EVERYONE is the only way FB continues to increase revenue. We just single out Children because they are most easily influenced and impacted.
Oh I’m perfectly aware this is most likely a chain of pressure and responsibility dodging:
- the top demands more users more active,
- the bottom develops some solutions they demo while refusing any responsability for its impact.
- Some middle pressed to meet demand while having only one solution available at the time eventually decide to deploy it, maybe “temporarily”.
Many years ago a grocery store chain, which was rapidly becoming national, had its progress halted by a meat bleaching scandal. They set impossible goals for their meat department, knowing there was zero way to sell the meat at the volume they demanded, so the local stores were left to do illegal things to meet the impossible quotas. The higher ups claimed plausible deniability, while knowing there was but one answer.
What’s even crazier, is the grocery store (Food Lion) sued the journalists who went undercover to expose it, and won. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-01-23-mn-21242-story.html
Fortunately, the damage to their reputation did far greater damage than they won in the lawsuit, but as far as I could find, no legal actions were taken against Food Lion.
I doubt. I think it’s more like they fear us getting to them through their kids.
Imagine doing that to your child. Raising them in an alternate world that doesn’t really exist? That’s not fearing the tech and caring about their kids. That’s control. That’s them proving their children are the same things as a car.
Does musk even see any of his kids often enough to set rules?
not if his kids have any say in the matter
He probably just wishes he put it in the contract signed with the mothers.
I can imagine he has access to crazy surveillance of them and their mothers.
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.
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.
They’re subhumans with no morality or code of ethics whose sights are set on more and more wealth, spiralling them further into the depths of depravity and the cardinal sin of greed.
Greed begets more greed, but unlike gluttony and wrath, the billionaires’ deterioration doesn’t manifest itself physically, so they allow themselves to become evermore corrupted by it until they become a fountain of disease, rotting and decaying everything around them.
Calling someone “subhuman” is the language of a supremacist. They are some of the absolute worst examples of humanity, yes, but they are still human. Referring to them as subhuman abdicates humanity’s responsibility to bring them to justice and to build systems that prevent a disproportionate concentration of power and influence.
Nah. They’re subhuman. At best.
Yeah, but the Epstein class wants us conditioned to be as forgetful as their LLMs, and compartmentalized like good robots so we reset to compliance by default without connecting too many dots. Concentration and focus are how you exercise consciousness, which is the opposite of what the ruling class wants. They’ve literally attempted to and in the minds of many individuals they’ve succeeded in framing consciousness as a “mind virus”.
Because they know their kids will have an advantage over the stupefied masses if they can keep them unmezmerizes.
That’s so much Zone of Interest.
