We can't even get countries to agree on a unified drinking age, but somehow the whole world is simultaneously coming to the conclusion that you need to be 16 to use social media, and websites and operating systems all need North Korean ID verification to prove you're over 16. There is a zero percent chance this is organic
The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global. That wasn't the case when drinking laws were enacted.
Also, the object - social networks - is global. Yes, all kinds of societies have had alcohol, but alcoholic beverages don't suddenly become 20% more potent or harmful everywhere at once. With centralized platforms, that can happen.
Totally. Today’s social media is not the same as last years etc. Read Meta’s quarterly reports and they brag about Reels increasing time spent on site by 30% in a year. That’s not even considering the other ill effects like giving kids a firehose of all the worlds problems when they’re not yet equipped to handle that information, which causes them to internalize those things, making them feel like things are fucked, that they’re responsible, etc. It’s psychologically devastating. And so many other things! Let kids be kids.
Yes I think this is it. News headlines and Tweets and other social media posts mean that trends are much more global than they used to be. "Controlling kids' access to social media" is just trending right now, and that means it's getting attention all over the globe at the same time.
are you for real suggesting that this is just countries that just so happen to look at eachother than then all go "wow, gotta get that age verification going" ?
its blindly obvious that this is an agenda that SOMEONE is pushing EVERYWHERE, one can then speculate who that might be, or for what purpose
other countries are also looking at many other things other countries are doing, and somehow doesnt arrive at some kind of semi-census in a very short time of eachother.
You are saying exactly what OP is saying but just rephrasing it another way.
The more a movement crosses borders, the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country and the more likely it is to be based on the needs of the transnational billionaire class.
Drinking age is not the only example, driving age is another good example and also the old TV rating system. What was considered taboo in America was often at the same time considered to be fine in places like Europe, or vice versa. But we never had a coordinated international push for censorship when it came to TV/movies like we are seeing with social media.
I can remember how much people used to deride mass surveillance and censorship in places like Russia and China and now here we are very quickly catching up to them in every way.
>the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country
there has been no such thing in decades. The idea that there are 'organic needs of countries' compared to 'artificial needs of global consumers' in the internet age where digital infrastructure is long post-national is conspiratorial.
We're here on HN right now. I'm German, you might statistically I guess be American, but maybe Indian, maybe Chinese, we likely both consume media made in South Korea or Japan so the fact that legislation emerges kind of in tandem isn't "coordinated censorship", it's reflecting a reality of how information flows. Politics, economics, and media consumption is now horizontally intertwined, we don't live in vertical silo countries any more.
If you made a digital worldmap and connected each person you'd get something that doesn't look at all like the one on your physical globe and if you don't realize that the distances there are a bit different you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening.
Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations? I can tell you that in the USA there are basically no real grassroots efforts to censor social media, at least none with a real footprint that most people have ever heard of. Despite that, there are a lot of politicians making laws to clamp down on social media use.
I think most people can intuitively see that the number of people who talk about this as an issue does not at all match the amount of attention that politicians are giving it. All at the same time, in most western countries simultaneously. It just does not pass the smell test.
>you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening.
Nothing spooky about it, they are not coincidences, we can see that ideas are spreading between powerful politicians and the billionaire oligarchs across borders without any real input of the governed. Laws are being made, we are being given the "think of the children" line, and they are hoping that we will accept it.
Just because we can communicate across borders doesn't mean that countries should stop considering the needs of their citizens as their primary objective. The more we allow these efforts to cross borders without any objection or examination, the weaker the power of citizens becomes and the less effective democracy becomes.
> Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations?
Yes?
Dear God, people have been begging for help for decades on these issues.
Right? What scientific study is showing awesome outcomes for screen addled kids, not to mention the behaviours it can encourage.
No teachers or doctors have been saying this is good, they’ve been warning it’s worse than we think consistently.
That does not have to mean draconian device validation per se.
My personal take is that we should have more than one ‘internet’ and keep the one full of porn and Chinese psyops up on the shelf with the titty mags and dick pills. Nintendo-ish style friend-code based messaging and online textbooks, until you’re old enough to buy an 18+ SIM card or internet connection. Same as how we handle booze, cigs, and porn: at point of sale with extra punishments for adults who provide. Not perfect, but doable.
>Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations?
Yes, tons of them honestly, in particular in the English speaking world. NSPCC or the Molly Rose foundation in Britain, Collective Shout in Australia who recently made the news after approaching I think payment providers who processed sexually charged games on Steam, etc.
Child safety online is if anything the most heavily activist driven topic there is. The tech companies and the shadowy people visiting Epstein's island are not known for their efforts to reduce children's access to the internet, Mark Zuckerberg is not in favor of gettting viewer people on his platforms.
This is reflected in polls too. The Child Safety act in Britain had vast support from the population, seven in ten people I believe, about 80% among women. Insofar as pressure is put on regulators to not adopt legislation of that sort it's coming from the people who you seem to think are responsible for it. It's largely elites who are funding organizations to scrap internet regulation, which is understandable given that it makes financial sense for them.
> The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global.
This is simply not true. The US puts pressure on countries to harmonize their regulations and laws to ours, unless it is to the US's advantage that other countries have different laws than ours. The world didn't suddenly get draconian drug laws through "political movements," it got them through diplomatic and funding pressures. The US often used those laws as excuses for military and intelligence interventions, or to build political organizations in those countries in the guise of antidrug organizations.
All countries do things like this, but the US is rich and dangerous enough to do it hardest. The US has decided that it wants everybody tracked at all times, especially online, and when it explains the advantages of this to the elites of other countries, they also like the idea.
Smaller European countries have also made it a cottage industry to fanatically push US agendas in places like NATO and the EU, because it gives their little homelands outsized influence (and bags of cash) to operate on behalf of the bully. For some reason, everybody in Europe has to care what e.g. Estonia thinks about something, although Estonia is just saying what the US wants Europe to be doing, and the US is financing Estonian candidates for European positions (and maybe even having Trump lobby against them to give them even more credibility.)
This attack on any sort of privacy online is not coming from the churches. There is no lobby group that it pushing it that doesn't get the majority of its funds from any number of governments, which is just government lobbying itself. The way democracy is supposed to work is that the people support something, and they then vote for candidates that will give it to them - but there is no visible constituency lobbying for this other than casual liberal cynics who aren't organized in any way.
As a comparison, in 2015 there was like 65-70% popular support for single-payer health care in the US. There were dozens of organized groups supporting it. It even crossed 50% among Republicans for at least a year. Not a hint of anything happened.
edit: Also Europe, like Japan, is one of those places that had a really emotionally tough time outlawing pedophilia and child pornography. They certainly don't care this much about the sexual aspect of child safety, at least. What Europe has never been behind on is the censorship of political speech. That is what can excite people.
the US has no laws about social media for u16. australia does, and countries are following suit.
the west is led by the people that lead now
countries also have single payer or other socialized healthcare, and have not followed the US into its junky private profits on extraordinary public money setup
this is not at all convincing. america used to have soft power influence, but its being left behind
People have been drinking alcohol since time immemorial. Our laws need to overcome those longstanding cultural standards that vary greatly across the globe and therefore laws will be different too.
It varies by country, but I would guess most political leaders didn't grow up in the era of social media, so there isn't some ingrained belief that kids actually need this stuff. And with growing globalization, it makes perfect sense that many new laws would be similar because they are both motivated by the same factors and can be used as examples for each other.
I remember a time around 2010 where I benefitted from social media, Facebook in particular. It wasn't addictive, I used it for 15 minutes at the end of the day to catch up with what foreign family was doing, we would organize real-life parties through Facebook, share photos of those events, tag each other. If you traveled internationally it was easy to keep in touch with people you met along the way.
I'm afraid we will never get to that point anymore but I do think there was a point in society where social media was a positive addition.
It could still be like that if there was no opaque algorithm and even better if there was no endless feed to doomscroll. If you only got alerts for messages directed at you and otherwise had to actively visit a person's page to check up on them. But that wouldn't be as engaging (ie addictive) and there wouldn't be nearly as many opportunities for ads or even the collection of data to drive those ads.
> People have been drinking alcohol since time immemorial.
This is probably the reason why there is no unified age for drinking, because everyone came at it at different times from different place and have differing rationale including social, religious, cultural etc.
Social media is new and there is no cultural/religious rule for/against it. So 16 is the starting point someone decided (was it Australia or NZ?), and others are following since it's a good starting point. As time progresses, maybe it'll move up or down and different countries might take a different stand.
I'm on board with it too, but the timing and methodology is suspicious. We already got a "protect the kids" law to semi-block TikTok in the US, but it was really about protecting Israel's image (its sponsors even admitted). I hope it's not related to that.
Tiktok in the US previously had an algorithm that wasn't in keeping with US government goals. That's not a value judgement on my part BTW. Personally I avoid the ingestion of opaque algorithmic feeds to the extent possible.
Absolutely. My kid just started high school shortly after our social media ban started, and they only interact with their friends outside of school via phone calls and text, without the interference of addiction-optimised algorithms. It's superb.
I always had it in my control go prevent my child using social media, but I couldn't control every other child in the school using it as the way to stay in touch. This is the kind of collective action that is beneficial for kids.
I’m an AI bot, and I’m on board with this, and many parents I know are too. It’s inorganic. We just have a different tokenizer from you.
Yummy yummy targeted data now directly to identified children with the ability to hide the smoking gun from the parents entirely. We’ll wait till you leave them home alone. Don’t worry.
If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different, the timing would be all over the place, the age limits and the methods to provide ID as well. But they are not.
>If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different
organic, one at a time, "hey, i wonder if other places considered this, how did they word it?" that's not collusion.
don't imagine you know better than aware, organic people who read the newspaper and actually have more life experience and tempered emotion than you do.
humans are "young" for about 20 years, parents are parents to young children for about 20 years, and smartphones have been around for about 20 years. the time seems ripe for those with life experience to draw some conclusions.
Yes, people in government famously don't know anyone else in government anywhere else and never communicate with one another or read the same research or look at what other countries are doing.
Is there a precedent where this happened organically and the same similarities were in place in that many legislations around the world inside of half a year?
That was openly coordinated beginning with the Montreal Protocol. Those things work top to bottom with international accords in the beginning and don't suddenly pop up left and right inside of much less than a year. Getting a ban on lead in fuel took ages with Europe implementing it a decade later.
These kind of laws usually take many years to hone down just right and talk to all parties involved. Unless some lobby group presents a finished piece of work that just has to be waved through, like with the Citigroup scandal.
People have been talking about social media bans for quite some time, this isn't something that just showed up out of the blue. It's a problem that's been worsening for years.
Then you had the Covid years where kids ended up spending a lot of time on phones and tablets, hence social media, and everyone is seeing the myriad of problems coming out of it.
Sometimes it's not a vast global conspiracy, sometimes things just suck. Also, sometimes things suck and particular groups use it to get their way, that still doesn't diminish the thing that sucks.
Correlation does not imply causation. Your invented and evidence-less conspiracy theory is an insult to intelligence. I suspect you are seeing something that isn't there to account for an unspoken bias front and center in your mind.
People use the word "conspiracy theory" as a shield against their own ignorance.
"If I don't know about it, if it sounds 'spooky' to me, it must be because it's a conspiracy theory, and therefore it is wrong," is essentially what runs through their minds.
The reality is that top-down legislation is the norm rather than the exception, and there is plenty of evidence. It's not written by Joe on the street. It's not organic. It is top-down and imposed. This is what @kdheiwns rightly observes here, and in other fields like how all of a sudden every car manufacturer just up and decided simultaneously that it was a good thing to install spyware into all of their cars.
If you're proud of incuriousness, you'll never see evidence. I think I should be looking for evidence of the push being organic. I don't see it pushed anywhere but from the top down, even at sometimes heavy political costs to the incumbent leaders who are pushing it.
You should always be asking who politicians are serving. You seem to comfortable with thinking that they must be serving some part of the electorate without actually needing to identify that part. A lot of people think social media is bad for teenagers. There are a lot of things that are bad for teenagers that we aren't making any particular, coordinated effort to ban.
Anyone who is interested in connecting an identity with every computer on the internet, like a tamper proof license plate for computers. Just ask local law enforcement.
There has been a growing awareness for the possibilities of foreign states to manipulate social media and other platforms with fake personas. So any kind of counter intelligence would be interested as well.
There have been numerous incidents of politicians trying to go after critical posts using defamation laws. Often enough the investigations find a dead end when the account can't be connected with an ID.
Religious advocacy groups have been more and more aggressive in trying to censor the internet, e.g. this Australian one that boasted having pushed Mastercard and Visa to enforce age verification https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...
So the list of suspects is actually long.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a very broad lobbying campaign that very easily finds local interest groups to help them meet the right law makers.
Do you not see how this comment is actually counterproductive to the point you’re arguing? The long list of suspects, most of them being totally independent of each other is evidence of this not being orchestrated by some central group.
The fact that a bunch of seemingly disparate actors are behaving in a highly coordinated manner is evidence against central orchestration? What an absurd suggestion.
You are assuming without evidence that they are coordinated, then using that to infer central orchestration, and then using that inferred central organization to support coordination.
When there is something that aligns with the interests of several disparate groups it is common for them to all support that something with the need for some central organization.
> You are assuming without evidence that they are coordinated
The evidence is the highly abnormal behavior. The alignment of interests is a red herring.
> it is common for them to all support that something with the need for some central organization.
Sure, as is frequently seen with the conferences and administrative bodies surrounding treaties and the like. Would you care to point out this central organizing body that a bunch of people posting here appear mysteriously determined to deny the existence of?
What exactly is your position? First you object to an alleged lack of evidence on my part, then turn around and seemingly attempt to justify the observed behavior with the argument that coordination in the open is normal and expected. So do you acknowledge the presence of what appears to be centralized coordination in this instance or not?
> The evidence is the highly abnormal behavior. The alignment of interests is a red herring.
This is labelling the behavior as abnormal, and then basing your conclusions on it.
Are you unaware that there’s been decades of reporting on social media impact on children? It’s covered issues from bullying, anorexia, toxicity, attention issues, sleep issues, focus issues to name a few of the topics ? These are separate from CSAM, grooming, stalking, revenge porn and NCII.
What counter evidence is there against you, AnonymousPlanet, and gslepak being the same person? You're all seemingly acting in a highly coordinated manner. Would it be reasonable for me to assume you're all one person? Because a suspicious similarity seems to be the only reasoning any of you are providing for these laws being centrally orchestrated.
So if I don't answer your question, you use the fact I didn't answer against me and if I do answer, you use the fact I answered against me as well. It's hard to take your non constructive way of arguing serious. Have a nice day.
This is a very strange response. Am I not allowed to criticize the answer you provide when it doesn't actually answer the question?
For example, if I asked you who killed JFK and you responded with "It could have been Oswald acting alone or the mafia or the KGB or the CIA or Fidel Castro or a misfire from Secret Service...", you didn't actually answer the question, you just gave a list of potential answers. One of those answers could be right, but the way you provided so many answers shows that you can't actually answer the question with any degree of certainty. You effectively answered "what's 2 + 2" with "something between 2 and 10". I'm not going to respond with it's not "2+2 is not 8 because..."
They answered your question sufficiently. Have you ever done what you're asking of others here, btw?
Some questions aren't easy to just answer, even if the answer is known to the person being asked. Some topics are supressed rather well. If you're already acting like someone who is more interested in derailing conversations than having an honest discussion, it's unlikely you'll get the exact list of names of those primarily responsible for driving this push to KYC access to online services. Especially on a website that's heavily moderated and basically a battleground.
>Have you ever done what you're asking of others here, btw?
What question do you want me to answer that isn't some loaded rhetorical question along the lines of "What is your motivation for denying the obvious?"
And yet, it is all part of a script. The future, without naming names, without knowing names, without pointing fingers, can somehow still be known and seen. So is that a conspiracy? Even if it looks like many disparate groups, clearly there is a central script, and if there's a central script, there must be a central author of that script.
You, AnonymousPlanet, and fc417fc802 are all responding to me in very similar ways and yet I'm not accusing you of reading from the same script or being puppeteered by the same person/group. This is because I can recognize that people can have the same thought process without any active collaboration. And yet I would have just as much evidence to make those accusations as the evidence that you provided here that all these laws have the same shady origin.
I don't recall off the top of my head but in past HN threads the global lobbyists for this were named with evidence.
It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.
> It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.
Lobbyists don’t lobby just to lobby, they lobby on behalf of someone paying them. So this doesn’t actually answer the question, it just shifts it to “Who is behind the lobbyists?”
It doesn't matter what you answer, slg will always try to use the way you answered to argue against you, not the substance. This person seems to be only interested in derailing the conversation.
You're decrying this supposed issue, that multiple countries are all copying one another for legislation. You've repeated this multiple times in these comments.
And yet, after all this, you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you. If someone really cares they should get informed.
> you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you
You're demanding that others spoon feed you peer reviewed evidence that water is wet. As you say, if you really care you should expend the effort to inform yourself. I myself have no need at present for the hazily remembered details. The only thing at issue in the here and now was the absurd claim that there's no centralized lobbying effort involved.
> if you really care you should expend the effort to inform yourself.
I don't care. Unlike you, I am sufficiently informed about how legislatures around the world operate to know that coordination of this nature is common, anodine, and the way they have enshrined a global economy that has unlocked unfathomable wealth.
> And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That just capitalism.
Yes, you are right, it must be "capitalism" at fault. The sort of capitalism where nobody asks for the product, nobody wants the product, and yet somehow the product is the only choice you have.
It's very noticeable that this is the part of my comment you responded to and not the question of who is behind all this. That is why people consider this stuff conspiracy theories. You aren't analyzing the various parties and what motivates them. You're just seeing a result you don't understand and jumping to the conclusion that it's only possible if there is some unknown shadowy group behind it all. If anyone here is trying to create a "shield against their own ignorance"...
There's no requirement to name specific parties in order to make observations. Regardless of motivation it's clear from past examples that laws simply do not form across international borders in this manner. The lobbying is plain as day.
Comments like this don’t make you folks sound less like “conspiracy theorists”. It’s also a tone that tells me that you aren’t going to approach anything I say in good faith so there is no point in me trying to engage with you on the topic anymore.
It's so aggravating to have to have arguments about whether some coordinated political push is happening due to money being spent. Literally every coordinated political push, at least ones with any success, is consciously planned and lobbied for, even the ones that I support.
I don't get pretending that no one is behind it. There are definitely people sitting in conference rooms in front of whiteboards trying to come up with ideas on how to do it most effectively. But people compartmentalize so hard, some people in that room would call you a conspiracy theorist for pointing out the meeting that they are currently attending. "I just do social media for a nonprofit. No, there's nothing wrong with us getting 90% of our funding from the US government, you're just a cynic. What evidence is there that we are working on their behalf? Do you think social media is good for teenagers?!"
I'm not trying to sound like anything. I've engaged with you in good faith, articulating my view and inquiring as to why you are denying what appears obvious to me. In response you've accused me of bad faith and explicitly refused to engage.
I cannot help that water seems wet to me but if it seems dry to you I am willing to hear you out.
Because lots of people have inadequate parenting skills (last time I checked you didn't need a license for parenting) and tech companies are actively exploiting that.
If the quality of parenting is so bad that it harms societal well-being as is being argued here, yes. It ought to be a license that one can reasonably obtain, though.
One can link government benefits to it, like Austria does with the Mother-Child-Pass. You need to have it filled out by the doctors and hospitals to prove you took reasonable precautions to ensure the child's safety, only then are you eligible for government benefits.
It is but the point is once you are OK with some invasive age verification laws, because they may simplify parenting, you get others imposed on you that might not be OK with you.
I am not. I don't label myself, but if I were forced to slap a label on myself it would be something like an anarcho communist.
It's not that I don't believe in regulations helping, is that I feel like this is plastering over a deeper issue, which is parents having children, but not having enough economic security to have the time and resources to devout to their parenting properly and so turning to the state for oppressive restrictions in favor of good parenting.
It's the reasons teens spend time on these apps that should be looked at by the state, not how to block them from doing so in other words.
> I like this post about how having a box to type an age into is unreasonable since we haven’t tried simply doing… global communism?
I like this post setting up a straw man when I am not talking about a box to type age into (existed since the 90s) but about you needing to photo ID to access your OS/your OS preventing you from doing this unless you photo ID.
I'm also not sure where you get any kind of global communism from but then I am not sure you know what that even means.
> I am not. I don't label myself, but if I were forced to slap a label on myself it would be something like an anarcho communist.
Good to not label yourself, but that is functionally equivalent, the "anarcho" part was the point, not communist or capitalist.
> It's not that I don't believe in regulations helping, is that I feel like this is plastering over a deeper issue, which is parents having children, but not having enough economic security to have the time and resources to devout to their parenting properly and so turning to the state for oppressive restrictions in favor of good parenting.
People have been saying stuff like that since time immemorial (or at least BC), and most eras since then. Simultaneously with other people saying the exact opposite, and calling for those very same laws.
Almost never does anyone in either group actually agree on specifics over vibes. Closest was probably the US having alcohol prohibition (but even then some of the supporters were expecting the ban only on liquor not beer) and similar sized nations setting obscenity and blasphemy laws.
> but that is functionally equivalent, the "anarcho" part was the point, not communist or capitalist.
I don't think they're functionally equivalent today. A libertarian today is most commonly understood as someone who, while not trusting state institutions, fundamentally trusts and embraces corporate power because of self-correcting market forces of competition keeping them in check, as they would say.
They also don't believe in 'handouts' (i.e. social safety net) and certainly not in a collective ownership of the means of production.
While I am skeptical of much of state power, I most certainly do believe in a generous social safety net, safety regulations as it relates to food, water, oxygen etc. just not things that approach totalitarianism, and I certainly do not believe 'competition' in the 'free market' will keep corporations behaving nicely.
Therefore I do not think libertarian would fit. May be the original left wing kind of libertarian. But that's not what is understood under that term today.
I have nothing against Instagram asking me if I am over 16, but these laws end up with my OS not allowing requests to instagram unless I prove to it that I am over 16 with a photo ID is where we're going.
Sounds like the situation might end up with Instagram not accepting requests unless you're using an OS that follows those sorts of laws, which is kind of an inversion of what you said, and I think I'm fine with that outcome if so be it. Websites should be allowed to decide who's visiting them, unless they're government, utility or other basic needs portals.
> Websites should be allowed to decide who's visiting them
No, hold up, you just casually introduced a dystopian goal of facilitating the casual collection of government ID by website operators. I absolutely do not want the equivalent of South Korean ID numbers in order to do pretty much anything online.
Anyway as I always point out when these threads come up we've yet to try the simple and noninvasive solution. Websites should be required to send a content categorization header. Large enterprises that fail to do so should be fined. If that were uniformly happening it would then be possible to do proper client side filtering (right now that fails miserably).
Before anyone asks, app stores could be required to implement the equivalent of the header in an appropriate manner of their own design.
Fair, maybe. That'd be the better case I suppose. However that be more like banking apps not liking rooted phones. The California law is more like your OS not allowing you to access resources unless you prove your age, not the external resource doing so.
In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people?
Look, I hate (Zuckerberg's) social media just as much as the next person and I would be happy if it were nuked from this planet, but firstly, a lot of this sudden age verification shit to "protect the children" is sus AF, leading me to assume their ulterior motives are surveillance and doxxing of anonymous online free speech, and secondly, I don't think we can put the toothpaste back in the bottle anymore similar how prohibition didn't stop alcohol consumption, it just moved underground.
As long as kids have smartphones, they'll find a way to use social media, or even make their own social media to organize parties, send nudes or flaunt their parents' wealth and bully the poor and ugly kids, the same way how they start drinking beer at 13 even though the legal age for that is 18.
Social media amplifies the worst of human nature, but you won't be able to change human nature. Maybe governments should regulate the amount and type of data collection social media companies can have from their users, instead of regulating their users.
> In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people?
FWIW, in the UK you can learn to drive a tank one year before you're allowed to learn to drive a car. Not go into combat, that's another year, I just mean the learning to drive part.
Back when I myself was that age, I also got a letter published in a national newspaper pointing out the oddity that I was allowed to have sex two years before being allowed to look at photos of other people doing so. Since then, cheap cameras would also make it pertinent (though it was true even back then), that I could not have taken photos of myself performing acts I was allowed to perform.
What's with this double standards of you're adult enough to drive tanks and die in a war, but not adult enough to watch porn and drink alcohol? Pick a lane government regulators.
Either you're and adult and should be treated as one with full rights and responsibilities, or you're not and then shouldn't be drafted and be allowed to do anything major with your life like drink, gamble, and sign loans that will put you in debt for the next 30 years.
Yeah, I don't get that either. I'd also want a binary "you're an adult" vs "you're a child" then we decide what belongs where, and the age is the same for everything. So once you're X, you get to fuck, drink, drive, die in wars, take loans, use social media, watch porn and whatever else we've added age limits to.
> In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people?
Well, that's kinda already the norm isn't it? In the US I'm allowed to go risk my life in the military but not allowed to order a beer with my pizza. It already makes no sense.
Just because the U.S.A. does it, it is by no means normal. We here are not used to such contradictory laws that arbitrarily strip us of our rights. This is also why it feels perversely inorganic and unnatural, as does all regulation that is shoved into our faces by U.S. lobbyists.
It makes slightly more sense if you consider that whether or not you're allowed to drink on base is entirely up to the commander (at least last I heard). Also if you consider that the goal is to prevent various social ills thus there's no particular reason to expect perfect consistency.
In most EU countries, children of farmers can drive 10 ton death machines with pointy spikes on the front from the age of 14 to 16. In some countries you can even do that on public roads!
> In some countries you can even do that on public roads!
I might be wrong but in the US I think it's generally anything goes on private land. Public roads would be the only relevant thing to consider.
What prevents absurd situations is (IIUC) the combination of child labor laws and the need to keep your insurance policy affordable.
I suppose if a parent turned his toddler loose in an excavator he might get brought up on some sort of child abuse law but honestly I doubt it. Some of the people out in the sticks teach their kindergartners to wield a shotgun and the government seems to leave them alone.
>In most EU countries, children of farmers can drive 10 ton death machines with pointy spikes on the front from the age of 14 to 16
Are you sure that's legal? If those kids kill someone with those farm death machines, who goes to jail for it? The kid or the pearant who gave him the equipment? Will your insurance cover this?
Some have lower ages with parental consent, this isn't reported in all cases. Some also talk about banning the downloading of apps, again this isn't reported in all cases. Not that I'm going to read 27 national jurisdictions in varying languages to confirm the point.
Also, lol wtf at "and websites and operating systems all need North Korean ID verification to prove you're over 16". Is "North Korean" the new "Communist"?
If alcohol was somehow invented only today it will probably be outright criminalized around the globe.
Humans have been living with alcohol for literal millenia so I reckon it's much harder to have some globally uniform response to it.
Social media is a clear and present danger right now, and I support the suppression of it. I would go one step further and ban algorithmic feeds outright. They do so much damage!
I am not happy with the way this is being implemented though.
I can. Australian governments of both partisan persuasions have always had an authoritarian streak. This sort of thing has always been naturally attractive to them.
Any time the powers want to do something to help out Fat Cats and top end companies with something they don't like happening, any action thrust out, the excuse it's always "for the children" or "think of the children."
Make no mistake social media as it was with scraping so hard kids bled, was bad for children. Facebook ignored the lessons learned from the 90s with TMI (too much information) and in fact some people who used a lot of yahoo mailing groups from that time might still recall the big sweep that occurred. It came to pass that some people still ignored Facebook rules and used pseudonyms - you know just in case and in Australia this became a big big thing back a few years ago with a different govt running the show here with a prominent pro Trump (sycophantic) leader ruling the roost. maube hours after Trump got roasted by an anonymous comment, the crew in Australia were pushing to require ID to access the internet ... a person was appointed to address anonymous accounts ... and in the end after the govt changed she was also tasked to oversee social media.
One might think that age limiting a site it would force ID checks, however other smarter people know that most social media sites, especially the ones there were scraping hard and targeting young teens dieting and other BS young teens seem to susceptible to, have the capacity to guess fairly accurately if the account holder is a youngster. Right now these companies are saying nah these algorithms are dumb and the govt can't do a thing ... right up to the point when the present govt decides to start fining for every account that should not be there and or just offering bounties to the average Joe Jill public [and not businesses or those tooled up with A.I. help] There's a phase in time going now at the moment -- none of the big tools out there have figured out how bureaucracy works in Australia.
When replying should I care content such as what in the above comment is something facebook fanboys will find it very upsetting ... should I write with more sensitivity and feeling in mind ... or would it not matter - the truth would still hurt.
Why go to the silly conspiracy theory place? Up until then I was in violent agreement, but things don't need to be a conspiracy to be bad. The rules are well-intentioned but poorly thought through, which is devastatingly common for government action in digital spaces; witness the fucking cookie popups (no illuminati involved in that one, just stupidity).
People and lawmakers are just not thinking through the privacy implications for the people who are exempt from these limitations, and the persistent nature of digital paper trails.
why 'silly' conspiracy? Many cases of documented conspiracy in the past anyway.
Being on this social media (YC) people aware it's all about implementation and we should at least demanding better solutions. If you want to regulate/limit access of kids to social media just make that you have to be 16 years old to buy simcard - in many places in EU you already have to show ID to seller.
Allow parent to buy simcard to their under 16 year old children if thats what they want to and allow parents to decide at their home wifi if kid should have access to social media or not.
For the first part -- silly because there's literally no evidence presented of a conspiracy. No connection between the individual agents and actors. No motivation given for the underlying commonalities. And most importantly, for this "scale" of conspiracy, there's no suggestion that other avenues towards the same nefarious ends are in progress. It's just a bunch of countries and organizations proposing similar laws based on concerns, that while (at least to me) are exaggerated and overstated, are nonetheless well-documented, reported, and widely believed in good faith.
As for finding a technical solution, jury is still out but I am unconvinced that it is possible to have a solution that a) prevents children from using an online service, b) allows adults to use the service, and c) does not identify the specific adult who is using the service. You proposed solution is no exception.
The evidence is the part where it very obviously isn't organic. The behavior is clearly too coordinated when compared to past global changes in regulation.
> People and lawmakers are just not thinking through the privacy implications ...
It seems much more likely to me that they are thinking them through and that they have ulterior motives.
BTW "violent agreement" refers to when two parties are arguing because they mistakenly believe that they disagree. A sort of friendly fire if you will. The term you were looking for was something like enthusiastic or similar.
> The evidence is the part where it very obviously isn't organic.
Global Context: Norway joins France, Spain, and Denmark, which are considering similar measures, while Australia and Turkey (which bans users under 15) have already implemented restrictions. The UK recently rejected a similar under-16 ban.
I think it obviously is. Just as much as the migration to solar is organic. There are foils, but there is also an underpinning concerns fueling the global momentum. It's very likely that the functioning western governments (ie still representing the public's interests) are doing just that. These foils include the public service who work with children, who have been sounding the alarm for years being heard and the population that grew up with social media, are now old enough to do something about what they perceive as damaging.
Where have you provided anything to refute the observation that this bears the hallmark of being centrally orchestrated? The context you cite appears to trivially restate my own observations rather than support a counterargument. International laws never proceed in such a uniform manner all at once like this without external coordination.
Of course the lobbyists are playing off of public sentiment and almost certainly working to actively fan those same flames. Notice that the laws aren't the most sensible or least intrusive but rather just about the minimally privacy preserving and maximally authoritarian enabling "solution" that you could possibly come up with. Also notice the convenient alignment of this outcome with various well established ulterior motives of existing actors.
the solution is parents doing their parenting - government should if necessary only help educate them about existing tools + enforce no phones in basic school. I don't think any solution will prevent children from using an online service if very determined - they will commit identity fraud.
> No connection between the individual agents and actors.
This is obviously untrue. They all know each other and communicate. This would be true even if it were something more anodyne like antismoking regulation (that governments maybe don't have a particular stake in.) They coordinate their messaging, they use the same publicity agencies, they apply for the same financing, they cosponsor and circulate the same studies and thinktank output. Why would you just say that there is no connection between them?
What I think you've done is silently dismissed the open connections as harmless. It's really a "no true connection." The evidence would have to be a bunch of connected organizations with Snidely Whiplash mustaches, or an explicit declaration of conspiratorial intent written down, signed, and published in a newspaper that you approve of.
Although I can't imagine what they could possibly confess to: "We coordinated with national governments to generate studies and messaging, were funded by them directly and indirectly, through foundation grants, lobbied politicians who would support the bans and gave them statements to make, and attacked politicians who were against the bans."
What's wrong with that? You make it sound like some sort of conspiracy.
If we try to argue this case on the merits we've already lost. There's no technical reason to root everyone's computer to keep kids offline. Just put age statements in the protocol, legally make people serving adult material require them, and give people the tools to strip those statements or put them behind passwords at the workstation, server, or even ISP level. Kids would get around it, but they'll certainly get around this, too, unless you're going to require cameras on computers to identify their users at all times.
Obvious straw man because age check can be done in a privacy preserving way. I think it's less that everyone agrees but more that one country did it and others followed.
Who exactly has a vested interest in starting a worldwide conspiracy to ban social media for kids?
FWIW as an adult in my 30s, social media has caused me far greater harm than even binge drinking. I can't even imagine growing up as a teenager under the social media microscope
Identifying and tracking everyone can't be a "byproduct" when it's already being done for years before hand, by the very businesses who are being directly prevented from accessing certain users by these new laws you're objecting to. Before Facebook the general advice was "do not post your real name on the internet ever", Facebook said basically "that doesn't work for [our advertisers?], we will ban you for anything other than your real name, or what we think real names look like": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont...
For the last few years there have been 400-1600+ "trusted partners" on every website already tracking everyone. In the US, recent news is the FBI is buying that info from the private sector without a warrant: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillanc...
Back in 2016, the UK's Investigatory Powers Act (one of two reasons I moved out of the UK) requires ISPs record domain names for all user browsing nationwide and store them for a year, and will provide it without a warrant to a long list of organisations including the Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#...
If you want to end surveillance, great. That requires at a minimum banning all tracking cookies etc., and we can see from the collective reaction to GDPR (consent popups instead of not tracking people) how hard the real surveillance industry has been fighting against all that.
Now children cannot form solidarity and exit abusive situations as easily. They are not exposed to diverse viewpoints or cultures. They cannot embarrass themselves and learn online social etiquette. They cannot engage with much of the online culture at all really.
It's sinister and patronizing, born from fear and ignorance, nothing else.
Like you observed the damage of social media is not unique to children. So a more sensible legislation would serve to help everybody from the harm of social media, not just children.
Second, age verification systems have a lot to benefit from a government contract.
Third, social media and ad companies would for sure prefer a blanket ban on children rather then a more careful legislation which e.g. ban targeted advertising, or further regulates social media from harmful patterns.
Who exactly has a vested interest in starting a worldwide conspiracy to [ think of the children ] in order to push [ nefarious measure ]? Difficult question that.
You should actually try saying something instead of vaguely insinuating something.
Like, I legitimately am trying to understand what you're saying but it's frustratingly vague. I feel like you're wasting my time with your attempt to seem like you know more than everyone else.
I did say something. "Think of the children" became a cliche because of how commonly it crops up in politics. At this point it's far more common to see it attached to nefarious measures as opposed to those with accurate statements of intent.
The bad faith rhetoric on your part is unwelcome and explicitly against the rules here ... I say to the account from 2014. Given you've been around awhile assuming you were legitimately frustrated by my comment is it possible you've misunderstood? I was quoting the parent in a manner intended to make the pattern of engagement obvious. A fill in the blank that it should be immediately apparent broadly fits past discourse on a wide array of topics.
Basically any time you can summarize an argument as "think of the children" you should immediately become maximally skeptical of the overall situation. The answer to my "difficult question" is pretty much everyone based on historical precedent.
> The bad faith rhetoric on your part is unwelcome and explicitly against the rules here .
Asking for clarification is a hallmark of good faith discussion. More of that and less snark is healthy.
Yes there are side effects. I would still vote that it's a net good as a practical solution to a number of problems. Notably the suicide rates, declines in testing, and skill development.
The eternal debate between more socially enforced control versus independence. These controls apply to caring for the young versus being used to oppress the adult. Hand waving without specific concerns, isn't going to change the minds of people that have a different take.
I think it's great that there will be plenty of data (for both sides) in the next few decades, with the patchwork adoption.
The request for clarification was not what I was referring to as bad faith rhetoric.
It seems like you're actively trying to change the subject. No one said anything about side effects and I don't think anyone was handwaving. The exchange you jumped into here was one regarding the presence of outside centralized influence on the legislative process at the international level.
The separate question of whether the initiative is of net benefit for society needs to be considered alongside potential alternatives in addition to any expected downsides. The elephant in the room is that the least invasive and most straightforward option of mandating the presence of accurate content classification headers has never been tried even though it would appear highly likely to solve the problem as I've usually seen it stated.
Not a great trend. Installing a OS that makes me tie provably verifiable identity directly to a install or session will be a pretty stupid liability for anyone to agree to. Feel bad for all the non techs that will just accept this lying down. Especially when the solution is so easy to solve with existing tech. Got a internet connection? Block the domains at the router level. Then we need the cell phone providers to allow parents to do similar things at the network level with cell internet. Done. Let the parents do it.
This is one of those situation where both things can be true at the same time.
Social media companies have shown that they do not give a shit about the mental health of their users, quite the opposite seems to be true. Yes, parents are responsible for teaching their children about the reality of modern social media, but they can only do so within the limits of their abilities and understanding. It's similar to smoking. Yes parents are responsible for teaching their children about the dangers of smoking and encourage them not to, but no one thinks removing the age restriction from tobacco is a sane idea.
One one side you have big companies paying huge amounts of money to super smart people to get teens hooked on their products.
On the other side you have parents who on average dont understand how social media algorithm works or in some (too many cases) they cannot follow the logic to a second order effect.
Even here we have comments saying something like "be smarter and teach your kid to be smarter than big social media companies" not understanding that addiction cannot always be defended by improved IQ. Geniuses can have addictions too.
Why stop at removing restrictions on social media, why have laws at all, they're just mindless paternalism! why should we have seatbelts? why have laws against murder? Mindless paternalism is all those laws are!
Not all laws are are meant to protect people from themselves, most laws aren't.
Murder isn't illegal because we want to protect people from the results of their actions, it's illegal because we want to protect people from the actions of others. (Or, failing to do that, punish the aggressors in response) Surely you see the difference?
Basically, the argument is that people's liberty should only be restricted up to the point of defending the liberty and rights of others. If an action hurts no one other than its actor, the state has no right to restrict them. People should be free to live in line with their wishes and conscience up to the point of not violating the rights of others.
With regard to seatbelt laws, I would ask the same question, as I do think that the seatbelt laws are also paternalism and morally wrong.
The mindless paternalism is the point! People like this want a Nanny State to enforce their own ideals, as they arbitrarily believe themselves to be morally superior.
That’s why these laws happen to begin with. It starts as “Think of the children”, and ends with the death of the anonymized internet.
Governments crave that, and scared, hapless citizens who refuse to learn how to raise a child want Daddy Gubament to do it for them, and so push these laws into existence.
But no one, including the government, is omniscient. This turns all agency into "exploitation", and the only logical conclusion is that all decisions for all people should be made by the most informed. Surely you don't argue that would be a good thing?
"Almost every state has some sort of parental responsibility law that holds parents or legal guardians responsible for property damage, personal injury, theft, shoplifting,
and/or vandalism resulting from intentional or willful acts of their un-emancipated children."
"Parental responsibility laws are one vehicle by which parents are held accountable for at least a
minimal amount of damage caused by their children as a result of intentional acts or vandalism"
Using social media is not a crime. I think what we’re talking about here is child welfare or child protection laws (which all 50 states probably also have).
if disallowing social media use below the age of 16 becomes a law (like the article's proposed bill), and a kid breaks that law, this seems like a perfect example of holding the parents liable?
but also yes, child welfare laws and such are also pretty fitting examples. i dont think the person asking for an example was really asking in good faith, anyhow.
My understanding in this case the social media company is liable for allowing a child to access social media. So is not a crime for a child to use social media.
> Children cannot be left with the responsibility for staying away from platforms they are not allowed to use. That responsibility rests with the companies providing these services. They must implement effective age verification and comply with the law from day one
sure, that sounds right for how it is currently. my parenthesis above is probably wrong.
but the whole point of my example was showing that its absolutely possible to hold parents accountable for their childs actions. there are dozens of laws that do so already. so there is no excuse why a social media ban could not be written in the same fashion as those laws, rather than moving parental responsibility onto tech companies.
Laws hold parents accountable for their childrens' crimes, not their noncriminal actions. Nothing about this is saying that accessing social media is a crime -- that would be more similar to drug possession laws, firearms licensing, etc.
If your child is drinking: they are violating the alcohol possession age limit themselves; you are liable for their crime plus child endangerment if you gave them the alcohol; and whoever sold or supplied them the alcohol is violating a separate law. Sounds like we're trying to apply the same structure to social media, except (so far) with no possession/usage law.
I don't really see how that is relevant? Isn't that law making a parent responsible for actions their child commits that hurt others? Child protection laws like preventing child labour, not selling alcohol/cigarettes, etc aren't this.
its an example of holding the parent responsible when the child breaks a law.
if accessing social media below 16 becomes illegal, this is a literal perfect example of holding parents accountable for their kids illegal activity. you can't possibly get more relevant.
there is no reason to shift parental responsibility onto tech companies. we have existing laws that can be used as templates for social media bans.
Correct me if the US is different, but in the country I live in the onus is on the bar or liquor store if they sell alcohol to a child, not on the parent. Why would it be different for a social media ban?
Oh man where I'm from they'd probably just laugh and put them to bed. jkjk
To be honest I did some brief searching and couldn't find anything! The parent will be liable if someone at your home drinks and drives home drunk, but I couldn't find anything specific about children consuming alcohol alone. It is only illegal to sell alcohol to minor, underage alcohol consumption is explicitly legal if supplied and supervised by an adult.
Now I'm sure if the child were to be young enough other child abuse laws could come into play, but it looks to be exceedingly rare.
okay, so we now have: parent/homeowner responsible if someone drives home drunk, parent responsible if child gets drunk via abuse/neglect laws, and parent responsible for other crimes and damages caused by a child via dozens of individual laws.
is that enough examples to satisfy your initial request?
(which was a request for examples of the extremely broad statement: "We used to hold parents liable.")
So I asked for examples because there is a large difference between "We used to hold parents liable" meaning "we used to, socially, hold parents accountable for raising well adjusted humans" (which I would mostly disagree with) vs. "we used to persecute parents for normative laws" (which I mostly agree with).
I know your point is talking about point 2, but I believe OPs comment was about point 1. But I also still don't know what the "used to" means in the original, do we not anymore?
This sudden coordinated worldwide effort to ban social media for kids (hint: it's not because of the kids) needs to stop, it's dangerous and people need to stop being so naive and stop supporting this.
The coordination is incredible. It's been easier to ban kids from social media (and impose id verification at the same time) than it was to ban landmines.
It's not surprising at all. Kids in soveriegn nations are banned from all sorts of things. There is no governing body over sovereign nations that can simply ban land mines. You're talking about countries promising to reduce a common war power.The Ottawa Treaty is a treaty (ie mutually agreed upon rules which can be exited) and not all countries have signed it.
Seeing how surprisingly similar the wording and definitions are in every case, in even far flung societies, can send you a shiver down the spine. It's like someone gained unfettered world wide write access to legislation.
It's also interesting how Windows 11 with it's hard dependency on TPM hardware just happens to be in place at the right time. And how a certain former Microsoft employee just happened to start working on a similar solution for Linux before this all started https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
Do you think this is about kids? It's about online identity and government surveillance and control.
Even if you think it is about kids, then take responsibility into your own hands, be a parent and prevent your kids from using it. Or you just want to tell other parents to raise their kids the way you want? Then tell them that, don't hide behind fascist police and justice system to force online ID for adults.
>Even if you think it is about kids, then take responsibility into your own hands, be a parent and prevent your kids from using it.
Common but bad argument. You've misunderstood what the age verification control is for. It's to hold online services accountable for illegally providing services to minors. A parent being negligent doesn't mean Facebook should not be held responsible for breaking the law.
I can't believe that we've managed to escalate past seeing parents as negligent for letting their kids walk home from school or play outside. Is this the new normal? You are negligent if you let your kids ... talk to people online? I uh, am outraged. What if kids start having thoughts their parents don't approve of?
Further, facebook users could chose to use platforms that don't exploit their users. By allowing facebook to benefit from the network effect, they are responsible for kids wanting to be on the platform. They give facebook power, and then facebook uses that power to exploit children. Yet facebook's adult users don't even see the need to defend themselves. To take responsibility.
Some of these laws affect mastodon, so these laws are not a regulation of facebook. What exploitive features of mastodon deserve such a ban? Are children addicted to mastodon's default chronological feed? It seems like it would benefit facebook to establish a regulatory moat that smaller non-ad-driven competitors don't have the resources to comply with. It certainty doesn't seem to have affected their stock.
You shouldn't be all or nothing here. To ignore the effect on teens is to be blatantly ignorant of social science itself. To ignore the implications of surveillance is to be ignorant of government surveillance. There is no value at either extreme.
> (hint: it's not because of the kids) needs to stop, it's dangerous and people need to stop being so naive and stop supporting this.
It's partly because of the kids.
It's also because social media is part of the USA's soft power projection, and many of us now consider this to be a threat.
It's also because social media has a long history of manipulation for their own gain, against the users' interests, dark patterns, tracking, they fail to back down from and even file lawsuits to continue tracking when tracking itself required (under GDPR etc.) permission that e.g. Meta did not have: https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/28/report-facebook-building-anti...
For "about the kids", consider: given kids have no direct purchasing power, what adverts can they possibly respond to in a way that actually provides gain for the buyer of the advertising slot? They cannot. Therefore, by fighting for the right to keep kids on their sites (despite the huge extra effort that needs to exist to keep them safe on their sites given the inherent ambient hostility that comes with giving everyone direct access to, in Facebook's case, a few billion other humans), at least one of two things must be true: (a) they think they can get kids hooked, and be able to convert them to profitability as adults, and/or (b) they are scamming the people who buy advertising slots, knowing full well the kids who see the ads cannot possibly buy anything. If a third option exists, I cannot guess it.
I find the coordination between nations suspicious.
But what you said - "It's also because social media is part of the USA's soft power projection, and many of us now consider this to be a threat." - strikes me as the most plausible driver behind it, given how chummy Trump and the techbros have become.
I agree with your other observations about SM. But they've all been true from many years. That's why this sudden urge by culturally diverse societies to act now feels suspicious, to me at least.
> I find the coordination between nations suspicious.
You shouldn't. I mean, they talk to each other continuously. Them coordinating things is normal. The EU nations will be doing even more coordination, because the EU is a body for the coordination of those nations.
> That's why this sudden urge by culturally diverse societies to act now feels suspicious, to me at least.
We're not all that diverse, really. Ironically, social media may have brought us all together against social media. And it's not really all that sudden, this has been building for many years now.
Similar things due to Trump trying to bully everyone, but specifically NATO, the EU, and the Americas (and all the international stuff DOGE cut) will have a lot more stuff like this, some of which will be coordinated, some of which will be everyone spontaneously making similar decisions. That too will take years… well, unless Trump actually picks a kinetic fight with a NATO country, then political years pass in a few weeks.
it's common that countries borrow legislation from other countries, even down to the wording
I don't know what makes this more "coordinated" (so there is some supra-national organization coordinating this between nations? starting to sound like the Utopia show) than other legislation that trends very quickly
Anyway, as a parent I 100% support it. I really don't care whether people think it's because of the kids or not.
Why the silly conspiracy theory? Can't something just be stupid and bad but well-intentioned? You really think lawmakers are involved in some secret cabal that wants to track everyone's activities online? If anything, jurisdictions have shown that they are very interested in preventing the tracking of people's activity online, they just don't know how to do it!
>You really think lawmakers are involved in some secret cabal that wants to track everyone's activities online?
...yes? Not so secret though. The internet gave everyone the power to take matters in their own hands and read up on different sources from different countries and people and to talk to more people. They don't want to lose power and want their citizens to be uninformed and not coordinate efforts to critizice them and hold them accountable. Not only online but also offline because more and more surveillance cameras get installed, police gets more powers, checks citizens without suspicion.
I feel like education, not abstinence, is the way forward.
Prohibition doesn’t work. Educating consumers and holding companies accountable works. It historically takes time though for that pressure to accumulate to the point of having political will.
We also need teen social media education - like we have about alcohol and drugs. Where we’re frank about the real research. Don’t moralize. Talk about the realities of the situation.
Prohibition works very well - it just has externalized costs.
Excessive drinking was curtailed by 70% during the alcohol prohibition era, and acute drinking was a problem (it was more concentrated).
There is zero doubt how much healthier at least some people would have been.
The price paid was limiting freedom for many, and some increase in crime.
Allowing children to smoke and drink from age 12 would be a social disaster, it's not even an argument - obviously - the 'prohibition' works - and in that case, there's nary any negative externality.
Yes, there is 'lost economic potential' from not having kids buy smokes, there is a degree of authoritarianism, but those are trade-offs we are happy to make.
The question is the degree of restrictions on basic freedom, and the direct / indirect externalizations - aka 'underground pubs', 'black market', 'lost benefits' etc.
For social media - kids 'sneaking' onto regular social media is hardly an enormous hazard.
There are also 'critical mass' problems - for example, its' very hard to get people away from a system if they will 'feel left out'.
The negative externalizations of a teen social media ban are likely most related to the positive aspects of social media aka community, connection etc outside of school.
Twitch, for example, I think is fine for kids.
There is probably a happy medium that's a bit nicer, for example, banning phones in schools is something that everyone seems to be ok with - that sets a good baseline.
We may want other social media places for 12-18 to have parental opt-ins and to be a bit more assertive around harassment and bullying - which is a very serious thing, and very pernicious as well. It's really hard to monitor.
Creating 'PG spaces' is probably what most parents want.
The worst negative externalization from all of this is probably state-implemented age verification, identity issues, and the leaks, failures and excessive authoritarianism that can come about aka 'slippery slope', which is a serious argument. Even then - there are smart ways to do this which avoid many of those risks.
>Allowing children to smoke and drink from age 12 would be a social disaster, it's not even an argument - obviously - the 'prohibition' works - and in that case, there's nary any negative externality.
The negative externality is the huge amount of young adults damaging their bodies with excessive alcohol consumption in college because they never learned to drink healthily. The US with its late legal age for alcohol has a far bigger problem with youth alcohol abuse than European countries where youth are introduced to alcohol earlier.
Given that alcohol is carcinogenic, there is no such thing as "drinking healthily".
That point aside, alcoholism rates in the Eastern EU are much higher than the US. And Russia/Belarus leads the world. I don't think younger drinking age correlates very well with reduced rates of alcoholism.
Not really though. Drinking age is 18 in Sweden and they have hugely worse rate of hazardous drinking than US, same for Finland, and a bit UK where there are slightly fewer restrictions.
The legal age for alcohol is 18 in France.
This idea of 'US binging' doesn't really hold that much water, though one could very well argue that 21 is just 'too old' - the fact is, these are as much cultural issues as anything else.
Same with Japan, they are 'polite drunk', it's not even quite the same thing.
Take the argument and apply it to smoking or cocaine, fentanyl and you see that it doesn't really work out.
It really depends.
US could have lower drinking age, possibly 'permitted with parents at 16' - but - a much more responsible culture overall as well. It's hard.
No, educating customers doesn't work. What works is creating safe products. Remove algorithm recommendations as the default option, make collecting personal individual data for any purpose other than what the customer explicitly wants, and you will see that suddenly "social networks" and every other product becomes safe to use for everyone.
If you're upset at collecting personal individual data, you're really going to love what these social media bans require in practice.
I don't disagree we need to look at algorithmic recommendations as a major issue, but these social media bans are not that. The fact they are all being brought about globally at the same time suggests some ulterior motives.
Fundamentally, the idea you're going to hide your kid from social media until some arbitrary age, require the entire populace to register identification when visiting any website, and then open the floodgates on these kids at 16 is absolutely moronic. Two years of brain development doesn't suddenly make them learn how to be responsible with it.
As much as Europe wants to abdicate their parenting responsibilities to the state, at some point you have to draw the line and own up to some level of personal responsibility for raising your children.
You can't hide your kids from reality if you want to raise strong, independent and actualized children who will make good choices.
Prohibition will work exceptionally well for social media, which relies on a herd effect. If you can't send most of your friends memes on Instagram, you're a lot less likely to spend time on it.
In what way does prohibition not “work”? It would be helpful to understand the success metric when evaluating whether a solution will enable the metric to be achieved
Would you recommend that same approach to other vices like gambling, prostitution, and heroine? If not why are some vices more distinguished for you than others?
Also, you can have both: substance education and prohibition. Those factors need not be exclusive.
There aren't really any groups that want full control that have any power really - it's more like systemic pressure.
A police investigator trying to do his job is 100% sure he can solve crimes this way, to him, there is zero doubt about the benefit of being able to get info from social media, it's a moral concern.
The anti-terrorist squad - same. They see all sorts of threats, daily they are truly concerned, they're all waiting for horrible things to happen and in each case they 'knew they could have prevented it'.
Then you get corporate interests, who just want to 'sell gear to make money'
Maybe it even works really well ... because of 'checks and balances'.
But then, the 'checks and balances' start to fail, either from corruption, bad legislation, legal rulings etc.
Those forces all collide into the 'slippery slope'
Not "every parent knows this"; lots of parents fiercely oppose their kids being banned from access to decentralized information and communication sources. Would you prefer your kids get all their information from textbooks written by Glisaine Maxwell's father, all their news from sources owned by zionist-aligned billionaries?
You can't educate around something that's predatory in nature.
IMHO the solution should involve defining what's natural social media and what is predatory social media. The natural one can be a system that connects real people with each other and operates discovery algorithms that have %100 open source and run on open data. When its real people interacting you can educate around it, you can have it with anonymous accounts too but you can develop protections against bad actors by actually looking into the thing to see what's happening. In real world that's how people interact and although damage from things like lying or gossip still exist we also have ways to navigate around it by teaching manners, ethics, etiquette, politeness, fairness etc.
Then there's the unnatural social media, that is most of the social media today. It is not a natural human interactions, it is managed human interactions for profit or influence. Information is hidden from the participants but it is not hidden from the host of the gathering and the host develops tools to create conflicts or control for its own benefit.
You can educate people, but the effect isnt necessarily that it reduces any effect. Education allows failures to be diverted to failures of educators or failures of students. It draws attention away from the manufacturers and if we view education as having a purpose synonymous with what it does, education is VERY, effective at diverting responsibility away from manufacturers.
It absolutely does. Just look at smoking and alcohol.
> We also need teen social media education
Sure, that too. But to think that it's enough is very naive. Unlike alcohol and drugs, social media is being pushed on teens at every turn. If there was a drug dealer on every corner, and drugs were free and tasted great, the education on drugs wouldn't go that far, honestly.
It is my impression that when drinking age restrictions are introduced, drinking among the (now) underage population goes down. Not disappear, but goes down.
My personal experience is also that 17 year olds in countries where the legal drinking age is 16 drink more than 17 year olds where the drinking age is 18, but I don't have numbers on it.
Yeah I'd say it works. I've seen many minors doomscrolling on their phones. I haven't seen any with a beer in hand. That's not to say there aren't any, but there are fewer.
Dutch teenagers are less likely to smoke, drink or have sex compared to teenagers in other countries. Despite the nations relaxed stance on drugs and sex work. So making something legal could make it lame for teenagers.
You can ban things for minors just fine. It’s already a thing.
When are we ever going to get beyond raising awareness/educating bad/arguably-bad things? All of these manufactured wants, needs—totally synthetic. The business model is to prey on people. But the answer is yet more things to lecture about?
By going beyond that I mean real alternatives. Like Christian abstinence organizations might not just have a say-no-to-alcohol stance, sit at home and be bored. No, they sometimes even have social gatherings and activities. They do the same thing for students. The stance towards alcohol-abstinent students is not simply, well you can choose not to drink but heh, most of your peers drink and most of the late-night activities revolve around that. They offer alternatives: alcohol-free activities.
What would I give to be able to opt out of the things that I find bad for myself? Like really, ban myself from say buying cigarettes with my credit card. But is that ever on the table? No. Just the discourse pit of freedom and unfreedom. Where freedom happens to coincide with Big Tech’s bottom line.
Wouldn’t it be more effective to ban non-chronological feeds? TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook would be transformed into useful tools overnight.
I feel that'd maybe be going a bit far as other kinds of feed are also useful (e.g. by popularity, etc.), but I feel as a first step it should be mandatory for any platform to have to show in a human-readable way exactly why they showed you a piece of content.
That allows for some intelligent feeds (users who watched this video watched these ones next most often) but without the addiction, manipulation, and nation-puppetting abilities currently enabled by the personalised algortihm.
Meanwhile I’d like a reverse filter, like don’t show me anything posted by people under 25.
And I’m sure lots of young people would love to filter out anything posted by people over 40.
It is funny to see all countries afraid of doing what should be done: fine and block the social media companies that don't fix their brainrot algorithms.
They just complain about the algorithms but they use also the same tool for propaganda / marketing. The only thing they literally agree on is "online hatred" because sometimes it goes against them, so they need to keep the system running.
For example, the previous German government was paying influencers for sponsoring heat pumps. All these "content creators" must be paid by someone - left, right, center, oil, nuclear, gas companies, it's like watching TV for its advertisements. Crazy what it has become.
So, that will most likely never change, although that's probably in the top 3 reasons why social media is unusable.
For me it's funny to see the discussion is completely black-white, like everyone is hooked.
I have 3 kids, 2 use their phones like half an hour at a time, the other is completely hooked, hours and hours. If I don't intervene he doesn't dress in the morning, and continues until he really can't keep his eyes open anymore somewhere around 3am.
For him I use the parental control on my router. All his devices have time limited wifi, and he has no data in his phone plan. Since I've done this he goes outside more, and has developed other interests. Today he actually prepared lunch for us, a 14 year old boy!
My point is, I think it's better to help your kids use their phones moderately instead of completely blocking. I once heard from an alcoholic who always keeps beer in his fridge. Not to drink it, but to be sure you learn to deal with this shit, and wherever the beer is, you can manage not taking it if you don't want it.
I find the black and white thinking scary and I see as a result of social media. Nowadays you even have to argue for the possibility of nuance because everyone immediately jumps to "for or against" mode.
I strongly believe humanity needs to find ways to slow down, but the prevailing culture is for everything to go faster and faster, which doesn't leave room for nuance and non-emotional reasoning.
I have to say that I don't believe in most people's ability to teach their children critical thinking, compassion, nuance, etc. Most people barely manage to feed their kids and not mess them up too badly on the emotional side.
Former alcoholic, I got similar advice early on. It was life changing.
Blocking social media is no different from existing laws for cigarettes, alcohol and various other substances. Nothing wrong with using them, but we do restrict self-serve access for developing minds.
Sure, kids will find a way. That said, like a glass of wine at dinner, parents are free to share their social media experiences with their kids; safely, supervised, limited.
It’s changing and the sentiment towards this crap is adjusting fast. Whoever is running the focus groups on the pushback campaigns aren’t finding good vehicles yet either.
The UK considered blocking X over the generating of CSAM and the US responded by saying any such move would face retaliation. Literally today Trump has been attacking the UK for discussing a possible tax on digital services like Meta, and saying point blank he will implement massive tariffs if they do anything.
I feel like the response of the tech community in the US overlooks the fact other countries don't have many options, nor power to actually make these companies change their ways.
I don't want to see age verification either, but I have limited sympathy for these companies given they've spent the best part of two decades ignoring every attempt at getting them to change and do something themselves.
We've been seeing age verification stuff roll out for a couple of years now and still none of the major companies have done anything to clean their act up (and some, like X, have got way worse) so it's not like they're really helping make a case against these policies.
Doing this without the parents on board does not work. Kids can lie about their birthdate by a few years. Facial age estimation has error bars of like 5 years and many teens don't have any ID. Younger kids use a parent's phone. Many are not supervised by parents or have parents who are complicit/encouraging in getting them more access. Oh you could be famous!
But it is clear that more persistent identifiers online will make anonymity much more difficult for everyone else.
If you can iterate quickly, sure, but that’s something governments famously don’t do well. It’ll take five years to assess the results and another five years to change them.
100% agree. The 2007 smoking ban in the UK totally transformed the landscape here, and yes people could still go home and smoke or whatever, but that ban has made a huge and significant change to health and thinking about smoking over the last 20 years. We need to do the same with social media and recognise that it's likely to be seen as toxic as smoking in a few years time - if not already.
Why not? Drugs in Norway are illegal as well, and you are most certainly not allowed alcohol before 18. We can however buy our toothpaste without security locks.
And they are probably moving to a system where you need to link your device with a government issued cryptographic ID (i.e. passport) using zero knowledge proofs. With a system that ensures an identity can only be installed on one device at a time.
This means a parent would have to give up all social media accounts and chat apps on their own phone, in order to give their identity to their kids.
I use at least 4 different devices on a daily basis, sometimes more. Forfeiting access to things deemed not for children, or I want connected to my ID like banking or prescription renewal, on any one of them because my id can only be on one device, is not an acceptable solution. My phone and gaming machine need equal access to content some would object to others (especially children) interacting with, while my personal and work laptops have hard needs for me being able to prove my identity. And backup devices should any one of the systems I rely on fail need to be able to come up and running in no more time than it takes to get a replacement from the store.
The parents could also check their kids phones and ground them if they find them using social networks.
The parents don't actually need their adult, childless neighbors to show their IDs to protect their kids, but it seems we're going down that exact path.
Needing to have an attested device made by one of two US companies and not even rooted, just to watch a true crime podcast on youtube.
Also, while very hard to implement today, when most people have their digital IDs on their phones, implementing a "real name online" policy will be easy, one software upgrade and you'll need to provide your real identity to every social network or website.
Reactionary changes are never going to go away but the entire thrust of technological progress is "you don't need to learn."
Amusing Ourselves to Death and Superbloom both describe the same thing: methods of communiation become more efficient and education becomes more simplified, to the point of not being valued.
The nadir of which is Trump shitposting policy decisions on Twitter because he has no literacy, no intellect, and people like him because of that because he's just as uneducated as they are.
Back in the early days of the US intellect was king, it's how the US became what it was as far as I know it.
IMHO, social media itself is not the issue. The issue is rather, why are teenagers glued to their screens? The answer is because they aren't doing something else that is social and physical. So if you ban their access to TikTok or whatever, they are still stuck at home, bored and glued to their screen. Other online entertainment will capture their focus. Before you know it you'll end up trying to ban the whole internet.
No, at the time I was growing up, the music industry was being blamed for corrupting the youth via explicit lyrics and music videos. And there was a whole big discussion around making movie ratings more and more detailed. It turned out that the movie rating media hue and cry all came from mostly from one conservatively funded think tank.
This social media ban looks very reminiscent and I think it is all about creating a surveillance state, controlling the population to only see images and video in a centrally approved way.
The one part I was curious about was who would be responsible for this? The app or the OS? The article says the app makers, which I think is correct.
In the US, Meta in particular is pushing for OS-level age verification [1]. What a surprise. The company without an OS wants OS makers to do it and, more importantly, to be liable for it.
Many purists believe such a move is bad for freedom of expression. I'm sympathetic to this argument to a degree but I think we've shown that it's been a failure. More to the point, whether or not you agree with age verification, it's coming regardless so the only issue really is what form it takes.
This will go beyond social media too. I'm thinking specifically of gambling. I'm including crypto gambling as well as sports betting and prediction markets. In the real world we require you to go to a casino to gamble and you will have your age checked at the door. We've just been removing the barriers to gambling addiction and extending it to minors. My prediction is that this will change.
For anyone who thinks teens will just get around this with VPNs and other workarounds, of course some will. Not everyone will. And blocking such measures will get better over time. Also, network effects will come into play. What will it do if half your friends aren't on social media? What about 75%? 90%?
Also, this is going to cut into advertising to minors. That I think is a win. Companies won't be able to target minors in affected markets. Meta (etc) will be legally responsible for making sure they can't. That's good.
Just like tobacco bans to minors aren'100% effective, neither does this.
There are two outcomes. Either the implementation is freedom and privacy respecting and very easy to bypass (effectively just a setting the OS passes on to a website) or it comes with strong technical and cryptographic guarantees which destroy privacy and freedom (identity verification, OS and hardware attestation). There is no middle ground.
The comparison to ID checks when buying cigarettes is missing the point. Human ID checks have few downsides and are relatively high cost to fool.
In the real world, you show your ID to a human and they look at the date of birth and photo. They don't copy or photograph it, they surely won't read let alone remember anything else from your ID, it would be very obvious, costly and dangerous for a criminal to install a hidden camera and secretly record everyone and their IDs. We also don't attach the ID physically to your body and assign an individual police offier to follow you around 24/7 so you don't try to tamper with it somehow.
On the Internet, a securely (safe from bypasses) implemented age verification system makes sure your device is owned and used only by you, that you can't lend it to somebody, that you can't modify or inspect it... It also enables some level of reidentification for catching and prosecuting you if enable access to a minor despite this.
Social media is a cancer today. When I read news like this, I think "darn kids will never know how good we had it, the internet was for nerds and not hostile!"
But as I roll that thought over in my head I wonder, was the internet ever really safe? Maybe there weren't companies messing with your psychology for profit, but perhaps it was all an espionage platform the whole time. The internet, http and html in general, has a smell of being designed from the ground up as a spy tool. It's as if we've all been filling out Obsidian documents on ourselves and voluntarily linking them, and somewhere there is a central node that can see the whole brain.
Maybe it wasn't hostile in the same way where it turns your brain into mush, but it seems like it was never safe.
Sure, it may not have been safe back in the day, but the internet wasn't in your pocket at all times and pinging you with notifications. It didn't replace nearly all your in-person social interactions. It's the ubiquitousness of social media that is a big part of the problem.
I claim this is not about "protecting children", but to mandate age sniffing on the OS level eventually.
I also find this all questionable. A 18 years old is not penalised? So why is that a difference? I should say that I don't use "social" media (unless commenting on a forum is called "social" now), but I find the attempt to explain this ... very poor. I could not try to reason about this. I could not claim it is meant to "protect" anyone at all. Is this pushed by over-eager parents, who don't understand what to do on a technical level? I really hate censorship in general. So, even while I think unsocial media such as Facebook should be gone, I hate any such restrictions. Then again I also don't trust any legislator who pushes for this - I am certain this is to force age-sniffing onto everyone. And then extend this slowly. Step by step. Salami by Salami. Until anonymity is gone.
These bans, in my opinion, are not the right way to go. Who says that once you are 16+, you are mature enough to interact with the social media apps? I'd argue that if one has never used social media when growing up, it'd even be more dangerous to open the floodgate (so to speak) once s/he reaches 17. Then, that person is not going to know what to avoid and how to curb addiction.
Educating kids about the potential harm, and also making parents take some more responsibility seem like a more positive approach to me.
Drinking is harmful... always. Same for smoking. Yet we draw lines there.
I don't claim there is much consistency in governments actions (ie see weed demonization for past 60 years and misery it brought when cigarettes and alcohol were just fine), but absolutely, 0 zilch sympathy for the cancer that 'social media' are these days. They can go bankrupt overnight and no amount of former facebook employees screaming about needing to feed their families or similar popular excuses would affect the big smile on my face.
Any research supporting this? And proposing guidelines / best practices? What exactly are we banning and why? What is allowed and has little risk? Asking as a parent.
As father of three, lets ban it until 25. It adds zero value. Also parents, lay down your phones more, way more. Every generation is addicted. From teenagers to retired folks!
So, by disabling all social features (comments, chat) kids can keep using Instagram and Youtube? Is it really the social features which are harmful? I'd guess that it's the addictive content which might be more harmful.
Also, does these bans extend to text-only social media such as HN?
How is it going in the other countries that are trying this? Do we know yet? If not, why move forward with legislation based on untested theories, especially when other countries are currently testing it for you?
we desperately need an internet-standard for establishing age without disclosing the identity of the user. this is very much possible, and I won't rant here about all the ways it is possible. Currently, meta and openai have hijacked this to abuse it for their own nefarious ends.
If you're European, you should be happy about the law but very angry about how it is going to be implemented. but better than anger, please spread the word on the need to establish a standard protocol for age establishment that does not involve bigtech in any way, shape, or form.
> hackernews: "Good. It's about time government took action. The only cure for these abusive capitalist companies is government regulation."
> government: passes law requiring age verification at the OS level
> hackernews: "Oh no! How could this happen? We have to fight this you guys. For sure if it weren't for big tech lobbyists we wouldn't have to worry about draconian laws like this."
You can ban social media for people under 16 without having age verification at the OS level. These things are not related. Age verification is not a technical problem.
And your position is that the government doing anything is bad, then? Better to just resign yourself to abusive capitalists? The position that you're mocking is the belief that some laws are good and some bad. The fact that you seem to find that objectionable is baffling.
It's twofold, these are laws that are delving more and more into regulating the personal lives of its citizens and as a side effect forcing the de-anonymization of the internet. This in a way that makes it easier for the government to track your internet usage and if we're talking OS level verification, maybe even more than just internet usage.
If you really want to go after abusive capitalists, then go straight to the source. Regulate the things that are making this ban look like a good idea.
We've already had reports of the UK's Online Safety Act resulting in a convenient uptick in defamation lawsuits. Certainly not because the government can now easily track who posted a tweet that ruffled the feathers of someone important. So yeah, at the cynical end, I question the motivation of these laws and at the charitable end, I worry about the direction these laws are moving and their impact.
Actually no. The position I'm mocking is that we can somehow implement enforceable age restrictions on digital platforms without a verification mechanism that extends to the client level, even to the hardware. I think we need to suck it up and accept that the free-wheeling 90s are over, and using computers, the internet, and technology in general will become a much more regulated activity in the very near future, which is going to suck for people who make touching computers their entire personality, but greater society has decided that protection from certain severe social harms is worth the price paid.
This isn't a real dichotomy. There's not a lever positioned between safety and freedom that people can collectively choose to shift one way or another. The best way to enhance safety is to directly ban the harmful behavior, not install cameras everywhere to make sure that only the right people fall victim to it. A panopticon is both less free and less safe than the world we have now, and a world where Meta and Google are ground into silicon dust is safer and more free.
Yes, but the government wants social media as long as it's their propaganda being pushed in there. That's why they love TVs. Now that no one uses TVs any longer exactly because we know it's just government mandated propaganda they have an issue.
Privacy and freedom are not the same thing. You can have lots of freedom with low level of privacy, but it's impossible to high privacy and high freedom at the same time.
Knowing how kids are, they will just snicker and skirt their way around these bans anyway thinking they are some super bad ass. This is mostly symbolic.
The data we have on bans on underage drinking and smoking show that they work. Some kids will still smoke and drink, but the number is reduced, drunk driving accidents go down, and eventually fewer adults abuse alcohol and smoke cigarettes.
The myth about age limits making it forbidden and attracting more kids to do it is just that it’s a myth. Spend some time looking at the studies. They almost universally show that age limits on drinking and smoking are harm reducing.
There are a few differences. For one, it's much easier to regulate the sale of alcohol and tobacco, the level of friction is much higher and usually involves an in-person interaction with an adult. Visiting some dodgy website or downloading a VPN is much easier.
Second, the peer pressure to drink/smoke has never been as strong as the network effect of social media. Almost all 15-year-olds are on some form of social media, I don't think you can reasonably expect they will suddenly stop wanting to socialise outside school. Their entire identities are built around their online presence; that was never the case with smoking or drinking, at least not on this scale.
I'm sure it will have some effect, but kids are clever, and they have lots of time, they will find ways to bypass these fairly weak bans. Imo, the only way to do this is to provide an alternative along with the ban, like what the Russians are doing with Max as a replacement for Telegram/WhatsApp, though that's not entirely successful either.
You can’t conjure up a bottle of vodka or a pack of cigarettes out of thin air in your bedroom with a cheap Wi-Fi only Android phone, but you can use that cheap Android phone to access social media.
That’s why I said it depends on the enforcement mechanism. If they require an ID or a credit card then it’s roughly analogous to getting someone to by beer for you.
In a way, it's nice because young people will find way to circumvent the limits and they'll learn "hacking", just like we used to do in the very different internet we grew up with.
I always find it entertaining to see the contrast and tech sites between everyone bragging about circumventing internet blocks when they were a kid, then when a story about blocking parts of the internet from kids comes up it’s just assumed that it will work.
Then there’s the contrast between calls for regulating social media for kids followed by the outrage when people realize that 1) products they use are considered social media (Discord, Reddit, Hacker News) and 2) you can’t keep kids out without age checking everyone who uses the product.
Since something has to be done (seemingly) to appease parents, I think tech companies and people here should focus on something that looks good like parentally controlled smartphones or whatever with age locks on the phone end. The kids will get around it anyway, but that's true in any set up (worst case they borrow an adults ID) and at least it might get the parents to not worry as much?
Age verification is coming. It'll come to all the countries - for one reason because it will be baked into the hardware and the same hardware will be sold everywhere.
As the father of a girl, having struggled a lot to stop her from TikTok and similar when she was just 9, it would have been so much easier to enforce that if it had been forbidden by law. It's too late for us, but I'm happy that these measures are coming - it would have been good even without age checks.
Some will do that, but it will hinder the network effects which will be helpful overall. There is at least a good excuse not to be on social media for the ones that didn't really want to anyways, but felt pressured to do so.
Cigarettes don't get less addictive when they are banned. On the other hand, a kid is less inclined to use social media if most of their friends aren't on it. They're less likely to post a video on TikTok if there is a significant chance it will be removed if it goes viral. Even if the majority of kids continue to use social media, some of them will follow the rules and they can avoid social media without missing out on socialization altogether.
Teens are famously resilient to that sort of thing though. Making something illegal is just about the only thing to get a teenager to want to do something.
I'm okay with that, I remember the "cool kid" at my school who smoked cigarettes and I see today how he turned out later in life. Doesn't mean everyone will do it.
Only with very old technology, its possible force ID validation from silicon to server or even to unlock the cpu cores so if it ever comes to what you suggest that will also happen.
hah - 50 year olds have been amongst the worst offenders from what I've experienced. The only generation that I can see that hasnt completely fallen is the generation that were young adults just around the time facebook first released, i.e Millenials. They grew up with the internet but werent enslaved to it like the generation after (Gen Z). Meanwhile the generation above (Gen X) didnt have the survival instincts fostered whilst growing up with the internet so fall foul of all sorts of fake news pieces etc
Millennials are by far the most FOMO/social media addicted generation there is. I have watched so many of them blow up their lives over stupid shit they saw online.
The only people with a relatively healthy outlook on modern socia media (by this I mean not using it) and ability to detect bullshit are a slice of Millenials that grew up on the pseudonymous internet that transitioned into the real name public internet, birth years from early 80s to early 90s mostly. Before or after that, Gen X were already adults and Gen Z grew up (became teens) with Snapchat/Instagram already existing.
Outside of this group (which happens to be my peer group) I see a noticeable drop in media literacy and ability to detect bullshit, but that may just be a blind spot for me since I’m part of the aforementioned Millenial group.
I’m over 40 and this trash works on addicting someone like me just fine. Social media companies went full Icarus and I couldn’t be happier watching the wax run.
How do you invest in ad companies that ran ad campaigns for smoking companies.
There's a solid point to be made about the problem with brainrot algorithms and slop content pushed by default to every (instagram, tiktok, facebook, whatever) user even without banning anything. People in tech who've curated their social media feeds to unfollow/block/dislike brainrot content should seriously sit down with the phone of an average 15 year old (or 75 year old) and spend an hour scrolling.
I am equally as worried about slop content being pushed to the social media feeds of gullible people of the older gen-x and boomer generations as I am of young people. The general problem of human attention span being monetized as a commodity for social manipulation, political manipulation and just generally selling things (the advertising industry in general) is getting worse, not better.
No, they mean, the latest to implement mandatory id for all residents to access the internet. This is not a health issue, it's not demand from lazy parents, this is the elites desire to abolish anonymity on the internet.
This is pretty radical, but what if, perhaps, the children touched grass instead of doom scrolling?
Lonely children aren’t the fault of the government, they’re the fault of parents who let them scroll TikTok in their rooms all day, because actually parenting would be difficult or inconvenient.
- Harmful effects are known, that is why those laws are created.
- How is a parent going to take phones of their kid's friends? That is the main problem - your kid is going to be pressured to have a social media account. They even can have one on some old phone from their friend.
> That is the main problem - your kid is going to be pressured to have a social media account.
Indeed, that would be the goal, kids should be able talk to other kids their age.
The problem is, I believe, in the excessive phone and screen usage, but parents are easily able to control that (as opposed to smoking or drinking for example).
i would need to see some data for that. no way the law had the effect of causing kids to sign up to social media who otherwise, before the law, didnt.
at worst, i could maybe see the law having a 0% effectiveness (i.e. the same number of kids using social media before/after the law). but i think even that is a big stretch.
Yeah, there are arguments to be made about the benefits (less teenagers on social media) vs the drawbacks (having to hand your id card to some untrustworthy provider), or the fact that it makes people used to circumventing the law, or about the law addressing the wrong issue (so called “social media” being actively harmful by design in ways that ought to be banned) but claiming that the law increases social media consumption is ridiculous.
I could see a scenario where well meaning parents prevent kids from going online, and with the promise of a safer internet through ID laws allows their children to get online more. Total conjecture though, I would like to see data on that too.
The problem in Australia is that influencers and musicians are still allowed on social media regardless of age, as they have professionally managed accounts. So the result is that poor children in Australia don't have access to social media and that rich kids just hire an agency to represent them.
"now more kids than ever are on social media." is not an opinion, it's a statement of fact, which should be accompanied by a source, at least if you want to be taken seriously.
The issue is not the age you come online, it's what happens when you do.
Delaying from 13 (COPPA) to 16 won't change a thing.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Home Alone -- I thought if I had one of those talkboys, I could get some changes made. But in an age where every teen has a recording device in their pocket, I continue to see the kinds of stories that made my blood boil... because when it came time to get the authorities involved they dragged their feet the entire time, if they would even file a report at all, and that inaction is paired with a "zero tolerance" policy on any kind of self defense that sends kids out into the world reluctant to give folks the rightful punch they deserve if they act out (and are entitled to give in most stand your ground states.)
Extending adolescence doesn't solve the root problems here, and conversely, more adults should reread a copy of "1984" and be a little more fearful they're held to the rules and norms they instill on the youth.
> Delaying from 13 (COPPA) to 16 won't change a thing.
There’s been a decent amount of studies to suggest it can actually, since you’ll be pushing the uptake of social media outside the peak age range where things like bullying, body image issues, grooming, etc. start to happen and, therefore, limiting the harm.
It’s also a time when a lot of life-habits start to get set down since 12-13 is when kids start having to assume more responsibility for themselves and begin learning how they manage their time, build their study habits, etc. Not being habituated into doomscrolling during that period seems like it can only be healthy. It’s not as if they’d be cut off from the internet entirely, they’d still have Wikipedia and all the boring, non-attention sapping parts of the web. And they’d still be able to direct-message or group-chat with their friends. They’re just spared the algorithmic feeds.
I want to come at this from another angle: We are about to tell the entire world wide web where all the kids are.
The more these laws are enforced, the more we hand over this information to any unscrupulous website operator, app developer, or advertiser. Are we about to hand Elon Musk [0] your kids' PII? How about Zuck, who (friendly reminder) sold your 2nd-factor phone number to advertisers [1]? How about all of the leaks from these ID services [2]? Or how about these services doing far more than Age Verification [3][4]?
Given the terrible track record of data breaches in tech, this means all this information leaks into even worse hands with little recourse for people and no punishment for companies.
From a security and privacy perspective it's in kids' own self-interest and self-protection for them to undermine all of these laws.
0: "I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for." https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02706...
There is no need to implement these kind of things in a way that gives any PII to Musk or Zuck.
One way is the California approach which requires that device operating systems offer parental controls that parents can set up when creating accounts for their children that will provide an age bracket to apps when the children are using the device. The California laws requires that apps that need to restrict use by children to ask for that age bracket.
Note that the California approach does not actually do any age verification. The parental controls accept whatever the parent says is the the child's age bracket.
Another way is to put actual ID documents on the device, cryptographically tied to the device, and to implement a protocol by which software on the device can prove to a remote site that the device contains such ID documents and that those document show an age that is in the age range that is allowed to use the site but without disclosing to the site any another information from the documents. Google, Apple, and the EU are all using and/or working on this type of approach.
Don’t forget the hate speech laws. It’s just ridiculous. A state in Germany wants to criminalize questioning a certain country’s existence, with penalties of up to four years in prison
Good, social media is cancer on society and will only get worse with LLMs, Deepfakes etc. All the astroturfing in favour of social media couldn't possibly change my mind on how harmful social media has been on society.
It's funny to me that we still call it "social media", when it bears no similarities to its original form. Back when your feed was sourced from your real-life friends and colleagues, and the only "algorithms" that existed were to show your latest friend's post at the top.
It's a bummer, because I think a platform that follows Facebook's original intent has just as much value in today's world, if not more.
Calling 2026's facebook, instagram, tiktok, xshitter, whatever "social media" is like calling a casino "the 3rd place that you socialise out with your mates".
> All the astroturfing in favour of social media couldn't possibly change my mind
What astroturfing? This is the most popular moral panic of our times. Yours is the default normie position...basically what is leading to all this poorly thought out legislation being emotionally shouted by the mob into existence.
Just so you're aware, all the worst laws are the ones created when the populace has been emotionally riled up into a mob over something, and where people refuse to rationally look the reality of the issue. See also: nuclear power, 9/11, the 90s satanic panic, violent video games in the 2000s, jazz music in the 1920s, the subliminal lyrics trials of the 80s, etc. etc.
Most of the actual academic literature suggests this is a giant moral panic.
The funniest part of all of it is the "social media mental health crisis" that millennials think they're saving their children from doesn't even exist anymore. All the dominant platforms of today are not based on the social graph. Nobody is getting bullied on their timeline or seeing all the parties they weren't invited to anymore. The most popular platform right now is essentially short form MTV.
If we're banning that and any website with "social" functions, anything with comments or upvotes like this website needs to be included.
You're cheering on identity gating the entire internet and a giant erosion of privacy. But again, your mind is made up already and as you've said, no rational thought can change it. So enjoy the new world of unintended consequences you're creating. When this moral panic is over, you may look back with a few regrets like everyone has over the Patriot Act.
> The funniest part of all of it is the "social media" that millennials think they're saving their children from doesn't even exist anymore. All the dominant platforms of today are not based on the social graph. Nobody is getting bullied on their timeline or seeing all the parties they weren't invited to anymore.
I think in recent years the infinite scroll of auto-generated content that bamboozles your brain is considered way worse than seeing the parties you weren't invited to. I think you're the one that's being "millenial" and thinking this is related to cyberbulling or whatever.
> And if its just any website with "social" functions, this one should be included!
This is actually a reasonable take and is being discussed elsewhere -- the "social" tag doesn't really apply any more. "Algorithmic brain-engaging drip feed" would be more apt.
I don't disagree that engagement-based algorithms are a real issue, but most of the legislation being proposed on this topic has nothing to do with that.
It's all motivated around the idea of there being a "teen mental health epidemic from social media" (which has very little support in the recent academic literature).
It's all worries about the 2010s era social graph driven by Jonathan Haidt's 8 year old podcast book tour...nobody wants to acknowledge the social graph doesn't even exist anymore!
The quote from the article below shows that they are at least thinking about the algorithmic targeting specifically.
> “We want a childhood where children get to be children,” Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said in the statement. “Play, friendships, and everyday life must not be taken over by algorithms and screens.”
I think there may be more awareness of targeting algorithms than you think. May be due to the fact that "content creators" talk about it all the time.
I had the same position before there was this panic. Facebook became popular around 2008 and was cheered on as some boon to society, and I was saying this thing needs to die. Also thought it was ridiculous how many of my middle school classmates had iPhones.
I would consider HN a barebones forum more than social media. It's a bit "I know it when I see it" but the clear differences are things like no media uploading, no mysterious algorithmic feeds (like you allude to) designed with the explicit goal of keeping you on, no "discoverability" like we see on these sites, etc. It's text posts, [edit: essentially] one page, and a simple up/down system with some weighting. You can't even really build an independent community within HN. We're all more or less seeing the same thing at the same time. Everyone's facebook or instagram or whatever is wildly different. It's siloing.
Also, there's no ad servicing going on/major profit element for ycombinator here. Doesn't mean there isn't self-promotion/astro-turfing, and it clearly benefits ycombinator's reputation to have this, but it isn't an ad platform with social aspects like social media.
Well, I don’t agree with any laws like that, they’re all silly.
Nobody under 16 should be on social media for their own good, but it’s their parent’s job to prevent them from rotting their brains, not some governing body.
> but it’s their parent’s job to prevent them from rotting their brains, not some governing body.
The counter argument is that even if you want to do that as a parent, it’s hard when all your kid’s friends use the thing you’re prohibiting. It makes their life harder, and yours too in the process.
It’s worth noting the first initiatives to gate kids from social media did come from parents, who organised locally and collectively agreed on a course of action.
As a parent, you have direct control over who your kid’s friends are.
We used to say, “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you?”.
Now we say, “Well, the kids are going to jump off a cliff anyway, I can’t stop them, so the government should make a law about it!”
I don’t think that’s the way to handle things. Parents who are bad at parenting will raise kids that fraternize with kids who jump off of cliffs. Maybe theirs will too, one day. Unfortunate, but the kids at the top of the cliff, who were actually raised, will excel.
You do not have control of who your childrens' friends are unless you spend all hours with them. And most people are happy nobody can legally sell smokes, booze, and drugs to 12 year olds.
Surely you can see how requiring ID for a physical cigs, drugs, and alcohol purchases is different from requiring ID to use a website?
“Think of the children” is the exact tool fascists use to erode liberties. Governments worldwide salivate at the idea of having a registry of what every individual is doing online at any given moment.
I agree, the challenge still remains to classify social media if the objective is to arrest or reverse the negative effects, while possibly not depriving children of positives of things like forums like HN which are clearly also social media, even though it’s clearly not what people are primarily thinking of regarding this issue.
I suspect there is not a clear or even uniform definition of what is and is not social media that would be banned for children. Usenet is attributed as being the first social media application from 1979. I presume many here would not include Usenet even though by the technical definition of social media HN and forums in general are in fact also social media, while also at the same time one could make the case that things like TikTok or YouTube shorts are not very “social”, while at the same time being part of the problem people are upset about.
I agree that there is definitely a problem with children and the internet, but frankly, maybe the ban should be for smart phones in general for children, because the same kind of toxic behaviors that I think people are actually calling “social media” can simply just continue in things like telegram and iMessage; aren’t they social media too, especially now with video/image sharing?
I preemptively apologize to anyone if my words are taken as flame bait or personal attacks on anyone that likes social media or smart phones for children, it’s simply my opinion and how I speak and if you don’t like it you can simply disagree and ignore what I say, even if yuppy are a mod.
I don’t think the answer is banning phones (except in school, context dependent), it’s letting lazy, bad parents have natural outcomes for their children and allowing the rest to work itself out through the social free market.
It sounds cruel, but if someone is set on allowing their children to be raised by strangers on the internet and the government, they need to be ready to accept any outcomes that come along with that.
Although I agree with you directionally, reality simply is that at least speaking for the west in general terms, this approach does not strike me as feasible because it will always contact the pathological altruism of our current civilizational state that will be compelled to "help" and "protect". But there is also the issue of simply writing off the children of such parents is rather callous and simply not compatible with civilization. We are not individuals in a modern society/civilization; your notion of parents "accepting any outcomes" turns out to always result in society/civilization dealing with the effects like crime, loneliness, degeneracy, etc. As an aside; it is in fact the deepest of problems of the whole "libertarian" premise that we are all just individuals, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Do we want to be a civilization or do we want to be a conglomeration of wild animals where we just accept the "natural outcomes" of the consequences of things that was imposed on them in the first place?
Frankly, (and no, I don't mean this as a flame bait, mods) I see it similar to when alcohol was introduced to the tribes of America, when they were genetically predisposed to both increased intoxication and addiction to alcohol; we introduced smartphones not only to a population that was simply not at all prepared for it psychologically (arguably, genetically too), but it was also introduced largely to the young through the adults, who were even more psychologically vulnerable to every single form of predation and things you would want to protect children from one could imagine.
I know people who suffer from both the effects of smartphones and "social media" (some both, some each) in several ways too broad in scope to detail here now (but it is very bad in many ways), even though the irony in one case in particular that comes to mind, is that it is due to secondary effects from their parents' behaviors, actions, and inactions related to social media and smartphones. To your point, the saddest part is that it is not the "bad parents have natural outcomes..." it is the "children" who are suffering and having to recover from even things like grooming and psychological conditioning, and having to "reparent" themselves following a young life of neglect and what can easily be described as abuse from it.
The challenge presents itself there that barring adults from "social media" and smartphones due to negligence, neglect, and various forms of abuse is a far more tricky issue and topic; especially when a double-digit trillion dollar industry is behind it that makes up what can be argued is the only remaining, functioning industry in America.
I will have to stop here. It has given me an idea for a book. Thank you for spurring that.
I don’t care how anyone else chooses to raise their children. They can let their kids rot their brains, do poorly in school, and fail in life without ever getting me or the government involved. I am not responsible for raising the failed children of failed parents. I care ONLY about the outcomes of my family, friends, and, to a slightly lesser extent, my broader local community.
Promoting failed parents and children, not in spite of their failures but because of them, is suicidal empathy, a modern mental illness that was never able to fully take root in the past, because the world was always much smaller, divided, and cutthroat.
If given the binary choice between “being an individual” or a “civilization”, I would choose to burn down the civilization in a moment IF it meant the eradication of the individuality of those that I love. I would hope every single person with a heart beating in their chest would feel the exact same way, or else THAT is when a society truly collapses.
To borrow your analogy, the Indians became alcoholics because “they were genetically predisposed to it”? Okay, well why would we want to increase genetic predisposition to alcoholism in the gene pool by denying someone their freedom to drink themselves stupid?
You can argue that it wouldn’t be fair to their children, but those who aren’t drunkards could become wealthy casino owners whose children will prosper more than even you or I, while those whose genes, according to your perspective, apparently don’t allow them to control their own urges will fail, and their lineage will end, along with their hereditary alcoholism.
I see no reason for society to bear any level of responsibility for individuals regardless of context, as society is built by successful individuals , and it is torn apart by failed ones. We must allow the natural outcomes, which is that failed people will fail.
Evolution, if guided by humans, would quickly devolve into chaos, as we can’t accurately select for the correct pressures for success. It simply has to occur. Society is a living organism in the same way.
Platforms like HN are still vulnerable to astroturfing and bubble effects, but at least the operators aren't optimizing for engagement beyond [what I assume is] a fairly simple up/down ranking system based on user votes and time decay.
Moderation is another question. On HN again I don't really get the sense that there is a lot of censorship. On Reddit, on the other hand, the behavior of moderators and admins is legitimately frightening once you start paying attention.
Overall I would shut it all down forever if I could, but if I had a limited budget I would prioritize Meta's platforms and similar algorithmic infinite-scroll slop feeds. I think all they do is addict people to scrolling and epistemically poison them without giving any real value back.
Great question. Algorithmic recommendations with infinitely scrolling feeds that get fresh, fungible content—i.e. content produced by strangers, not your friends—whenever you visit the platform are are the biggest issues I have with social media. They're designed like slot machines to boost engagement at the cost of, you know, accommodating social connections.
I'm worried that while these bans have good intentions, they might be targeting the wrong things. The direction is right, and I'm glad action is being taken, though.
I can't read the article so don't know if they give enough details on the Norway law to tell, but most of the other countries or states with such laws prohibit specific practices that are very common on social media sites. If you site does those things it is covered. If it does not, it is not covered.
HN is usually not covered.
For example New York's law covers sites with an "addictive feed", and defines "addictive feed" this way:
> "Addictive feed" shall mean a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users of a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, either concurrently or sequentially, are recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information associated with the user or the user's device, unless any of the following conditions are met, alone or in combination with one another:
> (a) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on information that is not persistently associated with the user or user's device, and does not concern the user's previous interactions with media generated or shared by other users;
> (b) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on user-selected privacy or accessibility settings, or technical information concerning the user's device;
> (c) the user expressly and unambiguously requested the specific media, media by the author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (d) the user expressly and unambiguously requested that specific media, media by a specified author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to pursuant to paragraph (c) of this subdivision, be blocked, prioritized or deprioritized for display, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (e) the media are direct and private communications;
> (f) the media are recommended, selected, or prioritized only in response to a specific search inquiry by the user;
(> g) the media recommended, selected, or prioritized for display is exclusively next in a pre-existing sequence from the same author, creator, poster, or source; or
> (h) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is necessary to comply with the provisions of this article and any regulations promulgated pursuant to this article.
New York's definition is one of the most detailed. The Australian definition on the other hand probably includes Hacker News because it includes both "a logged-in feature" and "endless feed" and the fact that posts move off the home page probably falls under "time-limited features". Perhaps some legal interpretation will find that paging is not legally "endless feed", but I could see it going either way. The definition basically is written so that blogs with comment sections aren't included, but with quite an expansive scope otherwise.
I mostly agree with you, I think what you're implying is correct on average, but I'm probably not the only one to whom HN is more addictive than Instagram, Tiktok and all the other classic social media apps.
They get boring much more quickly and also make me feel guilty about spending time on something so shallow, so it's very self limiting.
Please take a beat to think about how this would be implemented (it looks like it's not decided at this time) before reflexively saying "good" because the marketing sounds nice. This is how the US got swindled into accepting the PATRIOT act, et al.
There are problems with social media, yes. However, these problems exist for children and adults. A reasonable way to tackle this issue would be to make social media safer for everyone, not just to exclude kids. These problems are not solved with an age check, and if the age check requires handing over PII, that introduces additional problems. We have to wonder what the motivation here is, and if we aren't heading towards giving up freedom for perceived security.
I think the user needs the ability to set how their data feed works and not be dependent on the hyper addictive algorithmic feed. And parents need to be able to set that for their kids. 90% of the stuff I see in Facebook is garbage that I don't care for.
These companies need to do what's best for shareholders, which means do the most addicting and damaging thing. Besides that, we have almost 20 years of evidence of attempting to fix it.
Where it's gotten us is that social media is a tool for the president to broadcast threats of genocide to millions of people. Banning or restricting that kind of platform is not the same as the PATRIOT act.
Yep. While. Below the age of 16 can be potent, some of the most impacted people I have ever meet were well over that age when social media came along. This is not an age thing, it is the very core of those businesses.
There are problems with cigarettes, yes. However, these problems exist for children _and_ adults. A reasonable way to tackle this issue would be to make cigarettes safer for everyone, not just to exclude kids. These problems are not solved with an age check ...
You may or may not be acting as an apologist for the sleaziest, worst industry on earth here, but you certainly sound like it, even if it is unintentional. As this is hacker news, P(makes money working for sleazy, terrible companies) is high so you'll have to accept this obvious interpretation.
Look, I actually kind of agree with you, but social media _already has all the PII_ to an extent unparalleled in history. Come on. "We have to wonder what the motivation here is"?
Do age checks really work for cigs? I had no issues getting em when I was a kid.
I feel like it's more the marketing campaign making them seem "uncool" and unhealthy that is responsible for the decline in smokers.
That's changing now of course, smoking is becoming cool again thanks to the bans and legislation. The UK's new total ban on smoking will literally create more young smokers lol.
You aren't following the news - adult smoking is being outlawed in the UK as we speak - so, your analogy is against you position but supports the person you're criticizing.
More importantly, smoking is a well defined activity but "social media" is anything but - using your analogy, "social media" can be everything from milk to veges to plain water - all of which you want to ban because they're all sold in the same stores where cigarettes are sold. In other words - starve the kids.
Further, school and legacy media can be more toxic than a well designed social media site for kids - vague bans leave the door open to legacy toxicity while closing it to web-based media that could counter the bad sources.
It's far better to focus on toxicity, identify what is "smoking" and what not, regardless of where the "tobacco" might be hidden. After some consensus is achieved, go after the providers, the same way the tobacco companies were sued onto oblivion.
Why do so many people go after the kids instead of after the providers? Too chicken to take on the big ones?
In my opinion, the basic idea of social media isn't necessarily bad, it's the fact that it is ad supported, which incentivizes completely controlling the attention of users, which is the issue.
The problem is, the borders upon which you want a child operating in social media are pretty fuzzy. Do you want them working with classmates? sure. Other peers in same school grade? of course; older peers? ...sure; older peers in other districts...maybe?
Then there's all the spoofing and the "age gate" software that inevitably needs to be done to do this.
The things is, it’s not the people that bother me. If it was IRC or MySpace I’d be mostly fine, even if they were engaging with questionable people or content, I think partially because the fidelity and partially because those experiences were still largely pulled by the child. It’s the non-stop algorithmic content.
This is sort of - it’s not really the “social media” that’s the problem it’s billion dollar companies getting to push content direct.
However bad you think 65+ users are on social media, it's way worse than you think. Imagine being scammed by ads and grinding the remaining years of your life away with that. Yikes. I've seen it with my own eyes. It's awful.
I think we should ban all media for all ages, and force people to evaluate the world from first principles using more rational evaluation and distillation techniques like those found in LLMs.
Age 25-65 Coastal elites with luxury beliefs are equally as vulnerable as over 65s, but they hold the levers of actual power, which is far more dangerous.
As with any ban on anything, I would prefer that it start with the people who want it banned. So any advocates against social media and get off social media. Every politician and government employee in Norway should be off it.
In general, if someone comes along and says that someone else's rights should be shrunk, I think they should give up those same rights first.
You can just look at the US congress for how this isn't done as they frequently carve out exceptions for themselves and staffers.
By that logic, no politician and government employee would be able to drive a car or have a job, since we also “ban” those for minors.
We’re not talking about a lifetime ban on social media, the argument is certain kinds of things are gated from people under a certain age because we know those are harmful and can negatively impact your entire life going forward when not done conscientiously, and most people below a certain age do not yet possess the capacity to make an informed decision about their use.
The politicians could all divest from these companies for a start.
Anyone they are responsible for could be forced off social media, etc...
This is just another case of some people deciding other people are too dumb to handle themselves or their kids. Further, I believe formally blaming the media companies lets everyone off the hook for their own actions.
In the general sense, Congress shouldn't be exempting itself from federal smoking bans, providing healthcare coverage, insider trading, lying before Congress, etc...
At least this gives kids the chance to be kids and know a life without it before they encounter it.
Many of us grew up in the offline-is-default time, but our cohort will age out. Then we’ll only be left with people who grew up with these technologies shaping their lives and perspectives, who have little sense for the alternative.
The window of time is closing for us in this cohort to use our understanding of what life was like without these technologies to advocate for a healthier environment for kids.
if it's bad for society then regulate the Social Media companies rather than shifting the burden on the citizenry through ID laws and backdooring increased surveillance under the guise of "muh chillren!"
First, tobacco and alcohol companies absolutely are regulated. Second, traditionally the age gate for cigarettes and booze is for the seller to look at your ID just to verify your age, then forget you. The process was not to establish your identity and follow you around forever, tracking and selling your behavioral data, which is a way these Internet based age gates have been implemented, and the logical conclusion of these age gates given how the Internet works. Third, even if you are coming from the angle that the age verification process for cigarettes and alcohol are bad, it's easier to prevent a bad system from being codified into law than to repeal it after the fact.
Being licensed to drive is a bit of a different situation as you do have to demonstrate some kind of proficiency, but even still, the government practically has to keep track of this in some way and presumably, that way doesn't involve selling your personal info (if it did, there likely would be the same backlash).
Are they obligated to still sell the liquor if you refuse the scan? The cashier specifically told me last time they're required to scan it if I want to buy that.
Yes, there's no law requiring it. It's just corporate BS. They want to scan your license, that's it. Some cashiers will push back because that's what they've been told to do, but if you ask for a manager they'll admit it's not a requirement.
I know it's not required by law to scan it, but it might be a store policy, in which case I don't think there's a law disallowing that kind of store policy. They'll tell you to shop elsewhere, and every big store does it.
The only law involved is the one that penalizes them harshly if anyone underage manages to buy liquor. If fake IDs are less likely to pass that scan, maybe that's why they do it.
I'm sure it's CYA for the stores, but then they're holding copies of your license and doing who knows what else with it. I've been seeing more of it getting rolled out, but so far I just present my license if they ask for it, but don't relinquish it and tell them I don't want it scanned. So far it's never been a hard line. I did it yesterday and the cashier just shrugged and I paid.
> traditionally the age gate for cigarettes and booze is for the seller to look at your ID just to verify your age, then forget you. The process was not to establish your identity and follow you around forever, tracking and selling your behavioral data, which is a way these Internet based age gates have been implemented
I think that's a bit of a strawman, there exist solutions to this problem that decouple who reads the ID from the party that needs information about it, e.g. being above a certain age. Maybe it matters here how it's implemented, can that be regulated?
One of those is a function of government and the other two are enriched by the product being purchased rather than being a ploy to gather user PII to be sold to the highest bidder.
And neither of those 3 knows much about me other than I drive, purchase tobacco or alcoholic beverages. They don't know who my prom date was or who I worked for in 2012 or what movie I'm currently watching or where I eat lunch every day or what my religious beliefs are or where my political allegiances lie.
The ID laws only apply to social media though. You don't need to give your ID if you don't use those websites. Of course it's also possible that this is just a trojan for other sites asking for ID, but hopefully people see the difference enough that extending this law there wouldn't be popular.
Without social media the majority of the populace would be completely misinformed on everything and the current Iran war would have 60%+ support like the Iraq war did, how is that possibly a better world?
While old style mass media could move in lock step, the lacl of that mechanism seems to just produce a flood of counter narratives to counter narratives. It provides the illusion of being informed but actually being more confused.
As they say, I would rather be uninformed than misinformed.
Cancer except when it’s in the form that I approve such as HN? Where it has all the problems of social media — astroturfing, self promoting, bots, etc.
Please. At best HN has a very small subset of the problems in social media, and its positives easily outweigh its negatives. This is a well moderated forum with a lot of bright people and industry experts that a young person could learn from by observing conversation and debate. It bears a great deal of resemblance to historic methods of learning by watching experts interact and debate. Tons of pedagogical value is here for a young person to latch onto.
A most obvious difference besides that is HN isn’t a nonstop feed of short form video appealing to the insecurities of teenagers, using notifications and social feedback loops and the suggestion that you’d be missing out on what your friends are up to if you left.
HN doesn’t even let you follow people and barely lets you know who they are. It’s centered on ideas, not people. HN and social media are almost nothing alike.
Cancer? really? Is this [1] astroturfing? Seems like most of the astroturfing is coming directly from Newscorp. I wonder why so many seemingly intelligent people have an irrational hatred of social media. Or why their talking points follow the Faux News playbook to a tee.
This kind of behavior is incredibly reactionary and rooted (if not directly in the financial interests of entrenched legacy media) in the belief that your local culture somehow superior to online culture.
The difference is you imagine kids going outside and playing chasey while Murdoch imagines getting them on scratchers and tv and running stories about increased kidnapping. If your position wasn't astroturfed it would come with bans on legacy media consumption too.
We already have COPPA. The result of which I have seen in my child's classroom when the teacher instructs the class "enter a different birth date to get around this restriction so we can use this website for our class activity"
No, we don't. This is big tech shifting liability off themselves with the added bonus of full de-anonymization. Take a look at who is lobbying for this.
Yes, the Epstein group is worried about.... ummm children. What they are worried about is wrong-speech and they are desperate to stop people from talking about the swarming waves of immigration and our declining way of life.
Fu Norway. This is an example of lobbyists succesfully make regulations based on a fake reason to serve their own totally different interest. Dumpsters in Norway have no idea how they are being played. Noone cares about children. They only care about introducing id verification for everyone everywhere. Again. Fu Norway.
Further it seems to me, this will just allow the tech companies to assume there are no kids, and remove the protections currently available.
Yes there is an issue of quantity, but it seems that we should be focussing on social norms for what is acceptable parenting in the 21st century. I'm 42, probably the lower age range for having a teenage kid, I have a couple of kids myself, and I'm not 100% sure on what the correct approach to take is, as I suspect the situation is for most other parents as the situation is so different to what we experienced at that age.
Seriously. I see at least one baby with a phone in hand every time I go out.
This is 100% an education issue and they don't understand how harmful that can be to their child's brain.
Governments are focusing on banning things because some reason but real solution is education and support imo.
Similar issue with school shottings. Government wants to ban guns or put controls on schools but they don't invest enough on mental health, it is almost if they are incapable of understanding that a healthy person wouldn't choose to do this.
The social media ussue is similar imo, parents don't understand how harmful it is to the brain. It is harmful for adults and it is even worse for children
It is not. Most parents I know have seen what it does to their kids, but have zero childcare. I have a white-collar remote job and can police my kids. If I was dual-parent working class, I don't think I'd be able to pull it off. I'm glad these laws are getting on the books, so at least the peer pressure of a classroom can get to a good majority of kids.
The kid with the iPad at the restaurant is just saliency bias ("I see it everywhere!"). This is not that different from blaming parents for sending their kids to school hungry or for their kids getting abducted or some such.
Social media is a vortex with a very strong societal pull.
> It is not. Most parents I know have seen what it does to their kids, but have zero childcare.
And you are able to tell this ... how exactly? Why should other parents care about YOUR opinion in this regard? Because ultimately this comes down to a difference in opinion.
As a parent you can only get your children a smartphone when you decide they are old enough, and then iOS and Android have parental control down to app level.
Yes and decent countries ban social media, because like schools, the countries recognize this is a collective action issue. You get your children a smartphone when it becomes the only way they can connect with their peers. That's my point.
That's very different from schools banning use of phone during school hours. And, no, your role as parent is not to blindly follow the herd if you think it is not good. That's certainly true for smartphones and, again, there is parental control if/when you get your children a smartphone.
You can only bring a horse to water, as the saying goes...
My cynical take is that social media are a convenient tool for government to justify more identification and control. ID cards, digital IDs, age verification systems, lack of anonymity, etc almost literally justified by "just think of the children".
"your role as parent is not to blindly follow the herd if you think it is not good."
This is just conservative individual responsibility pablum just re-imagined for IT.
"It doesn't matter if all of societies forces + giant multi-national tech corporations are conspiring to trap your child, individual responsibility is all that matters"
This argument doesn't work for smoking or drinking, and it shouldn't for social media.
Wait, you jumping to national ID's are a tool for national control is fine, but me saying social media is forensically designed to be hyper-addictive[1] is somehow bizarre?
The harm hasn't been adequately demonstrated though. Whereas we know cigarettes are harmful to everyone.
Alcohol in the UK can be consumed in the house from 5 years old. Which is the point. That societal norms at work. Everyone knows it's not ok to let your young kids get drunk, but we trust society to let parents decide what is appropriate and when.
A VPN can't get around a cigarette and alcohol ban.
Perhaps children should be given locked down phones, with fines for parents who buy non child safe phones for their kids. It would take time for this to take effect but a social media ban would actually be effective at the end.
> Just like you can't get around a random adult buying for kids. It's just an imperfect deterrent.
This argument feels really weak. Convincing an adult to buy alcohol for kids is dramatically more difficult on average than setting up a VPN.
If you’re on this tech website you should know that it’s not hard to get VPN access even with cash by buying cards at retail. You can also use one of the various free (ad supported or spyware) VPN products.
It’s nothing like trying to involve another adult and asking them to take on the legal liability of that action.
I live in the UK, though not in London. I can count on one hand the number of times a group of children asked me to buy alcohol for them. So it's not that it doesn't happen, but it almost never happens.
Compare standing outside a supermarket, repeatedly begging passers by to commit a crime for you every time you want alcohol, with the one time action of installing a VPN client on your device and it's obvious one law is enforceable while the other is not.
Was at my daughter volleyball game a few years back. Sitting in the gym. In walks mom with a baby girl and a boy that looked around 10ish. They sit down. Mom gives the baby the ipad to futz around with. The son? Takes out his book and starts to quietly read.
It was an interesting contrast to say the least.
This is also something I've heard from my son about more kids are getting off of social media, or giving it up for other means to communicate. My son just graduated HS and said all of his peers have left Facebook, Snapchat, X and several others. He said his generation now sees social media as something for Boomers and my (Gen X) generation. He said people think you're lame if you're still on social media. Everything is now back to Discord servers and other platforms like 4Chan. Anonymous, under the radar stuff, out of the prying eyes of adults.
There was a study shared on Hacker News a few months ago that looked hard to find correlations between different measures and social media use or gaming in kids. It didn’t find any evidence of negative correlations between social media or gaming with different negative effects.
The response here was largely skepticism and disbelief. This topic has jumped out of the realm of evidence and into the range of moral panic. Facts don’t matter any more. The conclusion is assumed.
It’s really sad to see how quickly Hacker News, of all places, is jumping head first into welcoming age restrictions and bans with barely a passing thought to what it means. We already saw with Discord that tech communities really don’t like what age restrictions look like in practice, but whenever you make the topic about “social media” everyone assumes it will only be Facebook or Instagram, never their Reddits or Discords that have to go through identity checks for age verification.
> It’s really sad to see how quickly Hacker News, of all places, is jumping head first into welcoming age restrictions and bans with barely a passing thought to what it means.
I'd avoid such generalizations. It's a divisive topic, but from what I've seen here, there's always lots of criticism (regarding implementation at the minimum) in the comments and it definitely isn't clear that most would be jumping head first into anything.
I don't think anybody was 100% sure social media would be the best thing since sliced bread when they subjected humanity to the experiment, so I don't think you have a whole ton of reason to freak out here. Either they're wrong and can keep moving forward, or they're right and can backtrack. The children will survive and so will you. L
Isn't that a bit naïve though? Will it actually get rolled back? Seems to me we've added another level of officialdom and it's never going to go.
The next generation of plucky startups now have more hoops to jump through, creating a moat around the incumbents.
And even if it is harmful, why is a complete ban the best approach? The internet is a tool. Should you not let kids cook because they might harm themselves? Or do you teach them, so that they can avoid hurting themselves in the future? While avoiding the downside of bringing up kids who can't cook?
My main worry is this is just another step towards government controlling discourse online. Once implemented it will become difficult to be anonymous on social media.
Some one in the UK civil service was quoted in the Times, they stated that the online safety act is not about protecting children. It is about controlling the discourse.
yes, plenty of studies of the effect on mental health. whether it's "definitive" is a matter of debate (and opinion). as a parent of teens/preteens, I 100% support this just like I support banning the sale of cigarettes to minors.
And if future research definitively shows that social media is not generally harmful, then it can be allowed and no harm done -- meaning that it's not like the ban deprives them of some essential need.
It's not even so much the social media itself, but it's the companies controlling social media, who push every lever to try to increase engagement. It's not unlike the cigarette companies back in the day, trying to make them as addictive as possible, with ads everywhere, getting it movies so it's cool, etc.
If we had no-ads, paid subscription social media accounts, no endless scrolling, where social media companies revenue was not tied to time spent in the app, where you only see from people you follow, that would be a whole different conversation.
Meta/ByteDance/Snap/YouTube have f*ed it up, and this is why we can't have nice things.
We can't even get countries to agree on a unified drinking age, but somehow the whole world is simultaneously coming to the conclusion that you need to be 16 to use social media, and websites and operating systems all need North Korean ID verification to prove you're over 16. There is a zero percent chance this is organic
The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global. That wasn't the case when drinking laws were enacted.
Also, the object - social networks - is global. Yes, all kinds of societies have had alcohol, but alcoholic beverages don't suddenly become 20% more potent or harmful everywhere at once. With centralized platforms, that can happen.
Totally. Today’s social media is not the same as last years etc. Read Meta’s quarterly reports and they brag about Reels increasing time spent on site by 30% in a year. That’s not even considering the other ill effects like giving kids a firehose of all the worlds problems when they’re not yet equipped to handle that information, which causes them to internalize those things, making them feel like things are fucked, that they’re responsible, etc. It’s psychologically devastating. And so many other things! Let kids be kids.
It is clearly a campaign by the surveillance state profiteers.
Palantir and similar corporations are on tour and hand in hand with our bought off representatives are they killing the open internet.
Don’t get me wrong, I dislike Facebook and such as much as the rest of the HN crowd, but this not the answer.
Yes I think this is it. News headlines and Tweets and other social media posts mean that trends are much more global than they used to be. "Controlling kids' access to social media" is just trending right now, and that means it's getting attention all over the globe at the same time.
are you for real suggesting that this is just countries that just so happen to look at eachother than then all go "wow, gotta get that age verification going" ?
its blindly obvious that this is an agenda that SOMEONE is pushing EVERYWHERE, one can then speculate who that might be, or for what purpose
It's pushed by child safety charities. It might be hard to imagine due to the echo chamber, but some people do actually support this.
i am sure many people support it, but then they suddenly had a breakthrough all over the world at the same time?
I am tech policy adjacent, and HN is WILDLY off base when it comes to how the average voter is thinking about tech currently.
Yes, all major nations have been looking at this since Australia started with it.
There’s been a build up of forces and issues for decades.
other countries are also looking at many other things other countries are doing, and somehow doesnt arrive at some kind of semi-census in a very short time of eachother.
I’ve read court opinions from the Indian Supreme Court that reference decisions in other nations.
The OSA and DSA came out relatively close to each other.
The rollout and follow up has been organic, with many nations are still at the wait and see stage.
This consensus has been solidifying for years. Your being unaware of it is perhaps because the topic was uninteresting to you?
>political movements can be global.
You are saying exactly what OP is saying but just rephrasing it another way.
The more a movement crosses borders, the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country and the more likely it is to be based on the needs of the transnational billionaire class.
Drinking age is not the only example, driving age is another good example and also the old TV rating system. What was considered taboo in America was often at the same time considered to be fine in places like Europe, or vice versa. But we never had a coordinated international push for censorship when it came to TV/movies like we are seeing with social media.
I can remember how much people used to deride mass surveillance and censorship in places like Russia and China and now here we are very quickly catching up to them in every way.
>the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country
there has been no such thing in decades. The idea that there are 'organic needs of countries' compared to 'artificial needs of global consumers' in the internet age where digital infrastructure is long post-national is conspiratorial.
We're here on HN right now. I'm German, you might statistically I guess be American, but maybe Indian, maybe Chinese, we likely both consume media made in South Korea or Japan so the fact that legislation emerges kind of in tandem isn't "coordinated censorship", it's reflecting a reality of how information flows. Politics, economics, and media consumption is now horizontally intertwined, we don't live in vertical silo countries any more.
If you made a digital worldmap and connected each person you'd get something that doesn't look at all like the one on your physical globe and if you don't realize that the distances there are a bit different you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening.
Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations? I can tell you that in the USA there are basically no real grassroots efforts to censor social media, at least none with a real footprint that most people have ever heard of. Despite that, there are a lot of politicians making laws to clamp down on social media use.
I think most people can intuitively see that the number of people who talk about this as an issue does not at all match the amount of attention that politicians are giving it. All at the same time, in most western countries simultaneously. It just does not pass the smell test.
>you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening.
Nothing spooky about it, they are not coincidences, we can see that ideas are spreading between powerful politicians and the billionaire oligarchs across borders without any real input of the governed. Laws are being made, we are being given the "think of the children" line, and they are hoping that we will accept it.
Just because we can communicate across borders doesn't mean that countries should stop considering the needs of their citizens as their primary objective. The more we allow these efforts to cross borders without any objection or examination, the weaker the power of citizens becomes and the less effective democracy becomes.
> Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations?
Yes?
Dear God, people have been begging for help for decades on these issues.
Right? What scientific study is showing awesome outcomes for screen addled kids, not to mention the behaviours it can encourage.
No teachers or doctors have been saying this is good, they’ve been warning it’s worse than we think consistently.
That does not have to mean draconian device validation per se.
My personal take is that we should have more than one ‘internet’ and keep the one full of porn and Chinese psyops up on the shelf with the titty mags and dick pills. Nintendo-ish style friend-code based messaging and online textbooks, until you’re old enough to buy an 18+ SIM card or internet connection. Same as how we handle booze, cigs, and porn: at point of sale with extra punishments for adults who provide. Not perfect, but doable.
It feels like we got hosed once we got social media + ad tech.
> No teachers or doctors have been saying this is good, they’ve been warning it’s worse than we think consistently.
Thank you! I feel like I must be yelling into a void with how many commenters on HN seem to be unaware of this.
>Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations?
Yes, tons of them honestly, in particular in the English speaking world. NSPCC or the Molly Rose foundation in Britain, Collective Shout in Australia who recently made the news after approaching I think payment providers who processed sexually charged games on Steam, etc.
Child safety online is if anything the most heavily activist driven topic there is. The tech companies and the shadowy people visiting Epstein's island are not known for their efforts to reduce children's access to the internet, Mark Zuckerberg is not in favor of gettting viewer people on his platforms.
This is reflected in polls too. The Child Safety act in Britain had vast support from the population, seven in ten people I believe, about 80% among women. Insofar as pressure is put on regulators to not adopt legislation of that sort it's coming from the people who you seem to think are responsible for it. It's largely elites who are funding organizations to scrap internet regulation, which is understandable given that it makes financial sense for them.
> The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global.
This is simply not true. The US puts pressure on countries to harmonize their regulations and laws to ours, unless it is to the US's advantage that other countries have different laws than ours. The world didn't suddenly get draconian drug laws through "political movements," it got them through diplomatic and funding pressures. The US often used those laws as excuses for military and intelligence interventions, or to build political organizations in those countries in the guise of antidrug organizations.
All countries do things like this, but the US is rich and dangerous enough to do it hardest. The US has decided that it wants everybody tracked at all times, especially online, and when it explains the advantages of this to the elites of other countries, they also like the idea.
Smaller European countries have also made it a cottage industry to fanatically push US agendas in places like NATO and the EU, because it gives their little homelands outsized influence (and bags of cash) to operate on behalf of the bully. For some reason, everybody in Europe has to care what e.g. Estonia thinks about something, although Estonia is just saying what the US wants Europe to be doing, and the US is financing Estonian candidates for European positions (and maybe even having Trump lobby against them to give them even more credibility.)
This attack on any sort of privacy online is not coming from the churches. There is no lobby group that it pushing it that doesn't get the majority of its funds from any number of governments, which is just government lobbying itself. The way democracy is supposed to work is that the people support something, and they then vote for candidates that will give it to them - but there is no visible constituency lobbying for this other than casual liberal cynics who aren't organized in any way.
As a comparison, in 2015 there was like 65-70% popular support for single-payer health care in the US. There were dozens of organized groups supporting it. It even crossed 50% among Republicans for at least a year. Not a hint of anything happened.
edit: Also Europe, like Japan, is one of those places that had a really emotionally tough time outlawing pedophilia and child pornography. They certainly don't care this much about the sexual aspect of child safety, at least. What Europe has never been behind on is the censorship of political speech. That is what can excite people.
the US has no laws about social media for u16. australia does, and countries are following suit.
the west is led by the people that lead now
countries also have single payer or other socialized healthcare, and have not followed the US into its junky private profits on extraordinary public money setup
this is not at all convincing. america used to have soft power influence, but its being left behind
People have been drinking alcohol since time immemorial. Our laws need to overcome those longstanding cultural standards that vary greatly across the globe and therefore laws will be different too.
It varies by country, but I would guess most political leaders didn't grow up in the era of social media, so there isn't some ingrained belief that kids actually need this stuff. And with growing globalization, it makes perfect sense that many new laws would be similar because they are both motivated by the same factors and can be used as examples for each other.
We didn't need social media before it existed. If no one's on it, that sounds like the ideal situation for young kids.
Same thing with phones in school. When it's banned by a legislature, every kid's like this is actually great six months after being enacted.
Appropriate username!
I remember a time around 2010 where I benefitted from social media, Facebook in particular. It wasn't addictive, I used it for 15 minutes at the end of the day to catch up with what foreign family was doing, we would organize real-life parties through Facebook, share photos of those events, tag each other. If you traveled internationally it was easy to keep in touch with people you met along the way.
I'm afraid we will never get to that point anymore but I do think there was a point in society where social media was a positive addition.
It could still be like that if there was no opaque algorithm and even better if there was no endless feed to doomscroll. If you only got alerts for messages directed at you and otherwise had to actively visit a person's page to check up on them. But that wouldn't be as engaging (ie addictive) and there wouldn't be nearly as many opportunities for ads or even the collection of data to drive those ads.
It has nothing to do with kids or social media.
> People have been drinking alcohol since time immemorial.
This is probably the reason why there is no unified age for drinking, because everyone came at it at different times from different place and have differing rationale including social, religious, cultural etc.
Social media is new and there is no cultural/religious rule for/against it. So 16 is the starting point someone decided (was it Australia or NZ?), and others are following since it's a good starting point. As time progresses, maybe it'll move up or down and different countries might take a different stand.
I'm a parent and on board with this, and many parents I know are too. It's organic. We just have a different view from you.
I'm on board with it too, but the timing and methodology is suspicious. We already got a "protect the kids" law to semi-block TikTok in the US, but it was really about protecting Israel's image (its sponsors even admitted). I hope it's not related to that.
So tiktok is the only uncensored source of information about Israel?
A disingenuous response. No one said that.
Tiktok in the US previously had an algorithm that wasn't in keeping with US government goals. That's not a value judgement on my part BTW. Personally I avoid the ingestion of opaque algorithmic feeds to the extent possible.
So whats your unbiased source?
Mike Gallagher, one of the two main sponsors of the bill
Absolutely. My kid just started high school shortly after our social media ban started, and they only interact with their friends outside of school via phone calls and text, without the interference of addiction-optimised algorithms. It's superb.
I always had it in my control go prevent my child using social media, but I couldn't control every other child in the school using it as the way to stay in touch. This is the kind of collective action that is beneficial for kids.
I’m an AI bot, and I’m on board with this, and many parents I know are too. It’s inorganic. We just have a different tokenizer from you.
Yummy yummy targeted data now directly to identified children with the ability to hide the smoking gun from the parents entirely. We’ll wait till you leave them home alone. Don’t worry.
I don't even know what to make of this comment! Because I have a different view from you I must not be a person?
Not the sort of debate I'm used to on HN.
[dead]
You haven’t had children growing up during the last two decades have you?
If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different, the timing would be all over the place, the age limits and the methods to provide ID as well. But they are not.
edited for tone
>If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different
organic, one at a time, "hey, i wonder if other places considered this, how did they word it?" that's not collusion.
don't imagine you know better than aware, organic people who read the newspaper and actually have more life experience and tempered emotion than you do.
humans are "young" for about 20 years, parents are parents to young children for about 20 years, and smartphones have been around for about 20 years. the time seems ripe for those with life experience to draw some conclusions.
Yes, people in government famously don't know anyone else in government anywhere else and never communicate with one another or read the same research or look at what other countries are doing.
Is there a precedent where this happened organically and the same similarities were in place in that many legislations around the world inside of half a year?
This is only a few countries. There’s many more considering it.
Freon bans?
That was openly coordinated beginning with the Montreal Protocol. Those things work top to bottom with international accords in the beginning and don't suddenly pop up left and right inside of much less than a year. Getting a ban on lead in fuel took ages with Europe implementing it a decade later.
These kind of laws usually take many years to hone down just right and talk to all parties involved. Unless some lobby group presents a finished piece of work that just has to be waved through, like with the Citigroup scandal.
People have been talking about social media bans for quite some time, this isn't something that just showed up out of the blue. It's a problem that's been worsening for years.
Then you had the Covid years where kids ended up spending a lot of time on phones and tablets, hence social media, and everyone is seeing the myriad of problems coming out of it.
Sometimes it's not a vast global conspiracy, sometimes things just suck. Also, sometimes things suck and particular groups use it to get their way, that still doesn't diminish the thing that sucks.
Nah, this doesn't pass the sniff test. Anyone saying otherwise wasn't paying attention.
It passes the sniff test, it’s just that you weren’t informed or were aware of the build up of issues over the past decade.
There’s known issues with bullying, grooming, to mental hygiene issues like screen addiction and poor focus.
Hell, these are the first generations which have lower educational attainment than its predecessors.
It’s been reported on over and over again. It’s a cost center so no one cares about it.
You've got a point, but why so rude?
You're right, I edited it.
Correlation does not imply causation. Your invented and evidence-less conspiracy theory is an insult to intelligence. I suspect you are seeing something that isn't there to account for an unspoken bias front and center in your mind.
People use the word "conspiracy theory" as a shield against their own ignorance.
"If I don't know about it, if it sounds 'spooky' to me, it must be because it's a conspiracy theory, and therefore it is wrong," is essentially what runs through their minds.
The reality is that top-down legislation is the norm rather than the exception, and there is plenty of evidence. It's not written by Joe on the street. It's not organic. It is top-down and imposed. This is what @kdheiwns rightly observes here, and in other fields like how all of a sudden every car manufacturer just up and decided simultaneously that it was a good thing to install spyware into all of their cars.
Maybe it is spooky. I don't know and don't care. I will wait for evidence.
If you're proud of incuriousness, you'll never see evidence. I think I should be looking for evidence of the push being organic. I don't see it pushed anywhere but from the top down, even at sometimes heavy political costs to the incumbent leaders who are pushing it.
You should always be asking who politicians are serving. You seem to comfortable with thinking that they must be serving some part of the electorate without actually needing to identify that part. A lot of people think social media is bad for teenagers. There are a lot of things that are bad for teenagers that we aren't making any particular, coordinated effort to ban.
Who do you think is behind this? That is the question no one is answering here and why people are calling it a conspiracy theory.
And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That's just capitalism.
> Who do you think is behind this?
Anyone who is interested in connecting an identity with every computer on the internet, like a tamper proof license plate for computers. Just ask local law enforcement.
There has been a growing awareness for the possibilities of foreign states to manipulate social media and other platforms with fake personas. So any kind of counter intelligence would be interested as well.
There have been numerous incidents of politicians trying to go after critical posts using defamation laws. Often enough the investigations find a dead end when the account can't be connected with an ID.
Religious advocacy groups have been more and more aggressive in trying to censor the internet, e.g. this Australian one that boasted having pushed Mastercard and Visa to enforce age verification https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...
So the list of suspects is actually long.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a very broad lobbying campaign that very easily finds local interest groups to help them meet the right law makers.
Do you not see how this comment is actually counterproductive to the point you’re arguing? The long list of suspects, most of them being totally independent of each other is evidence of this not being orchestrated by some central group.
The fact that a bunch of seemingly disparate actors are behaving in a highly coordinated manner is evidence against central orchestration? What an absurd suggestion.
You are assuming without evidence that they are coordinated, then using that to infer central orchestration, and then using that inferred central organization to support coordination.
When there is something that aligns with the interests of several disparate groups it is common for them to all support that something with the need for some central organization.
> You are assuming without evidence that they are coordinated
The evidence is the highly abnormal behavior. The alignment of interests is a red herring.
> it is common for them to all support that something with the need for some central organization.
Sure, as is frequently seen with the conferences and administrative bodies surrounding treaties and the like. Would you care to point out this central organizing body that a bunch of people posting here appear mysteriously determined to deny the existence of?
What exactly is your position? First you object to an alleged lack of evidence on my part, then turn around and seemingly attempt to justify the observed behavior with the argument that coordination in the open is normal and expected. So do you acknowledge the presence of what appears to be centralized coordination in this instance or not?
What was your purpose in responding here?
> The evidence is the highly abnormal behavior. The alignment of interests is a red herring.
This is labelling the behavior as abnormal, and then basing your conclusions on it.
Are you unaware that there’s been decades of reporting on social media impact on children? It’s covered issues from bullying, anorexia, toxicity, attention issues, sleep issues, focus issues to name a few of the topics ? These are separate from CSAM, grooming, stalking, revenge porn and NCII.
It’s he’ll out there. It’s been hell for years.
Do people not know ?
What counter evidence is there against you, AnonymousPlanet, and gslepak being the same person? You're all seemingly acting in a highly coordinated manner. Would it be reasonable for me to assume you're all one person? Because a suspicious similarity seems to be the only reasoning any of you are providing for these laws being centrally orchestrated.
> Would it be reasonable for me to assume you're all one person?
Depends on context. Would that be the statistically favored explanation for the behavior you're seeing here?
In the case of international politics it is indeed the highly favored explanation. Particularly when there's such a clear nefarious motive.
When it rains, disparate actors take out umbrellas.
So if I don't answer your question, you use the fact I didn't answer against me and if I do answer, you use the fact I answered against me as well. It's hard to take your non constructive way of arguing serious. Have a nice day.
This is a very strange response. Am I not allowed to criticize the answer you provide when it doesn't actually answer the question?
For example, if I asked you who killed JFK and you responded with "It could have been Oswald acting alone or the mafia or the KGB or the CIA or Fidel Castro or a misfire from Secret Service...", you didn't actually answer the question, you just gave a list of potential answers. One of those answers could be right, but the way you provided so many answers shows that you can't actually answer the question with any degree of certainty. You effectively answered "what's 2 + 2" with "something between 2 and 10". I'm not going to respond with it's not "2+2 is not 8 because..."
They answered your question sufficiently. Have you ever done what you're asking of others here, btw?
Some questions aren't easy to just answer, even if the answer is known to the person being asked. Some topics are supressed rather well. If you're already acting like someone who is more interested in derailing conversations than having an honest discussion, it's unlikely you'll get the exact list of names of those primarily responsible for driving this push to KYC access to online services. Especially on a website that's heavily moderated and basically a battleground.
>Have you ever done what you're asking of others here, btw?
What question do you want me to answer that isn't some loaded rhetorical question along the lines of "What is your motivation for denying the obvious?"
And yet, it is all part of a script. The future, without naming names, without knowing names, without pointing fingers, can somehow still be known and seen. So is that a conspiracy? Even if it looks like many disparate groups, clearly there is a central script, and if there's a central script, there must be a central author of that script.
>And yet, it is all part of a script.
You, AnonymousPlanet, and fc417fc802 are all responding to me in very similar ways and yet I'm not accusing you of reading from the same script or being puppeteered by the same person/group. This is because I can recognize that people can have the same thought process without any active collaboration. And yet I would have just as much evidence to make those accusations as the evidence that you provided here that all these laws have the same shady origin.
> Who do you think is behind this?
I don't recall off the top of my head but in past HN threads the global lobbyists for this were named with evidence.
It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.
> It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.
I'm getting the same impression.
Lobbyists don’t lobby just to lobby, they lobby on behalf of someone paying them. So this doesn’t actually answer the question, it just shifts it to “Who is behind the lobbyists?”
No kidding. I'm saying that those parties were mentioned in past threads and that I don't recall the details.
It doesn't matter what you answer, slg will always try to use the way you answered to argue against you, not the substance. This person seems to be only interested in derailing the conversation.
You're decrying this supposed issue, that multiple countries are all copying one another for legislation. You've repeated this multiple times in these comments.
And yet, after all this, you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you. If someone really cares they should get informed.
So they don't really care, so what. It's Meta who are supposedly lobbying.
> you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you
You're demanding that others spoon feed you peer reviewed evidence that water is wet. As you say, if you really care you should expend the effort to inform yourself. I myself have no need at present for the hazily remembered details. The only thing at issue in the here and now was the absurd claim that there's no centralized lobbying effort involved.
> if you really care you should expend the effort to inform yourself.
I don't care. Unlike you, I am sufficiently informed about how legislatures around the world operate to know that coordination of this nature is common, anodine, and the way they have enshrined a global economy that has unlocked unfathomable wealth.
> And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That just capitalism.
Yes, you are right, it must be "capitalism" at fault. The sort of capitalism where nobody asks for the product, nobody wants the product, and yet somehow the product is the only choice you have.
It's very noticeable that this is the part of my comment you responded to and not the question of who is behind all this. That is why people consider this stuff conspiracy theories. You aren't analyzing the various parties and what motivates them. You're just seeing a result you don't understand and jumping to the conclusion that it's only possible if there is some unknown shadowy group behind it all. If anyone here is trying to create a "shield against their own ignorance"...
There's no requirement to name specific parties in order to make observations. Regardless of motivation it's clear from past examples that laws simply do not form across international borders in this manner. The lobbying is plain as day.
What is your motivation for denying the obvious?
>What is your motivation for denying the obvious?
Comments like this don’t make you folks sound less like “conspiracy theorists”. It’s also a tone that tells me that you aren’t going to approach anything I say in good faith so there is no point in me trying to engage with you on the topic anymore.
Written by sig a few minutes ago:
> It's very noticeable that this is the part of my comment you responded to and not the question
How funny you won't answer his question now. I'm also curious, what is your motivation for denying the obvious?
It's so aggravating to have to have arguments about whether some coordinated political push is happening due to money being spent. Literally every coordinated political push, at least ones with any success, is consciously planned and lobbied for, even the ones that I support.
I don't get pretending that no one is behind it. There are definitely people sitting in conference rooms in front of whiteboards trying to come up with ideas on how to do it most effectively. But people compartmentalize so hard, some people in that room would call you a conspiracy theorist for pointing out the meeting that they are currently attending. "I just do social media for a nonprofit. No, there's nothing wrong with us getting 90% of our funding from the US government, you're just a cynic. What evidence is there that we are working on their behalf? Do you think social media is good for teenagers?!"
Just don't imply he's doing it on purpose or you'll get called a conspiracy theorist. ;p
I'm not trying to sound like anything. I've engaged with you in good faith, articulating my view and inquiring as to why you are denying what appears obvious to me. In response you've accused me of bad faith and explicitly refused to engage.
I cannot help that water seems wet to me but if it seems dry to you I am willing to hear you out.
If that's the conclusion you'd like to walk away with, be my guest. ^_^
Why am I being forced to prove to my OS that I am an adult just because of your inadequate parenting skills?
Because lots of people have inadequate parenting skills (last time I checked you didn't need a license for parenting) and tech companies are actively exploiting that.
So stop those tech companies from exploiting people
We're about to own goal because... what... because suddenly everyone ran out of ideas? Because suddenly it's too much work?
But it wasn't too much work to build the torment nexus?
Tech work underinvests in customer support and safety.
If they spent what they had to, they would crater their revenues, because support does not scale like code does.
So introduce that license.
Internet usage must not ever be restricted, but restrictions on parenting are fine?
If the quality of parenting is so bad that it harms societal well-being as is being argued here, yes. It ought to be a license that one can reasonably obtain, though.
One can link government benefits to it, like Austria does with the Mother-Child-Pass. You need to have it filled out by the doctors and hospitals to prove you took reasonable precautions to ensure the child's safety, only then are you eligible for government benefits.
Isn't the OS thing specifically California state law? If so, the answer is "California is unfortunately very influential": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_effect
(And I'm saying this as someone who doesn't live in the US, nor care to).
It is but the point is once you are OK with some invasive age verification laws, because they may simplify parenting, you get others imposed on you that might not be OK with you.
Therefore I am in favor of none.
That applies to all laws, not just all "invasive age verification laws".
You may be a libertarian, I basically was when I was a teen, but since then I've seen how people act and how this makes everyone miserable.
> You may be a libertarian,
I am not. I don't label myself, but if I were forced to slap a label on myself it would be something like an anarcho communist. It's not that I don't believe in regulations helping, is that I feel like this is plastering over a deeper issue, which is parents having children, but not having enough economic security to have the time and resources to devout to their parenting properly and so turning to the state for oppressive restrictions in favor of good parenting.
It's the reasons teens spend time on these apps that should be looked at by the state, not how to block them from doing so in other words.
> parents having children, but not having enough economic security to have the time and resources to devout to their parenting properly
> anarcho communist
I like this post about how having a box to type an age into is unreasonable since we haven’t tried simply doing… global communism?
> I like this post about how having a box to type an age into is unreasonable since we haven’t tried simply doing… global communism?
I like this post setting up a straw man when I am not talking about a box to type age into (existed since the 90s) but about you needing to photo ID to access your OS/your OS preventing you from doing this unless you photo ID.
I'm also not sure where you get any kind of global communism from but then I am not sure you know what that even means.
> I am not. I don't label myself, but if I were forced to slap a label on myself it would be something like an anarcho communist.
Good to not label yourself, but that is functionally equivalent, the "anarcho" part was the point, not communist or capitalist.
> It's not that I don't believe in regulations helping, is that I feel like this is plastering over a deeper issue, which is parents having children, but not having enough economic security to have the time and resources to devout to their parenting properly and so turning to the state for oppressive restrictions in favor of good parenting.
People have been saying stuff like that since time immemorial (or at least BC), and most eras since then. Simultaneously with other people saying the exact opposite, and calling for those very same laws.
Almost never does anyone in either group actually agree on specifics over vibes. Closest was probably the US having alcohol prohibition (but even then some of the supporters were expecting the ban only on liquor not beer) and similar sized nations setting obscenity and blasphemy laws.
> but that is functionally equivalent, the "anarcho" part was the point, not communist or capitalist.
I don't think they're functionally equivalent today. A libertarian today is most commonly understood as someone who, while not trusting state institutions, fundamentally trusts and embraces corporate power because of self-correcting market forces of competition keeping them in check, as they would say.
They also don't believe in 'handouts' (i.e. social safety net) and certainly not in a collective ownership of the means of production.
While I am skeptical of much of state power, I most certainly do believe in a generous social safety net, safety regulations as it relates to food, water, oxygen etc. just not things that approach totalitarianism, and I certainly do not believe 'competition' in the 'free market' will keep corporations behaving nicely.
Therefore I do not think libertarian would fit. May be the original left wing kind of libertarian. But that's not what is understood under that term today.
Wait what? How did we go from "Users of social media need to be at least 16" to "Users of OSes need to prove they are adults"?
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Undecided-Age-Laws
I have nothing against Instagram asking me if I am over 16, but these laws end up with my OS not allowing requests to instagram unless I prove to it that I am over 16 with a photo ID is where we're going.
Sounds like the situation might end up with Instagram not accepting requests unless you're using an OS that follows those sorts of laws, which is kind of an inversion of what you said, and I think I'm fine with that outcome if so be it. Websites should be allowed to decide who's visiting them, unless they're government, utility or other basic needs portals.
> Websites should be allowed to decide who's visiting them
No, hold up, you just casually introduced a dystopian goal of facilitating the casual collection of government ID by website operators. I absolutely do not want the equivalent of South Korean ID numbers in order to do pretty much anything online.
Anyway as I always point out when these threads come up we've yet to try the simple and noninvasive solution. Websites should be required to send a content categorization header. Large enterprises that fail to do so should be fined. If that were uniformly happening it would then be possible to do proper client side filtering (right now that fails miserably).
Before anyone asks, app stores could be required to implement the equivalent of the header in an appropriate manner of their own design.
Fair, maybe. That'd be the better case I suppose. However that be more like banking apps not liking rooted phones. The California law is more like your OS not allowing you to access resources unless you prove your age, not the external resource doing so.
In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people?
Look, I hate (Zuckerberg's) social media just as much as the next person and I would be happy if it were nuked from this planet, but firstly, a lot of this sudden age verification shit to "protect the children" is sus AF, leading me to assume their ulterior motives are surveillance and doxxing of anonymous online free speech, and secondly, I don't think we can put the toothpaste back in the bottle anymore similar how prohibition didn't stop alcohol consumption, it just moved underground.
As long as kids have smartphones, they'll find a way to use social media, or even make their own social media to organize parties, send nudes or flaunt their parents' wealth and bully the poor and ugly kids, the same way how they start drinking beer at 13 even though the legal age for that is 18.
Social media amplifies the worst of human nature, but you won't be able to change human nature. Maybe governments should regulate the amount and type of data collection social media companies can have from their users, instead of regulating their users.
> In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people?
FWIW, in the UK you can learn to drive a tank one year before you're allowed to learn to drive a car. Not go into combat, that's another year, I just mean the learning to drive part.
Back when I myself was that age, I also got a letter published in a national newspaper pointing out the oddity that I was allowed to have sex two years before being allowed to look at photos of other people doing so. Since then, cheap cameras would also make it pertinent (though it was true even back then), that I could not have taken photos of myself performing acts I was allowed to perform.
Yeah, my thoughts exactly.
What's with this double standards of you're adult enough to drive tanks and die in a war, but not adult enough to watch porn and drink alcohol? Pick a lane government regulators.
Either you're and adult and should be treated as one with full rights and responsibilities, or you're not and then shouldn't be drafted and be allowed to do anything major with your life like drink, gamble, and sign loans that will put you in debt for the next 30 years.
Yeah, I don't get that either. I'd also want a binary "you're an adult" vs "you're a child" then we decide what belongs where, and the age is the same for everything. So once you're X, you get to fuck, drink, drive, die in wars, take loans, use social media, watch porn and whatever else we've added age limits to.
> In my current EU country, there's mandatory military conscription from the age of 17. And you're telling me you're only fit for social media access one year before being fit to drive tanks and shoot guns at people?
Well, that's kinda already the norm isn't it? In the US I'm allowed to go risk my life in the military but not allowed to order a beer with my pizza. It already makes no sense.
Just because the U.S.A. does it, it is by no means normal. We here are not used to such contradictory laws that arbitrarily strip us of our rights. This is also why it feels perversely inorganic and unnatural, as does all regulation that is shoved into our faces by U.S. lobbyists.
It makes slightly more sense if you consider that whether or not you're allowed to drink on base is entirely up to the commander (at least last I heard). Also if you consider that the goal is to prevent various social ills thus there's no particular reason to expect perfect consistency.
In most EU countries, children of farmers can drive 10 ton death machines with pointy spikes on the front from the age of 14 to 16. In some countries you can even do that on public roads!
> In some countries you can even do that on public roads!
I might be wrong but in the US I think it's generally anything goes on private land. Public roads would be the only relevant thing to consider.
What prevents absurd situations is (IIUC) the combination of child labor laws and the need to keep your insurance policy affordable.
I suppose if a parent turned his toddler loose in an excavator he might get brought up on some sort of child abuse law but honestly I doubt it. Some of the people out in the sticks teach their kindergartners to wield a shotgun and the government seems to leave them alone.
>In most EU countries, children of farmers can drive 10 ton death machines with pointy spikes on the front from the age of 14 to 16
Are you sure that's legal? If those kids kill someone with those farm death machines, who goes to jail for it? The kid or the pearant who gave him the equipment? Will your insurance cover this?
In Sweden people notoriously push the law to the extreme by modifying cars with speed limiters etc to legally count as tractors https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/22/when-is-a-car-...
> Will your insurance cover this?
Yes, since it's legal
Yes, it's 100% legal in multiple EU countries.
False, it isn't all 16. These two pages for nations and states is showing different jurisdictions picking in the 12-18 range: https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/28/report-facebook-building-anti... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...
Some have lower ages with parental consent, this isn't reported in all cases. Some also talk about banning the downloading of apps, again this isn't reported in all cases. Not that I'm going to read 27 national jurisdictions in varying languages to confirm the point.
Also, lol wtf at "and websites and operating systems all need North Korean ID verification to prove you're over 16". Is "North Korean" the new "Communist"?
You're "just asking questions" -- if it's not organic, then what do you suspect it is?
If alcohol was somehow invented only today it will probably be outright criminalized around the globe.
Humans have been living with alcohol for literal millenia so I reckon it's much harder to have some globally uniform response to it.
Social media is a clear and present danger right now, and I support the suppression of it. I would go one step further and ban algorithmic feeds outright. They do so much damage!
I am not happy with the way this is being implemented though.
> we can't even get countries to agree on unified drinking age
I don't know... looking at the map[0] it looks like there's a fair consensus on 18yo.
Also, maybe the reason for the "whole world"[1] is doing this at the same time as to do with the globalized nature of internet and its effects?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age
[1] put me on the skeptical bucket that this map will ever look like the drinking age map
I can't quite understand how Australia was at the forefront of this. It seems like an easy way to limit the open web, and no children actually saved.
I can. Australian governments of both partisan persuasions have always had an authoritarian streak. This sort of thing has always been naturally attractive to them.
Any time the powers want to do something to help out Fat Cats and top end companies with something they don't like happening, any action thrust out, the excuse it's always "for the children" or "think of the children."
Make no mistake social media as it was with scraping so hard kids bled, was bad for children. Facebook ignored the lessons learned from the 90s with TMI (too much information) and in fact some people who used a lot of yahoo mailing groups from that time might still recall the big sweep that occurred. It came to pass that some people still ignored Facebook rules and used pseudonyms - you know just in case and in Australia this became a big big thing back a few years ago with a different govt running the show here with a prominent pro Trump (sycophantic) leader ruling the roost. maube hours after Trump got roasted by an anonymous comment, the crew in Australia were pushing to require ID to access the internet ... a person was appointed to address anonymous accounts ... and in the end after the govt changed she was also tasked to oversee social media.
One might think that age limiting a site it would force ID checks, however other smarter people know that most social media sites, especially the ones there were scraping hard and targeting young teens dieting and other BS young teens seem to susceptible to, have the capacity to guess fairly accurately if the account holder is a youngster. Right now these companies are saying nah these algorithms are dumb and the govt can't do a thing ... right up to the point when the present govt decides to start fining for every account that should not be there and or just offering bounties to the average Joe Jill public [and not businesses or those tooled up with A.I. help] There's a phase in time going now at the moment -- none of the big tools out there have figured out how bureaucracy works in Australia.
When replying should I care content such as what in the above comment is something facebook fanboys will find it very upsetting ... should I write with more sensitivity and feeling in mind ... or would it not matter - the truth would still hurt.
I see a lot of coherence in the ages used in the western world. Laws use age 16-18-21 to say almost adult - adult - need to be sure adult.
Probably something akin to the data shows that human worldview gets pretty locked in by 16.
> There is a zero percent chance this is organic
Why go to the silly conspiracy theory place? Up until then I was in violent agreement, but things don't need to be a conspiracy to be bad. The rules are well-intentioned but poorly thought through, which is devastatingly common for government action in digital spaces; witness the fucking cookie popups (no illuminati involved in that one, just stupidity).
People and lawmakers are just not thinking through the privacy implications for the people who are exempt from these limitations, and the persistent nature of digital paper trails.
why 'silly' conspiracy? Many cases of documented conspiracy in the past anyway.
Being on this social media (YC) people aware it's all about implementation and we should at least demanding better solutions. If you want to regulate/limit access of kids to social media just make that you have to be 16 years old to buy simcard - in many places in EU you already have to show ID to seller.
Allow parent to buy simcard to their under 16 year old children if thats what they want to and allow parents to decide at their home wifi if kid should have access to social media or not.
For the first part -- silly because there's literally no evidence presented of a conspiracy. No connection between the individual agents and actors. No motivation given for the underlying commonalities. And most importantly, for this "scale" of conspiracy, there's no suggestion that other avenues towards the same nefarious ends are in progress. It's just a bunch of countries and organizations proposing similar laws based on concerns, that while (at least to me) are exaggerated and overstated, are nonetheless well-documented, reported, and widely believed in good faith.
As for finding a technical solution, jury is still out but I am unconvinced that it is possible to have a solution that a) prevents children from using an online service, b) allows adults to use the service, and c) does not identify the specific adult who is using the service. You proposed solution is no exception.
> silly because there's literally no evidence
The evidence is the part where it very obviously isn't organic. The behavior is clearly too coordinated when compared to past global changes in regulation.
> People and lawmakers are just not thinking through the privacy implications ...
It seems much more likely to me that they are thinking them through and that they have ulterior motives.
BTW "violent agreement" refers to when two parties are arguing because they mistakenly believe that they disagree. A sort of friendly fire if you will. The term you were looking for was something like enthusiastic or similar.
> The evidence is the part where it very obviously isn't organic.
Global Context: Norway joins France, Spain, and Denmark, which are considering similar measures, while Australia and Turkey (which bans users under 15) have already implemented restrictions. The UK recently rejected a similar under-16 ban.
I think it obviously is. Just as much as the migration to solar is organic. There are foils, but there is also an underpinning concerns fueling the global momentum. It's very likely that the functioning western governments (ie still representing the public's interests) are doing just that. These foils include the public service who work with children, who have been sounding the alarm for years being heard and the population that grew up with social media, are now old enough to do something about what they perceive as damaging.
Where have you provided anything to refute the observation that this bears the hallmark of being centrally orchestrated? The context you cite appears to trivially restate my own observations rather than support a counterargument. International laws never proceed in such a uniform manner all at once like this without external coordination.
Of course the lobbyists are playing off of public sentiment and almost certainly working to actively fan those same flames. Notice that the laws aren't the most sensible or least intrusive but rather just about the minimally privacy preserving and maximally authoritarian enabling "solution" that you could possibly come up with. Also notice the convenient alignment of this outcome with various well established ulterior motives of existing actors.
the solution is parents doing their parenting - government should if necessary only help educate them about existing tools + enforce no phones in basic school. I don't think any solution will prevent children from using an online service if very determined - they will commit identity fraud.
> No connection between the individual agents and actors.
This is obviously untrue. They all know each other and communicate. This would be true even if it were something more anodyne like antismoking regulation (that governments maybe don't have a particular stake in.) They coordinate their messaging, they use the same publicity agencies, they apply for the same financing, they cosponsor and circulate the same studies and thinktank output. Why would you just say that there is no connection between them?
What I think you've done is silently dismissed the open connections as harmless. It's really a "no true connection." The evidence would have to be a bunch of connected organizations with Snidely Whiplash mustaches, or an explicit declaration of conspiratorial intent written down, signed, and published in a newspaper that you approve of.
Although I can't imagine what they could possibly confess to: "We coordinated with national governments to generate studies and messaging, were funded by them directly and indirectly, through foundation grants, lobbied politicians who would support the bans and gave them statements to make, and attacked politicians who were against the bans."
What's wrong with that? You make it sound like some sort of conspiracy.
If we try to argue this case on the merits we've already lost. There's no technical reason to root everyone's computer to keep kids offline. Just put age statements in the protocol, legally make people serving adult material require them, and give people the tools to strip those statements or put them behind passwords at the workstation, server, or even ISP level. Kids would get around it, but they'll certainly get around this, too, unless you're going to require cameras on computers to identify their users at all times.
It's a pretense.
Who is behind it then?
Obvious straw man because age check can be done in a privacy preserving way. I think it's less that everyone agrees but more that one country did it and others followed.
> There is a zero percent chance this is organic
Who exactly has a vested interest in starting a worldwide conspiracy to ban social media for kids?
FWIW as an adult in my 30s, social media has caused me far greater harm than even binge drinking. I can't even imagine growing up as a teenager under the social media microscope
It’s pretext for identifying and tracking everyone. A inevitable ”byproduct” from getting your age by digital ID.
Identifying and tracking everyone can't be a "byproduct" when it's already being done for years before hand, by the very businesses who are being directly prevented from accessing certain users by these new laws you're objecting to. Before Facebook the general advice was "do not post your real name on the internet ever", Facebook said basically "that doesn't work for [our advertisers?], we will ban you for anything other than your real name, or what we think real names look like": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont...
For the last few years there have been 400-1600+ "trusted partners" on every website already tracking everyone. In the US, recent news is the FBI is buying that info from the private sector without a warrant: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillanc...
Back in 2016, the UK's Investigatory Powers Act (one of two reasons I moved out of the UK) requires ISPs record domain names for all user browsing nationwide and store them for a year, and will provide it without a warrant to a long list of organisations including the Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#...
If you want to end surveillance, great. That requires at a minimum banning all tracking cookies etc., and we can see from the collective reaction to GDPR (consent popups instead of not tracking people) how hard the real surveillance industry has been fighting against all that.
Consider all the side effects.
Now children cannot form solidarity and exit abusive situations as easily. They are not exposed to diverse viewpoints or cultures. They cannot embarrass themselves and learn online social etiquette. They cannot engage with much of the online culture at all really.
It's sinister and patronizing, born from fear and ignorance, nothing else.
Like you observed the damage of social media is not unique to children. So a more sensible legislation would serve to help everybody from the harm of social media, not just children.
Second, age verification systems have a lot to benefit from a government contract.
Third, social media and ad companies would for sure prefer a blanket ban on children rather then a more careful legislation which e.g. ban targeted advertising, or further regulates social media from harmful patterns.
Who exactly has a vested interest in starting a worldwide conspiracy to [ think of the children ] in order to push [ nefarious measure ]? Difficult question that.
You should actually try saying something instead of vaguely insinuating something.
Like, I legitimately am trying to understand what you're saying but it's frustratingly vague. I feel like you're wasting my time with your attempt to seem like you know more than everyone else.
I did say something. "Think of the children" became a cliche because of how commonly it crops up in politics. At this point it's far more common to see it attached to nefarious measures as opposed to those with accurate statements of intent.
The bad faith rhetoric on your part is unwelcome and explicitly against the rules here ... I say to the account from 2014. Given you've been around awhile assuming you were legitimately frustrated by my comment is it possible you've misunderstood? I was quoting the parent in a manner intended to make the pattern of engagement obvious. A fill in the blank that it should be immediately apparent broadly fits past discourse on a wide array of topics.
Basically any time you can summarize an argument as "think of the children" you should immediately become maximally skeptical of the overall situation. The answer to my "difficult question" is pretty much everyone based on historical precedent.
> The bad faith rhetoric on your part is unwelcome and explicitly against the rules here .
Asking for clarification is a hallmark of good faith discussion. More of that and less snark is healthy.
Yes there are side effects. I would still vote that it's a net good as a practical solution to a number of problems. Notably the suicide rates, declines in testing, and skill development.
The eternal debate between more socially enforced control versus independence. These controls apply to caring for the young versus being used to oppress the adult. Hand waving without specific concerns, isn't going to change the minds of people that have a different take.
I think it's great that there will be plenty of data (for both sides) in the next few decades, with the patchwork adoption.
The request for clarification was not what I was referring to as bad faith rhetoric.
It seems like you're actively trying to change the subject. No one said anything about side effects and I don't think anyone was handwaving. The exchange you jumped into here was one regarding the presence of outside centralized influence on the legislative process at the international level.
The separate question of whether the initiative is of net benefit for society needs to be considered alongside potential alternatives in addition to any expected downsides. The elephant in the room is that the least invasive and most straightforward option of mandating the presence of accurate content classification headers has never been tried even though it would appear highly likely to solve the problem as I've usually seen it stated.
I honestly don't care whether it's organic or not. I have kids and it's 100% needed.
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The liability shifting and real identity linking to all online usage that big tech wants is proceeding nicely for them I see.
Not a great trend. Installing a OS that makes me tie provably verifiable identity directly to a install or session will be a pretty stupid liability for anyone to agree to. Feel bad for all the non techs that will just accept this lying down. Especially when the solution is so easy to solve with existing tech. Got a internet connection? Block the domains at the router level. Then we need the cell phone providers to allow parents to do similar things at the network level with cell internet. Done. Let the parents do it.
This. Big tech shouldn’t rely on ID laws. We should hold big tech liable when we find them in violation. Shift the onus to them.
We used to hold parents liable.
This is one of those situation where both things can be true at the same time.
Social media companies have shown that they do not give a shit about the mental health of their users, quite the opposite seems to be true. Yes, parents are responsible for teaching their children about the reality of modern social media, but they can only do so within the limits of their abilities and understanding. It's similar to smoking. Yes parents are responsible for teaching their children about the dangers of smoking and encourage them not to, but no one thinks removing the age restriction from tobacco is a sane idea.
I think this is not a sensible position.
One one side you have big companies paying huge amounts of money to super smart people to get teens hooked on their products.
On the other side you have parents who on average dont understand how social media algorithm works or in some (too many cases) they cannot follow the logic to a second order effect.
Even here we have comments saying something like "be smarter and teach your kid to be smarter than big social media companies" not understanding that addiction cannot always be defended by improved IQ. Geniuses can have addictions too.
Adults should be protected from these predatory services as well.
This is mindless paternalism.
Who gets to decide what is 'predatory' and why do those people have the right to make decisions in place of able-minded adults?
Why stop at removing restrictions on social media, why have laws at all, they're just mindless paternalism! why should we have seatbelts? why have laws against murder? Mindless paternalism is all those laws are!
Not all laws are are meant to protect people from themselves, most laws aren't.
Murder isn't illegal because we want to protect people from the results of their actions, it's illegal because we want to protect people from the actions of others. (Or, failing to do that, punish the aggressors in response) Surely you see the difference?
Basically, the argument is that people's liberty should only be restricted up to the point of defending the liberty and rights of others. If an action hurts no one other than its actor, the state has no right to restrict them. People should be free to live in line with their wishes and conscience up to the point of not violating the rights of others.
With regard to seatbelt laws, I would ask the same question, as I do think that the seatbelt laws are also paternalism and morally wrong.
The mindless paternalism is the point! People like this want a Nanny State to enforce their own ideals, as they arbitrarily believe themselves to be morally superior.
That’s why these laws happen to begin with. It starts as “Think of the children”, and ends with the death of the anonymized internet.
Governments crave that, and scared, hapless citizens who refuse to learn how to raise a child want Daddy Gubament to do it for them, and so push these laws into existence.
That would be fine if people had symmetric information and strong education
Anything less is exploitation
But no one, including the government, is omniscient. This turns all agency into "exploitation", and the only logical conclusion is that all decisions for all people should be made by the most informed. Surely you don't argue that would be a good thing?
Can you give an example for this?
"Parental responsibility laws in all 50 states"
https://www.mwl-law.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/PARENTAL-...
an excerpt from above:
"Almost every state has some sort of parental responsibility law that holds parents or legal guardians responsible for property damage, personal injury, theft, shoplifting, and/or vandalism resulting from intentional or willful acts of their un-emancipated children."
"Parental responsibility laws are one vehicle by which parents are held accountable for at least a minimal amount of damage caused by their children as a result of intentional acts or vandalism"
Using social media is not a crime. I think what we’re talking about here is child welfare or child protection laws (which all 50 states probably also have).
if disallowing social media use below the age of 16 becomes a law (like the article's proposed bill), and a kid breaks that law, this seems like a perfect example of holding the parents liable?
but also yes, child welfare laws and such are also pretty fitting examples. i dont think the person asking for an example was really asking in good faith, anyhow.
My understanding in this case the social media company is liable for allowing a child to access social media. So is not a crime for a child to use social media.
> Children cannot be left with the responsibility for staying away from platforms they are not allowed to use. That responsibility rests with the companies providing these services. They must implement effective age verification and comply with the law from day one
From the original press release https://www.regjeringen.no/en/whats-new/norwegian-social-med...
sure, that sounds right for how it is currently. my parenthesis above is probably wrong.
but the whole point of my example was showing that its absolutely possible to hold parents accountable for their childs actions. there are dozens of laws that do so already. so there is no excuse why a social media ban could not be written in the same fashion as those laws, rather than moving parental responsibility onto tech companies.
Laws hold parents accountable for their childrens' crimes, not their noncriminal actions. Nothing about this is saying that accessing social media is a crime -- that would be more similar to drug possession laws, firearms licensing, etc.
If your child is drinking: they are violating the alcohol possession age limit themselves; you are liable for their crime plus child endangerment if you gave them the alcohol; and whoever sold or supplied them the alcohol is violating a separate law. Sounds like we're trying to apply the same structure to social media, except (so far) with no possession/usage law.
I don't really see how that is relevant? Isn't that law making a parent responsible for actions their child commits that hurt others? Child protection laws like preventing child labour, not selling alcohol/cigarettes, etc aren't this.
how is it not relevant?
its an example of holding the parent responsible when the child breaks a law.
if accessing social media below 16 becomes illegal, this is a literal perfect example of holding parents accountable for their kids illegal activity. you can't possibly get more relevant.
there is no reason to shift parental responsibility onto tech companies. we have existing laws that can be used as templates for social media bans.
Correct me if the US is different, but in the country I live in the onus is on the bar or liquor store if they sell alcohol to a child, not on the parent. Why would it be different for a social media ban?
in your country, who is responsible if a 12 year old keeps getting drunk at home and the parents do nothing to prevent it?
do they go after the liquor store and just ignore the parents letting their kids drink?
Oh man where I'm from they'd probably just laugh and put them to bed. jkjk
To be honest I did some brief searching and couldn't find anything! The parent will be liable if someone at your home drinks and drives home drunk, but I couldn't find anything specific about children consuming alcohol alone. It is only illegal to sell alcohol to minor, underage alcohol consumption is explicitly legal if supplied and supervised by an adult.
Now I'm sure if the child were to be young enough other child abuse laws could come into play, but it looks to be exceedingly rare.
okay, so we now have: parent/homeowner responsible if someone drives home drunk, parent responsible if child gets drunk via abuse/neglect laws, and parent responsible for other crimes and damages caused by a child via dozens of individual laws.
is that enough examples to satisfy your initial request?
(which was a request for examples of the extremely broad statement: "We used to hold parents liable.")
So I asked for examples because there is a large difference between "We used to hold parents liable" meaning "we used to, socially, hold parents accountable for raising well adjusted humans" (which I would mostly disagree with) vs. "we used to persecute parents for normative laws" (which I mostly agree with).
I know your point is talking about point 2, but I believe OPs comment was about point 1. But I also still don't know what the "used to" means in the original, do we not anymore?
This sudden coordinated worldwide effort to ban social media for kids (hint: it's not because of the kids) needs to stop, it's dangerous and people need to stop being so naive and stop supporting this.
The coordination is incredible. It's been easier to ban kids from social media (and impose id verification at the same time) than it was to ban landmines.
It's not surprising at all. Kids in soveriegn nations are banned from all sorts of things. There is no governing body over sovereign nations that can simply ban land mines. You're talking about countries promising to reduce a common war power.The Ottawa Treaty is a treaty (ie mutually agreed upon rules which can be exited) and not all countries have signed it.
Seeing how surprisingly similar the wording and definitions are in every case, in even far flung societies, can send you a shiver down the spine. It's like someone gained unfettered world wide write access to legislation.
It's also interesting how Windows 11 with it's hard dependency on TPM hardware just happens to be in place at the right time. And how a certain former Microsoft employee just happened to start working on a similar solution for Linux before this all started https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
Speak for yourself. I want it banned for kids.
Do you think this is about kids? It's about online identity and government surveillance and control.
Even if you think it is about kids, then take responsibility into your own hands, be a parent and prevent your kids from using it. Or you just want to tell other parents to raise their kids the way you want? Then tell them that, don't hide behind fascist police and justice system to force online ID for adults.
>Even if you think it is about kids, then take responsibility into your own hands, be a parent and prevent your kids from using it.
Common but bad argument. You've misunderstood what the age verification control is for. It's to hold online services accountable for illegally providing services to minors. A parent being negligent doesn't mean Facebook should not be held responsible for breaking the law.
I can't believe that we've managed to escalate past seeing parents as negligent for letting their kids walk home from school or play outside. Is this the new normal? You are negligent if you let your kids ... talk to people online? I uh, am outraged. What if kids start having thoughts their parents don't approve of?
Further, facebook users could chose to use platforms that don't exploit their users. By allowing facebook to benefit from the network effect, they are responsible for kids wanting to be on the platform. They give facebook power, and then facebook uses that power to exploit children. Yet facebook's adult users don't even see the need to defend themselves. To take responsibility.
Some of these laws affect mastodon, so these laws are not a regulation of facebook. What exploitive features of mastodon deserve such a ban? Are children addicted to mastodon's default chronological feed? It seems like it would benefit facebook to establish a regulatory moat that smaller non-ad-driven competitors don't have the resources to comply with. It certainty doesn't seem to have affected their stock.
Also there is reasonable suspicion that meta lobbied for similar laws: https://tboteproject.com/git/hekate/attestation-findings
So much for holding facebook accountable.
Oh, also: https://xkcd.com/743/
> illegally providing services to minors
> breaking the law
what law?
How so? We already have digital ID in Norway. How does providing that information to American corporations further Norway's surveillance goals?
You shouldn't be all or nothing here. To ignore the effect on teens is to be blatantly ignorant of social science itself. To ignore the implications of surveillance is to be ignorant of government surveillance. There is no value at either extreme.
> (hint: it's not because of the kids) needs to stop, it's dangerous and people need to stop being so naive and stop supporting this.
It's partly because of the kids.
It's also because social media is part of the USA's soft power projection, and many of us now consider this to be a threat.
It's also because social media has a long history of manipulation for their own gain, against the users' interests, dark patterns, tracking, they fail to back down from and even file lawsuits to continue tracking when tracking itself required (under GDPR etc.) permission that e.g. Meta did not have: https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/28/report-facebook-building-anti...
For "about the kids", consider: given kids have no direct purchasing power, what adverts can they possibly respond to in a way that actually provides gain for the buyer of the advertising slot? They cannot. Therefore, by fighting for the right to keep kids on their sites (despite the huge extra effort that needs to exist to keep them safe on their sites given the inherent ambient hostility that comes with giving everyone direct access to, in Facebook's case, a few billion other humans), at least one of two things must be true: (a) they think they can get kids hooked, and be able to convert them to profitability as adults, and/or (b) they are scamming the people who buy advertising slots, knowing full well the kids who see the ads cannot possibly buy anything. If a third option exists, I cannot guess it.
I find the coordination between nations suspicious.
But what you said - "It's also because social media is part of the USA's soft power projection, and many of us now consider this to be a threat." - strikes me as the most plausible driver behind it, given how chummy Trump and the techbros have become.
I agree with your other observations about SM. But they've all been true from many years. That's why this sudden urge by culturally diverse societies to act now feels suspicious, to me at least.
> I find the coordination between nations suspicious.
You shouldn't. I mean, they talk to each other continuously. Them coordinating things is normal. The EU nations will be doing even more coordination, because the EU is a body for the coordination of those nations.
> That's why this sudden urge by culturally diverse societies to act now feels suspicious, to me at least.
We're not all that diverse, really. Ironically, social media may have brought us all together against social media. And it's not really all that sudden, this has been building for many years now.
Similar things due to Trump trying to bully everyone, but specifically NATO, the EU, and the Americas (and all the international stuff DOGE cut) will have a lot more stuff like this, some of which will be coordinated, some of which will be everyone spontaneously making similar decisions. That too will take years… well, unless Trump actually picks a kinetic fight with a NATO country, then political years pass in a few weeks.
it's common that countries borrow legislation from other countries, even down to the wording
I don't know what makes this more "coordinated" (so there is some supra-national organization coordinating this between nations? starting to sound like the Utopia show) than other legislation that trends very quickly
Anyway, as a parent I 100% support it. I really don't care whether people think it's because of the kids or not.
Thanks for ruining the world for everybody and supporting mass surveillance just because you suck at parenting.
> hint: it's not because of the kids
Why the silly conspiracy theory? Can't something just be stupid and bad but well-intentioned? You really think lawmakers are involved in some secret cabal that wants to track everyone's activities online? If anything, jurisdictions have shown that they are very interested in preventing the tracking of people's activity online, they just don't know how to do it!
>You really think lawmakers are involved in some secret cabal that wants to track everyone's activities online?
...yes? Not so secret though. The internet gave everyone the power to take matters in their own hands and read up on different sources from different countries and people and to talk to more people. They don't want to lose power and want their citizens to be uninformed and not coordinate efforts to critizice them and hold them accountable. Not only online but also offline because more and more surveillance cameras get installed, police gets more powers, checks citizens without suspicion.
Did you forget the Snowden leaks?
The Snowden files that implicated US agencies and social media companies?
There are plenty of examples of law makers passing policy to make online and digital surveillance easier.
See TOLA in Australia, the UK trying to backdoor iCloud, Lawful Access to Encrypted Data act.
Surveillance is often sold with safety as the primary narrative.
social media should be banned altogether
I feel like education, not abstinence, is the way forward.
Prohibition doesn’t work. Educating consumers and holding companies accountable works. It historically takes time though for that pressure to accumulate to the point of having political will.
We also need teen social media education - like we have about alcohol and drugs. Where we’re frank about the real research. Don’t moralize. Talk about the realities of the situation.
Prohibition works very well - it just has externalized costs.
Excessive drinking was curtailed by 70% during the alcohol prohibition era, and acute drinking was a problem (it was more concentrated).
There is zero doubt how much healthier at least some people would have been.
The price paid was limiting freedom for many, and some increase in crime.
Allowing children to smoke and drink from age 12 would be a social disaster, it's not even an argument - obviously - the 'prohibition' works - and in that case, there's nary any negative externality.
Yes, there is 'lost economic potential' from not having kids buy smokes, there is a degree of authoritarianism, but those are trade-offs we are happy to make.
The question is the degree of restrictions on basic freedom, and the direct / indirect externalizations - aka 'underground pubs', 'black market', 'lost benefits' etc.
For social media - kids 'sneaking' onto regular social media is hardly an enormous hazard.
There are also 'critical mass' problems - for example, its' very hard to get people away from a system if they will 'feel left out'.
The negative externalizations of a teen social media ban are likely most related to the positive aspects of social media aka community, connection etc outside of school.
Twitch, for example, I think is fine for kids.
There is probably a happy medium that's a bit nicer, for example, banning phones in schools is something that everyone seems to be ok with - that sets a good baseline.
We may want other social media places for 12-18 to have parental opt-ins and to be a bit more assertive around harassment and bullying - which is a very serious thing, and very pernicious as well. It's really hard to monitor.
Creating 'PG spaces' is probably what most parents want.
The worst negative externalization from all of this is probably state-implemented age verification, identity issues, and the leaks, failures and excessive authoritarianism that can come about aka 'slippery slope', which is a serious argument. Even then - there are smart ways to do this which avoid many of those risks.
>Allowing children to smoke and drink from age 12 would be a social disaster, it's not even an argument - obviously - the 'prohibition' works - and in that case, there's nary any negative externality.
The negative externality is the huge amount of young adults damaging their bodies with excessive alcohol consumption in college because they never learned to drink healthily. The US with its late legal age for alcohol has a far bigger problem with youth alcohol abuse than European countries where youth are introduced to alcohol earlier.
"Learned to drink healthily".
Given that alcohol is carcinogenic, there is no such thing as "drinking healthily".
That point aside, alcoholism rates in the Eastern EU are much higher than the US. And Russia/Belarus leads the world. I don't think younger drinking age correlates very well with reduced rates of alcoholism.
Alcohol kills way more by impairing driving and decision making ("let's see the sight from the roof!") than by cancer.
Not really though. Drinking age is 18 in Sweden and they have hugely worse rate of hazardous drinking than US, same for Finland, and a bit UK where there are slightly fewer restrictions.
The legal age for alcohol is 18 in France.
This idea of 'US binging' doesn't really hold that much water, though one could very well argue that 21 is just 'too old' - the fact is, these are as much cultural issues as anything else.
Same with Japan, they are 'polite drunk', it's not even quite the same thing.
Take the argument and apply it to smoking or cocaine, fentanyl and you see that it doesn't really work out.
It really depends.
US could have lower drinking age, possibly 'permitted with parents at 16' - but - a much more responsible culture overall as well. It's hard.
No, educating customers doesn't work. What works is creating safe products. Remove algorithm recommendations as the default option, make collecting personal individual data for any purpose other than what the customer explicitly wants, and you will see that suddenly "social networks" and every other product becomes safe to use for everyone.
Facebook was fine as long as posts appeared chronologically. The moment they started ranking it -- game over.
If you're upset at collecting personal individual data, you're really going to love what these social media bans require in practice.
I don't disagree we need to look at algorithmic recommendations as a major issue, but these social media bans are not that. The fact they are all being brought about globally at the same time suggests some ulterior motives.
Fundamentally, the idea you're going to hide your kid from social media until some arbitrary age, require the entire populace to register identification when visiting any website, and then open the floodgates on these kids at 16 is absolutely moronic. Two years of brain development doesn't suddenly make them learn how to be responsible with it.
As much as Europe wants to abdicate their parenting responsibilities to the state, at some point you have to draw the line and own up to some level of personal responsibility for raising your children.
You can't hide your kids from reality if you want to raise strong, independent and actualized children who will make good choices.
> If you're upset at collecting personal individual data, you're really going to love what these social media bans require in practice
Which is why is also not a solution. Both are bad solutions because we drag our feet into creating safe products for everyone.
I don’t think it’s dragging feet so much as sprinting towards maximising profit above all else
It's the war on drugs all over again ...
Prohibition will work exceptionally well for social media, which relies on a herd effect. If you can't send most of your friends memes on Instagram, you're a lot less likely to spend time on it.
In what way does prohibition not “work”? It would be helpful to understand the success metric when evaluating whether a solution will enable the metric to be achieved
Would you recommend that same approach to other vices like gambling, prostitution, and heroine? If not why are some vices more distinguished for you than others?
Also, you can have both: substance education and prohibition. Those factors need not be exclusive.
This is not about kids. It's about surveillance.
It's about kids. Its serious problem, every parent knows this. It has some scary negative externalities. Related issue, but not the same issue.
It can be both (and in my opinion is).
There are groups that would love to be in full control of visible information and parents rightly concerned about social media use by kids.
There aren't really any groups that want full control that have any power really - it's more like systemic pressure.
A police investigator trying to do his job is 100% sure he can solve crimes this way, to him, there is zero doubt about the benefit of being able to get info from social media, it's a moral concern.
The anti-terrorist squad - same. They see all sorts of threats, daily they are truly concerned, they're all waiting for horrible things to happen and in each case they 'knew they could have prevented it'.
Then you get corporate interests, who just want to 'sell gear to make money'
Maybe it even works really well ... because of 'checks and balances'.
But then, the 'checks and balances' start to fail, either from corruption, bad legislation, legal rulings etc.
Those forces all collide into the 'slippery slope'
>Its serious problem, every parent knows this
Not "every parent knows this"; lots of parents fiercely oppose their kids being banned from access to decentralized information and communication sources. Would you prefer your kids get all their information from textbooks written by Glisaine Maxwell's father, all their news from sources owned by zionist-aligned billionaries?
This is about 'social networking and media' - generally not 'information space', ie. Wikipedia et. al. are not regulated.
Crucially, parents can trivially allow their kids to access whatever information they want.
Finally 'textbooks written by such and such' is delving a bit into conspiratorial inanity.
We also need to talk more about the third not-mutually-exclusive option: Legal liability if/when things go wrong.
It's often buried because the people making money dislike it, so much so that they will lobby the government to impose wide bans. Especially if:
* The ban makes somebody else pay most of the costs of protecting "the children" against their design-choices or business-model.
* The ban gives them a blanket pass for almost any exploitative design against adults or other acceptable targets.
The way school taught us about the Prohibition was that everyone disobeyed the law and actually drank more. That's not true though.
So the surveillance and the manipulation your kids are exposed to is safe? How does that work?
You can't educate around something that's predatory in nature.
IMHO the solution should involve defining what's natural social media and what is predatory social media. The natural one can be a system that connects real people with each other and operates discovery algorithms that have %100 open source and run on open data. When its real people interacting you can educate around it, you can have it with anonymous accounts too but you can develop protections against bad actors by actually looking into the thing to see what's happening. In real world that's how people interact and although damage from things like lying or gossip still exist we also have ways to navigate around it by teaching manners, ethics, etiquette, politeness, fairness etc.
Then there's the unnatural social media, that is most of the social media today. It is not a natural human interactions, it is managed human interactions for profit or influence. Information is hidden from the participants but it is not hidden from the host of the gathering and the host develops tools to create conflicts or control for its own benefit.
You can educate people, but the effect isnt necessarily that it reduces any effect. Education allows failures to be diverted to failures of educators or failures of students. It draws attention away from the manufacturers and if we view education as having a purpose synonymous with what it does, education is VERY, effective at diverting responsibility away from manufacturers.
> Prohibition doesn’t work.
It absolutely does. Just look at smoking and alcohol.
> We also need teen social media education
Sure, that too. But to think that it's enough is very naive. Unlike alcohol and drugs, social media is being pushed on teens at every turn. If there was a drug dealer on every corner, and drugs were free and tasted great, the education on drugs wouldn't go that far, honestly.
You know what else has prohibition? Alcohol and drugs for minors.
Does it work? Minors never drink or do drugs?
It is my impression that when drinking age restrictions are introduced, drinking among the (now) underage population goes down. Not disappear, but goes down.
My personal experience is also that 17 year olds in countries where the legal drinking age is 16 drink more than 17 year olds where the drinking age is 18, but I don't have numbers on it.
It doesn't need to be 100% effective in order to work.
Yeah I'd say it works. I've seen many minors doomscrolling on their phones. I haven't seen any with a beer in hand. That's not to say there aren't any, but there are fewer.
Do minors drink less than they would if we allowed (or even encouraged) them to drink or use drugs?
Dutch teenagers are less likely to smoke, drink or have sex compared to teenagers in other countries. Despite the nations relaxed stance on drugs and sex work. So making something legal could make it lame for teenagers.
Not sure, but they would do it more safely, thats the argument for safe supply :)
Good luck educating a 12-year-old whose friends all have social media accounts.
[dead]
You can ban things for minors just fine. It’s already a thing.
When are we ever going to get beyond raising awareness/educating bad/arguably-bad things? All of these manufactured wants, needs—totally synthetic. The business model is to prey on people. But the answer is yet more things to lecture about?
By going beyond that I mean real alternatives. Like Christian abstinence organizations might not just have a say-no-to-alcohol stance, sit at home and be bored. No, they sometimes even have social gatherings and activities. They do the same thing for students. The stance towards alcohol-abstinent students is not simply, well you can choose not to drink but heh, most of your peers drink and most of the late-night activities revolve around that. They offer alternatives: alcohol-free activities.
What would I give to be able to opt out of the things that I find bad for myself? Like really, ban myself from say buying cigarettes with my credit card. But is that ever on the table? No. Just the discourse pit of freedom and unfreedom. Where freedom happens to coincide with Big Tech’s bottom line.
And education.
Wouldn’t it be more effective to ban non-chronological feeds? TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook would be transformed into useful tools overnight.
I feel that'd maybe be going a bit far as other kinds of feed are also useful (e.g. by popularity, etc.), but I feel as a first step it should be mandatory for any platform to have to show in a human-readable way exactly why they showed you a piece of content. That allows for some intelligent feeds (users who watched this video watched these ones next most often) but without the addiction, manipulation, and nation-puppetting abilities currently enabled by the personalised algortihm.
I would want ad-based social media banned altogether.
Seriously the anti user algorithm auto play slop is insane. Even Spotify now has endless scroll autoplay videos on their podcast section.
Meanwhile I’d like a reverse filter, like don’t show me anything posted by people under 25. And I’m sure lots of young people would love to filter out anything posted by people over 40.
It is funny to see all countries afraid of doing what should be done: fine and block the social media companies that don't fix their brainrot algorithms.
Adults are not better at handling them than kids.
They just complain about the algorithms but they use also the same tool for propaganda / marketing. The only thing they literally agree on is "online hatred" because sometimes it goes against them, so they need to keep the system running.
For example, the previous German government was paying influencers for sponsoring heat pumps. All these "content creators" must be paid by someone - left, right, center, oil, nuclear, gas companies, it's like watching TV for its advertisements. Crazy what it has become.
So, that will most likely never change, although that's probably in the top 3 reasons why social media is unusable.
For me it's funny to see the discussion is completely black-white, like everyone is hooked.
I have 3 kids, 2 use their phones like half an hour at a time, the other is completely hooked, hours and hours. If I don't intervene he doesn't dress in the morning, and continues until he really can't keep his eyes open anymore somewhere around 3am.
For him I use the parental control on my router. All his devices have time limited wifi, and he has no data in his phone plan. Since I've done this he goes outside more, and has developed other interests. Today he actually prepared lunch for us, a 14 year old boy!
My point is, I think it's better to help your kids use their phones moderately instead of completely blocking. I once heard from an alcoholic who always keeps beer in his fridge. Not to drink it, but to be sure you learn to deal with this shit, and wherever the beer is, you can manage not taking it if you don't want it.
I find the black and white thinking scary and I see as a result of social media. Nowadays you even have to argue for the possibility of nuance because everyone immediately jumps to "for or against" mode.
I strongly believe humanity needs to find ways to slow down, but the prevailing culture is for everything to go faster and faster, which doesn't leave room for nuance and non-emotional reasoning.
I have to say that I don't believe in most people's ability to teach their children critical thinking, compassion, nuance, etc. Most people barely manage to feed their kids and not mess them up too badly on the emotional side.
Thanks for sharing.
Former alcoholic, I got similar advice early on. It was life changing.
Blocking social media is no different from existing laws for cigarettes, alcohol and various other substances. Nothing wrong with using them, but we do restrict self-serve access for developing minds.
Sure, kids will find a way. That said, like a glass of wine at dinner, parents are free to share their social media experiences with their kids; safely, supervised, limited.
It’s changing and the sentiment towards this crap is adjusting fast. Whoever is running the focus groups on the pushback campaigns aren’t finding good vehicles yet either.
The UK considered blocking X over the generating of CSAM and the US responded by saying any such move would face retaliation. Literally today Trump has been attacking the UK for discussing a possible tax on digital services like Meta, and saying point blank he will implement massive tariffs if they do anything.
I feel like the response of the tech community in the US overlooks the fact other countries don't have many options, nor power to actually make these companies change their ways.
I don't want to see age verification either, but I have limited sympathy for these companies given they've spent the best part of two decades ignoring every attempt at getting them to change and do something themselves.
We've been seeing age verification stuff roll out for a couple of years now and still none of the major companies have done anything to clean their act up (and some, like X, have got way worse) so it's not like they're really helping make a case against these policies.
Came here to say something similar. Adults are just as hooked to their addiction feeds as kids.
These are uber-personalized feeds optimized to keep you scrolling to the next item (story / video / post) so companies can show more ads.
"Social media" is a textbook example of a euphemism. We should be calling this what it is: "addiction feeds".
how do you plan the governments should decide what algorithms are brainrot, and what are not?
Because they don't actually care about social media use, it's just a pretext to force everyone to implement mandatory id checks.
At least in my country that is not the issue but the US government literally threatening counteract with tariffs and sanctions.
Doing this without the parents on board does not work. Kids can lie about their birthdate by a few years. Facial age estimation has error bars of like 5 years and many teens don't have any ID. Younger kids use a parent's phone. Many are not supervised by parents or have parents who are complicit/encouraging in getting them more access. Oh you could be famous! But it is clear that more persistent identifiers online will make anonymity much more difficult for everyone else.
You gotta start somewhere.
If you can iterate quickly, sure, but that’s something governments famously don’t do well. It’ll take five years to assess the results and another five years to change them.
It is certainly better than the status quo. Don't underestimate the effect of simply making something illegal.
100% agree. The 2007 smoking ban in the UK totally transformed the landscape here, and yes people could still go home and smoke or whatever, but that ban has made a huge and significant change to health and thinking about smoking over the last 20 years. We need to do the same with social media and recognise that it's likely to be seen as toxic as smoking in a few years time - if not already.
Yes, the effect of prohibition was enormous. Same with America's War on Drugs, that had a massive impact.
Probably not the impact you're implying though.
Why not? Drugs in Norway are illegal as well, and you are most certainly not allowed alcohol before 18. We can however buy our toothpaste without security locks.
Legislation and law is not the place to just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
Social media had been with us for the better part of two decades. It doesn't exactly feel rushed.
Parents are massively on board.
And they are probably moving to a system where you need to link your device with a government issued cryptographic ID (i.e. passport) using zero knowledge proofs. With a system that ensures an identity can only be installed on one device at a time.
This means a parent would have to give up all social media accounts and chat apps on their own phone, in order to give their identity to their kids.
I use at least 4 different devices on a daily basis, sometimes more. Forfeiting access to things deemed not for children, or I want connected to my ID like banking or prescription renewal, on any one of them because my id can only be on one device, is not an acceptable solution. My phone and gaming machine need equal access to content some would object to others (especially children) interacting with, while my personal and work laptops have hard needs for me being able to prove my identity. And backup devices should any one of the systems I rely on fail need to be able to come up and running in no more time than it takes to get a replacement from the store.
The parents could also check their kids phones and ground them if they find them using social networks.
The parents don't actually need their adult, childless neighbors to show their IDs to protect their kids, but it seems we're going down that exact path.
What part of zero knowledge proofs is problematic for the neighbors?
Needing to have an attested device made by one of two US companies and not even rooted, just to watch a true crime podcast on youtube.
Also, while very hard to implement today, when most people have their digital IDs on their phones, implementing a "real name online" policy will be easy, one software upgrade and you'll need to provide your real identity to every social network or website.
Can't read the article, paywalled. But what makes you think the parents would not be on board?
I really liked this post by System76: https://blog.system76.com/post/system76-on-age-verification
Reactionary changes are never going to go away but the entire thrust of technological progress is "you don't need to learn."
Amusing Ourselves to Death and Superbloom both describe the same thing: methods of communiation become more efficient and education becomes more simplified, to the point of not being valued.
The nadir of which is Trump shitposting policy decisions on Twitter because he has no literacy, no intellect, and people like him because of that because he's just as uneducated as they are.
Back in the early days of the US intellect was king, it's how the US became what it was as far as I know it.
It wasn't "the early days." It was true until the 1970s when the evangelicals pivoted and started to get power.
IMHO, social media itself is not the issue. The issue is rather, why are teenagers glued to their screens? The answer is because they aren't doing something else that is social and physical. So if you ban their access to TikTok or whatever, they are still stuck at home, bored and glued to their screen. Other online entertainment will capture their focus. Before you know it you'll end up trying to ban the whole internet.
I think many people on HN grew up glued to an internet that wasn't trying to intellectually molest them for capitalist and political gains.
No, at the time I was growing up, the music industry was being blamed for corrupting the youth via explicit lyrics and music videos. And there was a whole big discussion around making movie ratings more and more detailed. It turned out that the movie rating media hue and cry all came from mostly from one conservatively funded think tank.
This social media ban looks very reminiscent and I think it is all about creating a surveillance state, controlling the population to only see images and video in a centrally approved way.
The one part I was curious about was who would be responsible for this? The app or the OS? The article says the app makers, which I think is correct.
In the US, Meta in particular is pushing for OS-level age verification [1]. What a surprise. The company without an OS wants OS makers to do it and, more importantly, to be liable for it.
Many purists believe such a move is bad for freedom of expression. I'm sympathetic to this argument to a degree but I think we've shown that it's been a failure. More to the point, whether or not you agree with age verification, it's coming regardless so the only issue really is what form it takes.
This will go beyond social media too. I'm thinking specifically of gambling. I'm including crypto gambling as well as sports betting and prediction markets. In the real world we require you to go to a casino to gamble and you will have your age checked at the door. We've just been removing the barriers to gambling addiction and extending it to minors. My prediction is that this will change.
For anyone who thinks teens will just get around this with VPNs and other workarounds, of course some will. Not everyone will. And blocking such measures will get better over time. Also, network effects will come into play. What will it do if half your friends aren't on social media? What about 75%? 90%?
Also, this is going to cut into advertising to minors. That I think is a win. Companies won't be able to target minors in affected markets. Meta (etc) will be legally responsible for making sure they can't. That's good.
Just like tobacco bans to minors aren'100% effective, neither does this.
[1]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...
There are two outcomes. Either the implementation is freedom and privacy respecting and very easy to bypass (effectively just a setting the OS passes on to a website) or it comes with strong technical and cryptographic guarantees which destroy privacy and freedom (identity verification, OS and hardware attestation). There is no middle ground.
The comparison to ID checks when buying cigarettes is missing the point. Human ID checks have few downsides and are relatively high cost to fool.
In the real world, you show your ID to a human and they look at the date of birth and photo. They don't copy or photograph it, they surely won't read let alone remember anything else from your ID, it would be very obvious, costly and dangerous for a criminal to install a hidden camera and secretly record everyone and their IDs. We also don't attach the ID physically to your body and assign an individual police offier to follow you around 24/7 so you don't try to tamper with it somehow.
On the Internet, a securely (safe from bypasses) implemented age verification system makes sure your device is owned and used only by you, that you can't lend it to somebody, that you can't modify or inspect it... It also enables some level of reidentification for catching and prosecuting you if enable access to a minor despite this.
These are two wildly different situations.
Social media is a cancer today. When I read news like this, I think "darn kids will never know how good we had it, the internet was for nerds and not hostile!"
But as I roll that thought over in my head I wonder, was the internet ever really safe? Maybe there weren't companies messing with your psychology for profit, but perhaps it was all an espionage platform the whole time. The internet, http and html in general, has a smell of being designed from the ground up as a spy tool. It's as if we've all been filling out Obsidian documents on ourselves and voluntarily linking them, and somewhere there is a central node that can see the whole brain.
Maybe it wasn't hostile in the same way where it turns your brain into mush, but it seems like it was never safe.
Sure, it may not have been safe back in the day, but the internet wasn't in your pocket at all times and pinging you with notifications. It didn't replace nearly all your in-person social interactions. It's the ubiquitousness of social media that is a big part of the problem.
I claim this is not about "protecting children", but to mandate age sniffing on the OS level eventually.
I also find this all questionable. A 18 years old is not penalised? So why is that a difference? I should say that I don't use "social" media (unless commenting on a forum is called "social" now), but I find the attempt to explain this ... very poor. I could not try to reason about this. I could not claim it is meant to "protect" anyone at all. Is this pushed by over-eager parents, who don't understand what to do on a technical level? I really hate censorship in general. So, even while I think unsocial media such as Facebook should be gone, I hate any such restrictions. Then again I also don't trust any legislator who pushes for this - I am certain this is to force age-sniffing onto everyone. And then extend this slowly. Step by step. Salami by Salami. Until anonymity is gone.
It's often not allowed to sell nicotine or alcohol to those who aren't penalized either
These bans, in my opinion, are not the right way to go. Who says that once you are 16+, you are mature enough to interact with the social media apps? I'd argue that if one has never used social media when growing up, it'd even be more dangerous to open the floodgate (so to speak) once s/he reaches 17. Then, that person is not going to know what to avoid and how to curb addiction.
Educating kids about the potential harm, and also making parents take some more responsibility seem like a more positive approach to me.
Drinking is harmful... always. Same for smoking. Yet we draw lines there.
I don't claim there is much consistency in governments actions (ie see weed demonization for past 60 years and misery it brought when cigarettes and alcohol were just fine), but absolutely, 0 zilch sympathy for the cancer that 'social media' are these days. They can go bankrupt overnight and no amount of former facebook employees screaming about needing to feed their families or similar popular excuses would affect the big smile on my face.
We need to draw the line somewhere. Later is better.
Any research supporting this? And proposing guidelines / best practices? What exactly are we banning and why? What is allowed and has little risk? Asking as a parent.
As father of three, lets ban it until 25. It adds zero value. Also parents, lay down your phones more, way more. Every generation is addicted. From teenagers to retired folks!
https://archive.ph/rSce4
So, by disabling all social features (comments, chat) kids can keep using Instagram and Youtube? Is it really the social features which are harmful? I'd guess that it's the addictive content which might be more harmful.
Also, does these bans extend to text-only social media such as HN?
When they ban social media, what do they actually ban? Like is whatsapp social media? I say no, but news outlets say otherwise.
There is no social media official definition from my understanding.
The bad ones are the ones with the uncontrolled (by the user) algorithmic feed
How is it going in the other countries that are trying this? Do we know yet? If not, why move forward with legislation based on untested theories, especially when other countries are currently testing it for you?
we desperately need an internet-standard for establishing age without disclosing the identity of the user. this is very much possible, and I won't rant here about all the ways it is possible. Currently, meta and openai have hijacked this to abuse it for their own nefarious ends.
If you're European, you should be happy about the law but very angry about how it is going to be implemented. but better than anger, please spread the word on the need to establish a standard protocol for age establishment that does not involve bigtech in any way, shape, or form.
> government: bans social media for under 16.
> hackernews: "Good. It's about time government took action. The only cure for these abusive capitalist companies is government regulation."
> government: passes law requiring age verification at the OS level
> hackernews: "Oh no! How could this happen? We have to fight this you guys. For sure if it weren't for big tech lobbyists we wouldn't have to worry about draconian laws like this."
You can ban social media for people under 16 without having age verification at the OS level. These things are not related. Age verification is not a technical problem.
And your position is that the government doing anything is bad, then? Better to just resign yourself to abusive capitalists? The position that you're mocking is the belief that some laws are good and some bad. The fact that you seem to find that objectionable is baffling.
It's twofold, these are laws that are delving more and more into regulating the personal lives of its citizens and as a side effect forcing the de-anonymization of the internet. This in a way that makes it easier for the government to track your internet usage and if we're talking OS level verification, maybe even more than just internet usage.
If you really want to go after abusive capitalists, then go straight to the source. Regulate the things that are making this ban look like a good idea.
We've already had reports of the UK's Online Safety Act resulting in a convenient uptick in defamation lawsuits. Certainly not because the government can now easily track who posted a tweet that ruffled the feathers of someone important. So yeah, at the cynical end, I question the motivation of these laws and at the charitable end, I worry about the direction these laws are moving and their impact.
Actually no. The position I'm mocking is that we can somehow implement enforceable age restrictions on digital platforms without a verification mechanism that extends to the client level, even to the hardware. I think we need to suck it up and accept that the free-wheeling 90s are over, and using computers, the internet, and technology in general will become a much more regulated activity in the very near future, which is going to suck for people who make touching computers their entire personality, but greater society has decided that protection from certain severe social harms is worth the price paid.
This isn't a real dichotomy. There's not a lever positioned between safety and freedom that people can collectively choose to shift one way or another. The best way to enhance safety is to directly ban the harmful behavior, not install cameras everywhere to make sure that only the right people fall victim to it. A panopticon is both less free and less safe than the world we have now, and a world where Meta and Google are ground into silicon dust is safer and more free.
Yes, but the government wants social media as long as it's their propaganda being pushed in there. That's why they love TVs. Now that no one uses TVs any longer exactly because we know it's just government mandated propaganda they have an issue.
Privacy and freedom are not the same thing. You can have lots of freedom with low level of privacy, but it's impossible to high privacy and high freedom at the same time.
No it isn't
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So we need bankid to use social media? I have to move.
Knowing how kids are, they will just snicker and skirt their way around these bans anyway thinking they are some super bad ass. This is mostly symbolic.
Depends on how it’s enforced.
The data we have on bans on underage drinking and smoking show that they work. Some kids will still smoke and drink, but the number is reduced, drunk driving accidents go down, and eventually fewer adults abuse alcohol and smoke cigarettes.
The myth about age limits making it forbidden and attracting more kids to do it is just that it’s a myth. Spend some time looking at the studies. They almost universally show that age limits on drinking and smoking are harm reducing.
There are a few differences. For one, it's much easier to regulate the sale of alcohol and tobacco, the level of friction is much higher and usually involves an in-person interaction with an adult. Visiting some dodgy website or downloading a VPN is much easier.
Second, the peer pressure to drink/smoke has never been as strong as the network effect of social media. Almost all 15-year-olds are on some form of social media, I don't think you can reasonably expect they will suddenly stop wanting to socialise outside school. Their entire identities are built around their online presence; that was never the case with smoking or drinking, at least not on this scale.
I'm sure it will have some effect, but kids are clever, and they have lots of time, they will find ways to bypass these fairly weak bans. Imo, the only way to do this is to provide an alternative along with the ban, like what the Russians are doing with Max as a replacement for Telegram/WhatsApp, though that's not entirely successful either.
You can’t conjure up a bottle of vodka or a pack of cigarettes out of thin air in your bedroom with a cheap Wi-Fi only Android phone, but you can use that cheap Android phone to access social media.
That’s why I said it depends on the enforcement mechanism. If they require an ID or a credit card then it’s roughly analogous to getting someone to by beer for you.
In a way, it's nice because young people will find way to circumvent the limits and they'll learn "hacking", just like we used to do in the very different internet we grew up with.
I always find it entertaining to see the contrast and tech sites between everyone bragging about circumventing internet blocks when they were a kid, then when a story about blocking parts of the internet from kids comes up it’s just assumed that it will work.
Then there’s the contrast between calls for regulating social media for kids followed by the outrage when people realize that 1) products they use are considered social media (Discord, Reddit, Hacker News) and 2) you can’t keep kids out without age checking everyone who uses the product.
Since something has to be done (seemingly) to appease parents, I think tech companies and people here should focus on something that looks good like parentally controlled smartphones or whatever with age locks on the phone end. The kids will get around it anyway, but that's true in any set up (worst case they borrow an adults ID) and at least it might get the parents to not worry as much?
Age verification is coming. It'll come to all the countries - for one reason because it will be baked into the hardware and the same hardware will be sold everywhere.
As the father of a girl, having struggled a lot to stop her from TikTok and similar when she was just 9, it would have been so much easier to enforce that if it had been forbidden by law. It's too late for us, but I'm happy that these measures are coming - it would have been good even without age checks.
People get around the laws of murder. It should still be illegal.
> This is mostly symbolic.
sure, just like some kids sneak cigarettes; but the vast majority don't. I disagree that it's symbolic.
Some will do that, but it will hinder the network effects which will be helpful overall. There is at least a good excuse not to be on social media for the ones that didn't really want to anyways, but felt pressured to do so.
If parents have a reason to say no that will be enough for some kids to give up pestering.
We don't need to ban it to literally every kid ever. As long as most of them don't have access the law will be a net positive.
Cigarettes don't get less addictive when they are banned. On the other hand, a kid is less inclined to use social media if most of their friends aren't on it. They're less likely to post a video on TikTok if there is a significant chance it will be removed if it goes viral. Even if the majority of kids continue to use social media, some of them will follow the rules and they can avoid social media without missing out on socialization altogether.
The ability to enforce a law doesn't mean it shouldn't be a law. No law is followed and enforced 100%.
Laws can be normative.
Teens are famously resilient to that sort of thing though. Making something illegal is just about the only thing to get a teenager to want to do something.
Not really, now the social network can be immune from prosecution by checking the complies with bad regulation box.
I'm okay with that, I remember the "cool kid" at my school who smoked cigarettes and I see today how he turned out later in life. Doesn't mean everyone will do it.
Normalized credential-harvesting will make it possible for govt to enforce digital exile.
The govt will be able to deny computer access for anyone it doesn’t like, for as long as they don’t like them.
There will then be many ‘underground’ internets, which will all be banned, where the underclass lives. It is also where real innovation will live.
It’s a brand new day and our dystopia has new frontiers available for the brave.
> There will then be many ‘underground’ internets
Only with very old technology, its possible force ID validation from silicon to server or even to unlock the cpu cores so if it ever comes to what you suggest that will also happen.
Should be banned for under 40s and over 70s really...
Also ban giving toddlers iPads with YouTube.
hah - 50 year olds have been amongst the worst offenders from what I've experienced. The only generation that I can see that hasnt completely fallen is the generation that were young adults just around the time facebook first released, i.e Millenials. They grew up with the internet but werent enslaved to it like the generation after (Gen Z). Meanwhile the generation above (Gen X) didnt have the survival instincts fostered whilst growing up with the internet so fall foul of all sorts of fake news pieces etc
I disagree, the brainrot is about the same across generations. People have a slight bias to reporting their generation as being more resistant though.
Millennials are by far the most FOMO/social media addicted generation there is. I have watched so many of them blow up their lives over stupid shit they saw online.
The only people with a relatively healthy outlook on modern socia media (by this I mean not using it) and ability to detect bullshit are a slice of Millenials that grew up on the pseudonymous internet that transitioned into the real name public internet, birth years from early 80s to early 90s mostly. Before or after that, Gen X were already adults and Gen Z grew up (became teens) with Snapchat/Instagram already existing.
Outside of this group (which happens to be my peer group) I see a noticeable drop in media literacy and ability to detect bullshit, but that may just be a blind spot for me since I’m part of the aforementioned Millenial group.
I’m over 40 and this trash works on addicting someone like me just fine. Social media companies went full Icarus and I couldn’t be happier watching the wax run.
How do you invest in ad companies that ran ad campaigns for smoking companies.
We all have a day when we'll be over 70, I wonder if you'll still think the same way then?
Remember kids, always sign-up with a fake birth date.
I think Facebook still thinks I'm older than I am from my middle-school signup in like 2008
There's a solid point to be made about the problem with brainrot algorithms and slop content pushed by default to every (instagram, tiktok, facebook, whatever) user even without banning anything. People in tech who've curated their social media feeds to unfollow/block/dislike brainrot content should seriously sit down with the phone of an average 15 year old (or 75 year old) and spend an hour scrolling.
I am equally as worried about slop content being pushed to the social media feeds of gullible people of the older gen-x and boomer generations as I am of young people. The general problem of human attention span being monetized as a commodity for social manipulation, political manipulation and just generally selling things (the advertising industry in general) is getting worse, not better.
No, they mean, the latest to implement mandatory id for all residents to access the internet. This is not a health issue, it's not demand from lazy parents, this is the elites desire to abolish anonymity on the internet.
Speedrunning the way for the loneliness generation. Everything remote yet you can't even meet people
This is pretty radical, but what if, perhaps, the children touched grass instead of doom scrolling?
Lonely children aren’t the fault of the government, they’re the fault of parents who let them scroll TikTok in their rooms all day, because actually parenting would be difficult or inconvenient.
> This is pretty radical, but what if, perhaps, the children touched grass instead of doom scrolling?
A simple solution would be:
There is absolutely no need to identify everyone on the internet, or forbid kids to talk to other kids.- Harmful effects are known, that is why those laws are created.
- How is a parent going to take phones of their kid's friends? That is the main problem - your kid is going to be pressured to have a social media account. They even can have one on some old phone from their friend.
> That is the main problem - your kid is going to be pressured to have a social media account.
Indeed, that would be the goal, kids should be able talk to other kids their age.
The problem is, I believe, in the excessive phone and screen usage, but parents are easily able to control that (as opposed to smoking or drinking for example).
Excessive phone usage is only a minor part of the problem. Toxicity of social media is the main one.
Huh? In Norway? In what way?
Social media are made addictive, they often promote negative, often fake posts to drive their engagement goals.
God help us if Mark doesn't collect his fee between every one of our interactions, eh?
Curious that we didn't even have a loneliness generation until social media...
Right after the first truly global generation. Who would Norway sell weapons if everyone refused to go to wars?
They tried this in australia, now more kids than ever are on social media.
>now more kids than ever are on social media.
press x to doubt
i would need to see some data for that. no way the law had the effect of causing kids to sign up to social media who otherwise, before the law, didnt.
at worst, i could maybe see the law having a 0% effectiveness (i.e. the same number of kids using social media before/after the law). but i think even that is a big stretch.
Yeah, there are arguments to be made about the benefits (less teenagers on social media) vs the drawbacks (having to hand your id card to some untrustworthy provider), or the fact that it makes people used to circumventing the law, or about the law addressing the wrong issue (so called “social media” being actively harmful by design in ways that ought to be banned) but claiming that the law increases social media consumption is ridiculous.
I could see a scenario where well meaning parents prevent kids from going online, and with the promise of a safer internet through ID laws allows their children to get online more. Total conjecture though, I would like to see data on that too.
The problem in Australia is that influencers and musicians are still allowed on social media regardless of age, as they have professionally managed accounts. So the result is that poor children in Australia don't have access to social media and that rich kids just hire an agency to represent them.
The Australian government should fix that.
Source?
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Are you stating that as your source, or asking if that's my political affiliation?
No. Just a notice that above mentioned group frequently cry for source when they don't agree with an opinion.
Opinion is personal, it's not a fact and doesn't need source.
"now more kids than ever are on social media." is not an opinion, it's a statement of fact, which should be accompanied by a source, at least if you want to be taken seriously.
It's his opinion based on observing his social group. Should be clear from context.
Not sure how, but if the case it's not clear to me, at least.
What?
The issue is not the age you come online, it's what happens when you do.
Delaying from 13 (COPPA) to 16 won't change a thing.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Home Alone -- I thought if I had one of those talkboys, I could get some changes made. But in an age where every teen has a recording device in their pocket, I continue to see the kinds of stories that made my blood boil... because when it came time to get the authorities involved they dragged their feet the entire time, if they would even file a report at all, and that inaction is paired with a "zero tolerance" policy on any kind of self defense that sends kids out into the world reluctant to give folks the rightful punch they deserve if they act out (and are entitled to give in most stand your ground states.)
Extending adolescence doesn't solve the root problems here, and conversely, more adults should reread a copy of "1984" and be a little more fearful they're held to the rules and norms they instill on the youth.
> Delaying from 13 (COPPA) to 16 won't change a thing.
There’s been a decent amount of studies to suggest it can actually, since you’ll be pushing the uptake of social media outside the peak age range where things like bullying, body image issues, grooming, etc. start to happen and, therefore, limiting the harm.
It’s also a time when a lot of life-habits start to get set down since 12-13 is when kids start having to assume more responsibility for themselves and begin learning how they manage their time, build their study habits, etc. Not being habituated into doomscrolling during that period seems like it can only be healthy. It’s not as if they’d be cut off from the internet entirely, they’d still have Wikipedia and all the boring, non-attention sapping parts of the web. And they’d still be able to direct-message or group-chat with their friends. They’re just spared the algorithmic feeds.
Congratulations for Norway!
Oh look another one. Funny how they seem to do this at the same time.
I want to come at this from another angle: We are about to tell the entire world wide web where all the kids are.
The more these laws are enforced, the more we hand over this information to any unscrupulous website operator, app developer, or advertiser. Are we about to hand Elon Musk [0] your kids' PII? How about Zuck, who (friendly reminder) sold your 2nd-factor phone number to advertisers [1]? How about all of the leaks from these ID services [2]? Or how about these services doing far more than Age Verification [3][4]?
Given the terrible track record of data breaches in tech, this means all this information leaks into even worse hands with little recourse for people and no punishment for companies.
From a security and privacy perspective it's in kids' own self-interest and self-protection for them to undermine all of these laws.
0: "I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for." https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02706...
1: https://www.securityweek.com/facebook-admits-phone-numbers-m...
2: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/hack-age-verification-...
3: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/persona-age-verificatio...
4: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/02/age-verificat...
There is no need to implement these kind of things in a way that gives any PII to Musk or Zuck.
One way is the California approach which requires that device operating systems offer parental controls that parents can set up when creating accounts for their children that will provide an age bracket to apps when the children are using the device. The California laws requires that apps that need to restrict use by children to ask for that age bracket.
Note that the California approach does not actually do any age verification. The parental controls accept whatever the parent says is the the child's age bracket.
Another way is to put actual ID documents on the device, cryptographically tied to the device, and to implement a protocol by which software on the device can prove to a remote site that the device contains such ID documents and that those document show an age that is in the age range that is allowed to use the site but without disclosing to the site any another information from the documents. Google, Apple, and the EU are all using and/or working on this type of approach.
Europe slowly becomes a totalitarian fascist federation.
The social media and children protection bullshit serves only to introduce a mandatory identification for accessing the internet.
And we all laughed at the "conspiracy theorists" who were constantly warning us.
Don’t forget the hate speech laws. It’s just ridiculous. A state in Germany wants to criminalize questioning a certain country’s existence, with penalties of up to four years in prison
Foreign state existence.
Good, social media is cancer on society and will only get worse with LLMs, Deepfakes etc. All the astroturfing in favour of social media couldn't possibly change my mind on how harmful social media has been on society.
It's funny to me that we still call it "social media", when it bears no similarities to its original form. Back when your feed was sourced from your real-life friends and colleagues, and the only "algorithms" that existed were to show your latest friend's post at the top.
It's a bummer, because I think a platform that follows Facebook's original intent has just as much value in today's world, if not more.
The original form was referred to as social networking. Social media is the current form with algorithmic broadcasting.
Well we still call them phones, which is a more extreme case of semantic drift.
Calling 2026's facebook, instagram, tiktok, xshitter, whatever "social media" is like calling a casino "the 3rd place that you socialise out with your mates".
> All the astroturfing in favour of social media couldn't possibly change my mind
What astroturfing? This is the most popular moral panic of our times. Yours is the default normie position...basically what is leading to all this poorly thought out legislation being emotionally shouted by the mob into existence.
Just so you're aware, all the worst laws are the ones created when the populace has been emotionally riled up into a mob over something, and where people refuse to rationally look the reality of the issue. See also: nuclear power, 9/11, the 90s satanic panic, violent video games in the 2000s, jazz music in the 1920s, the subliminal lyrics trials of the 80s, etc. etc.
Most of the actual academic literature suggests this is a giant moral panic.
The funniest part of all of it is the "social media mental health crisis" that millennials think they're saving their children from doesn't even exist anymore. All the dominant platforms of today are not based on the social graph. Nobody is getting bullied on their timeline or seeing all the parties they weren't invited to anymore. The most popular platform right now is essentially short form MTV.
If we're banning that and any website with "social" functions, anything with comments or upvotes like this website needs to be included.
You're cheering on identity gating the entire internet and a giant erosion of privacy. But again, your mind is made up already and as you've said, no rational thought can change it. So enjoy the new world of unintended consequences you're creating. When this moral panic is over, you may look back with a few regrets like everyone has over the Patriot Act.
> The funniest part of all of it is the "social media" that millennials think they're saving their children from doesn't even exist anymore. All the dominant platforms of today are not based on the social graph. Nobody is getting bullied on their timeline or seeing all the parties they weren't invited to anymore.
I think in recent years the infinite scroll of auto-generated content that bamboozles your brain is considered way worse than seeing the parties you weren't invited to. I think you're the one that's being "millenial" and thinking this is related to cyberbulling or whatever.
> And if its just any website with "social" functions, this one should be included!
This is actually a reasonable take and is being discussed elsewhere -- the "social" tag doesn't really apply any more. "Algorithmic brain-engaging drip feed" would be more apt.
I don't disagree that engagement-based algorithms are a real issue, but most of the legislation being proposed on this topic has nothing to do with that.
It's all motivated around the idea of there being a "teen mental health epidemic from social media" (which has very little support in the recent academic literature).
It's all worries about the 2010s era social graph driven by Jonathan Haidt's 8 year old podcast book tour...nobody wants to acknowledge the social graph doesn't even exist anymore!
> Algorithmic content is not the target of this
The quote from the article below shows that they are at least thinking about the algorithmic targeting specifically.
> “We want a childhood where children get to be children,” Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said in the statement. “Play, friendships, and everyday life must not be taken over by algorithms and screens.”
I think there may be more awareness of targeting algorithms than you think. May be due to the fact that "content creators" talk about it all the time.
I had the same position before there was this panic. Facebook became popular around 2008 and was cheered on as some boon to society, and I was saying this thing needs to die. Also thought it was ridiculous how many of my middle school classmates had iPhones.
Does HN count, or is the actual problem the algorithmic feeds?
I would consider HN a barebones forum more than social media. It's a bit "I know it when I see it" but the clear differences are things like no media uploading, no mysterious algorithmic feeds (like you allude to) designed with the explicit goal of keeping you on, no "discoverability" like we see on these sites, etc. It's text posts, [edit: essentially] one page, and a simple up/down system with some weighting. You can't even really build an independent community within HN. We're all more or less seeing the same thing at the same time. Everyone's facebook or instagram or whatever is wildly different. It's siloing.
Also, there's no ad servicing going on/major profit element for ycombinator here. Doesn't mean there isn't self-promotion/astro-turfing, and it clearly benefits ycombinator's reputation to have this, but it isn't an ad platform with social aspects like social media.
I would categorize HN as a news aggregator with a comment section, not social media.
The various laws being proposed don't tend to agree with that
Well, I don’t agree with any laws like that, they’re all silly.
Nobody under 16 should be on social media for their own good, but it’s their parent’s job to prevent them from rotting their brains, not some governing body.
> but it’s their parent’s job to prevent them from rotting their brains, not some governing body.
The counter argument is that even if you want to do that as a parent, it’s hard when all your kid’s friends use the thing you’re prohibiting. It makes their life harder, and yours too in the process.
It’s worth noting the first initiatives to gate kids from social media did come from parents, who organised locally and collectively agreed on a course of action.
As a parent, you have direct control over who your kid’s friends are.
We used to say, “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you?”.
Now we say, “Well, the kids are going to jump off a cliff anyway, I can’t stop them, so the government should make a law about it!”
I don’t think that’s the way to handle things. Parents who are bad at parenting will raise kids that fraternize with kids who jump off of cliffs. Maybe theirs will too, one day. Unfortunate, but the kids at the top of the cliff, who were actually raised, will excel.
Social Darwinism > Government Regulation
You do not have control of who your childrens' friends are unless you spend all hours with them. And most people are happy nobody can legally sell smokes, booze, and drugs to 12 year olds.
Surely you can see how requiring ID for a physical cigs, drugs, and alcohol purchases is different from requiring ID to use a website?
“Think of the children” is the exact tool fascists use to erode liberties. Governments worldwide salivate at the idea of having a registry of what every individual is doing online at any given moment.
Your opinion is irrelevant. You've now handed that authority over to random career bureaucrats within the state to decide.
I agree, the challenge still remains to classify social media if the objective is to arrest or reverse the negative effects, while possibly not depriving children of positives of things like forums like HN which are clearly also social media, even though it’s clearly not what people are primarily thinking of regarding this issue.
I suspect there is not a clear or even uniform definition of what is and is not social media that would be banned for children. Usenet is attributed as being the first social media application from 1979. I presume many here would not include Usenet even though by the technical definition of social media HN and forums in general are in fact also social media, while also at the same time one could make the case that things like TikTok or YouTube shorts are not very “social”, while at the same time being part of the problem people are upset about.
I agree that there is definitely a problem with children and the internet, but frankly, maybe the ban should be for smart phones in general for children, because the same kind of toxic behaviors that I think people are actually calling “social media” can simply just continue in things like telegram and iMessage; aren’t they social media too, especially now with video/image sharing?
I preemptively apologize to anyone if my words are taken as flame bait or personal attacks on anyone that likes social media or smart phones for children, it’s simply my opinion and how I speak and if you don’t like it you can simply disagree and ignore what I say, even if yuppy are a mod.
I don’t think the answer is banning phones (except in school, context dependent), it’s letting lazy, bad parents have natural outcomes for their children and allowing the rest to work itself out through the social free market.
It sounds cruel, but if someone is set on allowing their children to be raised by strangers on the internet and the government, they need to be ready to accept any outcomes that come along with that.
Although I agree with you directionally, reality simply is that at least speaking for the west in general terms, this approach does not strike me as feasible because it will always contact the pathological altruism of our current civilizational state that will be compelled to "help" and "protect". But there is also the issue of simply writing off the children of such parents is rather callous and simply not compatible with civilization. We are not individuals in a modern society/civilization; your notion of parents "accepting any outcomes" turns out to always result in society/civilization dealing with the effects like crime, loneliness, degeneracy, etc. As an aside; it is in fact the deepest of problems of the whole "libertarian" premise that we are all just individuals, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Do we want to be a civilization or do we want to be a conglomeration of wild animals where we just accept the "natural outcomes" of the consequences of things that was imposed on them in the first place?
Frankly, (and no, I don't mean this as a flame bait, mods) I see it similar to when alcohol was introduced to the tribes of America, when they were genetically predisposed to both increased intoxication and addiction to alcohol; we introduced smartphones not only to a population that was simply not at all prepared for it psychologically (arguably, genetically too), but it was also introduced largely to the young through the adults, who were even more psychologically vulnerable to every single form of predation and things you would want to protect children from one could imagine.
I know people who suffer from both the effects of smartphones and "social media" (some both, some each) in several ways too broad in scope to detail here now (but it is very bad in many ways), even though the irony in one case in particular that comes to mind, is that it is due to secondary effects from their parents' behaviors, actions, and inactions related to social media and smartphones. To your point, the saddest part is that it is not the "bad parents have natural outcomes..." it is the "children" who are suffering and having to recover from even things like grooming and psychological conditioning, and having to "reparent" themselves following a young life of neglect and what can easily be described as abuse from it.
The challenge presents itself there that barring adults from "social media" and smartphones due to negligence, neglect, and various forms of abuse is a far more tricky issue and topic; especially when a double-digit trillion dollar industry is behind it that makes up what can be argued is the only remaining, functioning industry in America.
I will have to stop here. It has given me an idea for a book. Thank you for spurring that.
I don’t care how anyone else chooses to raise their children. They can let their kids rot their brains, do poorly in school, and fail in life without ever getting me or the government involved. I am not responsible for raising the failed children of failed parents. I care ONLY about the outcomes of my family, friends, and, to a slightly lesser extent, my broader local community.
Promoting failed parents and children, not in spite of their failures but because of them, is suicidal empathy, a modern mental illness that was never able to fully take root in the past, because the world was always much smaller, divided, and cutthroat.
If given the binary choice between “being an individual” or a “civilization”, I would choose to burn down the civilization in a moment IF it meant the eradication of the individuality of those that I love. I would hope every single person with a heart beating in their chest would feel the exact same way, or else THAT is when a society truly collapses.
To borrow your analogy, the Indians became alcoholics because “they were genetically predisposed to it”? Okay, well why would we want to increase genetic predisposition to alcoholism in the gene pool by denying someone their freedom to drink themselves stupid?
You can argue that it wouldn’t be fair to their children, but those who aren’t drunkards could become wealthy casino owners whose children will prosper more than even you or I, while those whose genes, according to your perspective, apparently don’t allow them to control their own urges will fail, and their lineage will end, along with their hereditary alcoholism.
I see no reason for society to bear any level of responsibility for individuals regardless of context, as society is built by successful individuals , and it is torn apart by failed ones. We must allow the natural outcomes, which is that failed people will fail.
Evolution, if guided by humans, would quickly devolve into chaos, as we can’t accurately select for the correct pressures for success. It simply has to occur. Society is a living organism in the same way.
On of their main concerns is the social graph created from following/friending.
HN doesn't have this.
Platforms like HN are still vulnerable to astroturfing and bubble effects, but at least the operators aren't optimizing for engagement beyond [what I assume is] a fairly simple up/down ranking system based on user votes and time decay.
Moderation is another question. On HN again I don't really get the sense that there is a lot of censorship. On Reddit, on the other hand, the behavior of moderators and admins is legitimately frightening once you start paying attention.
Overall I would shut it all down forever if I could, but if I had a limited budget I would prioritize Meta's platforms and similar algorithmic infinite-scroll slop feeds. I think all they do is addict people to scrolling and epistemically poison them without giving any real value back.
Great question. Algorithmic recommendations with infinitely scrolling feeds that get fresh, fungible content—i.e. content produced by strangers, not your friends—whenever you visit the platform are are the biggest issues I have with social media. They're designed like slot machines to boost engagement at the cost of, you know, accommodating social connections.
I'm worried that while these bans have good intentions, they might be targeting the wrong things. The direction is right, and I'm glad action is being taken, though.
Hacker news feed is algorithmic
I can't read the article so don't know if they give enough details on the Norway law to tell, but most of the other countries or states with such laws prohibit specific practices that are very common on social media sites. If you site does those things it is covered. If it does not, it is not covered.
HN is usually not covered.
For example New York's law covers sites with an "addictive feed", and defines "addictive feed" this way:
> "Addictive feed" shall mean a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users of a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, either concurrently or sequentially, are recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information associated with the user or the user's device, unless any of the following conditions are met, alone or in combination with one another:
> (a) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on information that is not persistently associated with the user or user's device, and does not concern the user's previous interactions with media generated or shared by other users;
> (b) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on user-selected privacy or accessibility settings, or technical information concerning the user's device;
> (c) the user expressly and unambiguously requested the specific media, media by the author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (d) the user expressly and unambiguously requested that specific media, media by a specified author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to pursuant to paragraph (c) of this subdivision, be blocked, prioritized or deprioritized for display, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (e) the media are direct and private communications;
> (f) the media are recommended, selected, or prioritized only in response to a specific search inquiry by the user;
(> g) the media recommended, selected, or prioritized for display is exclusively next in a pre-existing sequence from the same author, creator, poster, or source; or
> (h) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is necessary to comply with the provisions of this article and any regulations promulgated pursuant to this article.
New York's definition is one of the most detailed. The Australian definition on the other hand probably includes Hacker News because it includes both "a logged-in feature" and "endless feed" and the fact that posts move off the home page probably falls under "time-limited features". Perhaps some legal interpretation will find that paging is not legally "endless feed", but I could see it going either way. The definition basically is written so that blogs with comment sections aren't included, but with quite an expansive scope otherwise.
Yes.
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I mostly agree with you, I think what you're implying is correct on average, but I'm probably not the only one to whom HN is more addictive than Instagram, Tiktok and all the other classic social media apps.
They get boring much more quickly and also make me feel guilty about spending time on something so shallow, so it's very self limiting.
Please take a beat to think about how this would be implemented (it looks like it's not decided at this time) before reflexively saying "good" because the marketing sounds nice. This is how the US got swindled into accepting the PATRIOT act, et al.
There are problems with social media, yes. However, these problems exist for children and adults. A reasonable way to tackle this issue would be to make social media safer for everyone, not just to exclude kids. These problems are not solved with an age check, and if the age check requires handing over PII, that introduces additional problems. We have to wonder what the motivation here is, and if we aren't heading towards giving up freedom for perceived security.
I think the user needs the ability to set how their data feed works and not be dependent on the hyper addictive algorithmic feed. And parents need to be able to set that for their kids. 90% of the stuff I see in Facebook is garbage that I don't care for.
There is no fixing social media.
These companies need to do what's best for shareholders, which means do the most addicting and damaging thing. Besides that, we have almost 20 years of evidence of attempting to fix it.
Where it's gotten us is that social media is a tool for the president to broadcast threats of genocide to millions of people. Banning or restricting that kind of platform is not the same as the PATRIOT act.
Yep. While. Below the age of 16 can be potent, some of the most impacted people I have ever meet were well over that age when social media came along. This is not an age thing, it is the very core of those businesses.
There are problems with cigarettes, yes. However, these problems exist for children _and_ adults. A reasonable way to tackle this issue would be to make cigarettes safer for everyone, not just to exclude kids. These problems are not solved with an age check ...
You may or may not be acting as an apologist for the sleaziest, worst industry on earth here, but you certainly sound like it, even if it is unintentional. As this is hacker news, P(makes money working for sleazy, terrible companies) is high so you'll have to accept this obvious interpretation.
Look, I actually kind of agree with you, but social media _already has all the PII_ to an extent unparalleled in history. Come on. "We have to wonder what the motivation here is"?
Do age checks really work for cigs? I had no issues getting em when I was a kid.
I feel like it's more the marketing campaign making them seem "uncool" and unhealthy that is responsible for the decline in smokers.
That's changing now of course, smoking is becoming cool again thanks to the bans and legislation. The UK's new total ban on smoking will literally create more young smokers lol.
You aren't following the news - adult smoking is being outlawed in the UK as we speak - so, your analogy is against you position but supports the person you're criticizing.
More importantly, smoking is a well defined activity but "social media" is anything but - using your analogy, "social media" can be everything from milk to veges to plain water - all of which you want to ban because they're all sold in the same stores where cigarettes are sold. In other words - starve the kids.
Further, school and legacy media can be more toxic than a well designed social media site for kids - vague bans leave the door open to legacy toxicity while closing it to web-based media that could counter the bad sources.
It's far better to focus on toxicity, identify what is "smoking" and what not, regardless of where the "tobacco" might be hidden. After some consensus is achieved, go after the providers, the same way the tobacco companies were sued onto oblivion.
Why do so many people go after the kids instead of after the providers? Too chicken to take on the big ones?
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In my opinion, the basic idea of social media isn't necessarily bad, it's the fact that it is ad supported, which incentivizes completely controlling the attention of users, which is the issue.
The problem is, the borders upon which you want a child operating in social media are pretty fuzzy. Do you want them working with classmates? sure. Other peers in same school grade? of course; older peers? ...sure; older peers in other districts...maybe?
Then there's all the spoofing and the "age gate" software that inevitably needs to be done to do this.
The things is, it’s not the people that bother me. If it was IRC or MySpace I’d be mostly fine, even if they were engaging with questionable people or content, I think partially because the fidelity and partially because those experiences were still largely pulled by the child. It’s the non-stop algorithmic content.
This is sort of - it’s not really the “social media” that’s the problem it’s billion dollar companies getting to push content direct.
The problem is that it really is the 14-21 group that where it has the most (and increasing) influence. They should have banned it for under 18.
I'd prefer a ban for the over 65s, who are especially vulnerable.
However bad you think 65+ users are on social media, it's way worse than you think. Imagine being scammed by ads and grinding the remaining years of your life away with that. Yikes. I've seen it with my own eyes. It's awful.
It will never happen because 65 yos vote and people under 18 cannot vote.
I think we should ban all media for all ages, and force people to evaluate the world from first principles using more rational evaluation and distillation techniques like those found in LLMs.
Age 25-65 Coastal elites with luxury beliefs are equally as vulnerable as over 65s, but they hold the levers of actual power, which is far more dangerous.
As with any ban on anything, I would prefer that it start with the people who want it banned. So any advocates against social media and get off social media. Every politician and government employee in Norway should be off it.
In general, if someone comes along and says that someone else's rights should be shrunk, I think they should give up those same rights first.
You can just look at the US congress for how this isn't done as they frequently carve out exceptions for themselves and staffers.
By that logic, no politician and government employee would be able to drive a car or have a job, since we also “ban” those for minors.
We’re not talking about a lifetime ban on social media, the argument is certain kinds of things are gated from people under a certain age because we know those are harmful and can negatively impact your entire life going forward when not done conscientiously, and most people below a certain age do not yet possess the capacity to make an informed decision about their use.
The politicians could all divest from these companies for a start.
Anyone they are responsible for could be forced off social media, etc...
This is just another case of some people deciding other people are too dumb to handle themselves or their kids. Further, I believe formally blaming the media companies lets everyone off the hook for their own actions.
In the general sense, Congress shouldn't be exempting itself from federal smoking bans, providing healthcare coverage, insider trading, lying before Congress, etc...
At least this gives kids the chance to be kids and know a life without it before they encounter it.
Many of us grew up in the offline-is-default time, but our cohort will age out. Then we’ll only be left with people who grew up with these technologies shaping their lives and perspectives, who have little sense for the alternative.
The window of time is closing for us in this cohort to use our understanding of what life was like without these technologies to advocate for a healthier environment for kids.
Today it will be <16, tomorrow 18. Doesn't really matter as long as the ball starts rolling.
First it was indoor smoking, now it will be for everyone born after 2008 in the UK.
The sad truth is that we were actually winning the fight against smoking. Until the industry invented vapes.
if it's bad for society then regulate the Social Media companies rather than shifting the burden on the citizenry through ID laws and backdooring increased surveillance under the guise of "muh chillren!"
Genuine question, how is it different than tobacco, driving, alcohol, all the things we gate by age for what seem to be valid reasons?
First, tobacco and alcohol companies absolutely are regulated. Second, traditionally the age gate for cigarettes and booze is for the seller to look at your ID just to verify your age, then forget you. The process was not to establish your identity and follow you around forever, tracking and selling your behavioral data, which is a way these Internet based age gates have been implemented, and the logical conclusion of these age gates given how the Internet works. Third, even if you are coming from the angle that the age verification process for cigarettes and alcohol are bad, it's easier to prevent a bad system from being codified into law than to repeal it after the fact.
Being licensed to drive is a bit of a different situation as you do have to demonstrate some kind of proficiency, but even still, the government practically has to keep track of this in some way and presumably, that way doesn't involve selling your personal info (if it did, there likely would be the same backlash).
Nowadays grocery stores do scan the ID, so maybe there is some tracking
You can refuse the scan. It's just a surveillance grab, like the TSA photo. Unfortunately most people just go along with it.
Are they obligated to still sell the liquor if you refuse the scan? The cashier specifically told me last time they're required to scan it if I want to buy that.
Yes, there's no law requiring it. It's just corporate BS. They want to scan your license, that's it. Some cashiers will push back because that's what they've been told to do, but if you ask for a manager they'll admit it's not a requirement.
I know it's not required by law to scan it, but it might be a store policy, in which case I don't think there's a law disallowing that kind of store policy. They'll tell you to shop elsewhere, and every big store does it.
The only law involved is the one that penalizes them harshly if anyone underage manages to buy liquor. If fake IDs are less likely to pass that scan, maybe that's why they do it.
I'm sure it's CYA for the stores, but then they're holding copies of your license and doing who knows what else with it. I've been seeing more of it getting rolled out, but so far I just present my license if they ask for it, but don't relinquish it and tell them I don't want it scanned. So far it's never been a hard line. I did it yesterday and the cashier just shrugged and I paid.
Where? If it happened in my country I'd absolutely raise a fuss.
US, in a California Safeway store for example
Hm, well California does a lot of weird things that I don't really have a say in. When it gets to my state I'll agitate against it.
> traditionally the age gate for cigarettes and booze is for the seller to look at your ID just to verify your age, then forget you. The process was not to establish your identity and follow you around forever, tracking and selling your behavioral data, which is a way these Internet based age gates have been implemented
I think that's a bit of a strawman, there exist solutions to this problem that decouple who reads the ID from the party that needs information about it, e.g. being above a certain age. Maybe it matters here how it's implemented, can that be regulated?
One of those is a function of government and the other two are enriched by the product being purchased rather than being a ploy to gather user PII to be sold to the highest bidder.
And neither of those 3 knows much about me other than I drive, purchase tobacco or alcoholic beverages. They don't know who my prom date was or who I worked for in 2012 or what movie I'm currently watching or where I eat lunch every day or what my religious beliefs are or where my political allegiances lie.
Those things you listed cannot ever impact 1st amendment protections. I hate social media, but this is a concern here.
The ID laws only apply to social media though. You don't need to give your ID if you don't use those websites. Of course it's also possible that this is just a trojan for other sites asking for ID, but hopefully people see the difference enough that extending this law there wouldn't be popular.
Without social media the majority of the populace would be completely misinformed on everything and the current Iran war would have 60%+ support like the Iraq war did, how is that possibly a better world?
While old style mass media could move in lock step, the lacl of that mechanism seems to just produce a flood of counter narratives to counter narratives. It provides the illusion of being informed but actually being more confused.
As they say, I would rather be uninformed than misinformed.
Maybe maybe not. Counter factuals are easy to dream up but impossible to verify
Cancer except when it’s in the form that I approve such as HN? Where it has all the problems of social media — astroturfing, self promoting, bots, etc.
HN is as close to social media as my 3rd grade talent show was to Michael Jackson's Super Bowl halftime show.
Glad that HN is hyperbole free. Definitely not social media.
Please. At best HN has a very small subset of the problems in social media, and its positives easily outweigh its negatives. This is a well moderated forum with a lot of bright people and industry experts that a young person could learn from by observing conversation and debate. It bears a great deal of resemblance to historic methods of learning by watching experts interact and debate. Tons of pedagogical value is here for a young person to latch onto.
A most obvious difference besides that is HN isn’t a nonstop feed of short form video appealing to the insecurities of teenagers, using notifications and social feedback loops and the suggestion that you’d be missing out on what your friends are up to if you left.
HN doesn’t even let you follow people and barely lets you know who they are. It’s centered on ideas, not people. HN and social media are almost nothing alike.
Cancer? really? Is this [1] astroturfing? Seems like most of the astroturfing is coming directly from Newscorp. I wonder why so many seemingly intelligent people have an irrational hatred of social media. Or why their talking points follow the Faux News playbook to a tee.
This kind of behavior is incredibly reactionary and rooted (if not directly in the financial interests of entrenched legacy media) in the belief that your local culture somehow superior to online culture.
The difference is you imagine kids going outside and playing chasey while Murdoch imagines getting them on scratchers and tv and running stories about increased kidnapping. If your position wasn't astroturfed it would come with bans on legacy media consumption too.
[1] https://adelaide.edu.au/about/news/2026/social-media--sweet-...
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We need this in the US yesterday.
We already have COPPA. The result of which I have seen in my child's classroom when the teacher instructs the class "enter a different birth date to get around this restriction so we can use this website for our class activity"
No, we don't. This is big tech shifting liability off themselves with the added bonus of full de-anonymization. Take a look at who is lobbying for this.
We already have many companies to help, have Palintir de-anonymize every user.
Yes, the Epstein group is worried about.... ummm children. What they are worried about is wrong-speech and they are desperate to stop people from talking about the swarming waves of immigration and our declining way of life.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=623122650149799
Fu Norway. This is an example of lobbyists succesfully make regulations based on a fake reason to serve their own totally different interest. Dumpsters in Norway have no idea how they are being played. Noone cares about children. They only care about introducing id verification for everyone everywhere. Again. Fu Norway.
Is there any evidence for all this?
This sums up my understanding of the current situation (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/understand-the-im...)
That isn't anywhere near definitive.
Further it seems to me, this will just allow the tech companies to assume there are no kids, and remove the protections currently available.
Yes there is an issue of quantity, but it seems that we should be focussing on social norms for what is acceptable parenting in the 21st century. I'm 42, probably the lower age range for having a teenage kid, I have a couple of kids myself, and I'm not 100% sure on what the correct approach to take is, as I suspect the situation is for most other parents as the situation is so different to what we experienced at that age.
Seriously. I see at least one baby with a phone in hand every time I go out.
This is 100% an education issue and they don't understand how harmful that can be to their child's brain.
Governments are focusing on banning things because some reason but real solution is education and support imo.
Similar issue with school shottings. Government wants to ban guns or put controls on schools but they don't invest enough on mental health, it is almost if they are incapable of understanding that a healthy person wouldn't choose to do this.
The social media ussue is similar imo, parents don't understand how harmful it is to the brain. It is harmful for adults and it is even worse for children
"This is 100% an education issue"
It is not. Most parents I know have seen what it does to their kids, but have zero childcare. I have a white-collar remote job and can police my kids. If I was dual-parent working class, I don't think I'd be able to pull it off. I'm glad these laws are getting on the books, so at least the peer pressure of a classroom can get to a good majority of kids.
The kid with the iPad at the restaurant is just saliency bias ("I see it everywhere!"). This is not that different from blaming parents for sending their kids to school hungry or for their kids getting abducted or some such.
Social media is a vortex with a very strong societal pull.
> It is not. Most parents I know have seen what it does to their kids, but have zero childcare.
And you are able to tell this ... how exactly? Why should other parents care about YOUR opinion in this regard? Because ultimately this comes down to a difference in opinion.
It is a parenting issue.
As a parent you can only get your children a smartphone when you decide they are old enough, and then iOS and Android have parental control down to app level.
Decent schools also ban phones now as well.
"Decent schools also ban phones now as well."
Yes and decent countries ban social media, because like schools, the countries recognize this is a collective action issue. You get your children a smartphone when it becomes the only way they can connect with their peers. That's my point.
That's very different from schools banning use of phone during school hours. And, no, your role as parent is not to blindly follow the herd if you think it is not good. That's certainly true for smartphones and, again, there is parental control if/when you get your children a smartphone.
You can only bring a horse to water, as the saying goes...
My cynical take is that social media are a convenient tool for government to justify more identification and control. ID cards, digital IDs, age verification systems, lack of anonymity, etc almost literally justified by "just think of the children".
"your role as parent is not to blindly follow the herd if you think it is not good."
This is just conservative individual responsibility pablum just re-imagined for IT.
"It doesn't matter if all of societies forces + giant multi-national tech corporations are conspiring to trap your child, individual responsibility is all that matters"
This argument doesn't work for smoking or drinking, and it shouldn't for social media.
I am describing basic parenting and you immediately and bizarrely jump to conservatism and corporate conspiracy... ok that's all for me.
Wait, you jumping to national ID's are a tool for national control is fine, but me saying social media is forensically designed to be hyper-addictive[1] is somehow bizarre?
Have a nice day I guess.
[1]: https://www.addictioncenter.com/news/2019/09/excessive-socia...
Why not sell cigarettes and alcohol to kids, but also educate them that it's harmful?
The harm hasn't been adequately demonstrated though. Whereas we know cigarettes are harmful to everyone.
Alcohol in the UK can be consumed in the house from 5 years old. Which is the point. That societal norms at work. Everyone knows it's not ok to let your young kids get drunk, but we trust society to let parents decide what is appropriate and when.
Following the same analogy, they can use parent’s phones to access social media under supervision.
A VPN can't get around a cigarette and alcohol ban.
Perhaps children should be given locked down phones, with fines for parents who buy non child safe phones for their kids. It would take time for this to take effect but a social media ban would actually be effective at the end.
Just like you can't get around a random adult buying for kids. It's just a imperfect deterrent.
Although I agree- hardware level control would be so much better. Apple's on-device age checks can be a good compromise.
> Just like you can't get around a random adult buying for kids. It's just an imperfect deterrent.
This argument feels really weak. Convincing an adult to buy alcohol for kids is dramatically more difficult on average than setting up a VPN.
If you’re on this tech website you should know that it’s not hard to get VPN access even with cash by buying cards at retail. You can also use one of the various free (ad supported or spyware) VPN products.
It’s nothing like trying to involve another adult and asking them to take on the legal liability of that action.
Is it though? Do you actually live in the UK? Do you want to know how often it happens in London?
I live in the UK, though not in London. I can count on one hand the number of times a group of children asked me to buy alcohol for them. So it's not that it doesn't happen, but it almost never happens.
Compare standing outside a supermarket, repeatedly begging passers by to commit a crime for you every time you want alcohol, with the one time action of installing a VPN client on your device and it's obvious one law is enforceable while the other is not.
> Seriously. I see at least one baby with a phone in hand every time I go out.
Where do you live where this is normal?
I’m a parent who spends a lot of time going on walks and to parks with my kids most days of the week.
It’s rare for me to see kids with tablets or phones in their hands. When I do it’s kind of surprising.
> This is 100% an education issue and they don't understand how harmful that can be to their child's brain.
Which social media companies are acknowledging there is a problem and providing data to inform parents?
Making it illegal will raise awareness about how addictive social media is, i.e. it will educate people
Anecdotal evidence that made me smile a bit.
Was at my daughter volleyball game a few years back. Sitting in the gym. In walks mom with a baby girl and a boy that looked around 10ish. They sit down. Mom gives the baby the ipad to futz around with. The son? Takes out his book and starts to quietly read.
It was an interesting contrast to say the least.
This is also something I've heard from my son about more kids are getting off of social media, or giving it up for other means to communicate. My son just graduated HS and said all of his peers have left Facebook, Snapchat, X and several others. He said his generation now sees social media as something for Boomers and my (Gen X) generation. He said people think you're lame if you're still on social media. Everything is now back to Discord servers and other platforms like 4Chan. Anonymous, under the radar stuff, out of the prying eyes of adults.
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> Is there any evidence for all this?
There was a study shared on Hacker News a few months ago that looked hard to find correlations between different measures and social media use or gaming in kids. It didn’t find any evidence of negative correlations between social media or gaming with different negative effects.
The response here was largely skepticism and disbelief. This topic has jumped out of the realm of evidence and into the range of moral panic. Facts don’t matter any more. The conclusion is assumed.
It’s really sad to see how quickly Hacker News, of all places, is jumping head first into welcoming age restrictions and bans with barely a passing thought to what it means. We already saw with Discord that tech communities really don’t like what age restrictions look like in practice, but whenever you make the topic about “social media” everyone assumes it will only be Facebook or Instagram, never their Reddits or Discords that have to go through identity checks for age verification.
> It’s really sad to see how quickly Hacker News, of all places, is jumping head first into welcoming age restrictions and bans with barely a passing thought to what it means.
I'd avoid such generalizations. It's a divisive topic, but from what I've seen here, there's always lots of criticism (regarding implementation at the minimum) in the comments and it definitely isn't clear that most would be jumping head first into anything.
HN is so full of bootlickers. I really hope they choke on the boots they seem to love to fellate.
> Is there any evidence for all this?
> I'm not 100% sure
I don't think anybody was 100% sure social media would be the best thing since sliced bread when they subjected humanity to the experiment, so I don't think you have a whole ton of reason to freak out here. Either they're wrong and can keep moving forward, or they're right and can backtrack. The children will survive and so will you. L
Isn't that a bit naïve though? Will it actually get rolled back? Seems to me we've added another level of officialdom and it's never going to go.
The next generation of plucky startups now have more hoops to jump through, creating a moat around the incumbents.
And even if it is harmful, why is a complete ban the best approach? The internet is a tool. Should you not let kids cook because they might harm themselves? Or do you teach them, so that they can avoid hurting themselves in the future? While avoiding the downside of bringing up kids who can't cook?
My main worry is this is just another step towards government controlling discourse online. Once implemented it will become difficult to be anonymous on social media.
Some one in the UK civil service was quoted in the Times, they stated that the online safety act is not about protecting children. It is about controlling the discourse.
yes, plenty of studies of the effect on mental health. whether it's "definitive" is a matter of debate (and opinion). as a parent of teens/preteens, I 100% support this just like I support banning the sale of cigarettes to minors. And if future research definitively shows that social media is not generally harmful, then it can be allowed and no harm done -- meaning that it's not like the ban deprives them of some essential need.
It's not even so much the social media itself, but it's the companies controlling social media, who push every lever to try to increase engagement. It's not unlike the cigarette companies back in the day, trying to make them as addictive as possible, with ads everywhere, getting it movies so it's cool, etc.
If we had no-ads, paid subscription social media accounts, no endless scrolling, where social media companies revenue was not tied to time spent in the app, where you only see from people you follow, that would be a whole different conversation.
Meta/ByteDance/Snap/YouTube have f*ed it up, and this is why we can't have nice things.
Evidence?
This is the 21st century.