This concerted global effort is more about building the surveillance infrastructure for the web that will be required given AI's takeoff, and less-so about the well being of children.
I am against these age bans because I know the mechanisms behind it will be used against everybody.
I am, however, all for banning personalised feeds, data collection, targeted ads, what amounts slot machines, and generally the poison these platforms spew.
What this will look like in practice I don't know. I am neither a lawyer, politician, nor do I work on these systems.
This is just banning social media with one extra step, these apps are virtually useless without personalization and their economy relies on it. I'm all for banning these platforms, we're all hooked on them and we need a hard ban, I know it won't happen but it's the only way.
You could make social media based on anonymous queries without personalization or likes. It wouldn't be useless, it would just be unrecognizable as social media.
I am completely on the fence regarding these age bans. On one hand you are correct, but on the other hand consider that what’s lost is something most of us probably could live without. I am putting both social media and porn into that bucket.
The more I think about it the less and less difference I see between social media and porn.
I'm against all those things as well but placing a ban on them is the same mechanism as banning anything. People should have the freedom to do things we disagree with. I haven't used social media (other than HN if it counts as one) for almost 20 years. I think they're toxic and a waste of time. But that doesn't mean other people shouldn't be allowed to use them. If people want to watch brainrot all day its they're life and I have no say in that. This is so my own personal freedom is preserved.
You can't have freedom if a few people have a microphone that reaches hundreds of millions of people have zero responsibilities for how they use that microphone.
If you actually haven't used social media recently then I get why you'd be confused, because back in the day Facebook had a chronological timeline of people you specifically added in. The way a modern social media recommender algorithms work is completely different. If you, for example, say "I want to hear everything that Bob has to say" by "subscribing" to Bob or whatever, you "might" see when Bob says something, or instead you "might" see Mary's post from the other side of the world that has some strangely aggressive opinions about someone the billionaire platform owner happens to hate.
Social media companies have decided by buddying up to the US administration that they get to decide what everyone around you sees or hears. If a couple of billionaires decide that they don't like phyzix5761 you might just get lynched by an angry mob. That's not gonna do much for your freedom, in-fact it's kind of the opposite.
I marketed on FB before ads, our first client at the social agency I worked at in 08 was nature made supplements. It was fun and interesting at the beginning, then ads rolled in and I got out of it. It turned into something like the neighborhood swimming pool where everyone was swimming in each other's... I could see it and feel it.
Since about 2012 or so I was dreaming of a simple law or something on the books that banned ads in algorithmic feeds. It would be a really easy way to stop us from getting where we are today. It certainly would have slowed down the walled gardens and shittification of the internet.
I deal with teenagers that are on this stuff now and it's a fight, constantly. They hate hearing me go on about it.
What do yall think of Snapchat b.c we just caved and let my daughter use it.
I live with my older in laws and it’s not just affecting the younger generation. The older generation will also happily doom scroll whatever slop the algorithm feeds them. Usually not uplifting stuff…
I agree. I’d much rather if we simply banned personalised algorithmic feeds, for everyone. They’re the new smoking. They’re toxic to mental health and to society more broadly. They’re no good for adults or children - so no need for age checks for any of it.
YouTube and Facebook could still work. Just show the channels I’m subscribed to instead of whatever an AI thinks will drive me toward addiction. Even YouTube’s recommended “watch next” could survive. They’d just have to base the recommendations on what the viewer population as a whole enjoy instead of putting me personally in a bubble.
Well, one example is the "are you a bot check". If you don't give out your age and let the provider verify that, you are banned from using the internet.
Thse are new "freedoms" we are going to enjoy in a little while.
But from first hand, I grew up on social media and I can’t say it was really positive for me or the people around me that also grew up on/with social media.
I’m wondering how this would change mental health in young people. Can anyone point me to specific studies on this?
Personally I believe that our communities and mental health deteriorate through social media especially in a young age.
Although I am a firm believer of the above, I do not believe that Governments are doing it because they do care about our health.
Quite the opposite. I believe they want to manipulate us as much as they can so they can keep in power.
Although they want that, they have seen that social media has the power on gathering people and creating protests, so I believe they want to cut it off on younger people that usually have way more anger and got much less to lose (nowadays that the light at the end of the tunnel is fading) than a middle-aged man being mind-controlled his whole life being a good abiding citizen.
Its a power tool, they are just swinging it where they want. Soonish in EU we'll have the same ban, but it won't be because EU politicians cares about children, it is so they can keep their power and not have a generation that has access to other sources than traditional media and structured schools grooming them on just obeing their masters.
Are political revolutions really brought about by children under 16? I think there's an argument that these policies push for identifying adults and that that might stifle speaking out, but I don't think any of it would be about stifling uprising from 15 year olds.
And when you speak of governments doing this to stay in power: which governments? All political parties in general? Just typical old-school politicians? Because there's a fairly atypical leader in the US, and there's an atypical rising force in Australia, and so on, and I think their popularity is stronger in older age brackets than aforementioned 15 year old.
The Anxious Generation is a recent book that extensively explains the damage caused by social media before age 16. The arguments in the book would support such a ban if it manages to get the majority of kids off social media, but it has to be a critical mass and not easily evadable
I’ve given this a lot of thought as well and I’m also generally a little unsure, especially because the Internet was so positive for me in most other ways (it’s hard to overstate what battle.net communities did for my psychology and confidence as somebody who felt kind of alone) but I think what ultimately distinguishes the current harm of social media is that what we had back then was not nearly as sophisticated. Yes I’m sure they were getting some data from us, yes there was exploitation and problems, But the current infrastructure of the “attention economy” is absolutely insane and beyond destructive.
From a social perspective, it wasn’t really until Instagram blew up in popularity and we had to start learning not to take people’s feeds as representative of how great their lives were that this stuff started to creep up. IMO Facebook was a little more text driven and myspace was mostly just middle school drama that would’ve taken place IRL anyway.
I think that comment about sophistication is absolutely key. Not even just data harvesting, but actively working against the interests of a user to keep them actively engaged.
This is separate from mandating age verification onto everyone.
Personally I don't really care as to whether social media is banned or not, though I also don't think state actors should even be able to restrict us. However had, when it comes to age sniffing, I fail to see why I should yield my personal data, in order to access information on the www. This kind of defeats the purpose of www if a state can restrict us here (any state - not surprising in a dictatorship, but odd in a democracy).
The list is pretty small, so I wonder if this just drives users to other, smaller platforms. That said, the list of platforms includes all the biggest offenders of engagement optimization, so it feels more like a ban of addictive social media than all social media in general. But it's also interesting they ban messaging apps, which I assume parents use to keep contact with their kids.
And I personally get a lot of news from Facebook and Insta, never used Twitter. So who is to choose what social media is good and what should be banned.
So we're all going to accept mass survaliance for everybody who is >=16 in order to "protect" those who are under 16. Yet parents wont get any notices if their child bypasses the id check.
Social media is inherently mass surveillance, or at least that's the narrative the big companies themselves sell to those who want ad slots in order to justify the prices they charge.
As a Malaysian and a parent, and as someone who detests censorship and who is wholely aware of the slippery slope nature of censorship, I actually agree with the ban.
This is because in Malaysia we already have seen enough examples of bad, vague laws have been used to shut up/down the ethnic minorities and dissenters, adding this ban will not change too much of the landscape.
Banning younger children to have a social media account is good. If we can ban kids from driving because their brains aren't fully developed yet, why not just ban social media account for the same reason?
It's actually sickening to see that everyone-- especially children-- glues to phone in public space: playground, restaurants and whatnot. Of course you can say that adults should follow the same ban but adults are more resistant to the opium of social media ( refer to the driving car example above). So I think the double standard is excusable.
The detriment effects of social media towards the young, girls especially, are well documented ( see the Jonathan Hahdt book "the anxious generation"). So I think the ban is valid.
Like banning the sale of nicotine products to under-16s, it won't be a perfect solution as a few will continue to work around the restriction, but it's a huge step in the right direction.
I like this. I'm just worried that it's going to make it way harder to create new independent small websites, if the webmasters have to check their users' age.
Well no-one said they have to implement it themselves. I'm sure Google and Apple are willing to send a hardware-signed attestation that the device owner is 18+ if required bu the state.
I think this is by design. I think small independent new websites will cease to exist.
I'm generally supportive of bans like this, but I don't want it to come at the expense of the privacy of adult users. I fear this is the way we're going in the west.
This is likely because the government fears of protests. Just like the bans in the west were mostly about anti Israel/ pro Palestinian rhetoric, this is a response to the anti Government protests last year in Indonesia and elsewhere. They're afraid of it happening there.
Out of curiosity, how difficult (from reasonably expensive to impossibly expensive) would it be to build a second internet for children, completely disconnected from what we'd call the adult internet?
If we're going toward this highly curated model, which I'm not against, I'm wondering if this would be a reasonable solution to preventing the exploitation of minors on the internet.
It might be a good business (like youtube for kids) but would it actually be good for kids? They should go outside with their friends, and people in the tech industry should stay away from them. Allegedly good intentions ("help you stay in touch with your friends") will eventually turn into what it always turns into.
Nothing is universally good for kids in too big quantities, but I think this approach would be less bad than any other approach to the moral panic around social media.
I would never let my kids access YouTube Kids, and I probably also wouldn't let them loose unsupervised on a kids-only internet either, but I would much prefer it to the alternative whack-a-mole approach of trying to make the actual internet a kids friendly place, which will eventually destroy online anonymity and turn a few of the biggest tech companies into de facto gatekeepers for everyone and handing them a regulatory moat the size of the Atlantic.
At first I thought this sounded implausible, but then I remembered we already have a second internet, largely isolated from the main internet - the darkweb.
are you really under the impression that preventing exploitation of minors is the goal of these online-identification-masquerading-as-age-verification laws?
> I'm wondering if this would be a reasonable solution to preventing the exploitation of minors on the internet
The bulk of exploitation comes from
1. Big tech. I imagine that 90% of "internet for kids" would be Cocomelon AI-generated slop
2. Other kids bullying each other
Not to mention the simple fact that if you shelter kids from any adult content then they'll turn 18 while still having child-like mindset, which means that "exploitation of kids" will turn into "explanation of young adults".
> The rules require social media platforms to implement age-verification systems and block users under 16 from creating accounts.
The to me interesting part is how these all allege to restrict under-age people, but EVERYONE will be forced to give out their year. Aka the world wide web is turned into a giant age-sniffing network. I don't buy for a second that this is due to the alleged "we must protect children". What is also weird is ... if you are 15 years old, you get restricted here; at age 16, you don't, and at age 18 you are often taken from mandatory draft (in some countries) to be used for training in the military. In modern warfare with drones, this means cannon fodder, while the superrich are exempt from everything (look at the orange man and ask him when he served). Something is fundamentally broken here.
This concerted global effort is more about building the surveillance infrastructure for the web that will be required given AI's takeoff, and less-so about the well being of children.
I am against these age bans because I know the mechanisms behind it will be used against everybody.
I am, however, all for banning personalised feeds, data collection, targeted ads, what amounts slot machines, and generally the poison these platforms spew.
What this will look like in practice I don't know. I am neither a lawyer, politician, nor do I work on these systems.
>banning personalised feeds
This is just banning social media with one extra step, these apps are virtually useless without personalization and their economy relies on it. I'm all for banning these platforms, we're all hooked on them and we need a hard ban, I know it won't happen but it's the only way.
You could make social media based on anonymous queries without personalization or likes. It wouldn't be useless, it would just be unrecognizable as social media.
The old social media was at its simplest a chronological feed from the friends, you wanted to see.
If I want to add personalization I could add a algorithm to do that, only so that it promotes my wellbeing.
It really shouldn't be this difficult.
Personally I would prioritize banning things like smoking, alcohol and meat.
But then again, it’s kinda a free world. You can’t just ban everything. I think an age ban is a good middle road.
> these apps are virtually useless without personalization
Social media was popular before the algorithmically tuned endless scroll.
I am completely on the fence regarding these age bans. On one hand you are correct, but on the other hand consider that what’s lost is something most of us probably could live without. I am putting both social media and porn into that bucket.
The more I think about it the less and less difference I see between social media and porn.
Porn is way more regulated and the addiction to it is not a mental health pandemic like social media addiction
I'm against all those things as well but placing a ban on them is the same mechanism as banning anything. People should have the freedom to do things we disagree with. I haven't used social media (other than HN if it counts as one) for almost 20 years. I think they're toxic and a waste of time. But that doesn't mean other people shouldn't be allowed to use them. If people want to watch brainrot all day its they're life and I have no say in that. This is so my own personal freedom is preserved.
You can't have freedom if a few people have a microphone that reaches hundreds of millions of people have zero responsibilities for how they use that microphone.
If you actually haven't used social media recently then I get why you'd be confused, because back in the day Facebook had a chronological timeline of people you specifically added in. The way a modern social media recommender algorithms work is completely different. If you, for example, say "I want to hear everything that Bob has to say" by "subscribing" to Bob or whatever, you "might" see when Bob says something, or instead you "might" see Mary's post from the other side of the world that has some strangely aggressive opinions about someone the billionaire platform owner happens to hate.
Social media companies have decided by buddying up to the US administration that they get to decide what everyone around you sees or hears. If a couple of billionaires decide that they don't like phyzix5761 you might just get lynched by an angry mob. That's not gonna do much for your freedom, in-fact it's kind of the opposite.
I marketed on FB before ads, our first client at the social agency I worked at in 08 was nature made supplements. It was fun and interesting at the beginning, then ads rolled in and I got out of it. It turned into something like the neighborhood swimming pool where everyone was swimming in each other's... I could see it and feel it.
Since about 2012 or so I was dreaming of a simple law or something on the books that banned ads in algorithmic feeds. It would be a really easy way to stop us from getting where we are today. It certainly would have slowed down the walled gardens and shittification of the internet.
I deal with teenagers that are on this stuff now and it's a fight, constantly. They hate hearing me go on about it.
What do yall think of Snapchat b.c we just caved and let my daughter use it.
The worst part are other parents that don't give a shit. You wouldn't have to fight if everyone would keep their kids off socials.
I live with my older in laws and it’s not just affecting the younger generation. The older generation will also happily doom scroll whatever slop the algorithm feeds them. Usually not uplifting stuff…
Yes - Australian here. We started this, somehow.
I agree. I’d much rather if we simply banned personalised algorithmic feeds, for everyone. They’re the new smoking. They’re toxic to mental health and to society more broadly. They’re no good for adults or children - so no need for age checks for any of it.
YouTube and Facebook could still work. Just show the channels I’m subscribed to instead of whatever an AI thinks will drive me toward addiction. Even YouTube’s recommended “watch next” could survive. They’d just have to base the recommendations on what the viewer population as a whole enjoy instead of putting me personally in a bubble.
Well, one example is the "are you a bot check". If you don't give out your age and let the provider verify that, you are banned from using the internet.
Thse are new "freedoms" we are going to enjoy in a little while.
I’m on the fence regarding bans like this.
But from first hand, I grew up on social media and I can’t say it was really positive for me or the people around me that also grew up on/with social media.
I’m wondering how this would change mental health in young people. Can anyone point me to specific studies on this?
Personally I believe that our communities and mental health deteriorate through social media especially in a young age.
Although I am a firm believer of the above, I do not believe that Governments are doing it because they do care about our health. Quite the opposite. I believe they want to manipulate us as much as they can so they can keep in power.
Although they want that, they have seen that social media has the power on gathering people and creating protests, so I believe they want to cut it off on younger people that usually have way more anger and got much less to lose (nowadays that the light at the end of the tunnel is fading) than a middle-aged man being mind-controlled his whole life being a good abiding citizen.
Its a power tool, they are just swinging it where they want. Soonish in EU we'll have the same ban, but it won't be because EU politicians cares about children, it is so they can keep their power and not have a generation that has access to other sources than traditional media and structured schools grooming them on just obeing their masters.
Are political revolutions really brought about by children under 16? I think there's an argument that these policies push for identifying adults and that that might stifle speaking out, but I don't think any of it would be about stifling uprising from 15 year olds.
And when you speak of governments doing this to stay in power: which governments? All political parties in general? Just typical old-school politicians? Because there's a fairly atypical leader in the US, and there's an atypical rising force in Australia, and so on, and I think their popularity is stronger in older age brackets than aforementioned 15 year old.
> I believe they want to manipulate us as much as they can so they can keep in power.
And the social media companies don't want to manipulate you for power and profit?
The conspiratorial angles to these bans sounds an awful lot like the disinformation you see on social media about subjects like vaccines.
The Anxious Generation is a recent book that extensively explains the damage caused by social media before age 16. The arguments in the book would support such a ban if it manages to get the majority of kids off social media, but it has to be a critical mass and not easily evadable
I'd be very careful about studies that show a result favourable to the current zeitgeist's moral panic:
"A recent study claimed to show that social media use was hurting kids' cognitive development.
But I had access to their data, so I was able to show that they were completely wrong."
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/social-scientists-are-lazy
I’ve given this a lot of thought as well and I’m also generally a little unsure, especially because the Internet was so positive for me in most other ways (it’s hard to overstate what battle.net communities did for my psychology and confidence as somebody who felt kind of alone) but I think what ultimately distinguishes the current harm of social media is that what we had back then was not nearly as sophisticated. Yes I’m sure they were getting some data from us, yes there was exploitation and problems, But the current infrastructure of the “attention economy” is absolutely insane and beyond destructive.
From a social perspective, it wasn’t really until Instagram blew up in popularity and we had to start learning not to take people’s feeds as representative of how great their lives were that this stuff started to creep up. IMO Facebook was a little more text driven and myspace was mostly just middle school drama that would’ve taken place IRL anyway.
I think that comment about sophistication is absolutely key. Not even just data harvesting, but actively working against the interests of a user to keep them actively engaged.
But you refer here solely to social media.
This is separate from mandating age verification onto everyone.
Personally I don't really care as to whether social media is banned or not, though I also don't think state actors should even be able to restrict us. However had, when it comes to age sniffing, I fail to see why I should yield my personal data, in order to access information on the www. This kind of defeats the purpose of www if a state can restrict us here (any state - not surprising in a dictatorship, but odd in a democracy).
The real subject is what it implies: identification of every Malaysian posting on social media to enforce this ban.
Control of speech through think of the children rhetoric.
Ah, it requires at least 8 million users[0] in Malaysia and they have a list. I was wondering how Hacker News etc. were going to comply.
0: https://soyacincau.com/2025/12/15/mcmc-social-media-instant-...
The list is pretty small, so I wonder if this just drives users to other, smaller platforms. That said, the list of platforms includes all the biggest offenders of engagement optimization, so it feels more like a ban of addictive social media than all social media in general. But it's also interesting they ban messaging apps, which I assume parents use to keep contact with their kids.
At this point, if we all get banned from Instagram and Facebook we lose nothing. I find Twitter very useful still for software stuff.
And I personally get a lot of news from Facebook and Insta, never used Twitter. So who is to choose what social media is good and what should be banned.
So we're all going to accept mass survaliance for everybody who is >=16 in order to "protect" those who are under 16. Yet parents wont get any notices if their child bypasses the id check.
Social media is inherently mass surveillance, or at least that's the narrative the big companies themselves sell to those who want ad slots in order to justify the prices they charge.
HN is social media...
As a Malaysian and a parent, and as someone who detests censorship and who is wholely aware of the slippery slope nature of censorship, I actually agree with the ban.
This is because in Malaysia we already have seen enough examples of bad, vague laws have been used to shut up/down the ethnic minorities and dissenters, adding this ban will not change too much of the landscape.
Banning younger children to have a social media account is good. If we can ban kids from driving because their brains aren't fully developed yet, why not just ban social media account for the same reason?
It's actually sickening to see that everyone-- especially children-- glues to phone in public space: playground, restaurants and whatnot. Of course you can say that adults should follow the same ban but adults are more resistant to the opium of social media ( refer to the driving car example above). So I think the double standard is excusable.
The detriment effects of social media towards the young, girls especially, are well documented ( see the Jonathan Hahdt book "the anxious generation"). So I think the ban is valid.
Great news, hope many more countries follow suit.
Like banning the sale of nicotine products to under-16s, it won't be a perfect solution as a few will continue to work around the restriction, but it's a huge step in the right direction.
I like this. I'm just worried that it's going to make it way harder to create new independent small websites, if the webmasters have to check their users' age.
Well no-one said they have to implement it themselves. I'm sure Google and Apple are willing to send a hardware-signed attestation that the device owner is 18+ if required bu the state.
I think this is by design. I think small independent new websites will cease to exist.
I'm generally supportive of bans like this, but I don't want it to come at the expense of the privacy of adult users. I fear this is the way we're going in the west.
"The rules ... apply to platforms with at least 8 million users..."
This is likely because the government fears of protests. Just like the bans in the west were mostly about anti Israel/ pro Palestinian rhetoric, this is a response to the anti Government protests last year in Indonesia and elsewhere. They're afraid of it happening there.
Out of curiosity, how difficult (from reasonably expensive to impossibly expensive) would it be to build a second internet for children, completely disconnected from what we'd call the adult internet?
If we're going toward this highly curated model, which I'm not against, I'm wondering if this would be a reasonable solution to preventing the exploitation of minors on the internet.
It might be a good business (like youtube for kids) but would it actually be good for kids? They should go outside with their friends, and people in the tech industry should stay away from them. Allegedly good intentions ("help you stay in touch with your friends") will eventually turn into what it always turns into.
Nothing is universally good for kids in too big quantities, but I think this approach would be less bad than any other approach to the moral panic around social media.
I would never let my kids access YouTube Kids, and I probably also wouldn't let them loose unsupervised on a kids-only internet either, but I would much prefer it to the alternative whack-a-mole approach of trying to make the actual internet a kids friendly place, which will eventually destroy online anonymity and turn a few of the biggest tech companies into de facto gatekeepers for everyone and handing them a regulatory moat the size of the Atlantic.
At first I thought this sounded implausible, but then I remembered we already have a second internet, largely isolated from the main internet - the darkweb.
I shudder at the mere thought of opening this can of worms, but… have you looked into web3?
Web3 is neckbeard territory, under 16s rarely get that kind of hair.
are you really under the impression that preventing exploitation of minors is the goal of these online-identification-masquerading-as-age-verification laws?
Prepare for Lords of the Flies: Digital Edition , I'd say.
> I'm wondering if this would be a reasonable solution to preventing the exploitation of minors on the internet
The bulk of exploitation comes from
1. Big tech. I imagine that 90% of "internet for kids" would be Cocomelon AI-generated slop
2. Other kids bullying each other
Not to mention the simple fact that if you shelter kids from any adult content then they'll turn 18 while still having child-like mindset, which means that "exploitation of kids" will turn into "explanation of young adults".
Honestly? Yes
Social media is more harmful than alcohol, and it could solicit so much negative reactions at formation age. This needs to be global.
> The rules require social media platforms to implement age-verification systems and block users under 16 from creating accounts.
The to me interesting part is how these all allege to restrict under-age people, but EVERYONE will be forced to give out their year. Aka the world wide web is turned into a giant age-sniffing network. I don't buy for a second that this is due to the alleged "we must protect children". What is also weird is ... if you are 15 years old, you get restricted here; at age 16, you don't, and at age 18 you are often taken from mandatory draft (in some countries) to be used for training in the military. In modern warfare with drones, this means cannon fodder, while the superrich are exempt from everything (look at the orange man and ask him when he served). Something is fundamentally broken here.