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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Smoking may be bad. But doesn't a law like this arguably open the door to age discrimination across the board?
So weird that someone born in 2007 will be able to legally buy cigarettes for life while a person born just a few months later won't be... again, for life. Bizarre.
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.
> 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, 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" 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.
And if its just any website with "social" functions, this one should 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Wouldn’t it be more effective to ban non-chronological feeds? TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook would be transformed into useful tools overnight.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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"
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
This is not about kids. It's about surveillance.
You know what else has prohibition? Alcohol and drugs for minors.
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.
Well we still call them phones, which is a more extreme case of semantic drift.
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.
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.
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.
> now it will be for everyone born after 2008
Smoking may be bad. But doesn't a law like this arguably open the door to age discrimination across the board?
So weird that someone born in 2007 will be able to legally buy cigarettes for life while a person born just a few months later won't be... again, for life. Bizarre.
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.
> 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, 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" 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.
And if its just any website with "social" functions, this one should 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.
Does HN count, or is the actual problem the algorithmic feeds?
I would categorize HN as a news aggregator with a comment section, not social media.
Your opinion is irrelevant. You've handed that authority over to random authorities within the state to decide.
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.
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.
On of their main concerns is the social graph created from following/friending.
HN doesn't have this.
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
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.
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 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.
Yes.
And oxygen's a poison. At this point I think this line must be willful ignorance.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
social media should be banned altogether
Wouldn’t it be more effective to ban non-chronological feeds? TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook would be transformed into useful tools overnight.
Seriously the anti user algorithm auto play slop is insane. Even Spotify now has endless scroll autoplay videos on their podcast section.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can't read the article, paywalled. But what makes you think the parents would not be on board?
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.ph/rSce4
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
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.Right after the first truly global generation. Who would Norway sell weapons if everyone refused to go to wars?
God help us if Mark doesn't collect his fee between every one of our interactions, eh?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Source?
Liberal progressive democrat?
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.
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
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.
Should be banned for under 40s and over 70s really...
Also ban giving toddlers iPads with YouTube.
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.
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.
I disagree, the brainrot is about the same across generations. People have a slight bias to reporting their generation as being more resistant though.
We all have a day when we'll be over 70, I wonder if you'll still think the same way then?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The ability to enforce a law doesn't mean it shouldn't be a law. No law is followed and enforced 100%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Intelligence is not one of the tools you like to use is it?
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.
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
Oh look another one. Funny how they seem to do this at the same time.
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.
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.
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
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 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...
> 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.
Why not sell cigarettes and alcohol to kids, but also educate them that it's harmful?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Evidence?
This is the 21st century.
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 need this in the US yesterday.
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 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"
We already have many companies to help, have Palintir de-anonymize every user.
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.
Ban them from tiktok, draft them for Ukraine. Lock-down the logins, so they can't complain.
You zoom zooms had better bust out the guillotines on the boom booms before they send you out to be boom boomed by drones.
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.