All the pro-freedom arguments ring hollow and insincere to the wider world.
From an outside perspective, the tech industry/community has repeatedly demonstrated that it's actually very pro-surveillance and child exploitation. From that same outside perspective, another argument of 'hey, we have to combat all attempts at protecting children to avoid surveillance' just sounds like self-serving lies.
You can argue that the tech world is not a monolith, but it looks like one from a wider societal perspective, and often the conflicting calls are coming from the same exact sources. Every AI company, for example, bleats about the potential harms of AI while chasing after them headfirst.
If you want to argue against this kind of legislation, you need to repair a lot of lost trust first.
I really wish we could just pass "common sense" laws. Like, you just can't use addiction to make money, full stop. You can't use any kind of trickery in marketing, in particular anything trying to circumvent people's rational brain and preying on the weak animal brain underneath. Marketing and advertising would be gone overnight - good riddance -because anyone can write an honest advert.
The problem with us is we get stuck in local optima and we just can't get out. We're like ants in a death spiral. It takes some enormous external shock to get us out, like a world war. Even a financial crisis or global pandemic isn't enough any more, unfortunately. Individuals just can't accept less and no leaders appear to be able or willing to explain to the concepts of global optimisation or long term plans etc. So we get stuck with shit on top of more shit.
If governments want to set up online age gates, they should be responsible for providing an electronic ID system and enable privacy preserving age verification (zero knowledge proofs)
The people do want this crap. If you have kids of a certain age, you know kids that have had near misses with grooming on Roblox, or have seen the comments from men on child Tiktok accounts. It's a stupid amount of exposure that we just didn't have to deal with as kids.
People just don't understand the problems implementing AVS.
I'd be much much happier submitting details or a face scan to a .gov.uk service than all these rando verification services.
Tell me you don't have teenagers without telling me you don't have teenagers. I'd love kids to do what they're told. That would absolutely solve this but as we all know, they don't.
I want it. As someone who’s trying to keep their kids off screens and social media it’s easier to win the battle when it’s illegal. If I have to provide ID I’ll probably stop using it to and that’s good. Shit is garbage. Hopefully this becomes a global thing and we might get classic internet back, when it was actually good, before social media…
Zero knowledge proofs don't accomplish the ID checking that the governments want.
The reason all of these improvised ID check systems require you to do things like submit a video of you moving your face around (which has its own problems) is because they want to get closer to proving that the ID you submit is actually the ID of the person holding the phone, not just some ID (or zero knowledge proof) you copied from the internet.
Classic. So tell me how I can just not deal with the credit bureaus? Or tax filing companies? Or any site that sells my data to adtech, without totally secluding myself from the modern web? Where’s the supposed competition?
What you’re saying is functionally equivalent to “just deal with it,” since ultimately people will choose to have their privacy violated over the lifelong Sisyphean task of trying to avoid all of that. That doesn’t mean people don’t care about privacy, it’s just the current equilibrium in our broken system.
> I think we have been stuck in this way of life so long we can't imagine an alternative.
> the credit bureaus? >> Do NOT buy on credit. Close your CCs. Use Debit cards, Wise/Revolut or BC wallet. > Or tax filing companies? >> Do self assessment? Go and see actual CPA personally?
"This week, politicians in the UK pushed forward with plans to eviscerate privacy and free speech on the internet by announcing a ban on social media for users under 16 that is set to take effect in Spring 2027."
Is "social media" the internet
Does "social media", i.e., "Big Tech", preserve privacy or eviscerate it. "Internet privacy" is been in direct conflict with their "business model". They engage in sweeping data collection and mass surveillance of internet users to support invasive "personalised" ad services
It seems like most people engaging in "free speech" on "social media" are not anonymous, not really interested in "privacy"
In many cases, they "share" their every thought
40 ways to share information over the internet without age verification
Canadian federal govt just pushed thru a slew of similar legislation - absolutely unprecedented assault on privacy, tools for tracking everyone all the time, minimally constrained, giving broad leeway to a three-person unelected body to implement the actual details.
About 2 million adults in the UK don't have government-issued photo ID. Certainly many 16-17 year olds will have trouble verifying their age. They're blocking huge sectors of the UK population from being able to use the internet normally.
Doesn't matter, if this goes through as is you will have to submit photo-id and/or facial scans linking you to a google account in order to watch any youtube other than the kids section.
The world was fine before youtube, it's not the end of the world. It's full of fake education who won't take responsibility by claiming they're "just entertainment".
Realistically, the kids will find their way around the ban.
The EFF believes the ends (freedom) justify the means (access to everything good and bad for everyone). Governments are pragmatic, not fundamentalist.
This article addresses the technological flaws in age verification, then says “but even if there were, broad restrictions on social media will inevitably limit access to lawful speech, and valuable online communities, and arts and culture.”
If the EFF care about freedom above all else (a reasonable position) muddying the waters with half-baked
age verification isn’t perfect arguments is just sloppy.
Why does the freedom matter above all else? That’s what voters need to be convinced of.
“ But the social media ban does not stop there. The provision also requires internet service providers to limit the time kids spend online, and has rules about who can contact them online. These extreme rules will take decisions about using technology away from families and put them in the hands of government regulators. “
I’m not sure that “there are rules on who can contact children online” is “extreme” for anyone outside of hyper libertarian circles.
The EFF needs to start engaging with actual real world, because it’s intransigence on the issues being caused by unfettered internet usage mean it is unable to prevent bad solutions being proposed.
I'm frustrated with how the various internet freedom orgs have handled this over the years.
The writing was on the wall for years - it's not the 90s anymore and some compromise on anonymity and verification is coming. Frankly for good reason - I think the social utility of Big Social is massively negative, and even more so for kids.
That was the shot of orgs like EFF to help shape the debate in a good direction. Zero knowledge proofs, anonymity preserving age checks, good govt regulation on this etc.
Instead they all dug their heels in, refused to give an inch or even engage in the debate. If you wanted anything other that a Toresque utopia then you clearly want Big Brother to keep tabs on everything, and you're probably a moron who thinks you have "nothing to hide".
So they vacated the space while Mumsnet users came to the only logical conclusion: let's ban social media for kids, with whatever method comes to their mind. Scanning their ID, face scans, fingerprints connected to a government DB ran by the cheapest contractor - who knows how this will materialise. And I kind of can't blame them. The adults of internet privacy vacated the room because they said everyone else in the room is too stupid. So they left and left the stupid people in charge.
The technical incoherence doesn’t matter. What matters is being able to say “you can’t use Snapchat” and then they say “my friend xxx uses it” you can say “xxx’s parent are delinquent”
This isn’t about blocking as much as setting societal expectations.
Totally agree. Setting the tone is so important. It’s so bad it’s “illegal” is a lot more convincing than saying to your kid, “well the research shows…”
If its primary legislation (Acts of Parliament) like Online Safety Act, the courts cannot strike it down. If its secondary legislation by ministers and other agencies, it could be contested in courts.
This is the slipperiest of slopes. I'm all for restricting social consumption, but absolutely against the current suggestions for age restrictions methods. The end goal is noble, the means of achieving it are sinister
I find the idea that someone would care about their privacy and choose to be on social media really hard to fathom. These things are personal data vacuums that infer everything there is to know about you, if you don't just give it to them.
"Under-16 social media ban" sounds narrow.
In practice it means building an age-checking layer for the whole web, then hoping it only gets used for children.
I do believe social media should be verboten for younger people, although I believe it should be enforced by good parenting rather than legislation. That said, we live in a society, and sometimes that means our libertarian ideals don’t work on the large scale. I reserve judgement for the people of the UK, their government isn’t without its serious faults, but less regulation doesn’t seem to be the panacea Reagan and Thatcher sold it to be.
Honestly I would love to see a ban on social media in general, for all ages (or more specifically, content that's algorithmically feed and reliant on ads/engagement). Take out Tinder and gambling while you're at it.
EFF are way off base here - this isn't "free as in free speech" but "free as in giant corporations are free to fuck people up the arse".
I agree, chronological feeds of people you’ve explicitly chosen to follow are fine, but AIs looking to optimize engagement have caused untold damage to society. Future generations will study it as an example of unintended consequences in AI systems. The sooner we shutdown this disastrous technology the better.
but snark aside, society needs to have a big conversation (meaning political) about what is good and what is bad about what should really be understood as the 'connectivity revolution' of the last 10-20 years.
This is a horrible straw-man of the situation which somewhat conveniently manages to sidestep any real acknowledgement of the genuine harm and its scale.
> they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.
Cmon, if you’re trying to make the case for how essential social media is for children under the age of 16, please find some better examples. As if there are no other sources of educational content online than YouTube and anyone who has left Facebook knows the last two points are simply not true. This is so weak from the EFF.
> they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.
How in the world did kids ever survive before social media? Miracle of god keeping them sane every second of their miserable deprived lives. Seriously, this is such a bad argument for something that is a return to a previous known good state versus being a new state. No proof provided that social media makes any of these better versus either pre social media approaches or modern alternatives.
Ah a strawmen augment. This is comparing two specific states. If you’re admitting that the two states of pre and post social media are the same by virtue of resorting to a strawmen then glad we agree.
The answer, IMO, is simply banning all algorithm-driven social media, for everyone and not just kids.
This conveniently sidesteps the identity/privacy arguments, makes it much easier to enforce, and would present an even greater net benefit. There is no benefit to algorithmic social media at all, and everyone would be better off without it.
We have parental controls on devices. The change forced by the UK government is to give control to corporations, instead of the parents.
Parents are much better at knowing their own kid's age than corporations are. Teens keep fooling the age verification (pointing the camera at a video game character, using fake ID, even drawing beards on their face with a pen). But they aren't going to fool their own mother, and they don't need to trust ID verification startup with photographs of everbody's teenage kids to do it.
This is a tricky one, but it actually gives control to the government, not corporations. The government now has rules which let them define what social media is and how big its market can be.
The government is, frankly, just better at deciding what's good for most children than their parents when it comes to matters of health. That's a controversial statement, but truthfully most parents are just not educated enough or strict enough to decide where the boundaries should be on their children's health.
That's irrelevant because social media regulation is a collective action problem. No individual parent can restrict their kids access to social media without ostracizing it, it only makes sense if all parents together get their kids off these platforms.
>it only makes sense if all parents together get their kids off these platforms
Yes, and the wishes of all parents together != the wishes of the UK government which has its own agenda at play in which to weaponize this public outrage for their own benefit(mass surveillance and mass censorship).
The UK government doesn't actually want what's best for all the children of all the parents, otherwise it wouldn't have allowed and even enabled the rape gangs and sweep the issue under the rug in a massive coverup.
>Yes, and the wishes of all parents together != the wishes of the UK government
This legislation has widespread support among British parents across the political spectrum[1]
"As YouGov has shown previously, such a policy would be widely popular with the general public. In our latest survey, looking more specifically at the views of parents, we find that 77% of those with children under the age of 18 would support a ban, compared to only 14% who are opposed.[...] Likewise, 76% of parents think the government needs to kick up their activity on this issue, although a much lower rate of 43% think they need to be doing “much more”."
I don't even have any idea what the last paragraph, other than being some generic twitter rant has to do with the topic of the thread
>This legislation has widespread support among British parents across the political spectrum[1]
Because parents like most voters, are incredibly stupid, and just want to delegate accountability of their kids to the state, not that they actually understand the repercussions of what they're supporting. Same with brexit. Voters want a scapegoat on why their kids are stupid(er), and the government is happy to offer a monkey paw.
I'm all for protecting kids from facebook/insta/snap/etc, they have love hate relationships with all of those, but YT is a bridge too far, is's more a knowledge sharing platform than a social network.
If you primarily choose to watch educational videos sure, but YouTube can give you just as much brainrot as TikTok, depending on what the recommendation engine decides you might like.
Then it can separate the two separate components easily to satisfy whatever the law is. If it can’t then it is social media. A lot of YouTube is not knowledge sharing unless you view MrBeast as a sharer of knowledge.
Parents are there to protect their children. The potential harm caused by eroded privacy and reduced control over our devices is not worth the perceived benefits of this policy in ensuring children’s safety.
Unpopular to say, but the government is just better at deciding what's good for most children than their parents when it comes to matters of health. Unfortunately most parents are just very uneducated or lacking in discipline, and no child should be punished in the name of freedom. That being said, age verification laws are obviously a bad way to do that. They should just ban specific categories of social media outright.
As long as you're hysterically foaming at the mouth with enraged performative moral panic, then start with keeping kids away from Priests instead of Drag Queens.
The whole idea of this is broken, since so much of our collective knowledge is locked away in YouTube/Reddit. It's making a law against children in libraries because there are adult books in it.
This will be a controversial statement here, but for better or worse, Youtube is a modern Library of Alexandria. It archives a significant amount of human knowledge and culture in video form, and for a lot of it, there is no backup.
Big, popular channels do push their viewers to alternative platforms like Patreon because of Youtube's censorship guidelines and arbitrary demonetization, but a lot of valuable content is on smaller channels where the owners may not have the wherewithal to transfer all of their content, much less their audience.
All the pro-freedom arguments ring hollow and insincere to the wider world.
From an outside perspective, the tech industry/community has repeatedly demonstrated that it's actually very pro-surveillance and child exploitation. From that same outside perspective, another argument of 'hey, we have to combat all attempts at protecting children to avoid surveillance' just sounds like self-serving lies.
You can argue that the tech world is not a monolith, but it looks like one from a wider societal perspective, and often the conflicting calls are coming from the same exact sources. Every AI company, for example, bleats about the potential harms of AI while chasing after them headfirst.
If you want to argue against this kind of legislation, you need to repair a lot of lost trust first.
Probably an unpopular view, but why not fix the issues with social media.
This is the start
I really wish we could just pass "common sense" laws. Like, you just can't use addiction to make money, full stop. You can't use any kind of trickery in marketing, in particular anything trying to circumvent people's rational brain and preying on the weak animal brain underneath. Marketing and advertising would be gone overnight - good riddance -because anyone can write an honest advert.
The problem with us is we get stuck in local optima and we just can't get out. We're like ants in a death spiral. It takes some enormous external shock to get us out, like a world war. Even a financial crisis or global pandemic isn't enough any more, unfortunately. Individuals just can't accept less and no leaders appear to be able or willing to explain to the concepts of global optimisation or long term plans etc. So we get stuck with shit on top of more shit.
This is the best thing to do IMO
If governments want to set up online age gates, they should be responsible for providing an electronic ID system and enable privacy preserving age verification (zero knowledge proofs)
That is what I have been saying: we need ZKP! I highly doubt they will implement it though.
Who is "government" Is it not the people? The people don't want this crap. It's a few zealots with their motives that are pushing this down society.
The people do want this crap. If you have kids of a certain age, you know kids that have had near misses with grooming on Roblox, or have seen the comments from men on child Tiktok accounts. It's a stupid amount of exposure that we just didn't have to deal with as kids.
People just don't understand the problems implementing AVS.
I'd be much much happier submitting details or a face scan to a .gov.uk service than all these rando verification services.
Then do your parenting and stop limiting the rights of the rest.
Tell me you don't have teenagers without telling me you don't have teenagers. I'd love kids to do what they're told. That would absolutely solve this but as we all know, they don't.
But how are your rights limited?
Most people want social media banned for under 16s. Some people realized they can use this as an excuse to ram through id checks
Your (the people’s) preferences are largely irrelevant here.
https://willbrownsberger.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Gile...
I want it. As someone who’s trying to keep their kids off screens and social media it’s easier to win the battle when it’s illegal. If I have to provide ID I’ll probably stop using it to and that’s good. Shit is garbage. Hopefully this becomes a global thing and we might get classic internet back, when it was actually good, before social media…
The kids will just use illegal plattforms instead, which will not even try to stay above board or protect children.
You do know that you will need to provide your ID for every single website in the future?
Zero knowledge proofs don't accomplish the ID checking that the governments want.
The reason all of these improvised ID check systems require you to do things like submit a video of you moving your face around (which has its own problems) is because they want to get closer to proving that the ID you submit is actually the ID of the person holding the phone, not just some ID (or zero knowledge proof) you copied from the internet.
But the party verifying that the person matches the id doesn’t need to know what the claim is for
Implementation detail. Fine companies that allow minors access and they'll find a way to verify age by themselves.
For liquor for example I don't think the govt actually specifies that you shall check ID they specify that you shall not sell to minors.
> they'll find a way to verify age by themselves.
Yeah, by outsourcing it to some shady company that sells all your private info to the lowest bidder. See Discord for example.
Don't use the site then? Or sites can compete on which age verifies in the least shitty way?
I think we have been stuck in this way of life so long we can't imagine an alternative.
Classic. So tell me how I can just not deal with the credit bureaus? Or tax filing companies? Or any site that sells my data to adtech, without totally secluding myself from the modern web? Where’s the supposed competition?
What you’re saying is functionally equivalent to “just deal with it,” since ultimately people will choose to have their privacy violated over the lifelong Sisyphean task of trying to avoid all of that. That doesn’t mean people don’t care about privacy, it’s just the current equilibrium in our broken system.
> I think we have been stuck in this way of life so long we can't imagine an alternative.
I agree.
> the credit bureaus? >> Do NOT buy on credit. Close your CCs. Use Debit cards, Wise/Revolut or BC wallet. > Or tax filing companies? >> Do self assessment? Go and see actual CPA personally?
"This week, politicians in the UK pushed forward with plans to eviscerate privacy and free speech on the internet by announcing a ban on social media for users under 16 that is set to take effect in Spring 2027."
Is "social media" the internet
Does "social media", i.e., "Big Tech", preserve privacy or eviscerate it. "Internet privacy" is been in direct conflict with their "business model". They engage in sweeping data collection and mass surveillance of internet users to support invasive "personalised" ad services
It seems like most people engaging in "free speech" on "social media" are not anonymous, not really interested in "privacy"
In many cases, they "share" their every thought
40 ways to share information over the internet without age verification
https://decss.zoy.org
This is old and could be updated with more
C'mon ppl, nothing new. China, N. Korea, Iran, Russia ... to some extent Turkey. So what? Adapt. We've been there before.
Canadian federal govt just pushed thru a slew of similar legislation - absolutely unprecedented assault on privacy, tools for tracking everyone all the time, minimally constrained, giving broad leeway to a three-person unelected body to implement the actual details.
A society whose individuals needs government laws to make good "choices" is probably doomed
The only possible law is making bigco social media less addictive, and better controls for parents
But maybe this is UK just exercising some soft power, since they have no tech to speak of
Related petition to be debated in parliament: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/757233
About 2 million adults in the UK don't have government-issued photo ID. Certainly many 16-17 year olds will have trouble verifying their age. They're blocking huge sectors of the UK population from being able to use the internet normally.
Use *social media normally. Social media != The Internet. They’ll be able to use 99.9999% of the internet just fine.
YouTube is part of the ban.
so nobody can watch youtube without an account? that's going to go down well...
Nobody needs to use social media though.
Really they should just torch the lot.
you don't use YouTube?
I use YouTube, but only watch stuff I SEARCH for or from people I have subscribed to. No watch next BS.
If you have self control you can avoid the social media element of it.
YouTube demonetisation tends to act as a reasonable steward on the platform, but it does need to be strengthened.
I.e. make YouTube responsible as the publisher for any video with over 100k views. This would be totally doable.
Doesn't matter, if this goes through as is you will have to submit photo-id and/or facial scans linking you to a google account in order to watch any youtube other than the kids section.
The world was fine before youtube, it's not the end of the world. It's full of fake education who won't take responsibility by claiming they're "just entertainment".
Realistically, the kids will find their way around the ban.
The EFF believes the ends (freedom) justify the means (access to everything good and bad for everyone). Governments are pragmatic, not fundamentalist.
This article addresses the technological flaws in age verification, then says “but even if there were, broad restrictions on social media will inevitably limit access to lawful speech, and valuable online communities, and arts and culture.”
If the EFF care about freedom above all else (a reasonable position) muddying the waters with half-baked age verification isn’t perfect arguments is just sloppy.
Why does the freedom matter above all else? That’s what voters need to be convinced of.
“ But the social media ban does not stop there. The provision also requires internet service providers to limit the time kids spend online, and has rules about who can contact them online. These extreme rules will take decisions about using technology away from families and put them in the hands of government regulators. “
I’m not sure that “there are rules on who can contact children online” is “extreme” for anyone outside of hyper libertarian circles.
The EFF needs to start engaging with actual real world, because it’s intransigence on the issues being caused by unfettered internet usage mean it is unable to prevent bad solutions being proposed.
Or you maybe need to start properly educating your children by limiting your own devices instead of harming the whole net sphere.
Call your ISP and set restricted DNS' and ban any instalation of software on children's devices. Problem solved.
I don’t have kids, but I live in society.
I'm frustrated with how the various internet freedom orgs have handled this over the years.
The writing was on the wall for years - it's not the 90s anymore and some compromise on anonymity and verification is coming. Frankly for good reason - I think the social utility of Big Social is massively negative, and even more so for kids.
That was the shot of orgs like EFF to help shape the debate in a good direction. Zero knowledge proofs, anonymity preserving age checks, good govt regulation on this etc.
Instead they all dug their heels in, refused to give an inch or even engage in the debate. If you wanted anything other that a Toresque utopia then you clearly want Big Brother to keep tabs on everything, and you're probably a moron who thinks you have "nothing to hide".
So they vacated the space while Mumsnet users came to the only logical conclusion: let's ban social media for kids, with whatever method comes to their mind. Scanning their ID, face scans, fingerprints connected to a government DB ran by the cheapest contractor - who knows how this will materialise. And I kind of can't blame them. The adults of internet privacy vacated the room because they said everyone else in the room is too stupid. So they left and left the stupid people in charge.
Am I right in thinking that the EFF doesn't launch any legal campaigns inside the UK (but they offer support to those who do)
Is there a UK version of the EFF that fights in the courts against this lunacy or does it not quite work the same in the UK as it does in the US.
> Is there a UK version of the EFF that fights in the courts against this lunacy or does it not quite work the same in the UK as it does in the US.
The government looks likely to introduce the ban as regulation through secondary legislation (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9824zvpz9po).
That is open to judicial review.
If primary legislation was instead passed, that's a lot harder to challenge - Parliament makes the law, so whatever Parliament said applies.
Politics is very different in the UK than in the US, especially when the governing party has such a large majority.
The banning of under-16s from social media has widespread support across the parties in Parliament.
It’s overwhelmingly supported action.
The technical incoherence doesn’t matter. What matters is being able to say “you can’t use Snapchat” and then they say “my friend xxx uses it” you can say “xxx’s parent are delinquent”
This isn’t about blocking as much as setting societal expectations.
Totally agree. Setting the tone is so important. It’s so bad it’s “illegal” is a lot more convincing than saying to your kid, “well the research shows…”
If its primary legislation (Acts of Parliament) like Online Safety Act, the courts cannot strike it down. If its secondary legislation by ministers and other agencies, it could be contested in courts.
There's no defending social media, not for adults, not for kids, ever.
It's a toxic trap which will do absolutely nothing good for and to its users.
Keep the kids away from it, doesn't take an Einstein reincarnate to realize that.
Hacker News is a social media site, but not according to the UK government.
According to the UK government, YouTube is a social media site.
This is the slipperiest of slopes. I'm all for restricting social consumption, but absolutely against the current suggestions for age restrictions methods. The end goal is noble, the means of achieving it are sinister
Sure, is HN social media?
According to Australia’s rules, no.
Couple of Months latter kids will have vipe coded their decentralized sm version that's here to stay.
When will politicians understand how and why the internet was build?
They are really underestimating the harm of being on these platforms causes.
These platforms are the digital equivalent of heroin if heroin always came with either nazi or bolshevik propaganda.
They are entirely focused on the axe they rightfully have to grind the whole age verification debacle they are not seeing the bigger picture.
The major social media companies are undermining the foundations of our societies for ad revenue and giggles.
Keeping teens out is a huge step in the right direction.
I find the idea that someone would care about their privacy and choose to be on social media really hard to fathom. These things are personal data vacuums that infer everything there is to know about you, if you don't just give it to them.
Lmao yeah, bolshevik propaganda. Hilarious.
"Under-16 social media ban" sounds narrow. In practice it means building an age-checking layer for the whole web, then hoping it only gets used for children.
I do believe social media should be verboten for younger people, although I believe it should be enforced by good parenting rather than legislation. That said, we live in a society, and sometimes that means our libertarian ideals don’t work on the large scale. I reserve judgement for the people of the UK, their government isn’t without its serious faults, but less regulation doesn’t seem to be the panacea Reagan and Thatcher sold it to be.
Just ban all social media, no need for consent, no need for age detection BS.
Honestly I would love to see a ban on social media in general, for all ages (or more specifically, content that's algorithmically feed and reliant on ads/engagement). Take out Tinder and gambling while you're at it.
EFF are way off base here - this isn't "free as in free speech" but "free as in giant corporations are free to fuck people up the arse".
I agree, chronological feeds of people you’ve explicitly chosen to follow are fine, but AIs looking to optimize engagement have caused untold damage to society. Future generations will study it as an example of unintended consequences in AI systems. The sooner we shutdown this disastrous technology the better.
*to billionaires
but snark aside, society needs to have a big conversation (meaning political) about what is good and what is bad about what should really be understood as the 'connectivity revolution' of the last 10-20 years.
Big tech is deathly afraid of these experiments having a good outcome.
This is a horrible straw-man of the situation which somewhat conveniently manages to sidestep any real acknowledgement of the genuine harm and its scale.
Terrible article.
> they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.
Cmon, if you’re trying to make the case for how essential social media is for children under the age of 16, please find some better examples. As if there are no other sources of educational content online than YouTube and anyone who has left Facebook knows the last two points are simply not true. This is so weak from the EFF.
I am all for it. UK has a big problem with organized pedofile crime, and this may prevent it.
> they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.
How in the world did kids ever survive before social media? Miracle of god keeping them sane every second of their miserable deprived lives. Seriously, this is such a bad argument for something that is a return to a previous known good state versus being a new state. No proof provided that social media makes any of these better versus either pre social media approaches or modern alternatives.
So because humans used to survive in caves eating raw meet we should go back to that?
Ah a strawmen augment. This is comparing two specific states. If you’re admitting that the two states of pre and post social media are the same by virtue of resorting to a strawmen then glad we agree.
The EFF is very wrong on this one. Some things are bad and we should keep children away from them.
The answer, IMO, is simply banning all algorithm-driven social media, for everyone and not just kids.
This conveniently sidesteps the identity/privacy arguments, makes it much easier to enforce, and would present an even greater net benefit. There is no benefit to algorithmic social media at all, and everyone would be better off without it.
We have parental controls on devices. The change forced by the UK government is to give control to corporations, instead of the parents.
Parents are much better at knowing their own kid's age than corporations are. Teens keep fooling the age verification (pointing the camera at a video game character, using fake ID, even drawing beards on their face with a pen). But they aren't going to fool their own mother, and they don't need to trust ID verification startup with photographs of everbody's teenage kids to do it.
This is a tricky one, but it actually gives control to the government, not corporations. The government now has rules which let them define what social media is and how big its market can be.
The government is, frankly, just better at deciding what's good for most children than their parents when it comes to matters of health. That's a controversial statement, but truthfully most parents are just not educated enough or strict enough to decide where the boundaries should be on their children's health.
>We have parental controls on devices
That's irrelevant because social media regulation is a collective action problem. No individual parent can restrict their kids access to social media without ostracizing it, it only makes sense if all parents together get their kids off these platforms.
>it only makes sense if all parents together get their kids off these platforms
Yes, and the wishes of all parents together != the wishes of the UK government which has its own agenda at play in which to weaponize this public outrage for their own benefit(mass surveillance and mass censorship).
The UK government doesn't actually want what's best for all the children of all the parents, otherwise it wouldn't have allowed and even enabled the rape gangs and sweep the issue under the rug in a massive coverup.
>Yes, and the wishes of all parents together != the wishes of the UK government
This legislation has widespread support among British parents across the political spectrum[1]
"As YouGov has shown previously, such a policy would be widely popular with the general public. In our latest survey, looking more specifically at the views of parents, we find that 77% of those with children under the age of 18 would support a ban, compared to only 14% who are opposed.[...] Likewise, 76% of parents think the government needs to kick up their activity on this issue, although a much lower rate of 43% think they need to be doing “much more”."
I don't even have any idea what the last paragraph, other than being some generic twitter rant has to do with the topic of the thread
[1]https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54969-eight-in-ten-parents...
>This legislation has widespread support among British parents across the political spectrum[1]
Because parents like most voters, are incredibly stupid, and just want to delegate accountability of their kids to the state, not that they actually understand the repercussions of what they're supporting. Same with brexit. Voters want a scapegoat on why their kids are stupid(er), and the government is happy to offer a monkey paw.
I'm all for protecting kids from facebook/insta/snap/etc, they have love hate relationships with all of those, but YT is a bridge too far, is's more a knowledge sharing platform than a social network.
If you primarily choose to watch educational videos sure, but YouTube can give you just as much brainrot as TikTok, depending on what the recommendation engine decides you might like.
Then it can separate the two separate components easily to satisfy whatever the law is. If it can’t then it is social media. A lot of YouTube is not knowledge sharing unless you view MrBeast as a sharer of knowledge.
I think the personalised content and advertising puts it into the same category. At least, I think it has the same problematic incentives.
Parents are there to protect their children. The potential harm caused by eroded privacy and reduced control over our devices is not worth the perceived benefits of this policy in ensuring children’s safety.
Unpopular to say, but the government is just better at deciding what's good for most children than their parents when it comes to matters of health. Unfortunately most parents are just very uneducated or lacking in discipline, and no child should be punished in the name of freedom. That being said, age verification laws are obviously a bad way to do that. They should just ban specific categories of social media outright.
This is not about protecting kids, when will you finally understand?
Some things, like invasion of privacy, are bad enough, that we should protect all citizens from it, independent of age.
So just DNS block them in the UK. They don't need YouTube
As long as you're hysterically foaming at the mouth with enraged performative moral panic, then start with keeping kids away from Priests instead of Drag Queens.
Great, you do your job as a parent and keep your children away from them while leaving the rest of us free from your envisioned surveillance state.
He says clicking "accept" to tracking cookies and their 762 "partners"
I have no messages for these under Dillo, nor in most browsers with UBo or a global hosts file.
Uh, speak for yourself, guy.
Not surpised supporters of the regime don't know about tracking protection.
It's always the tech illiterates cheering on the surveillance.
Weird take. And brutally, if predictably, wrong (client ad-blockers, pihole, wireguard if you must know).
The whole idea of this is broken, since so much of our collective knowledge is locked away in YouTube/Reddit. It's making a law against children in libraries because there are adult books in it.
There is some okay stuff on YouTube.
There is nothing stopping people reposting stuff on platforms without social media elements and with proper curation and publisher responsibilities.
Most big YouTubers would love this to happen I’m sure.
This will be a controversial statement here, but for better or worse, Youtube is a modern Library of Alexandria. It archives a significant amount of human knowledge and culture in video form, and for a lot of it, there is no backup.
Big, popular channels do push their viewers to alternative platforms like Patreon because of Youtube's censorship guidelines and arbitrary demonetization, but a lot of valuable content is on smaller channels where the owners may not have the wherewithal to transfer all of their content, much less their audience.
YouTube is very mixed.
Putting short form content on it was a mistake.
It’s only not trash if you use it correctly.
Watch some videos by some racists, you get fed videos making you racist.
It has all the negatives of social media.
Ideal the UK would just make platforms responsible as publishers.
This is the dividing line which should apply for under 18s.