Hacker News Reader

Comment by fighterpilot | Hacker News Reader

The two best ideas I've heard:

- Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this.

- Require ID verification by law but allow people to use a fake name.

Fixes the bots issue and the kid depression issue.

The market isn't going to get there by itself because of competition. If insta implements this then they lose market share to snap. So there's a strong incentive to attract as many kids as possible. Need a govt intervention.

This also isn't negative for free speech as a value, since people can still post under a fake name. It just kills the bots. And without the bot assisted fake news, there will be less pressure and need to censor, so it's actually a win for free speech.

View on HN

I grew up on an internet community that railed against age restrictions for video games and content blockers for children. Bypassing school content blockers was a perennial favorite topic. I have to admit it’s surreal to see proposals like this on some of those same sites that advocated for freedom and deferring to parental choice:

> Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this.

It’s also surreal to see that totalitarian governments like China are doing almost exactly this (see recent video gaming bans for under-18s) with a negative reaction from HN and tech communities, but for some reason the same restrictions are championed for social media.

I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that HN and online tech communities are getting older. We can imagine ourselves playing video games as kids, but social media is a new, scary foreign concept that we need to protect the children from.

I have to wonder if the whole anti-social-media trend will play out like the anti-violent video game protests of the 90s: A flurry of “think of the children” arguments and political non-action that ultimately fizzles out when the new generation grows up and takes over the discourse, having growing up with social media and turned out just fine.

I'm with you, though, I have a fairly controversial opinion on FB and social media in general.

I think Facebook is just the result you get when the general public participates in online discourse. I believe the algorithms may in some cases magnify certain discussions that many deem "dangerous," but mostly, it's just that people have zero empathy when conversing online.

If you've seen Parks and Rec, the scenes from the town hall meetings are basically Facebook. You have one person complaining about some inane thing nobody cares about, another complaining about undesirable people in their neighborhood, another spouting off conspiracies, etc.

Back in the early days of the internet, most of the people participating in online discussion were nerds. This fact alone made the discourse more manageable since most forums focused on discussions around specific topics.

Of course, there was always the "General Discussion" parts of any forum which suffered similar problems to what we see on FB. The difference was, the forums were heavily moderated. I'm sure many here have stories about some authoritarian mod that banned them just for having a different opinion.

Facebook on the other hand, isn't moderated much. If you start a flame war on FB, there is no one there to ban you. In the earlier days of the internet, you would get banned pretty quickly if you veered too far from the acceptable level of discourse.

Shit, look at forums with little moderation, they are 1000x worse than FB or any social media app. There is no algorithm that made 4chan the cesspit that it is (was?).

Personally, I think FB's approach has been pretty hands-off, and I think this is the correct choice for their platform.

It seems, what everyone wants (this "whistleblower" included) is for the ideas they don't like to be moderated. The internet has shown us what "the other side" really thinks, and we don't like it.

>Shit, look at forums with little moderation, they are 1000x worse than FB or any social media app. There is no algorithm that made 4chan the cesspit that it is (was?).

This isn't really the case. 4chan is pretty heavily moderated, it just has different strategies than most forums, e.g. quarantining toxic or off-topic opinions in containment boards rather than having all content in a single centralized feed.

The site has plenty of rules and ban-able offenses, and each board has their own rules and ban-able offenses on top of that -- and then there's board-level etiquette which can cause a post to get ignored or not, and even thread-level etiquette for whether your post within a recurring general thread will get replies or not, all of which can be described as moderation in some form. Site culture as a whole tends to be more prickly than most due to total anonymity, chronological (rather than vote-based) post ordering, and inherited countercultural origins, rather than any lack of moderation.

Video games are a flawed analogy because the evidence that video games are harmful for kids (except in situations of extreme addiction) is far more flimsy than the evidence for social media's widespread harms to kids. If you're for the alcohol age limits but against the same for social media I'd ask why the difference.

> Require ID verification

I'll pass on putting my personal ID in the hands of an organization that sells data as a business. No matter how many flimsy laws they put in place to ban selling my PII, you'd have to be born yesterday to think that won't just delay the sale this new treasure-trove of information.

I think this just goes to show how useful some kind of digital identity verification service would be. Giving your ID to a third party isn't that risky (as I hand it over to grocery cashiers all the time) but we certainly have the tech to do better.

It would be great to have a system with a municipal agency where you sign up for an account at the DMV and then they will sign low-info attestations of identity ("this person is over 18", "this person resides in California", etc) in response to queries from orgs.

We have a lot of evidence that local/municipal agencies are a huge attack vector for hackers. You have the resources and talent pool of a small city who now has to defend against attacks from all over the planet. Consider the ransomware attacks against the city of Baltimore: https://www.govtech.com/security/for-second-time-in-a-year-b...

I'd much rather my sensitive digital information be stored with FB (knowing how much they spend on cyber security) than the CA DMV.

> I'd much rather my sensitive digital information be stored with FB (knowing how much they spend on cyber security) than the CA DMV.

I know what you mean and also my information is stored at the DMV if I want a drivers' liscence - we have no choice in the matter. I think we must improve public systems.

Where on earth (quite literally) do you live where you give your ID to cashiers in the grocery stores? Even in alcohol sales, these ID records are not kept. The clerks just look at the ID.

It's quite common to scan IDs in California to verify age (I assume to guard against fakes). I believe it's also common in other parts of the US.

This. Society evolving to require a service like this sounds great to me.

They probably already have all your data, from Equifax or T-Mobile or whomever else is selling.

I’m not a Facebook fan, but it is incorrect to say they sell data. They collect data, build a profile of you and your interests and sell access to your eyeballs to advertisers.

They generally don't really sell data, they use your data to sell your eyeballs. The PII you're referring to is a drop in the bucket compared to the content most users are willingly sharing on their own. Yes, they will immediately monetize this information. But if that really bothers you, I'd have to ask if you're actually at all interested in being in the platform at all. The marginal privacy invasion going on here is so tiny compared to the product itself. It doesn't seem like a reasonable counterargument to implementing this as a safeguard.

Perhaps there are ways to do it indirectly?

Require a credit card associated with the account that matches the name of the account? (IIRC, you need to be 18+ to get a credit card)

(I recognize this goes outside the scope of GP, and this example may not be viable as I'm sure I am forgetting something here.)

Not sure all states do this, but the Texas DMV already sells the information on your driver's license to marketers. Not much you can do when the agency that issues identification also sells your data, aside from totally withdraw and don't participate in modern life.

The world isn't Texas. I'd rather not give Facebook extra data to play with because "well, Texas already sells Texan's data".

What if the government gives each valid person a unique token that they can use to register once per social media site?

Have you ever provided your SSN to use a bank or applied for a car loan or mortgage? In all cases you are probably dealing with an entity that would sell your data or atleast share with "affiliates and partners."

Your argument is "well the cat is out of the bag already, so let's make it worse by giving Facebook this sort of data too". We're talking about Facebook here.

Your personal ID contains public information.

My public information is not tied intimately to my behavior and social circles.

Unless you live in a shed in the Rockies, I got bad news for you.

Skip the trite cliches, what are you talking about? My driver's license, passport, whatever does not directly encode my relationships other than simple demographics.

I'm not under an illusion that I myself am personally anonymous. I'm sure I leave enough breadcrumbs around the Internet but that's my (dubious) choice. However, force me to verify my identity, use my real name, or enter a phone number and I lose that opportunity.

Every time I swipe my credit card, an intimate profile of who I am and what I do is updated. I don't see the difference between verifying my identity to use a service, and the thousands of other electronic activities I perform on a daily basis that succinctly outline what I do.

This nonsense that one more organization asking for ID is somehow the straw the broke the camels back is decades too late.

You say you are under no illusions, and then you demonstrate with words that you are under illusions.

You don't see it? It is clear as a bell to me.

I still fail to see how this makes the idea of trusting Facebook or any other social media company with my ID any better. What's clear as a bell to me is that, given how Facebook is known to behave reprehensibly, giving them more data is not something we should even be considering.

It's a lot like saying "well now, this boat is full of holes, so rather than start patching them, let's just open several new ones".

> let's just open several new ones

I see it as the exact opposite: the gambler's fallacy. "This time we'll protect our privacy! I got a lucky feeling!!"

Doors open. Horse is gone. ID is actually smarter in this case because it will prevent fake accounts, which is a huge problem given their failures at policing the horrible things being done behind anonymity.

This isn't even remotely close to the gambler's fallacy. This isn't an issue of statistics, or probabilities being skewed 'this time'. Really what the question being asked is if you want to force people by law to hand more information over to organizations like Facebook. Legislation or not, Facebook and their ilk will abuse this data. Give it time, and so will any government. Your argument is basically "yeah, well it's so bad at this point we might as well not even try to stop it".

In addition:

> policing the horrible things being done behind anonymity

Anonymity isn't something you can just do away with and have a happy ending. In some parts of the world, anonymity is the only thing standing between people and their government. That's not something I'd like to see done away with. The Afghan people need anonymity now more than nearly anyone else in the world. As do the Chinese, the Turkmens, Eritreans, domestic violence victims, and anyone who lives in a world where being identified could lead to a swift, brutal death. What are these folks to do? Hide forever? If that's the result, then we are not just seeing social cooling, we're looking at a social ice age.

HIPAA isn't a flimsy law and works quite well . Something similar can be used

Right, the difference is medical records don't have a track record of being bought and sold with zero consequence. We're looking to take businesses that operate from the paradigm of "sell first, deal with the fallout later". Not organization that from day one have had a gun to their head if they so much as give the data a sideways look like those under HIPAA.

Sounds like a big ask porting something like that over to a widely public industry

HIPAA is PHI - wouldn’t apply in this example

> Something similar can be used

>I'll pass on putting my personal ID in the hands of an organization that sells data as a business.

I see this as a win for society. The more friction we insert and the more people are discouraged to join these ad-ware social networks the better.

I don't think the average person cares enough, or knows enough about how these organizations operate to actually think past putting their ID in whatever state approved portal you need to use. If people do it willingly, it does not reduce the cost to society of millions personal ID documents leaking or being sold to the highest bidder.

There's an even simpler solution: ban free social media. Require each platform to charge a minimum of $x/user/year.

You remove kids by default (no credit card/bank card), and the focus of product managers is less on driving addictive browsing, and more on driving renewals (presumably through quality features, content, and fostering community).

The customer is no longer the advertisers (or shady Governmental data scrapers), but now the users.

Look at the generally higher quality of Netflix content compared to free-to-air TV.

You could apply the same regulation to other addictive products: p*rnography and games. These categories would also improve in quality, be less exploitative, and become less available to children, if a minimum payment was required for access.

There was an article on here not too long ago that made a rather salient point that "even if you're paying, you might still be the product". If you're not paying, the only way they'll make money is off of you, but there's nothing stopping them from doing so anyway even if you are paying.

Found it:

https://odysee.com/@CyberLounge:a/even-if-youre-paying-youre...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27918331

> You remove kids by default (no credit card/bank card

Children have parents and many of them will shell out thousands of dollars a year so their kid can buy Fortnite skins. I don’t imagine a credit card requirement will keep kids off of social media.

For the purposes of addressing some of the data privacy concerns, I think it would be even easier to just restrict the collection and/or sale of personal information. Simply charging for the service doesn’t prevent or disincentivize companies from also selling your data.

The control is still with the parents. They can cut off access by controlling payment access. When the product is free, the control is with the corporation.

Agreed, it sounded like you were trying to prevent kids' access altogether and not just give better parental controls..

Okay, they'll charge 0.01 per year and you've just kicked every poor person (or person without a bank card) off social media.

Social media, for all its terrible ills, is the primary way many people get their real news too. By news, I mean municipal updates, weather alerts, local events, etc.

I don't think putting up a financial barrier to that by law is the solution.

> municipal updates, weather alerts, local events, etc.

Having public -- especially government -- information siloed in private services is its own problem that in my opinion also needs badly to be fixed.

Magazines (fashion, fitness, sport, etc) have this effect by virtue of advertisers not wanting to be seen in a "free" publication, but most of their revenue still comes from ads, which is why you continue to still receive new issues for months after you supposedly canceled, even though you nominally are paying for it, all the incentives are for them to pretend you're a paying customer when you in fact are not.

But I don't really know how you could reasonably make this work for online communities. Is reading a blog and commenting on it participating in a "social network"? What about reading a blog without comments? Viewing a sponsored Twitch stream?

It would be a pretty easy legal definition. Start with services that have over 100 million users:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...

And exclude messaging services eg. Telegram, or platforms which are focused on technical or professional knowledge sharing (eg. Quora, LinkedIn, Wikipedia).

I think the risk would be conglomeration - platforms would partner up so that the minimum fee could give access to multiple services. You'd also want to avoid the fee from just becoming a 'token' with advertising still driving 90%+ of revenue.

Old-fashioned antitrust enforcement might still be necessary (eg. separating Facebook from Instagram and Whatsapp), as well as setting a maximum % of gross revenue that can come from advertising, maybe 75%.

> You remove kids by default (no credit card/bank card)

You also remove about 7-22% of the US population that is unbanked or underbanked (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbanked) from participation in democracy. Not to mention you then have an enforceable paper trail from an online account to some sort of government-backed ID (since you need that to open a bank account), which will lead to self-censorship issues.

Facebook and the Internet in general has become the virtual equivalent of townhalls and public "speakers corners".

That sounds like China. Recently they restricted time spent on video games. And banned portrayal of ‘effeminate and gay men’ in video games’

So..now we need regulations to be free? Nice!

* https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/31/tech/china-ban-video-games-mi...

Being able to pay reddit to remove ads is one of the reasons I like the site. Sure, the fact I'm paying probably makes my data more valuable to ad companies, but at least at reddit I won't see any.

Their increasing push to gamify awards, while selling a currency to do so does annoy me though.

How would you stop prepaid debit cards? In this country a child can get one attached to their kids bank account, themselves, from the age of 11. Admitedly there's an audit trail, but I'm not sure it blocks as many kids as you think it would.

That would also drive many people into realizing that they do not need any social media at all. That's a good policy. However, foreign companies may decide that they don't care about US laws because they have no US employees or assets.

> This also isn't negative for free speech as a value

Free speech is a right in the USA, not a "value". It isn't something we strive for; it is a basic right.

Things like film ratings are not legally biding for example. The industry took it upon themselves to create ratings as guidelines to parents.

> - Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this.

As for alcohol - purchasing alcohol isn't a protected right and not analogous to speech at all.

Free speech is only a right as far as the constitution guarantees (which is limited). Personally I’d like US culture to fully embrace the value of free speech, but support for it generally depends on if your favorite political party is in power.

If we truly valued free speech we would not have all this debate over censorship.

The Bill of Rights is a list of God given rights the government CANNOT take away from you, not something they give you.

In self rule, The goverment is us. We can take away any part of the bill of rights that we see fit, with a new amendment

Fascinating how God did not appear to intervene in the preceding 100 centuries of government taking away exactly those rights.

  "Free speech is a right in the USA, not a "value"."

Speech on someone's private platform isn't a right, it's a privilege that they're choosing to extend to you. That's why in this instance, this ID verification law is merely protecting the ethical value and culture of free speech, not the legal right to do so which remains unchanged. It's a shame we don't have separate terms for the legal right of free speech and cultural value of free speech, since it's easy to confuse the two.

  "As for alcohol - purchasing alcohol isn't a protected right and not analogous to speech at all."

I hadn't thought of the angle that banning kids off social media was effectively a government restriction of free speech. Interesting perspective! Any 1A afficianados want to provide commentary here?

The parents comment was with regard to passing laws restricting access to or dissemination of speech on social media websites. That was the context of my response. If FB wants to implement age restrictions then that is their prerogative. But the government has no authority in this private matter. Their recent foray into a new “kids insta” leads me to believe FB is not interested in limiting their most profitable growth segment.

How would you prevent kids from just going on some other, new site? What's the distinction between the internet and social media?

Ignoring whether or not what you're describing is technically feasible (I don't think it is) - ultimately as long as children can use the internet the issues at hand will exist. Furthermore, why give social media entities more data in the form of government backed authentication?

  "news site"

Because social media is a status and looks competition between peers which is where the depression comes from. If they're just reading news and commenting that's fine. The internet itself isn't the problem, it's specifically social media.

  "Furthermore, why give social media entities more data in the form of government backed authentication?"

Part of the law could be to require an outsourced solution, with a Chinese Wall between them. The solution is only able to relay to the company that the person is a real person and over the age of X. Or a government solution, where the government provides a unique token to each valid person which can be used once per registration, so no ID needs to be given to the companies. Whatever it is, I'm sure a solution can be thought of.

I don’t know how the US would do it, but other countries like Korea and China and Russia have an agency to force their internally operated websites to comply. Global sites either fly under the radar by being too small, or comply under threat of being banned when they are large enough.

Kids are still able to buy alcohol by having other people do it for them. They also steal it. During a house break in, the police will often ask if any alcohol is missing which is a tell tale that teenagers were involved.

Kids are not simple, and will often out wit the adults in order to do things they want to do. It amazes me how adults seem to forget the things they did as teenagers, and maybe if they were actually goody two-shoe teenagers they had to have known what shenanigans other teens got up to. Pretty much the whole point of being a teenager is seeing what one can get away with by whatever means necessary.

Edit: some people are reading too much into this. no where did I suggest don't do x because of y. However, if you think x is a perfect solve, you need to be reminded that y can still happen. solving for y is always a problem

"People still do it" is a lame argument. It's all in the numbers. By that logic, murder should be legal since after all, murders still happen.

There are a lot of nice boys and girls who won't do something if it's illegal, but will if the government sanctions it.

The incentive for kids to break the law will be greatly diminished since the network of their peers won't be at a critical mass and it'll no longer be a requirement for their social status.

"Kids will break the law" isn't a compelling argument to not have the law in the first place. Is it unenforceable? Probably not; it leaves a hell of a digital trail to make a fake account if someone cares enough to tie it together. And even rarely-enforced laws declare that something is unacceptable in society and set a guard rail that most people follow.

Both of those proposals would probably have the effect of making it nearly impossible to ever compete against something like instagram, and would cement their existing position.

We could probably make some requirements around age, and focus enforcement on the biggest players in the space. However if we require real ID verification, no is going to enter the space ever again and FB/Instagram may well continue to be dominant because of the high compliance cost.

Is KYC that expensive? It's a mostly automated process that takes at most 10 seconds of human time per user and has a number of outsourced solutions available. Or the government can provide a solution. Or they can implement these regulations only on social networks with more than X thousand users.

It seems to me that children "get" the problem with Facebook & Instagram better than their parents. To quote an 11-year old boy speaking with FB internal research, "Facebook is for old people."[1] Maybe we should implement an age ceiling on use of social media!

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-files...

Those sound too chilling.

I’d propose banning algorithms for services with over one million users. Users must have complete control over what their feed shows. (And ability to filter)

I'd just love to see how the law operationalizes and the courts interpret something like "banning algorithms".

Obviously it wouldn’t be written into a bill like that. But Just like any other law. It would be something Congress authorizes an agency like the FTC or FCC to regulate.

If nothing else the feed algorithms would be public and regulators could provide feedback.

Yes, that's what I mean by "the law operationalizes".

"banning algorithms"

yeah uh good luck with that one

I keep saying this but it is so bizarre to me that our knee jerk reaction it to regulate and blame users.

Let’s try regulating the problem corporation first.

I think people are missing your point. Yes it is chilling and yes who in their right mind would give FB their ID but I think that's exactly the point. No one should want want to. People let FB abuse them simply because they don't know what's going on behind the scenes and having been manipulated too much already. FB knows waaaay too much about people already and has no problem selling that data to whoever puts money in their pockets.

> We ban kids from alcohol

And it's worked out well! I, for one, never so much as tasted alcohol until I was 21, because it would have been illegal for me to have done otherwise.

This. People are so worried about adults freely sharing information, but when it comes to children being influenced and manipulated we don’t make a big enough deal.

How about, reset market valuation to something reasonable, instead of speculators pushing the stock price to insane levels of overvaluation, justifying every dirty trick in the book to justify said price speculation? Do we really need to dump hundreds of billions of dollars into a couple of chat and picture-sharing apps? Especially when said pile of junk spies on your every move, every preference, and ultimately, every waking moment? It's almost as if the market did not deliver a good outcome for anything but investors.

What is wrong with speculation?

The whole point of the equity market is to allocate more capital to companies that have promising futures so they can use that capital to grow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com