Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services
blog.ericgoldman.org
blog.ericgoldman.org
1. this bill is trash, it couldn’t be enforced, it’s pandering.
2. Social media as it has existed for the last 5-10 years is harmful for teenagers.
Instagram is making teens depressed and suicidal. TikTok videos have people celebrating mental illness like Tourette’s and has brainwashed impressionable kids into believing they too have tics or multiple personalities or Tourette’s.
Something needs to be done. Not every corporate evolution is good or must be accepted as permanent. That’s corporate propaganda. Instagram needs a “taking the cocaine out of the recipe” moment if it’s going to survive as a reputable product.
State attorney general notices his kid's social media app is giving algorithmic instead of chronological results, subpoenas social networks for number of under-18s in Minnesota, files charges, court sets up enormous fine.
Which part of this process is impossible?
As an example, I work for a European company whose product tracks people in an indoor space, as a byproduct of its main function.
Our (German) CEO made it clear we were constrained in our product development by GDPR's stipulations around pseudonymous data and data retention.
Stopping that would mean a KYC process for every social media signup. I don't think that works either.
I'm sure there are plenty enough kids who accurately represented their age between 13-18 to make this quite enforceable. I probably said I was 13 when I was 12, or something close enough.
Do a PSA campaign telling parents to make sure their kids' social media apps correctly represent their age to keep them safe. Would work well enough.
Well, you might have been a precocious 2-year old Microsoft fan in 2012. So, depending on your timezone, you should be in bed young man! And what do you think you were doing on HN at the young age of 1?
> (b) The social media platform is liable to an individual account holder who received user-generated content through a social media algorithm while the individual account holder was under the age of 18 and was using the individual account holder’s own account, if the social media platform knew or had reason to know that the individual account holder was under the age of 18 and located in Minnesota. [...]
Sounds like they're not requiring unreasonable knowledge of faked ages.
If so that implies social network will have to scan every video for the age range of participants.
(or, well, not showing results to anyone)
I'm much less concerned about the issue of identifying kids (if they can't identify kids, all the better, adults get to benefit too) than that they're probably accidentally banning whole categories of useful things like rolling your own search engine.
I actually enjoyed seeing what my friends were up to on Facebook until they moved to this algorithmic timeline and it started showing only what they think I'd want to see.
Unfortunately it invariably thinks I want more of the same and that's exactly not what I want.
But I've closed all my accounts and don't think I'll ever go back anyway.
More top down control is the natural progression of what we're already seeing.
1991-2017 https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/suicidal-teens
2012-2020 https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/health-of-wom...
okay? I guess everything is fine then.
The sophistication of manipulation and control is highly granular in todays world, even a keyboard typing pattern can give away emotion which some can exploit.
You have a source for that? The statistics you're referring certainly don't say anything at all to back your claim.
Pretty sure a whole lot of things are making adults depressed and suicidal.
Your notion of social media causing some sort of enormously unique and enormous damage needs to be heavily qualified by real evidence compared to previous trends. I say all this, by the way, as someone who has enormous criticism for the intrusive, manipulative and heavy handed totalities of social media companies. However, it's one thing to hate them where they deserve hate and another to attribute very old problems of teenage life to them as if they were unique emergences today.
It's popular on HN to hate on social networks (despite many people here very much being dependent on them for their large salaries) but some of this hate should be taken with a grain of salt and lots of qualification.
edit: social media makes teens suicidal and depressed, but not inordinately more than many other things would in their lives in general. Being saturated by these networks is not obligatory in life. Even teens have plenty of agency and opportunities to learn about the dangers of not moderating involvement in certain things. Enough with the youth social trauma porn.
Like what? Pressure to achieve? Being popular? Hormones?
Social media is a product like cigarettes it can and probably should be regulated. You can’t mandate everybody to have friends but you can regulate Facebook and TikTok.
(edit: i agree with you by the way, it is to respond to your question)
I'd love to see how you propose regulating it for teenagers and young people. I do hope it's at least something less foolish than the previous hysterical media/public fits about also "controlling" teens access to...... certain books, certain magazines, comics, TV, porno, "dangerous school games" and of course, video gaming!!! (which barely a couple decades ago supposedly made them prone to murder at an unusual rate). Remember all of these other media-inspired catastrophes for teen development? Do school library bans on books like "Catcher in the Rye" also ring a bell?
I repeat, qualification of claims: In other words, really show that some new tech or media terror actually does do inordinate, demonstrably above-normal harm to a large percentage of the bags of volatile hormones that teenagers have always been, with all sorts of mental issues that they largely end up handling reasonably well. They can grow further without being treated as if they were absurdly fragile and in need of protection from the wider world that they will anyhow have to face just a few years later, whatever its tendencies.
It gets tiresome to see some new supposed danger get trotted out after every couple of teenage generations as something that supposedly needs heavy intervention, mitigation and usually ridiculous regulations. Give teenagers just a bit more credit for mental toughness.
So unlike every other industry, social media is impervious to regulation?
Maybe the situation doesn’t call for prohibition but harm reduction? Why should parents and society as a whole just have to accept whatever some middle management product director at facebook thinks is right? We truly are not as enslaved to the current state of social media as you make it seem.
Nevermind the student loan debt crisis, the floundering economy or the authoritarianism sneaking in.
Definitely social media.
Spoken like the disconnected politicians creating these laws. Hilariously off the mark.
Social media is as dangerous for kids as video games. There's an argument to be made for advertising but I sense that is far beyond the perception of the people blaming social media for the state of the democratic society they've participated in for the past few decades...
https://tourette.org/debunking-myths-misconceptions/
> Although often treated by psychiatrists, Tourette is not a mental or psychiatric illness. Rather, it is a movement disorder that often occurs along with other psychiatric conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, etc.
I have some concerns about this bill and tactic. For example, even if it worked as intended, would we see an uptick of problems in 18 year olds' use of algorithmic social media as they're suddenly away from home/out from under their parents' supervision and given access to a bunch of exploiting content? It's similar to how the first two years of driving are more dangerous regardless of when those 2 years take place.
And as somebody who was 12 when COPPA went into effect, there are unintended consequences of banning minors from platforms:
1.) They lie, so either that's going to be commonly known/accepted OR a giant millstone around the neck of any existing company. This makes it a lot harder to pick out accounts that belong to minors, which makes it harder to both research and protect kids.
2.) Related to that, if you're breaking the rules by being in a space, you are way less likely to speak up. If you're a 15 year old who lies and says you're 18 to be on whatever social media platform, then if somebody harasses you, you're less likely to report it because it would get your account banned.
That's not even mentioning what something like this would do for the edge case of kids who genuinely are artists or content creators.
Algorithmic social media uses the exact same principles as gambling addictions. Teens are much more subject to these exploitations and we don't let them sit in casinos all day and loot boxes have seen some regulation as well.
Social media may be even worse because the gamble is far less tangible, it's cost in the surface is only time and the reward is purely an emotional one.
You mention casinos. One difference between casinos/alcohol/cigarettes is that there are easy places to intervene/place responsibility: the point of service is a physical location subject to local law. Digital regulation is a lot murkier and easier to exploit. (And not just by creepy adults: a lot of us kids in the 90s/early 00s picked up on the argument that if we weren't legally able to be held accountable, then we couldn't be legally held accountable for things like piracy either).
The only way to ensure something like this could be enforced would be to require ID for signing up for/into any algorithmic service and HELL no. Not only should we not throw the baby out with the bathwater, we also shouldn't set the cradle on fire.
You hint at an under-mentioned point here: we want laws that encourage companies to be aware of their users and to protect them, and an unintended consequence of laws that say, "you can continue operating as normal as long as you don't know any of your users are kids" is that companies hear, "don't make any moderation or safety features that might open you up to that kind of accusation."
Of course demanding that companies know all of their users perfectly is an obvious privacy violation with obviously even worse consequences. But even though it's better than hooking up ID verification to social networks, "pretend teenagers don't use the Internet" isn't harmless policy, it's not just that there are popups people click through.
----
I personally feel like this kind of "don't knowingly target" stuff is often counterproductive to keeping kids safe online. It means that when they hang out, almost every space they enter is going to be specifically designed for adults, and will systematically ignore the fact that they exist or might have unique needs -- because ignoring that kids exist and removing safeguards is now the safest thing for the website to do.
On a really small scale, think back to when Youtube got targeted for programming "aimed at kids". One short-term result I saw from that was animators/streamers trying to deliberately make their streams less child-appropriate so they wouldn't be swept up. It's anecdotal and I'd like to see more research on it, but I vaguely wonder if the result of these crackdowns isn't often to make social sites more dangerous for kids.
Related to that, we can't just pretend teenagers have no ability or agency. Honestly, it's a toss up who would 'win' a cat and mouse game between the MN legislature and a group of teens with programming capability. Adolescents are in a developmental stage where they're establishing themselves as individuals away from their parents/adult authorities; it's natural that they're going to seek out spaces that either their parents don't know about or don't want them going to. Our job as adults is to make sure that process is safe for them while still allowing them the autonomy to learn to make good decisions.
> I vaguely wonder if the result of these crackdowns isn't often to make social sites more dangerous for kids.
I wonder this too. I was a very digital kid back in the day before there were regulations against it, and there were opportunity costs to kicking out the under-13s that would be very magnified for 13-to-18s.
It prevents kids from having their own social structures and spaces. For example, 7-10 year old me ran a curatorial site for the Geocities' kids neighborhood and late elementary school me also had an IRC channel. It seems bonkers, but there were advantages: Since I/some of the other kids could run things ourselves (with some adult help from trusted adults), it kept creepy adults from integrating themselves into the group by providing resources. (Think the stereotypical college kid buying high schoolers booze; if kids can't sign up or learn how things work, then they have to play in adult playgrounds instead of making their own.) It meant I could kick people and that the conversation was age-appropriate (because that was where I talked about kid stuff and how dare you be off-topic in my channel [kids make great dictators]).
Related, having an admin/building group of kids is really helpful as a buffer, especially in the teen years. Lots of teens aren't going to tell their parents much, but they will tell other teens, so having some teens around who know how stuff works and gives advice is helpful.
You can't legislate for teens without remembering that they have agency and will act independently.
The power of small forums exists today - inside larger platforms that through aggregation have been able to corral the resources to persist.
Smaller forums falter and fade fairly easily (source: having admin'd them).
I'm always baffled by these nonsensical and arbitrary cutoffs. Obviously the proper approach is to define a function, either linear or logarithmic. In this case it's a reverse proportion: if you serve 500000 people in Minnesota, you are allowed to have 50% of Minnesota's youths on the platform, with 900000 people it's 10%, something like that. One could also have the age as a parameter of the relation, again to avoid the stupid cutoffs where the eighteenth birthday suddenly turns a person into an enlightened adult.
Hard zero at 1M also sounds random. I'd say the optimal function would be a reverse geometric progression tied to Minnesota's population and approaching zero teens at infinite Minnesotan accounts—or rather, one teen so there's no bogus fractional value.
Optimal in what sense?
Also, a new social network wouldn’t be as likely to be seen as a “threat” until it got to a certain scale.
(I’m not trying to defend the bill, just what I think the the rationale is for the thresholds used)
The goal is simply to say that big social media companies must comply and small niche ones are ok. It is arbitrary. It’s also probably fine. Note it’s not 1M people in Minnesota. It’s 1M users anywhere.
The internet, and specifically the web, is pretty much all user generated. It's the the corporate spam and walled gardens that are new should be highly regulated because the corporations themselves have incorporated and abstracted away all liability for their actions. It's the trade off.
But applying this nonsense to human persons is wrong.
The title makes it sound more general, e.g. like under-18's couldn't use social-media at all. But instead, it sounds like they don't want under-18's having user-generated content individually targeted at them, or something like that.
I'd guess that the concern would be echo-chamber effects? This is, if users get targeted with content algorithmically selected just for them, then it may tend to silo users' perceptions. And that might be especially concerning for less-experienced users, who may not realize it's happening or see stuff outside of that bubble.
No offence to you people - I know some of you are here! But by and large this is the crowd where I've seen the largest problems.
That might work for babies, but wouldn't most people over the age of, say, 7 simply lie and click "[Yes]"?
Sorry for the snark, but could I change my age to 17 to get access to this? Sounds like a dream feature.
I, too, would love to switch over to such a mode on several social services.
People also want this so others can see their posts, not just posts from popular posters.
Facebook seems to have this option, but I can’t get it to work. So I uninstalled it again.
The problem is not that the feed is algorithmically filtered. We should use algorithms to automatically gather useful information from a wide variety of sources. The problem is who controls the filters, and whose interests the default algorithms serve.
Why not just go outside?
I thought people were always saying they hated these features.
I can’t risk going near “idle” genre games, because even the ones I hate I find incredibly compelling.
YouTube entirely organized chronologically seems like a nightmare too. What about sites that offer study aids?
I guess it means all of Reddit would be organized by ‘new’? Hacker news too
Edit: Etsy and even you could argue Amazon have UGC as well.
Hand-curated search like Yahoo in 1993 shall be the future!
the elites don't want "unapproved" ideas getting into the minds of malleable youth...shaping the minds of youth is solely the province of our benevolent elites...
1) We should have school districts teaching _Republican_ ideals because the local schools support it.
2) We should have school districts teaching _Democrat_ ideals because the local schools support it.
3) No to both 1 and 2.
You simply can't have it both ways, therefore the reasonable option is to say no to both.
When facts get labeled as bias it's impossible to remove both from the classroom and still have a functional classroom.
3) is then a contradiction, in that there is nothing that could be taught, since everything is either republican ideals or not-republican ideals
Poltical education has been part of the education for the rulers since forever and since the enlightenment it has been more and more become part of education of everybody. By not teaching politics to a class of people you make them unable to work as lawyers, judges or (suprise) politicians taking away their control and feedback into how society develops. Those positions will be taken up instead by a different class of people by the accident of whom they have been birth been found deserving to get such an education. I hope do not elaborate why that is bad.
You could argue that people could get the same education from the internet. However as long as the internet is not censored people will spread versions of political education that are not aligned along country borders and not constrained by being a reproductive, self sustaining system of thought. This leaves the political order highly vulnerable.
We teach politics so that nations do not fall apart into local fiefdoms ruled by an elite class tied to who the parents are. By proposing to axe political education you are proposing to get onto a path to pre-enlightment political structures. This is not hyperbole. Political education goes beyond "how do i vote and how does my government work", it includes all of history, large parts of art, literature and so on. Political education like that is an pre-requisite to be able to find your own individual political opinion and it is a prerequisite for contributing to shape society. If you take away that power (in particular along a public/private education line) you kneecap one side of the politics of power and possibly irreversibly trigger a run-away feedback leading to a categorical change/tipping point how society works.
I hope i could persuade you that this is an extremely bad idea.
(my education list what not exhaustive)
2. You can not act upon facts. To rationally decide what action to take you need a value system. Value Innsystems are political.
3. If you do not teach a value system people tend to construct irrational, selfish, short sighted value systems or just without reflection assume value system of their environment. Some viral value systems teach helplessness, people wouldn't dare to use their own mind but instead consult book or preacher.
4. Without encouragement for unified values nations fracture. So without politics having a thumb on what goes on in schools nations can not reproduce over successive generations.
What's wrong? Your suggestion would cripple western society (actually any society) and might get people killed.
No, my suggestion is to view schools as politically agnostic. This is possible, and the best option for everyone everywhere.
Political beliefs can, and should be, left to adults to decide on their own.
The best one can do is teaching about the existence of the variety of values (i am against teaching ideals) walk through some of the consequences, discuss it and encourage students to reflect. If the memetic power of values of the parents are so low that knowledge of the existence of values which conflict with them causes them to not be transmitted to the next generation then i say "tough luck". If soley one set of values is being taught and all others are demonized that would be something parents can be justifiably enraged by.
I wouldn't trust the americans education system to get things right anyway but it can get things less wrong.
> (whether democrat or republican?)
I do not care much about this destinction.
> No, my suggestion is to view schools as politically agnostic.
My suggestion is to have schools teach tolerance and give people a rough enough understanding of the different value systems so they do not cause offense because of ignorance. I find this preferable. If existence of different values causes offense to the parent "too bad for them".
> Political beliefs can, and should be, left to adults to decide on their own.
For people to be able to make their own choice, they should be guaranteed the right to learn about other choices. (I am against home schooling, if you can not tell but i am not sure abolishing home schooling would be worth while use of political capital as it is used to plaster over a lot of problems in education system that would have to be fixed first).
>I do not care much about this destinction.
This is the crux of the problem here, American's very much do care about this distinction. So to dismiss it is to not solve the problem.
Not teaching politicized stuff is dangerous as that means a sufficiently large minority screaming loud enough have a mechanism to censor any school content by making it political even if it shouldn't be.
It did offer a solution in my reply. Explain multiple sides, explain other world religions, if students have a good understanding of all compatible with society ideologies they can pick when they are old enough.
If you aren't American, you simply cannot understand our political issues and to dismiss them as if they aren't important (because they aren't important to you) is disrespectful.
Anyways, lots of people and religions have wildly different ideas on the sanctity (or lack of sanctity) of sex. Some people don't like it when a public school decides to teach their child something different. Whether that's a school teaching that heterosexual monogamy is the one true way, or homosexualism or polygamy or whatever. People have very different opinions on this and that's OK.
The kid still managed to get caught hooking up with older men via Grindr.
I was certainly on Grindr before I was 18 because I was a curious child and was never exposed to queer people. I was thankfully raised by parents that also taught me why making decisions like hooking up with old men could be bad. So I never did that.
My parents banned the internet from me as a kid -until i was 18- except in controlled manners. I flashed Linux on a school computer, used it to make a bootable VM of android that I could use to run apps on my person computer. I was particularly technically literate but there’s endless ways to avoid your parents wishes.
I see no problem with this for children. I think that it's inevitable that this is instituted in the EU for children, and I think it should be an option for all people.
Seems like stoking the Think-of-the-children train is en vogue. Brought to you by the 5 eyes nations of course.
Those seem equal... /s
Libraries are a user-generated content service.
The legal system is a user-generated content service. But okay.
EDIT: There’s a case to be made for it! The Internet, especially social media, is as powerful as illicit drugs and probably impacts development. But IMHO, this should be up to parents to decide, and I think the lawmakers probably have no clue the extent of this kind of rule would be.
Oh no! Anyway...
Or maybe we should built them some sort of walled gardens. Only allow ISPs to link to certain sites.
I actually tend to avoid the types of services proscribed by this proposal myself! There's still plenty of Internet left for me.
My eldest is 12 and in his school they are not allowed to use their phones during school time, and I fully support this.
Due to some genius government policy here involving "digital classrooms", every child in his year has been handed an iPad to use during lessons. Guess what? Kids end up watching junk on YouTube during lessons, then get their devices confiscated.
I wonder if the policy wonks in government have met (m)any 12 year olds...
As you expect, phone use is a constant problem. Parents are very often no more willing to restrict phone use when it’s brought to their attention. It’s kind of a shit show.
so in practice you could make a dedicated platform for minnesota teens and never hit the '1M account holders' limit
also not sure how your content is going to 'appear in a chronological manner' without algorithms
When they propose such open-ended legislation there should be an ability for an outside party to make every single one of them fill out a survey of "Would this be allowed/disallowed under the new law?" with a bunch of examples. If the people who voted for it don't have consistency in their answers within some percentage (something like 95% must answer identically) then the bill is rejected since they clearly have no idea what they are talking about.
Ain’t enough Ron Wyden’s out there sadly.
I think it would, and I don't think HNs algorithm for ranking is abusive or toxic at all.
But the reason it’s being discussed is that social media like instagram and TikTok is toxic to teenagers. Something does need to be done, society is not enslaved to the aims of mid grade social media product managers.
>In addition to other damages, the PRA authorizes statutory damages of $1k per violation, capped at $100k per account holder per calendar year.
There are 1.3 million under 18 in MN, some percentage of those have social media accounts, let's just guess 500k, so a maximum statutory fine for non-compliance of $50 billion per year per social network. All sorts of ways to adjust that down but still a substantial motivation to turn on the "chronological only in Minnesota" feature. Or are you assuming a state court can't fine a social network?
It makes me wish Republicans were a little more sane so I could justify voting for some of them in Minnesota.
Social network: ok, we are blocking users from that jurisdiction from being able to access our product to comply with recently instated state legislation, please don't use a VPN to do so wink wink.
Plenty of people (yes, even those who aren't the most technologically advanced average users) have been using VPNs for a similar purpose to access Netflix shows available in other regions since a long time ago, so I can easily imagine people doing the same to access TikTok.
See the existing "you gotta be 13 or older to create an account" registration requirement on many platforms, which exists to comply with the law. Sure, it is enforceable in a sense that the government can go after any company that explicitly allows kids under 13 to register and flaunts this law. But it is utterly unenforceable in practice, because what is the government gonna do about kids lying about their age when creating an account? Nothing, aside from legally mandating identity verification and linking it to every account you create. But that's not the route I would ever want the world to take, not even mentioning that there will be ways around that too anyway (and the potential side effects of such id-linking mandate would be much more disastrous than the original problem).
I mean, the company can comply, and users can go around those restrictions by lying to the company. Whether the company decides to geofence or comply, it doesn't affect how enforceable this specific law would be at all. Users can go around it with equal ease in either case (as long as real identity verification for online accounts doesn't enter the equation).
I have an amazon profile. The reviews are user generated. They certainly rank popularity into categories.
In fact, I also have a wikipedia user profile as well and there's talk pages and here's the trending topics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Top_25_Report
Same goes with youtube, twitch, imdb, discogs, substack, medium, and oh yes, video games. Lots of UGC video games.
Social media can be bad, toxic, unhealthy, lead to suicide and depression among youth, ok. That's certainly terrible but you get a bunch of snazzy lawyers for billion dollar companies that work for the bottom line in the room, this thing won't stand.
Instead what might work better is to extend liability law to such forums of persuasion. It the parents of a dead kid have grounds to sue Facebook and Facebook knows it, they'll pull back quick. It's a page from the Ralph Nader playbook
Every word can be quibbled over as not actually applying and thus sitting outside the definition.
It's a prohibition against a generally described feature which makes it fundamentally contestable.
And say you nab them. Then they just have to do an otherwise meaningless permutation to the feature and claim they're compliant and you're back in court.
Ianal btw
You claim the lawmakers are too stupid to understand how tech works, but you're completely failing to understand how the law works. It's rarely (if ever) black and white. It's the job of the courts to interpret and decide what is allowed/disallowed under the law.
Above all law should be predictable a priori
I’m fine saying “think of the children” when you’re talking about … children.
There’s really bad stuff out there.
Think of the children.
But we shouldn't let them view user generated content?
Seems inconsistent at best.
Oh, the olden days of dialup and mainly using AOL CDs to keep birds away from flowerbeds.
Even so, chronological ordering is the worst choice. Now you can just flood the stream with whatever crap you want and it will push all the legitimate content down off the page.
That's how the things are used to operate, and that is the correct way. After all, if someone is annoying IRL, you stop make a decision to stop talking to them, you don't expect some random third party to remove them.